autobiography of winston churchill pdf

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The Official Biography of Winston Churchill

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June 18, 2008

About the official biography.

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL by Randolph Churchill & Martin Gilbert

The first volume of Winston S. Churchill was published in 1966, the year after Sir Winston died. After Randolph’s death in 1968 Martin Gilbert, who had joined Randolph as a research assistant in 1962, was appointed by the Churchill family to be the official biographer.

Sir Martin died in 2015 and since that time his former assistant, Dr Larry Arnn now of Hillsdale College is working to complete the biography companion volumes, known as  The Churchill Documents . Sir Martin included the following acknowledgement: ‘The publication of [ The War Papers ] was made possible by the exceptional generosity of Wendy Reves, and by the determination of the International Churchill Society… to bring the Churchill document series, known as the Companion Volumes, back into production.’

2024 International Churchill Conference

The following volumes of the official biography have been published to date:, narrative volumes.

Volume I. Youth, 1874-1900 by Randolph S. Churchill Volume II. Young Statesman, 1901-1914 by Randolph S. Churchill Volume III. The Challenge of War, 1914-1916 by Martin Gilbert Volume IV. World in Torment, 1916-1922 by Martin Gilbert Volume V. Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939 by Martin Gilbert Volume VI. Finest Hour, 1939-1941 by Martin Gilbert Volume VII. Road to Victory, 1941-1945 by Martin Gilbert Volume VIII. Never Despair, 1945-1965 by Martin Gilbert

‘The Churchill Documents’, Companion Volumes

Volume 1.   Youth 1874-1896 Volume 2.   Young Soldier 1896-1901 Volume 3.   Early Years in Politics 1901-1907 Volume 4.   Minister of the Crown 1907-1911 Volume 5.   At the Admiralty 1911-1914 Volume 6.   At the Admiralty July 1914-April 1915 Volume 7.   The Escaped Scapegoat May 1915-December 1916 Volume 8.   War and Aftermath December 1916-June 1919 Volume 9.   Disruption and Chaos July 1919-March 1921 Volume 10. Conciliation and Reconstruction April 1921-November 1922 Volume 11. The Exchequer Years 1922-1929 Volume 12. The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 Volume 13. The Coming of War 1936-1939 Volume 14. At the Admiralty September 1939-May 1940 Volume 15. Never Surrender May 1940-December 1940 Volume 16. The Ever-Widening War 1941 Volume 17. Testing Times 1942 Volume 18. One Continent Redeemed January-August 1943 Volume 19. Fateful Questions: September 1943 – April 1944 Volume 20. Normandy and Beyond: May – December 1944 Volume 21. The Shadows of Victory: January – July 1945 Volume 22. Leader of the Opposition: August 1945 – October 1951 Volume 23. Never Flinch, Never Weary: November 1951 – February 1965

“‘Why study Churchill?,’ I am often asked.  ‘Surely he has nothing to say to us today?’  Yet in my own work, as I open file after file of Churchill’s archive, from his entry into government in 1905 to his retirement in 1955 (a fifty-year span) I am continually surprised by the truth of his assertions, the modernity of his thought, the originality of his mind, the constructiveness of his proposals, his humanity, and, most remarkable of all, his foresight.” -Sir Martin Gilbert

You will help to support the International Churchill Society by purchasing your hardcover or digital editions at Amazon.com by following this link.

Not Really “Official”

Incidentally, the name ‘Official Biography’ is somewhat misleading, as Sir Martin Gilbert noted in a 1991 interview with Brian Lamb on C-Span’s ‘Booknotes’ : ‘I’m called the official biographer, though to the enormous credit of the Churchill family they’ve never asked to see a single word of what I was writing until the books were printed and bound and ready for sale to the public. They never asked me to delete a word or to skirt around a particular issue. So ‘official’ is a misnomer if it’s thought to mean a censored or restricted biographer.’

