Difference between revisions of "Winston Churchill"

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-The Right Honourable Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965), the son of [[Lord Randolph Churchill]] and Lady Randolph Churchill (American Jennie Jerome), was educated at [[Harrow]] and [[Sandhurst]]. After a brief but eventful career in the army, he became a Conservative Member of Parliament in 1900. He held many high posts in Liberal and Conservative governments during the first three decades of the century. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty - a post which he had earlier held from 1911 to 1915. In May, 1940, he became Prime Minister and Minister of Defense and remained in office until 1945, when ousted by [[Clement Attlee]]. He took over the premiership again in the Conservative victory of 1951 and resigned in 1955. However, he remained a Member of Parliament until the general election of 1964, when he did not seek re-election. [[Queen Elizabeth II]] conferred on Churchill the dignity of Knighthood and invested him with the insignia of the Order of the Garter in 1953. Among the other countless honours and decorations he received, special mention should be made of the honorary citizenship of the [[United States]] which President [[John F. Kennedy]] conferred on him in 1963, and The [[Nobel Prize]] in Literature 1953.
-Churchill's literary career began with campaign reports: The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899), an account of the campaign in the Sudan and the Battle of Omdurman. In 1900, he published his only novel, Savrola, and, six years later, his first major work, the biography of his father, [[Lord Randolph Churchill]]. His other famous biography, the life of his great ancestor, the [[Duke of Marlborough]], was published in four volumes between 1933 and 1938. Churchill's history of the First World War appeared in four volumes under the title of The World Crisis (1923-29); his memoirs of the Second World War ran to six volumes (1948-1953/54). After his retirement from office, Churchill wrote a History of the English-speaking Peoples (4 vols., 1956-58). His magnificent oratory survives in a dozen volumes of speeches, among them The Unrelenting Struggle (1942), The Dawn of Liberation (1945), and Victory (1946).
-Churchill, a gifted amateur painter, wrote Painting as a Pastime (1948). An autobiographical account of his youth, My Early Life, appeared in 1930.
-Winston Churchill died on January 24, 1965.
-[http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1953/churchill-bio.html]
-== Churchill on Churchill, the American Connection ==
-'''By Winston S. Churchill, his Grandson'''
-"WHILE recently assembling my grandfather's writings on America into a single volume entitled The Great Republic, I used it as the opportunity to research further my family's American forebears.
-Winston Churchill was half American by birth - a fact of which he was deeply proud. In his first address to a joint session of the United States Congress, on 26 December 1941, he teased the assembled Senators and Representatives with the mischievous suggestion, "If my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way 'round, I might have got here on my own!"
-His mother, Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn, New York, later Lady Randolph Churchill, was a noted beauty of her day and Winston, as a young cavalry officer, shamelessly used all the influence she was able to bring to bear in his quest to see action in different parts of the globe from Cuba in 1895 and the North-West Frontier of India in 1897, to the Sudan in 1898 and South Africa in 1899. Through his maternal grandfather, Leonard Jerome, sometime proprietor and editor of [[The New York Times]], he had at least two forebears who fought against the British in the [[American War of Independence]]: one great-grandfather, Samuel Jerome, served in the Berkshire County Militia while another, Major Libbeus Ball, of the 4th [[Massachusetts]] Regiment, marched and fought with George Washington's army at Valley Forge. Furthermore Leonard Jerome's maternal grandfather, Reuben Murray, served as a lieutenant in the Connecticut and New York Regiments, while his wife Clara's grandfather, Ambrose Hall, was a captain in the Berkshire County Militia at Bennington. Indeed I have found no evidence of any ancestor who fought with the British in this misguided conflict, which Chatham and Burke had been so eager to avoid!
-Not only did Winston Churchill have Revolutionary blood in his veins but, possibly, native American as well. According to family tradition, Jennie's maternal grandmother, Clarissa Willcox, was half-[[Iroquois]]. Clarissa's father, David Willcox, is recorded as marrying Anna Baker and settling in Palmyra, New York in 1791. The implication is that Clarissa may have been a half Iroquois accepted into the family. The truth will perhaps never be known. It is unsurprising that such matters, most especially in those days, went unrecorded. What is certain is that Winston's mother, Jennie, and her sister Leonie, firmly believed the story to be true, having been told by their mother, Clara: "My dears, there is something you should know. It may not be chic but it is rather interesting...." Furthermore, the family portrait of his maternal grandmother Clara, which I have inherited from my grandfather, lends credence to the suggestion that she may have been quarter-Iroquois, with her oval face and mysteriously dark features.
-In recent years, genealogical researchers have sought to cast scorn on the suggestion that Clara's descent is other than "American Colonial of English background" But this fails to explain why, some 130 years ago, Clara would have told her daughters the story, at a time when it would have been deeply unfashionable to make such a claim. Nor does it explain the evidence of Clara's features which have little in common with the Anglo-Saxon. Furthermore, it is undisputed that the densely wooded country south of [[Lake Ontario]] around Palmyra, New York, where Clarissa Willcox was born, was the heartland of the Iroquois nation.
