When was winston churchill born

Churchill expected to win the election of Everything pointed to his victory, from the primitive opinion polls to the cartoons in newspapers and the adulation Churchill received during the campaign, but he did not conduct it well. From the start he accused the Labour leaders - his former colleagues - of putting party before country and he later said that Socialists could not rule without a political police, a Gestapo.

As it happened, such gaffes probably made no difference. The political tide was running against the Tories and towards the party which wholeheartedly favoured a welfare state - the reward for war-time sacrifices. But Churchill was shocked by the scale of his defeat. When Clementine, who wanted him to retire from politics, said that it was perhaps a blessing in disguise, Churchill replied that the blessing was certainly very effectively disguised. For a time he lapsed into depression, which sympathetic letters from friends did little to dispel.

Soon, however, Churchill re-entered the political arena, taking an active part in political life from the opposition benches and broadcasting again to the nation after the victory over Japan. In defeat Churchill had always been defiant, but in victory he favoured magnanimity. Within a couple of years he was calling for a partnership between a "spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany" as the basis for the re-creation of "the European family".

At Fulton, Missouri, in , he pointed to the new threat posed by the Soviet Union and declared that an iron curtain had descended across Europe. Only by keeping the alliance between the English-speaking peoples strong, he maintained, could Communist tyranny be resisted.

After losing another election in , Churchill gained victory at the polls the following year. Publicly he called for "several years of quiet steady administration". Privately he declared that his policy was "houses, red meat and not getting scuppered".

This he achieved. But after suffering a stroke and the failure of his last hope of arranging a Summit with the Russians, he resigned from the premiership in April Churchill remained a member of parliament, though an inactive one, and announced his retirement from politics in This took effect at the general election the following year.

Churchill died on 24 January - seventy years to the day after the death of his father. He received the greatest state funeral given to a commoner since that of the Duke of Wellington. He was buried in Bladon churchyard beside his parents and within sight of his birthplace, Blenheim Palace.

In the autumn of Churchill, then a rising Liberal politician, married Clementine Hozier, granddaughter of the 10th Earl of Airlie. Their marriage was to prove a long and happy one, though there were often quarrels - Clementine once threw a dish of spinach at Winston it missed.

Clementine was high principled and highly strung; Winston was stubborn and ambitious. His work invariably came first, though, partly as a reaction against his own upbringing, he was devoted to his children. Winston and Clementine's first child, Diana, was born in Diana was a naughty little girl and continued to cause her parents great distress as an adult. In she married John Bailey, but the marriage was unsuccessful and they divorced in In that year she married the Conservative politician, Duncan Sandys, and they had three children.

That marriage also proved a failure. Diana had several nervous breakdowns and in she committed suicide. The Churchills' second child and only son, Randolph, was born in He was exceptionally handsome and rumbustious, and his father was very ambitious for him.

During the s Randolph stood for parliament several times but he failed to get in, being regarded as a political maverick. He did serve as Conservative Member of Parliament for Preston between and , and ultimately became an extremely successful journalist and began the official biography of his father during the s.

Randolph was married twice, first in to Pamela Digby later Harriman by whom he had a son, Winston, and secondly in to June Osborne by whom he had a daughter, Arabella.

Neither marriage was a success. The life of Sarah, the Churchills' third child, born in , was no happier than that of her elder siblings. Amateur dramatics at Chartwell led her to take up a career on the stage which flourished for a time. Sarah's charm and vitality were also apparent in her private life, but her first two marriages proved unsuccessful and she was widowed soon after her third.

Her first husband was a music hall artist called Vic Oliver whom she married against her parents' wishes. Her second was Anthony Beauchamp but this marriage did not last and after their separation he committed suicide.

In Clementine Churchill gave birth to a third girl, Marigold. But in , shortly after the deaths of both Clementine's brother and Winston's mother, Marigold contracted septicaemia whilst on a seaside holiday with the childrens' governess.

