LUCRARE DE ATESTAT LA

LIMBA ENGLEZĂ
WINSTON CHURCHILL

CONTENTS
I. Introduction …………………………………………………………..3

II. Early life ………………………………………………………….......4

2.1. Childhood and schooling……………………………………………………………4

2.2. Marriage and children……………………………………………………………….5

III. Political career ……………………………………………………......6

3.1. Liberal Member of Parliament…………………………………………………........6

3.2. Prime minister (1940 – 1945)….……………………………………........................7

3.3. Prime minister (1951 – 1955).……………………………………….......................11

IV. Winston Churchill as a writer………………………………….……...13

V. Death, funeral and memorials……………………………….………..14

VI. Epilogue……………………………………………………………....17

VII. Bibliography………………………………………………………......18

I. INTRODUCTION
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who
served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945, during the Second
World War, and again from 1951 to 1955.
Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900
to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an economic liberal and
imperialist, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from
1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.
Widely considered one of the 20th century's most significant figures, Churchill remains popular
in the Anglosphere, where he is seen as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role
in defending Europe's liberal democracy against the spread of fascism. He has been criticised for
some wartime events and also for his imperialist views.
 II. EARLY LIFE

III.1. C
HI L
DHOO D

AND

SCHOOLING

Churchill was born on 30 November 1874 at his family's ancestral home, Blenheim Palace in
Oxfordshire. On his father's side, he was a member of the British aristocracy as a direct
descendant of the 1st Duke of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, representing
the Conservative Party, had been elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Woodstock in 1873.
His mother, Jennie, was the daughter of Leonard Jerome, a wealthy American businessman.
In 1876, Churchill's paternal grandfather, John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough was
appointed Viceroy of Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom. Randolph became his private
secretary and the family relocated to Dublin. Winston's brother, Jack, was born there in 1880.
Throughout much of the 1880s, Randolph and Jennie were effectively estranged, and the
brothers were mostly cared for by their nanny, Elizabeth Everest. When she died in 1895,
Churchill wrote that "she had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the
twenty years I had lived".
Churchill began boarding at St George's School in Ascot, Berkshire, at age seven but was not
academic and his behaviour was poor. In 1884 he transferred to Brunswick School in Hove,
where his academic performance improved. In April 1888, aged 13, he narrowly passed the
entrance exam for Harrow School. His father wanted him to prepare for a military career and so
his last three years at Harrow were in the army form. After two unsuccessful attempts to gain
admittance to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, he succeeded on his third. He was
accepted as a cadet in the cavalry, starting in September 1893. His father died in January 1895, a
month after Churchill graduated from Sandhurst.

III.2. MARRIAGE AND CHILDREN

Churchill married Clementine Hozier in September 1908. They remained married for 57 years.
Churchill was aware of the strain that his political career placed on his marriage, and, according
to Colville, he had a brief affair in the 1930s with Doris Castlerosse, although this is discounted
by Andrew Roberts.
The Churchills' first child, Diana, was born in July 1909; the second, Randolph, in May 1911.
Their third, Sarah, was born in October 1914, and their fourth, Marigold, in November 1918.
Marigold died in August 1921, from sepsis of the throat, and she was buried in Kensal Green
Cemetery. Although her remains were relocated to Bladon Churchyard in 2019 to join the rest of
her family, her cenotaph still stands at Kensal Green. On 15 September 1922, Churchill’s last
child, Mary, was born. Later that month, the Churchills bought Chartwell, which would be their
home until Winston's died in 1965. According to Jenkins, Churchill was an "enthusiastic and
loving father" but one who expected too much of his children.

