Was Winston Churchill the greatest ever Englishman?

When choosing my ‘Cotswold Greats’ I oft try to select someone who’s lesser known or maybe whose links to the Cotswolds are not so obvious, but this month I felt I couldn’t ignore the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965). Lesser known? Not so obvious? Churchill drives a coach and horses through those pretensions.

Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill in November 1874. Pic: DeFacto Statesman, war leader, builder of walls (he was a bricklayer with a union card), artist, historian Nobel Prize winning writer etc, Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of the Churchills from the time of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. He was the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill, who became MP for Woodstock the year Winston was born, and Jeanette (Jennie) Jerome, the daughter of a New York businessman. Educated at Harrow and then the Royal Military College, Sandhurst (1893-94), it’s fair to say that Churchill was not a natural student. He was gazetted to the 4th Hussars in 1895, his early military career including time in India and the Sudan where he served in the Nile Expeditionary Force (1898) which saw him fighting at the Battle of Omdurman (September 2). A London newspaper correspondent during the 2nd Boer War (1899-1902), he was briefly captured but escaped with a price on his head. This is not bog-standard parliamentary background, but Winston nevertheless became a Conservative MP, for Oldham, in 1900. Differences with the party over free trade and ‘laissez-faire’ would see him cross the floor, however, as he switched to the Liberals in 1904, serving as President of the Board of Trade (1908-10) when he introduced labour exchanges, and then as Home Secretary, one of the three great offices of state, in 1910-11. In that capacity he was involved in the ‘Siege of Sidney Street’ (January 1911) when he showed a penchant for continuing to want to get a bit too close to the action, in this case a shootout between the Police and Army and some Latvian revolutionaries in London’s East End.

Lt. Col. Churchill commanding the 6th Battalion, The Royal Scots Fusiliers, Belgium, 1916. When Churchill lost favour after the Dardanelles fiasco his natural instinct was to swap politics for soldiering. Pic: Creative Commons In the same year (1911) Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, and at a time when storm clouds were firstly building with an ambitious Germany, as exemplified by that year’s ‘Agadir Incident’, and then those storm clouds broke over the war to end all wars. Serving as the political boss of the Navy until 1915, Churchill showed the same nous as in the 1930s, highlighting this nation’s need to prepare for a war he thought inevitable. He developed a war staff, fathered naval aviation and generally prepared the Navy for what he knew lay ahead. It was not the last time his thoughts would be prescient. When war started Churchill’s involvement in the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign (1915) would see him scapegoated and heading for the action again, joining the Army in France where he served as a colonel. His political recovery in 1917 saw him serving as Minister of Munitions in Lloyd George’s government, one of his initiatives being the production of thousands of tanks, an invention he was particularly keen on as politicians and Army chiefs sought ways of breaking the deadlock on the Western Front.

Churchill posing with film star Charlie Chaplin, Hollywood, 1929. Pic: T. Garrett / Manchester: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill With victory gained Churchill returned to peacetime politics, serving as Secretary of State for War and Air (1919-21), before being out of Parliament between 1922-24, and then, having switched allegiance once more, and whilst Conservative MP for Epping, acting as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924-29), another of those great offices of state. It’s fair to say that Churchill’s performance as Chancellor was not of the best as he failed to grasp the issues of deflation and unemployment that followed in the wake of the adoption of the gold bullion standard in 1925. He wouldn’t be the only Chancellor to be a bit out of his depth. During the General Strike of 1926 Churchill edited the British Gazette, the government mouthpiece during the confrontation. The Conservative government fell in 1929, to be replaced by the second Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald, and Churchill would be out of office until the outbreak of WW2.