Winston and Clementine

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Official Biography

• The Churchill Documents
• Book Reviews
• Bibliography
• Annotated Bibliography: Works About WSC
• The Churchill Timeline,1874-1977
• Churchill on Palestine, 1945-46
• Road to Israel, 1947-49
• The Art of Winston Churchill Gallery
• Churchill Conference Archive
• Dramatizations
• Documentaries

Winston S. Churchill

by Randolph S. Churchill and Martin Gilbert

“A milestone, a monument, a magisterial achievement… rightly regarded as the most comprehensive life ever written of any age.” —Andrew Roberts, historian and author

“The most scholarly study of Churchill in war and peace ever written.” —Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times

“Confronted with this mighty ocean of narrative, the only possible response is total immersion. The great tidal wave of detail plunges the reader almost involuntarily into Churchill’s life….It is a Churchilliad, and Gilbert is its bard.” —Simon Schama, The New Republic

Volume I, Youth, 1874-1900

This wonderfully readable volume was received with broad praise. Generally positive, though not without criticism, it reflects the theme of the work, “he shall be his own biographer,” but Randolph Churchill adds his own literary style, thoroughly documented with “wonderful grub” provided by his dedicated researchers, including his ultimate successor, Martin Gilbert. The text covers the years from Churchill’s birth in 1874, his education at Harrow and Sandhurst, his early adventures as a war correspondent and sensational escape during the Boer War, his North American lecture tour, and his entry into Parliament. The term “official” does not mean that the biographers were required to stick to an authorized line or avoid certain subjects; rather, that they were allowed unprecedented access to the Churchill archive from which the biography is largely drawn. Buy Now >

Volume II, Young Statesman, 1901-1914

The last volume written by Randolph Churchill traces the story of his father’s entry into Parliament as a Conservative, aged twenty-six. An independent spirit and rebel, Churchill is praised for his maiden speech by the Leader of the Opposition. His lifelong collegiality toward the opposite party is soon in evidence. Finally, in 1904, he breaks with the Conservatives over Free Trade, which he ardently supports. “Crossing the floor” to the Liberals with his usual good timing, Churchill holds increasingly important cabinet positions in the great Liberal governments of 1906-14. The volume details his work as a crusading Home Secretary, his key role in reforming the House of Lords, his advocacy of Irish Home Rule, and his arrival at the Admiralty, where he prepares the Royal Navy for war with Germany. Buy Now >

Volume III, The Challenge of War, 1914-1916

Martin Gilbert, appointed official biographer after Randolph’s death in 1968, now begins an almost day by day chronology of Churchill’s life, concentrating on the first perilous years of World War I. We begin with Churchill leading the Admiralty in early battles with the German fleet, moving to the epic failure of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns, when Churchill falls from power and is exiled to Belgian trenches as “the escaped scapegoat.” Detailed accounts describe Churchill the warrior, including his efforts to prolong the siege of Antwerp, to develop the expanded use of air power, and to promote his concept for what he calls a “land caterpillar,” soon to be known as the tank. In Flanders, he heads a battalion of Scots Fusiliers—at first unwelcome, later beloved by them all. Buy Now >

Volume IV, World in Torment, 1916-1922

This meticulous account of Churchill’s wide-ranging activities toward the end of World War I and its aftermath displays his persuasive oratory, administrative skill, and masterful leadership. Remarkably, only a few years after the disaster of the Dardanelles, Churchill regains a leading position in British political life. He returns to government as Minister of Munitions, becomes Minister for War and Air, and finally Colonial Secretary. Here we read of his minor role in the Versailles Treaty, his critical work demobilizing the army, and his intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia. Here too we see his actions over the Chanak Crisis with Turkey, the remaking of the Middle East, and the creation of the Irish Free State, when an Irish patriot wrote: “Tell Winston we could never have done without him.” Buy Now >

Volume V, The Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939

Here is a vivid, intimate picture of Churchill’s public and private life between the wars—eighteen years of triumph and tragedy. He becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer and defends the government during the General Strike. Out of office in 1929, he travels North America, enters a ten year sojourn in the political wilderness, but soon reaches his zenith as a writer. He fights the India Bill, champions Edward VIII in the Abdication crisis, and warns of the threat of Hitler. Martin Gilbert reveals the extent to which senior civil servants and officers risked their careers supplying Churchill with secret information about German rearmament. ​Finally, war is declared in September 1939 and Churchill becomes First Lord of the Admiralty ​a quarter century since he last held that post. Buy Now >

