I.

Introduction

Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874-1965), British politician and Prime Minister of Great Britain (1940-1945, 1951-1955), widely regarded as Britain's greatest 20th-century statesman, and celebrated for his national leadership during World War II.

Churchill, born on November 30, 1874, was the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill and the American heiress Jennie Jerome. He was educated at Harrow School and then became a cadet at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, passing out in February 1895 as a second lieutenant in the Fourth Queen's Own Hussars. He served as a cavalry officer in India and the Sudan (where he rode in the cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898 under the command of Horatio Herbert Kitchener), but resigned his commission in 1899 to become a newspaper correspondent in the South African War (Boer War). A daring escape from prison after he had been captured by the Boers made him a national hero and in 1900 he was elected to Parliament as Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Oldham. In 1904 he went over to the Liberal Party, having broken with the Conservatives on the issue of free trade, angering his constituents. Having found a new Manchester seat to contest, he was swept back into Parliament in the Liberal “landslide” of 1906. In 1908 he became President of the Board of Trade in the Liberal Cabinet of Herbert Henry Asquith, where he worked closely with the radical Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, in promoting social reform (see Liberal Britain). After a brief period as Home Secretary (1910-1911), during which he pursued the same policies, he became First Lord of the Admiralty (1911-1915). Before World War I he had insisted on maintaining the British Navy's superiority over that of its nearest rival, the German Navy, against the pressure of Cabinet economizers like Lloyd George for reductions in the naval estimates.