Sir Winston Churchill - "We shall fight in the hills, we shall neversurrender"

Sir Winston Churchill
(1874-1965)
'V' for victory

Sir Winston Churchill was born on 30th November 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Son to the Lord Randolph Churchill. He attended the Royal Military College, in Sandhurst, before embarking on his military career in the army.

In 1900, Churchill became a Conservative member of parliament for Oldham. However in 1904 he disaffected to the Liberal Party. He became the undersecretary at the Colonial Office when the Liberal Party won the election in 1905. This setting him on the road of his political career.

In 1911, he became the first Lord of the Admiralty. He was able to hold his post in the first few months of World War One, but he resigned after being blamed for the disaster of the Dardanelles Expedition. 

Churchill then served on the Western Front for a while on joining the army. Although, by 1917, he was back in government. From 1919-21 he was the Secretary of State for War and Air, and from 1924-29 he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

When the World War Two broke out in 1936, Churchill became the first Lord of the Admiralty again. In May 1940, Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister and Churchill took his place. He inspired the nation with his refusal to surrender to Germany. Building strong relations with the US President, Roosevelt and maintained a difficult alliance with the USSR, Stalin.

"We shall fight in the hills,
we shall never surrender" 
- Churchill

In 1945, Churchill lost power after the war elections in 1945, but still MP, he voiced his opinions of the Cold War, giving the phase the 'Iron Carton' to the Berlin Wall. In 1951, he once again became Prime Minister. However, in 1955, he resigned, but remaining a MP until his death. 

In 1953, he was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature because of his impressive number of publications, such as, his six-volumes of 'The Second World War'.

He died on 24th January 1965 and was the first former Prime Minister to be given a state funeral.