When she died Winston was grief-stricken and, as his last private secretary recently disclosed in an autobiography, Clementine screamed like an animal undergoing torture. The following September the Churchills' fifth and last child, Mary, was born.

Unlike her brother and older sisters, Mary was to cause her parents no major worries. Indeed she was a constant source of support, especially to her mother.

Theirs was to be a long and happy marriage. Over the years Christopher became a valued confidant and counsellor to his father-in-law. They had five children, the eldest of whom Nicholas became a prominent member of the Conservative party. Christopher Soames died in Churchill's enormous reserves of energy and his legendary ability to exist on very little sleep gave him time to pursue a wide variety of interests outside the world of politics.

Churchill loved gambling and lost what was, for him, a small fortune in the great crash of the American stock market in October , causing a severe setback to the family finances. But he continued to write as a means of maintaining the style of life to which he had always been accustomed.

Apart from his major works, notably his multi-volume histories of the First and Second World Wars and the Life of his illustrious ancestor John, first Duke of Marlborough, he poured forth speeches and articles for newspapers and magazines. His last big book was the History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which he had begun in and which was eventually published in the s.

In Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Churchill took up painting as an antidote to the anguish he felt over the Dardanelles disaster.

Painting became a constant solace and preoccupation and he rarely spent a few days away from home without taking his canvas and brushes. Even during his tour of France's Maginot Line in the middle of August Churchill managed to snatch a painting holiday with friends near Dreux.

In the summer of , while on the lookout for a suitable country house, Churchill caught sight of a property near Westerham in Kent, and fell instantly in love with it. Despite Clementine's initial lack of enthusiasm for the dilapidated and neglected house, with its overgrown and seemingly unmanageable grounds, Chartwell was to become a much-loved family home.

Clementine, however, never quite overcame her resentment of the fact that Winston had been less than frank with her over the buying of Chartwell, and from time to time her feelings surfaced.

With typical enthusiasm, Churchill personally undertook many major works of construction at Chartwell such as a dam, a swimming pool, the building largely with his own hands of a red brick wall to surround the vegetable garden, and the re-tiling of a cottage at the bottom of the garden. In Churchill bought a farm adjoining Chartwell and subsequently derived much pleasure, though little profit, from farming.

Churchill was born into the world of hunting, shooting and fishing and throughout his life they were to prove spasmodic distractions. But it was hunting and polo, first learned as a young cavalry officer in India, that he enjoyed most of all. In the summer of , Churchill embarked on a new venture - he bought a racehorse. Winston enrolled at Harrow in with very poor entrance exam scores, effectively placing him at the bottom of his class.

This was a humiliating position for a proud boy, and an irritation to his father. Winston possessed a keen mind, but also a spirit not suited to school regiment. However, he excelled in subjects that appealed to him - English and History. He also showed athletic ability by winning the Public Schools' fencing championship. The school newspaper reported, "His success was chiefly due to his quick and dashing attack, which quite took his opponents by surprise.

Winston's school days were deeply frustrating. I had hardly ever been asked to learn anything which seemed of the slightest use or interest, or allowed to play any game which was amusing. In retrospect those years form not only the least agreeable, but also the only barren and unhappy period of my life.

But I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar. For young gentlemen of Winston's social class only certain professions were considered suitable. The university was the gatekeeper to all but the military, and Winston's poor performance at school closed the university's doors to him.

Winston's lack of attention to studies nearly ended his military career before it began. He took three attempts to pass the entrance exams for the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, scoring just enough points to be admitted to the Cavalry, but not the Infantry.

Lord Randolph had hoped for at least an infantry career for his son, and was deeply disappointed. The Cavalry became a source of both joy and tension for Winston.

Riding became a passion and he proved exceptionally good at it. However, since the British Officer had to pay for his own uniforms and horses, Cavalry service taxed his family's financial resources. Churchill enjoyed a brief but eventful career in the British Army at a zenith of British military power.