Volume VI, Finest Hour, 1939-1941

This precise narrative puts us at Churchill’s shoulder during the most critical years of his life and the world’s, starting with the outbreak of war in September 1939 and ending with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Martin Gilbert unfolds the early events of World War II: Hitler’s supreme triumph on the continent, Britain’s victories in the air, the London Blitz, the U-boat war, Hitler’s attack on Russia, Churchill’s first personal contact with Roosevelt at the Atlantic Charter conference in August 1941, Pearl Harbor, and the forging of the “Grand Alliance.” In Churchill’s crucial meetings with FDR, Gilbert shows not only how each decision was reached, but what influences lay behind it, carefully developing an intimate account of a unique—if not wholly untroubled—relationship between the two great allies. Buy Now >

Volume VII, Road to Victory, 1941-1945

This volume runs from the Japanese attack on Hawaii and British Asia in 1941 through V-E Day and beyond to the end of World War II. From the nadir of the war we observe the turning of “the Hinge of Fate,” the battles of Alamein and Stalingrad, the invasions of North Africa, Italy, and finally France. We are there for the great summit conferences, from Moscow in 1942 (“like carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole”) to Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam. We witness Churchill’s reaction to the waxing of American and Soviet power, the ring closing around Germany, arguments over invasion routes, the death of Hitler, growing concerns about postwar Soviet expansion, the atomic bomb, and the fateful British election that cost the prime minister his job. Buy Now >

Volume VIII, Never Despair, 1945-1965

The final volume covers Churchill’s last twenty years, starting with his role as a scintillating Leader of the Opposition (1945-51). We witness his great speeches of resolve and reconciliation at Fulton, Zurich, and The Hague, his efforts for “a final settlement” with the Soviets, and Eisenhower’s determined resistance. We follow Churchill’s return to the premiership (1951-55), his last efforts to secure permanent peace, his resignation, his final words to his colleagues, his declining years, and his death—seventy years almost to the hour of his father’s passing in 1895. ​​Included is the full text of “The Dream,” Churchill’s ​imagined ​encounter with his father​’s ghost​, ​when​ ​he ​describes ​all that has happened since 1895—​never ​revealing the role ​Winston himself played. Buy Now >

History of the Official Biography

February 1932

Randolph Churchill asks his father for permission to write his biography. Winston says wait.

Winston Churchill writes his son Randolph: “I have reflected carefully on what you said. I think that your biography of Derby is a remarkable work, and I should be happy that you should write my official biography when the time comes.”

October 25, 1962

Martin Gilbert is hired by Randolph Churchill to serve as one of his research assistants.

Randolph Churchill publishes the first narrative volume of the official biography, Winston S. Churchill: Youth, 1874-1900.

Randolph Churchill dies aged only 57.

October 1968

Martin Gilbert is selected to succeed the late Randolph Churchill as the official biographer.

Larry Arnn begins working on the official biography as Sir Martin’s research assistant.

Martin Gilbert publishes the eighth and final narrative volume of the official biography, Winston S. Churchill: Never Despair, 1945-1965.

The document volumes, which had ceased appearing in 1982 after The Coming of War 1936-1939, resume publication as The Churchill War Papers, thanks to the kind generosity of Wendy Reves.

Martin Gilbert accepts a position with Hillsdale College as the William and Berniece Grewcock Distinguished Fellow.

Hillsdale College becomes the publisher of the official biography and undertakes to return every previous volume to print along with the still-unpublished document volumes covering 1942-1965.

The first Hillsdale editions are published, comprising Volume I, Youth 1874-1900, together with its two document volumes. Henceforth, the document volumes will be numbered sequentially.

After forty-four years as official biographer, Martin Gilbert falls ill and is unable to continue his work.

Hillsdale’s document volumes reach Vol. 17, Testing Times, 1942—the first new set of documents in thirteen years.

February 2015

Sir Martin Gilbert passes away aged 78.

Larry Arnn edits and publishes The Churchill Documents: Volume 18, One Continent Redeemed, January –August 1943 as a continuation of Martin Gilbert’s work.

October 2016

Volume 19, Fateful Question, September 1943 to April 1944, is published. At over 2,700 pages, it is the longest volume to date.

February 2018

Volume 20, Normandy and Beyond, May-December 1944, is published.

September 2018

Volume 21, The Shadows of Victory, January-July 1945, is published.

August 2019

Volume 22, Leader of the Opposition, August 1945 to October 1951, is published.

