Churchill, Winston

A Political and Economic Dictionary of Western Europe, First Edition

Winston Churchill was a politician and statesman in the United Kingdom. He is best known as Prime Minister of the coalition government of 1940–45 during the Second World War, when he won admiration for his determination and tireless efforts to secure the defeat of Nazi Germany. In the early post-war era, in 1946, he advocated building ‘a kind of United States of Europe’, founded on a close partnership between Germany and France (but not the United Kingdom), and he warned in the same year of the emerging Cold War in Europe, observing that ‘an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’.

Born on 30 November 1874 at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, Winston Churchill graduated from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and joined the Fourth Hussars in 1895. He saw battle during military service and as a war correspondent before first being elected to the House of Commons in 1900 for the Conservative Party. In 1904 switched to the Liberal Party, but rejoined the Conservatives in 1924. Churchill held a series of ministerial posts, including First Lord of the Admiralty (1911–16) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–29). He was reappointed to the post of First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939 and, following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain in 1940, became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence of an all-party coalition.

Churchill had been critical of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany prior to 1939 and insisted on Hitler’s unconditional surrender during the Second World War. While preparing Britain to fight alone against Germany, Churchill also developed a relationship with the USA, securing economic and military aid from that country.

In the first post-war election, held in July 1945, Churchill was replaced as Prime Minister by Clement Attlee of the Labour Party. He was re-elected as Prime Minister in 1951 but, having suffered a stroke in 1953, he retired from politics in 1955. Churchill’s career as a parliamentarian had spanned the reigns of six monarchs. He was also an accomplished artist and a prolific writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. He said in November 1949, ‘Writing a book was an adventure. To begin with it was a toy, an amusement; then it became a mistress, and then a master and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.’ Winston Churchill died on 24 January 1965. He was married to Clementine Hozier and they had five children.