III. POLITICAL CAREER

3.1. LIBERAL MP

Churchill and German Kaiser Wilhelm II

during a military manoeuvre near Breslau, Silesia, in 1906

As a Liberal, Churchill attacked government policy and gained a reputation as a radical under the
influences of John Morley and David Lloyd George. In December 1905, Balfour resigned as
Prime Minister and King Edward VII invited the Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman to
take his place. Hoping to secure a working majority in the House of Commons, Campbell-
Bannerman called a general election in January 1906, which the Liberals won. Churchill won the
Manchester North West seat. In the same month, his biography of his father was published; he
received an advance payment of £8,000. It was generally well received. It was also at this time
that the first biography of Churchill himself, written by the Liberal Alexander MacCallum Scott,
was published.
In the new government, Churchill became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonial Office, a
junior ministerial position that he had requested. He worked beneath the Secretary of State for
the Colonies, Victor Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin, and took Edward Marsh as his secretary; Marsh
remained Churchill's secretary for 25 years. Churchill's first task was helping to draft a
constitution for the Transvaal, and he helped oversee the formation of a government in the
Orange River Colony. In dealing with southern Africa, he sought to ensure equality between the
British and the Boers. He also announced a gradual phasing out of the use of Chinese indentured
labourers in South Africa; he and the government decided that a sudden ban would cause too
much upset in the colony and might damage the economy. He expressed concerns about the
relations between European settlers and the black African population; after the Zulu launched
their Bambatha Rebellion in Natal, Churchill complained about the "disgusting butchery of the
natives" by Europeans.

3.2. PRIME MINISTER (1940 – 1945)

Churchill aims with a Sten sub-machine gun in June 1941. The man
in the pin-striped suit and fedora to the right is his bodyguard, Walter H. Thompson.

In a sense, the whole of Churchill’s previous career had been a preparation for wartime
leadership. He was an intense patriot; a romantic believer in his country’s greatness and its
historic role in Europe, the empire, and the world; a devotee of action who thrived on challenge
and crisis; a student, historian, and veteran of war; a statesman who was master of the arts of
politics, despite or because of long political exile; a man of iron constitution, inexhaustible
energy, and total concentration, he seemed to have been nursing all his faculties so that when the
moment came he could lavish them on the salvation of Britain and the values he believed Britain
stood for in the world.
On September 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, Chamberlain appointed
Churchill to his old post in charge of the Admiralty. The signal went out to the fleet: “Winston is
back.” On September 11 Churchill received a congratulatory note from Pres. Franklin D.
Roosevelt and replied over the signature “Naval Person”; a memorable correspondence had
begun. At once Churchill’s restless energy began to be felt throughout the administration, as his
ministerial colleagues as well as his department received the first of those pungent minutes that
kept the remotest corners of the British wartime government aware that their shortcomings were
liable to detection and penalty. All his efforts, however, failed to energize the torpid Anglo-
French entente during the so-called “phoney war,” the period of stagnation in the European war
before the German seizure of Norway in April 1940. The failure of the Narvik and Trondheim
expeditions, dependent as they were on naval support, could not but evoke some memories of the
Dardanelles and Gallipoli, so fateful for Churchill’s reputation in World War I. This time,
however, it was Chamberlain who was blamed, and it was Churchill who endeavoured to defend
him.

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin

photographed on
the courtyard of the Livadia Palace, 9
February 1945.
 Churchill waving the Victory sign to the crowd in Whitehall on the day he broadcast to the
nation that the war with Germany had been won, 8 May 1945. Ernest Bevin stands to his right.

On
7
May 1945 at the SHAEF headquarters in Reims, the Allies accepted Germany's surrender. The
next day was Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) when Churchill broadcast to the nation that
Germany had surrendered and that a final ceasefire on all fronts in Europe would come into
effect at one minute past midnight that night (i.e., on the 9th). Afterwards, Churchill went to
Buckingham Palace where he appeared on the balcony with the Royal Family before a huge
crowd of celebrating citizens. He went from the palace to Whitehall where he addressed another
large crowd: "God bless you all. This is your victory. In our long history, we have never seen a
greater day than this. Everyone, man or woman, has done their best".
At this point, he asked Ernest Bevin to come forward and share the applause. Bevin said: "No,
Winston, this is your day", and proceeded to conduct the people in the singing of For He's a Jolly
Good Fellow. In the evening, Churchill made another broadcast to the nation asserting that the
defeat of Japan would follow in the coming months (the Japanese surrendered on 15 August
1945).
Unfortunately, after The Second World War ended, Churchill mishandled the election campaign
from July 1945 by resorting to party politics and trying to denigrate Labour.