Volume 23, Never Flinch, Never Weary, November 1951 to February 1965, is published, thus completing the publication of the Official Biography.

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Sir winston churchill: a biography, the aim of this page is to give a brief introduction to the career of sir winston churchill, and to reveal the main features of both the public and the private life of the most famous british prime minister of the twentieth century..

Winston Churchill was born into the privileged world of the British aristocracy on November 30, 1874. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of an American business tycoon, Leonard Jerome.

Winston’s childhood was not a particularly happy one. Like many Victorian parents, Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill were distant. The family Nanny, Mrs Everest, became a surrogate mother to Winston and his younger brother, John S Churchill.

The Soldier

After passing out of Sandhurst and gaining his commission in the 4th Hussars’ in February 1895, Churchill saw his first shots fired in anger during a semi-official expedition to Cuba later that year. He enjoyed the experience which coincided with his 21st birthday.

In 1897 Churchill saw more action on the North West Frontier of India, fighting against the Pathans. He rode his grey pony along the skirmish lines in full view of the enemy. “Foolish perhaps,” he told his mother, ” but I play for high stakes and given an audience there is no act too daring and too noble.” Churchill wrote about his experiences in his first book The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898). He soon became an accomplished war reporter, getting paid large sums for stories he sent to the press – something which did not make him popular with his senior officers.

Using his mother’s influence, Churchill got himself assigned to Kitchener’s army in Egypt. While fighting against the Dervishes he took part in the last great cavalry charge in English history – at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.

The Politician

Churchill was first elected to parliament in 1900 shortly before the death of Queen Victoria. He took his seat in the House of Commons as the Conservative Member for Oldham in February 1901 and made his maiden speech four days later. But after only four years as a Conservative he crossed the floor and joined the Liberals, making the flamboyant gesture of sitting next to one of the leading radicals, David Lloyd George.

Churchill rose swiftly within the Liberal ranks and became a Cabinet Minister in 1908 – President of the Board of Trade. In this capacity and as Home Secretary (1910-11) he helped to lay the foundations of the post-1945 welfare state.

His parliamentary career was far from being plain sailing and he made a number of spectacular blunders, so much so that he was often accused of having genius without judgement. The chief setback of his career occurred in 1915 when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he sent a naval force to the Dardanelles in an attempt to knock Turkey out of the war and to outflank Germany on a continental scale. The expedition was a disaster and it marked the lowest point in Churchill’s fortunes.

However, Churchill could not be kept out of power for long and Lloyd George, anxious to draw on his talents and to spike his critical guns, soon re-appointed him to high office. Their relationship was not always a comfortable one, particularly when Churchill tried to involve Britain in a crusade against the Bolsheviks in Russia after the Great War.

Between 1922 and 1924 Churchill left the Liberal Party and, after some hesitation, rejoined the Conservatives. Anyone could “rat”, he remarked complacently, but it took a certain ingenuity to “re-rat”. To his surprise, Churchill was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by Stanley Baldwin, an office in which he served from 1924 to 1929. He was an ebullient if increasingly anachronistic figure, returning Britain to the Gold Standard and taking an aggressive part in opposing the General Strike of 1926.

After the Tories were defeated in 1929, Churchill fell out with Baldwin over the question of giving India further self-government. Churchill became more and more isolated in politics and he found the experience of perpetual opposition deeply frustrating. He also made further blunders, notably by supporting King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936. Largely as a consequence of such errors, people did not heed Churchill’s dire warnings about the rise of Hitler and the hopelessness of the appeasement policy. After the Munich crisis, however, Churchill’s prophecies were seen to be coming true and when war broke out in September 1939 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. So, nearly twenty-five years after he had left the post in pain and sorrow, the Navy sent out a signal to the Fleet: “Winston is back”.

The War Leader

For the first nine months of the conflict, Churchill proved that he was, as Admiral Fisher had once said, “a war man”. Chamberlain was not. Consequently the failures of the Norwegian Campaign were blamed on the pacific Prime Minister rather than the belligerent First Lord, and, when Chamberlain resigned after criticisms in the House of Commons, Churchill became leader of a coalition government. The date was May 10, 1940: it was Churchill’s, as well as Britain’s, finest hour.