He joined the Fourth Queen's Own Hussars in and served in the Indian northwest frontier and the Sudan, where he saw action in the Battle of Omdurman in In , Churchill left the Army and worked as a war correspondent for the Morning Post , a conservative daily newspaper.

While reporting on the Boer War in South Africa, he was taken prisoner by the Boers during a scouting expedition. He made headlines when he escaped, traveling almost miles to Portuguese territory in Mozambique.

Upon his return to Britain, he wrote about his experiences in the book London to Ladysmith via Pretoria Following his father into politics, he also followed his father's sense of independence, becoming a supporter of social reform. Unconvinced that the Conservative Party was committed to social justice, Churchill switched to the Liberal Party in He was elected a member of Parliament in and was appointed to the prime minister's cabinet as president of the Board of Trade.

He introduced several reforms for the prison system, introduced the first minimum wage and helped set up labor exchanges and unemployment insurance. Churchill also assisted in the passing of the People's Budget, which introduced taxes on the wealthy to pay for new social welfare programs.

The budget passed in the House of Commons in and was initially defeated in the House of Lords before being passed in In January , Churchill showed his tougher side when he made a controversial visit to a police siege in London, with two alleged robbers holed up in a building.

Churchill's degree of participation is still in some dispute: Some accounts have him going to the scene only to see for himself what was going on; others state that he allegedly gave directions to police on how to best storm the building. What is known is that the house caught fire during the siege and Churchill prevented the fire brigade from extinguishing the flames, stating that he thought it better to "let the house burn down," rather than risk lives rescuing the occupants.

The bodies of the two robbers were later found inside the charred ruins. The couple had five children together: Diana, Randolph, Sarah, Marigold who died as a toddler of tonsillitis and Mary. Named First Lord of the Admiralty in , Churchill helped modernize the British Navy, ordering that new warships be built with oil-fired instead of coal-fired engines.

He was one of the first to promote military aircraft and set up the Royal Navy Air Service. He was so enthusiastic about aviation that he took flying lessons himself to understand firsthand its military potential. Churchill also drafted a controversial piece of legislation to amend the Mental Deficiency Act of , mandating sterilization of the feeble-minded.

The bill, which mandated only the remedy of confinement in institutions, eventually passed in both houses of Parliament. Churchill remained in his post as First Lord of the Admiralty through the start of World War I , but was forced out for his part in the disastrous Battle of Gallipoli. He resigned from the government toward the end of For a brief period, Churchill rejoined the British Army, commanding a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front and seeing action in "no man's land.

In , he was appointed minister of munitions for the final year of the war, overseeing the production of tanks, airplanes and munitions. From to , Churchill served as minister of war and air and colonial secretary under Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

As colonial secretary, Churchill was embroiled in another controversy when he ordered air power to be used on rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq, a British territory. At one point, he suggested that poisonous gas be used to put down the rebellion, a proposal that was considered but never enacted. Truman announces during a press conference that he is prepared to authorize the use of atomic weapons in order to achieve peace in Korea.

Clemens was apprenticed to a printer at age 13 and later worked for his older brother, who established the Hannibal Journal. In , the Keokuk Daily Post commissioned him to write a The following day, his car—containing his wallet, some condoms, and an empty vodka bottle—was found abandoned in a remote area of Ormond Beach.

Nearly two weeks later, his body The talks lasted until December 17, but ended inconclusively. On November 30, , the once proud Confederate Army of Tennessee suffers a devastating defeat after its commander, General John Bell Hood, orders a frontal assault on strong Union positions around Franklin, Tennessee.

The loss cost Hood six of his finest generals and nearly a On November 30, , the Red Army crosses the Soviet-Finnish border with , men and 1, aircraft. Helsinki was bombed, and 61 Finns were killed in an air raid that steeled the Finns for resistance, not capitulation.

The overwhelming forces arrayed against Finland