In 2002, the BBC conducted a nationwide vote to pick history’s greatest Briton. The competition was fierce—for second place.
The first-place finisher had never been in serious doubt: Winston Churchill (1874–1965), the prime minister who led his nation through its darkest hour and defeated Nazi Germany, topped the poll, as expected.
The son of a British aristocrat and an American heiress, Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace near Oxford, England, and graduated from the British military academy, Sandhurst. He fought in the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902) and covered several other conflicts as a war correspondent for British newspapers.
Churchill made his first foray into politics in 1900, winning election to Parliament as a Conservative. He switched to the Liberals in 1904 and then back to the Conservatives in 1924. (“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat,” he once quipped of his party switches.)
Early in his political career, Churchill was dealt two major setbacks: He was blamed for the 1915 British defeat at Gallipoli during World War I and for the disastrous decision in 1925 to return Britain to the gold standard. As a result, he was a deeply unpopular figure for much of the 1930s, a time he called his “wilderness” years.
During his time on the backbenches of Parliament, Churchill was one of the strongest voices warning against the threat from Nazi Germany. After the war started in 1939, Churchill joined the War Cabinet and was placed in charge of the navy. He was promoted to prime minister of the national unity government in May 1940. Churchill, in his first speech to Parliament as prime minister, set the tone of defiance and determination for which he would be famous over the next five years: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” he said.
Despite his heroic status, however, Churchill was turned out of office in 1945 in favor of Labour Party leader Clement Attlee (1883–1967). Churchill remained the leader of the Conservatives, served a second term as prime minister from 1951 to 1955, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II (1926–) in 1953. He died in London at age ninety.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Churchill won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his war memoirs, which were published between 1948 and 1954.
- The second-place finisher in the BBC’s Greatest Britons poll was a nineteenth-century engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859).
- Churchill coined the term Iron Curtain to describe the Cold War divide between Communist Eastern Europe and democratic Western Europe at a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946.