When the German armies conquered France and Britain faced the Blitz, Churchill embodied his country’s will to resist. His oratory proved an inspiration. When asked exactly what Churchill did to win the war, Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who served in the coalition government, replied: “Talk about it.” Churchill talked incessantly, in private as well as in public – to the astonishment of his private secretary, Jock Colville, he once spent an entire luncheon addressing himself exclusively to the marmalade cat.

Churchill devoted much of his energy to trying to persuade President Roosevelt to support him in the war. He wrote the President copious letters and established a strong personal relationship with him. And he managed to get American help in the Atlantic, where until 1943 Britain’s lifeline to the New World was always under severe threat from German U-Boats.

Despite Churchill’s championship of Edward VIII, and despite his habit of arriving late for meetings with the neurotically punctual King at Buckingham Palace, he achieved good relations with George VI and his family. Clementine once said that Winston was the last surviving believer in the divine right of kings.

As Churchill tried to forge an alliance with the United States, Hitler made him the gift of another powerful ally – the Soviet Union. Despite his intense hatred of the Communists, Churchill had no hesitation in sending aid to Russia and defending Stalin in public. “If Hitler invaded Hell,” he once remarked, “I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

In December 1941, six months after Hitler had invaded Russia, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The war had now become a global one. But with the might of America on the Allied side there could be no doubt about its outcome. Churchill was jubilant, remarking when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor: “So we have won after all!”

However, America’s entry into the war also caused Churchill problems; as he said, the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is fighting a war without them. At first, despite disasters such as the Japanese capture of Singapore early in 1942, Churchill was able to influence the Americans. He persuaded Roosevelt to fight Germany before Japan, and to follow the British strategy of trying to slit open the “soft underbelly” of Europe. This involved the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy – the last of which proved to have a very well armoured belly.

It soon became apparent that Churchill was the littlest of the “Big Three”. At the Teheran Conference in November, 1943, he said, the “poor little English donkey” was squeezed between the great Russian bear and the mighty American buffalo, yet only he knew the way home.

In June 1944 the Allies invaded Normandy and the Americans were clearly in command. General Eisenhower pushed across Northern Europe on a broad front. Germany was crushed between this advance and the Russian steamroller. On May 8, 1945 Britain accepted Germany’s surrender and celebrated Victory in Europe Day. Churchill told a huge crowd in Whitehall: “This is your victory.” The people shouted: “No, it is yours”, and Churchill conducted them in the singing of Land of Hope and Glory. That evening he broadcast to the nation urging the defeat of Japan and paying fulsome homage to the Crown.

From all over the world Churchill received telegrams of congratulations, and he himself was generous with plaudits, writing warmly to General de Gaulle whom he regarded as an awkward ally but a bastion against French Communism. But although victory was widely celebrated throughout Britain, the war in the Far East had a further three months to run. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally brought the global conflict to a conclusion. But at the pinnacle of military victory, Churchill tasted the bitterness of political defeat.

The Elder Statesman

Churchill expected to win the election of 1945. 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”. He was more equivocal about Britain’s role in his proposed “United States of Europe”, and, while the embers of the World War II were still warm, he announced the start of the Cold War. At Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, 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 1950, 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 1955.

“I am ready to meet my Maker,” Churchill had said on his seventy-fifth birthday; “whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter”. Churchill remained a member of parliament, though an inactive one, and announced his retirement from politics in 1963. This took effect at the general election the following year. Churchill died on 24 January 1965 – 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.

The Family Man

In the autumn of 1908 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 1909. Diana was a naughty little girl and continued to cause her parents great distress as an adult. In 1932 she married John Bailey, but the marriage was unsuccessful and they divorced in 1935. 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 1963 she committed suicide.

The Churchills’ second child and only son, Randolph, was born in 1911. He was exceptionally handsome and rumbustious, and his father was very ambitious for him. During the 1930s 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 1940 and 1945, and ultimately became an extremely successful journalist and began the official biography of his father during the 1960s.

Randolph was married twice, first in 1939 to Pamela Digby (later Harriman) by whom he had a son, Winston, and secondly in 1948 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 1914, 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 1918 Clementine Churchill gave birth to a third girl, Marigold. But in 1921, 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. In 1947 she married Christopher Soames; who was then Assistant Military Attaché in Paris and later had a successful parliamentary and diplomatic career. 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 1987.