Chartwell, the Kent home of Sir Winston Churchill where he began preparing for WW2 by developing an 'Intelligence Centre'. Pic: Bryan De'Ath It was the 1930s when Churchill endured his ‘Wilderness Years’, ignored by government yet mouthing from the sidelines about Britain’s unpreparedness for war and the folly of appeasing dictators and the inevitability of where this would lead. At his Chartwell home in Kent Churchill was preparing anyway, developing, with the aid of physicist F.A. Lindemann (1886-1951), a sophisticated intelligence centre. The ‘Munich Agreement’ (September 1938) when PM Neville Chamberlain returned with ‘peace for our time’ was viewed rather differently by Churchill: ‘A total and unmitigated defeat’. When war came for the second time in a generation Churchill was back at the Admiralty as First Lord but on May 10, 1940, he became Prime Minister, the day the Phoney War ended with Germany’s attack in the west, forming a coalition government, the start of his self-proclaimed ‘walk with destiny’, everything that had preceded this moment merely being preparation. He would famously offer the British people nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ (House of Commons, May 13, 1940). Our ‘darkest hour’ was perhaps from this time until June 1941 when Hitler launched his attack on the Soviet Union. Up until then the UK and its empire faced Germany and its Italian ally in splendid isolation. Churchill, a wordsmith and orator par excellence, used language to express and mobilise the national spirit of resistance.

Churchill, by now Prime Minister, walks through the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in the aftermath of the Coventry Blitz. Pic: William George Horton / War Office official photographer / Library of Congress During the war Churchill toiled ceaselessly, travelled 150,000 miles, and made the vital decisions that shaped the ‘Atlantic Charter’ (1941) and helped create the strategy that would result in the first significant British victory of the war at the Battle of 2nd El Alamein in November 1942 by which time the war was beginning to turn in favour of the Allies. There was also the prioritisation of the battle against German U-boats, the repelling of the Luftwaffe’s assault on Britain, and inspiring occupied Europe to keep the faith; his biggest weapon there was his own bombastic voice. Churchill got on well with the American president, F.D. Roosevelt, whilst also maintaining a prickly alliance with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, whose demands for a ‘Second Front’ grew more vociferous. Churchill would meet the pair, or Roosevelt’s successor, Truman, on three occasions, at Tehran (1943) and Yalta and Potsdam (both 1945).

'The Big Three' Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at Tehran, November/December 1943. Pic: US Signal Corps photo / Library of Congress It was the ultimate irony that Churchill was booted out by the British electorate (July 1945) when he was at the height of his wartime fame, and when the Potsdam conference was half-way through, but thoughts were turning to the post-war world. Winston became a vocal Leader of the Opposition to Clement Attlee’s Labour government, whilst maintaining a watchful eye on the world situation, warning about the emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union and coining a new phrase in the process: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’ (Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946), and advocating European and Atlantic unity that would ultimately see the birth of NATO.

The modest railway platform of Hanborough, Oxfordshire. The nearest railhead to Blenheim Palace and Bladon, this is where Sir Winston Churchill's funeral train arrived after his death in January 1965. Pic: Steve Roberts St Martin's, Bladon, the burial place of Sir Winston Churchill. A little village in Oxfordshire, perhaps Bladon was the perfect place for Churchill to be buried, in among his people, in the kind of place we were fighting for. Pic: Steve Roberts

The post-war Labour government served just one term with Churchill returning as Conservative PM in 1951 at the venerable age of 77. He would serve in this capacity until his resignation in 1955, aged 80, by which time he was the last survivor of the ‘Big Three’, Roosevelt and Stalin having been the other two unlikely bedfellows who oversaw the ultimate victory of WW2. Winston continued to serve as a backbencher, looked upon with increasing veneration by younger members of the House and would often be described as ‘the greatest living Englishman’ during this final phase of his illustrious life. Born in a palace he may have been, but Churchill could be a man of the people who appreciated that welfare had a part to play in a kinder world. He was above all a man of courage and imagination, one of passion and noble generosity, who garnered all his qualities in patriotic service to his country. Churchill died on January 24, 1965, and was laid to rest in a quiet Oxfordshire churchyard among his people, the people he refused to give up on during this nation’s darkest hour.

Sir Winston Churchill's grave, Bladon, Oxfordshire. Pic: Steve Roberts CHRONOLOGY