InfoBritain

 

Winston Churchill

The life of Winston Churchill is virtually the life of Britain through the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. He was born at Blenheim Palace on the 30th of November 1874. After a rather undistinguished school career he joined the army, and started writing journalistic pieces on the battles he took part in. He was present at the battle of Omdurman in 1898 when Kitchener reinvaded the Sudan, and was horrified at the subsequent ill-treatment of the defeated Islamic people by Kitchener. In the Boer War Churchill was captured, only to escape from jail in Pretoria and walk hundreds of miles to freedom. These exploits, and his talent for putting them into words, turned him into a national hero.

In 1900 Winston began his political career, winning for the Conservatives in Oldham. By 1908, having crossed to the Liberals, he was in Asquith's cabinet. By 1910 he was Home Secretary and becoming a controversial figure. His time as Home Secretary coincided with a number of crises. There were suffragette riots, anarchist riots, and industrial disputes involving the miners of south Wales. All of these emergencies involved Churchill in controversy. In south Wales, for example, export demand for coal was shrinking. While the owners needed to cut costs the miners were demanding a minimum wage. Unrest was met first with extra police. After a serious riot in which one miner was killed, troops were deployed. In Tonypandy troops fired on strikers, killing two and triggering another riot. Many people condemned Churchill at the time and some still do. Others point out that this situation wasn't simply a case of defenceless workers with a noble cause facing the bullies in government. By 1911 as strikes spread, Cardiff seamen were attacking Cardiff's small community of Chinese shopkeepers, and in Tredegar there were concerted attacks on the Jewish community. Communist groups also made no secret of the fact that they were exploiting unrest for their own ends.

Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, a position he held at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Churchill thought it unlikely that the Germans could be defeated in France, and he planned an attack at the German alliance's weakest point, in Turkey. The operation at the peninsula of Gallipoli in 1915 was a disaster and nearly finished Churchill's career. He resigned from government and after recovering from depression went to fight on the Western Front as a colonel in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Churchill survived a war which saw 700,000 British servicemen killed and one and a half million wounded. One in ten of an entire generation of young men had been killed. Losses were double what they would be in World War Two.

After the war Churchill rejoined the government and became colonial secretary in 1921. He was embroiled in more controversies, seeming rather keen to use poison gas against tribes rebelling against British rule in the former Ottoman Empire. In response to unrest in Ireland he sometimes defended brutalities inflicted by the Black and Tan paramilitary police force. At other times his belligerence was softened by second thoughts, and it was Churchill who negotiated a two state solution with the Sinn Fein leaders Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, with whom he got on well. In 1922 his political career seemed to end once again when he lost his seat, only to see him bounce back in 1924. Once again there were controversies, and once again these involved the miners. Shrinking export markets met demands for increased pay. The General Strike of 1926 saw Churchill setting up his own propaganda paper, called The Gazette, which was sometimes escorted to the news-stands by tanks. The government leant on the BBC to toe the party line, and the idea of the BBC being free of political influence dates from this time. By the 1930s Churchill was out of favour, and spent his time shouting about the need to hold India at all costs, and making famously insulting remarks about the Indian leader Gandhi.

Cabinet War Rooms, White Hall

It was in 1940 that Churchill came into his own. It was Churchill who saw Hitler for what he was, and who made repeated warnings about him. When the Second World War finally did begin, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, struggling through the early months of the "Phoney War" said: "How do I hate and loathe this war. I was never meant to be a war minister." For good or ill Winston Churchill was meant to be a war minister. Churchill took over as Prime Minister on the 10th of May 1940, the day that Holland and Belgium were invaded. This time all his characteristics, which could have played out well or badly, came together in the person that Britain needed. Churchill himself felt this: "...all my past life had been but preparation for this hour and this trial." At a crucial moment when Britain could easily have sought a settlement with a rampaging Nazi Germany, Churchill, through his presence and his words, galvanised the country to resist. His speeches are now famous, and were his main weapon:

"You ask what is our aim? I can answer in one word: it is victory, victory at all costs, victory inspite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival." (Speech to Parliament 13th of May 1940)

"I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground." (Speech to Cabinet 28th of May 1940)

"...we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." (Speech to Parliament 4th of June 1940)

"Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." (Speech to Parliament 13th of August 1940)

View of the Channel from Admiralty Casement, Dover Castle

Britain really was alone during 1940. President Theodore Roosevelt had refused a request for a British carrier to enter a U.S. port to embark aircraft the British government had purchased, since to do so would compromise United States neutrality. In these isolated circumstances it was Winston Churchill who gave Britain the strength to fight on.

Eventually America was to enter the war and the tide was to turn against Germany. As the war continued Churchill ironically, seemed to lose his way. The United States took over the allied military leadership, and Winston's finest hour had passed. His government was voted out of power only months after the war's end in 1945. He returned to government between 1951 and 1955, but it was that year of 1940 for which Churchill is best remembered.