The Private Man

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 1929, 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 1938 and which was eventually published in the 1950s. In 1953 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 1939 Churchill managed to snatch a painting holiday with friends near Dreux.

In the summer of 1922, 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 1946 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 1949, Churchill embarked on a new venture – he bought a racehorse. On the advice of Christopher Soames, he purchased a grey three-year-old colt, Colonist II. It was to be the first of several thoroughbreds in his small stud. They were registered in Lord Randolph’s colours – pink with chocolate sleeves and cap. (These have been adopted as the colours of Churchill College.) Churchill was made a member of the Jockey Club in 1950, and greatly relished the distinction.

Among Winston’s closest friends were Professor Lindemann and the “the three B’s” (none popular with Clementine), Birkenhead, Beaverbook, Bracken. The Churchills entertained widely, including among their guests Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein and Lawrence of Arabia. Churchill regularly holidayed with rich friends in the Mediterranean, spending several cruises in the late 1950s as the guest of Greek millionaire shipowner, Aristotle Onassis.

Editorial note

Much of the information presented here was originally compiled by Josephine Sykes, Monica Halpin and Victor Brown. It was edited by Allen Packwood.

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My Early Life: The Autobiography Kindle Edition

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About the author

Winston s. churchill.

Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965) has been called 'the greatest Briton'. An international statesman, orator, biographer, historian, author and Nobel Prize winner, his works remain in print with the world's leading publishers.

Educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, Winston spent several years in the army before becoming a newspaper correspondent and then an MP. His cabinet positions included First Lord of the Admiralty at the outbreak of the First World War and later Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940 and for five years led Britain though its 'finest hour'. Defeated in the July 1945 election, he was Leader of the Opposition until re-elected Prime Minister in 1951. He was knighted in 1953, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He stepped down as Prime Minister in 1955 and remained an MP until 1964.

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Is This the Best One-Volume Biography of Churchill Yet Written?

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By Richard Aldous

• Nov. 13, 2018

CHURCHILL Walking With Destiny By Andrew Roberts Illustrated. 1,105 pp. Viking. $40.

In April 1955, on the final weekend before he left office for the last time, Winston Churchill had the vast canvas of Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Lion and the Mouse” taken down from the Great Hall at the prime ministerial retreat of Chequers. He had always found the depiction of the mouse too indistinct, so he retrieved his paint brushes and set about “improving” on the work of Rubens by making the hazy rodent clearer. “If that is not courage,” Lord Mountbatten, the First Sea Lord, said later, “I do not know what is.”

Lack of courage was never Churchill’s problem. As a young man he was mentioned in dispatches for his bravery fighting alongside the Malakand Field Force on the North-West Frontier , and subsequently he took part in the last significant cavalry charge in British history at the Battle of Omdurman in central Sudan . In middle age he served in the trenches of World War I, during which time a German high-explosive shell came in through the roof of his dugout and blew his mess orderly’s head clean off. Later, as prime minister during World War II, and by now in his mid-60s, he thought nothing of visiting bomb sites during the Blitz or crossing the treacherous waters of the Atlantic to see President Roosevelt despite the very real chance of being torpedoed by German U-boats.

Churchill had political courage too, not least as one of the few to oppose the appeasement of Hitler. Many had thought him a warmonger and even a traitor. “I have always felt,” said that scion of the Establishment, Lord Ponsonby, at the time of the Munich debate in 1938, “that in a crisis he is one of the first people who ought to be interned.” Instead, when the moment of supreme crisis came in 1940, the British people turned to him for leadership. Here was his ultimate projection of courage: that Britain would “never surrender.”

If courage was not the issue, lack of judgment often was. Famous military disasters attached to his name, including Antwerp in 1914 , the Dardanelles (Gallipoli) in 1915 and Narvik in 1940 . So too did political controversies, like turning up in person to instruct the police during a violent street battle with anarchists, defying John Maynard Keynes in returning Britain to the gold standard or rashly supporting Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. His views on race and empire were anachronistic even for those times. The carpet bombing of German cities during World War II; the “naughty document” that handed over Romania and Bulgaria to Stalin; comparing the Labour Party to the Gestapo — the list of Churchillian controversies goes on. Each raised questions about his temperament and character. His drinking habits also attracted comment.