-My cousin, Anita Leslie, in The Fabulous Leonard Jerome, quotes her grandmother Leonie, remarking on her exceptional energy: "That's my Indian blood, only don't let Mama know I told you!" While it is unlikely that the question of the family's native American heritage can be firmly proved either way, I have little doubt as to the truth of the matter. For me physical features speak louder than any entry in a register of births, but I leave it to the reader to make his or her own judgment of the matter.
-WHILE compiling The Great Republic I read that the [[Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints]], better known as the Mormons, had made available thirty years of their researches on both sides of the Atlantic, [http://familysearch.org], dumping on the Internet the records of some 300 million individuals who had been born, been married or had died on either side of the Atlantic. The system is somewhat quirky, in that it refused to recognise my grandfather's name, but when I punched in the name of Jennie Jerome and her parents, suddenly an amazing family tree sprouted forth, detailing some 255 ancestors on the American side of my family, of whose existence I had previously been unaware. Many of the branches run back to before the time of Columbus, one even through twenty-eight generations to the West Country to one Gervaise Gifford born in 1122 at Whitchurch, Dorset. That particular branch of the family barely moved fifteen miles in the space of fifteen generations before William Gifford, born in 1614 at Milton Damerel, Devon, and who married at St. Martins, London, on 4 March 1683, sailed for America, dying soon afterwards at Sandwich, Massachusetts in 1687.
-Of these 255 ancestors I discovered no fewer than 26 who were born in England but died in America. To me they are true heroes - for these were the men and women who founded the America of today. In the course of my researches, I suddenly stumbled on the fact that one of my ancestors, John Cooke, who died in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1694, had been born in Leyden, Holland, in 1607. Aware that nearly half the Pilgrims on the Mayflower had been known as the "Leyden Community" - Walloon Protestants escaping religious persecution -I was prompted to wonder if any of my forebears had made that momentous voyage.
-Within seconds, using an admirable Internet search engine straight out of P. G. Wodehouse, appropriately named [http://askjeeves.com], I was able to call up via the Mayflower website the full manifest of all 102 passengers and was fascinated to discover (assuming the Morman database to be correct) that Winston Churchill, ten generations removed, had not one but three ancestors who sailed on the Mayflower and who, more importantly, were among the mere fifty who survived the rigours of that first cruel winter on the shores of Massachusetts.
-John Cooke, a lad of just 13, was one of those passengers, as was his father, Francis, and his future father-in-law, Richard Warren. I was further intrigued to learn that through them we may be linked to no fewer than three Presidents of the United States - Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Bush‹and to Alan Shephard, the first American in space and the fifth to walk on the moon.
-The one question mark regarding this lineage is whether John Cooke's and his wife Sarah Warren's daughter Elizabeth was indeed the mother of Churchill's ancestor, Daniel Willcox, Jr., born c. 1656/57 at Dartmouth, Massachusetts. While the Morman database is clear on this point, the suggestion has been advanced that Elizabeth may have been the second wife of Daniel Willcox - therefore only the step-mother of Daniel Jr.- in which case the direct link to the Mayflower would not be valid. There is here a conflict of evidence as yet unresolved.
-What is undisputed is that this injection of American blood, through my great-grandmother Jennie Jerome, kick-started to new triumphs the Marlborough dynasty which had slumbered through seven generations since John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, had won his series of dazzling victories that had humbled France's "Sun King," Louis XIV, at the turn of the 18th century."
-[http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=110]
-== Famous Quotes ==
-*Winston Churchill, election broadcast (May, 1945) "I must tell you that a socialist policy is abhorrent to British ideas on freedom. There is to be one State, to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State, once in power, will prescribe for everyone: where they are to work, what they are to work at, where they may go and what they may say, what views they are to hold, where their wives are to queue up for the State ration, and what education their children are to receive. A socialist state could not afford to suffer opposition - no socialist system can be established without a political police. They (the Labour government) would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo." ''(He lost the election by a landslide.  His prediction was completely wrong.)''
-*"Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
-*"Winston, if I were married to you I'd put poison in your coffee"...."Nancy, if I were married to you I'd drink it." ''(Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, Viscountess Astor, b.1879, speaking to Sir Winston, and his reply, this occurred during a weekend house party at Blenheim Palace in the early 1930's)''
-*"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, "come then, let us go forward together with our united strength."
-[http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=435]
-*The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist" -- Winston Churchill, November 21, 1943,
-{{DEFAULTSORT:Churchill, Winston}}
-[[Category:UK Prime Ministers]]
-[[Category:World War II]]
-[[Category:Historians]]
-[[Category:Nobel laureates in Literature]]

Difference between revisions of "Winston Churchill"

Revision as of 18:19, June 5, 2007

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