3.3. PRIME MINISTER (1951

– 1955)

Despite losing the popular vote to

Labour, the Conservatives won an
overall majority of 17 seats in the October
1951 general election and Churchill again became Prime Minister, remaining in office until his
resignation on 5 April 1955. Eden, his eventual successor, was restored to Foreign Affairs, the
portfolio with which Churchill was preoccupied throughout his tenure. Future Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan was appointed Minister of Housing and Local Government with a manifesto
commitment to build 300,000 new houses per annum, Churchill's only real domestic concern. He
achieved the target and, in October 1954, was promoted to Minister of Defence.
Churchill feared a global conflagration and firmly believed that the only way to preserve peace
and freedom was to build a solid foundation of friendship and cooperation between Britain and
America. He made four official transatlantic visits from January 1952 to July 1954.
 Churchill with Anthony Eden, Dean Acheson
and Harry Truman, 5 January 1952.

Elizabeth II offered to create Churchill Duke of London, but he declined because of the
objections of his son Randolph, who would have inherited the title on his father's death.
Although publicly supportive, Churchill was privately scathing about Eden's handling of the
Suez Crisis and Clementine believed that many of his visits to the United States in the following
years were attempts to help repair Anglo-American relations. After leaving the premiership,
Churchill remained an MP until he stood down at the 1964 general election. Apart from 1922 to
1924, he had been an MP since October 1900 and had represented five constituencies.

IV. WINSTON CHURCHILL AS A WRITER

Winston Churchill, in addition to his career as a soldier and politician, was a prolific writer under
the pen name 'Winston S. Churchill'. After being commissioned into the 4th Queen's Own
Hussars in 1895, Churchill gained permission to observe the Cuban War of Independence and
sent war reports to The Daily Graphic. He continued his war journalism in British India, at the
Siege of Malakand, then in Sudan during the Mahdist War and in southern Africa during the
Second Boer War.
His works include novels, fiction or non-fiction. Some of Churchill’s best-known books are: The
Story of the Malakand Field Force, The River War, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, Ian
Hamilton’s March or Lord Randolph Churchill.
V. DEATH, FUNERAL AND MEMORIALS

Churchill suffered his final stroke on 12 January 1965 and died twelve days later on the 24th, the
seventieth anniversary of his father's death. Like the Duke of
Wellington in 1852 and William Gladstone in 1898, Churchill was
given a state funeral. Planning for this had begun in 1953 under the
code-name of "Operation Hope Not" and a detailed plan had been
produced by 1958. His coffin lay in state at Westminster Hall for
three days and the funeral ceremony was at St Paul's Cathedral on 30
January. Afterwards, the coffin was taken by boat along the River Thames to
Waterloo Station and from there by a special train to the family plot at St Martin's
Church, Bladon, near his birthplace at Blenheim Palace.
Worldwide, numerous memorials have been dedicated to Churchill.
His statue in Parliament Square was unveiled by his widow
Clementine in 1973 and is one of only twelve in the square, all of
the prominent political figures, including Churchill's friend
Lloyd George and his India policy nemesis Gandhi.
Churchill's grave at St Martin's Church, Bladon.
 VI.

EPILOGUE

Sir Winston Churchill was the

first leader Queen
Elizabeth worked with when
she ascended the throne in 1952. Politician Roy Jenkins said that Sir Winston had what he called
“near idolatry” for Elizabeth and great respect for the monarchy. According to the Daily Mirror,
the Queen reportedly wrote Sir Winston a heartbreaking, handwritten letter after he retired in
1955, saying how much she would miss him. She wrote that no other Prime Minister would
"ever for me be able to hold the place of my first prime minister, to whom both my husband and
I owe so much and for whose wise guidance during the early years of my reign I shall always be
so profoundly grateful".
Years later, when Churchill died in 1965, Queen Elizabeth broke protocol by arriving at his
funeral before his family. Protocol states that the Queen is supposed to be the last person to
arrive at any function, but in this instance, she wanted to be respectful to the Churchill family.

Conservative Party leader Winston Churchill speaking to Princess Elizabeth at the opening of
the International Youth Centre, Chigwell, London, July 12th 1951.

VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Winston-Churchill
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Winston-Churchill/
https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/history-eu/eu-pioneers/winston-
churchill_en
https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/winston-churchill
https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/winston-churchill