Winston Churchill

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Sir Winston Churchill

The Right Honourable Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965) was a British statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for most of the Second World War. The only statesman to achieve high office in both World Wars and to write profusely about his experiences, Winston Churchill dominated the 20th Century like few other individuals. Although best known for his courageous leadership as British prime minister during World War II, Churchill was a formidable political thinker and one of the highest-paid journalists from the days of Queen Victoria's "little wars" to his memoirs of World War II.

A larger-than-life character, famous for his trademark cigar and his overblown reputation as a drinker (which he joyfully exaggerated), Churchill was also a talented amateur painter and pilot, soldier, farmer, bricklayer, and orator. When he retired from the House of Commons in 1964, he had spent over six decades in public life, a career that ran from the last great British cavalry charge to the nuclear age.

History

Born in 1874 to Lord Randolph Churchill and an American mother, the former Jennie Jerome, Winston spent a typical upperclass childhood in the hands of nurses and headmasters at a succession of private schools. While he was no more neglected than most boys of his age and class, his sensitive nature recoiled at his parents' aloofness and he always regretted his failure to achieve a close relationship with his father, who died in 1895 at the age of only 45. His mother later became his ardent ally, helping him achieve key assignments as a war reporter and smoothing his career in politics.

In late 1900, Churchill was elected to Parliament as a Conservative and took his seat in early 1901. His independent nature soon saw him at odds with his party, and in 1904 he "crossed the floor" to the Liberals, who won a landslide election in early 1906. He served the Liberal government as President of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary, where he helped introduce social legislation that laid the foundations for the later welfare state. In 1911, he became First Lord of the Admiralty (civilian head of the Royal Navy), working feverishly to complete the conversion of ships from coal to oil power. Together with his two First Sea Lords, Prince Louis of Battenberg and Admiral Lord Fisher, Churchill promoted fast, powerful battleships and outbuilt the Germans to maintain British naval supremacy. He founded the Naval Air Service, and made numerous visits to ships and navy bases, where he was admired for his efforts to improve conditions for officers and crews.

At Churchill's direction, the fleet was at its war station before war broke out in 1914, but it was never able to engage the Germans in a decisive early sea battle. Worse, Churchill's support of a failed campaign to force entry in the Dardanelles "by ships alone" caused his removal from the Admiralty in May 1915. Reporting to his regiment in the trenches of Belgium, he was under fire for three months before returning to Parliament. In 1917 he was appointed Minister of Munitions and, in 1919, Secretary for War and Air.

As Colonial Secretary in 1921-22, Churchill enjoyed two notable diplomatic achievements. At the 1921 Cairo conference, he helped establish the borders of the modern Middle East, though he failed in his attempt to set up a Kurdish homeland "to protect the Kurds against some future bully in Iraq." Closer to home, he helped to forge the Irish Treaty, which kept the peace in Ireland for 50 years. Michael Collins, the IRA revolutionary with whom Churchill negotiated, said from his deathbed: "Tell Winston we could have done nothing without him."

In 1924, Churchill rejoined the Conservatives, serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer through spring 1929. He returned Britain to the gold standard and ran a government newspaper, "The British Gazette," during the general strike of 1926. He became increasingly separated from the Conservatives in the 1930s, first over the plan to grant India dominion status; later over Britain's slow rearmament in the face of Hitler's aggression; and finally when he championed King Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936. Not until war had broken out again in 1939 was he asked to rejoin the Government - again becoming First Lord of the Admiralty, which according to legend, signaled to its ships: "Winston is Back." He renewed his energetic naval policies but was repulsed in an attempt to wrest Norway from the invading Germans in April 1940.

With the Nazi blitzkrieg pouring into the Low Countries, Churchill succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on May 10, 1940 and presided over a year of devastating defeats. In those months, when Britain stood alone and almost unarmed against Hitler, as Edward R. Murrow said, "he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle." After Hitler attacked Russia in June 1941, Churchill vowed to help the Soviets, declaring, "if Hitler invaded hell I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." Establishing close ties with President Roosevelt, he secured American military aid and moral support, but his ultimate goal was to have America fighting at Britain's side. When the United States was drawn into the war by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill admitted that he "slept the sleep of the saved and the thankful."

Churchill was disappointed by the failure to control an expansionist Soviet Union toward the end of the war, and watched with mounting concern another totalitarian state rise dominant in Europe. To the amazement of many outside Britain, his party was routed in the 1945 general election and he became Leader of the Opposition. His famous "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri in 1946 was the opening salvo and warning of the Cold War, unpopular at the time but later considered prophetic. In 1949, he predicted the demise of Communism, "ignited by a spark coming from God knows where, and in a moment the whole system of lies and oppression is on trial for its life."

In 1951 the Conservatives regained an electoral majority and Churchill became prime minister again, but he was disappointed in his effort to achieve a peaceful settlement of cold war antagonisms, and his domestic record was indifferent. He became a Knight of the Garter, acquiring the title "Sir Winston," in 1953.

Churchill won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature, bestowed for his numerous books on history, biography and politics. His greatest biography was Marlborough (4 volumes, 1933-38); his best-known historical work was A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (4 volumes, 1956-1958). His personal memoirs, My Early Life (1930), The World Crisis (5 volumes, 1923-31) and The Second World War (6 volumes, 1948-53) are readable personal accounts of his Victorian youth and the two world wars. In all, Churchill wrote over 40 titles in over 60 volumes, nearly 1,000 articles and uncounted speeches. His official life, by his son Randolph and Sir Martin Gilbert, is the longest biography ever published.

Asked to summarize Churchill in one sentence, Gilbert said: "He was a great humanitarian who was himself distressed that the accidents of history gave him his greatest power at a time when everything had to be focused on defending the country from destruction, rather than achieving his goals of a fairer society."

To Martin Gilbert also we owe these last lines from Sir Winston's biography: "When at last his life's great impulses were fading, Churchill's daughter Mary paid him perhaps the most eloquent tribute of all: 'In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving, generous father, I owe you what every Englishman, woman & child does -- Liberty itself.'"

Suffering from age and poor health, he retired in April 1955, but remained a Member of Parliament for another nine years. In 1963 he was declared an Honorary Citizen of the United States by President John F. Kennedy. He died at age 90 on January 24, 1965. [1]

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, [2], 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 [3], 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.

Sir Winston Churchill.jpg

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." [4]

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."
  • "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."[5]
  • 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.

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