Such is the challenge facing any biographer of Churchill: how to weigh in the balance a life filled with so much triumph and disaster, adulation and contempt. The historian Andrew Roberts’s insight about Churchill’s relation to fate in “Churchill: Walking With Destiny” comes directly from the subject himself. “I felt as if I were walking with destiny,” Churchill wrote of that moment in May 1940 when he achieved the highest office. But the story Roberts tells is more sophisticated and in the end more satisfying. “For although he was indeed walking with destiny in May 1940, it was a destiny that he had consciously spent a lifetime shaping,” Roberts writes, adding that Churchill learned from his mistakes, and “put those lessons to use during civilization’s most testing hour.” Experience and reflection on painful failures, while less glamorous than a fate written in the stars, turn out to be the key ingredients in Churchill’s ultimate success.

He did not get off to a particularly happy start. His erratic and narcissistic father, Lord Randolph Churchill, saw the boy as “among the second rate and third rate,” predicting that his life would “degenerate into a shabby, unhappy and futile existence.” His American mother, Jennie, was often not much kinder, sending letters to him at Harrow that must have arrived like a Howler in a Harry Potter novel. Parental judgments became an obvious spur to fame and attention. “Few,” Roberts writes, “have set out with more coldblooded deliberation to become first a hero and then a Great Man.”

After stints in Cuba, India and Sudan, Churchill achieved instant fame during the Boer War after a daring escape from a South African P.O.W. camp in 1899. That renown propelled him into Parliament, where he soon added notoriety to his reputation by crossing the floor of the House of Commons, abandoning the Conservative Party for the Liberals. Thereafter, wrote his friend Violet, daughter of the future prime minister H. H. Asquith, he was viewed as “a rat, a turncoat, an arriviste and, worst crime of all, one who had certainly arrived.” “We are all worms,” Churchill told her. “But I do believe that I am a glowworm.”

And glow he did, becoming in 1908, at 33, the youngest cabinet member in 40 years and subsequently the youngest home secretary since Peel in 1822. As First Lord of the Admiralty he was credited with making the navy ready for war — his single most important achievement in government before 1940. Even when disaster befell him, Churchill always managed to bounce back. A new prime minister, David Lloyd George, returned him to the wartime cabinet despite the catastrophe of the Dardanelles. When the Liberal Party disintegrated after the rise of Labour, Churchill conveniently “re-ratted” back to the Conservatives, where Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin put him unhappily in charge of the nation’s finances.

By the late 1930s, out of office and despised for his opposition to appeasement, Churchill seemed finished once and for all. But he was ready. “The Dardanelles catastrophe taught him not to overrule the Chiefs of Staff,” Roberts writes, “the General Strike and Tonypandy taught him to leave industrial relations during the Second World War to Labour’s Ernest Bevin; the Gold Standard disaster taught him to reflate and keep as much liquidity in the financial system as the exigencies of wartime would allow.”

Less well known is that Churchill also learned from his successes. Cryptographical breakthroughs at the Admiralty during World War I led him to back Alan Turing and the Ultra decrypters in the second war; the anti-U-boat campaign of 1917 instructed him about the convoy system; his earlier advocacy of the tank encouraged him to support the development of new weaponry. Research for a life of Marlborough (a book that Leo Strauss called the greatest historical work of the 20th century) taught Churchill the value of international alliances in wartime.

If Churchill’s entire life was a preparation for 1940, “the man and the moment only just coincided.” He was 65 years old when he became prime minister and had only just re-entered front-line politics after a decade out of office. It would be like Tony Blair returning to 10 Downing Street today, ready to put lessons learned during the Iraq war to work. Had Hitler delayed by a few years, Roberts suggests, Churchill would surely have been away from front-rank politics too long to “make himself the one indispensable figure.”

Experience certainly did not make success inevitable. In France, Marshal Pétain, revered as the “Lion of Verdun” for his glorious career in World War I, made all the wrong decisions as prime minister from June 1940 onward, equating peace with occupation and collaboration.

Churchill was the anti-Pétain, but what was it that made him “indispensable”? Hope, certainly, and an ability to communicate resolve with both clarity and force. Recordings of wartime speeches can still provoke goose bumps. In the end, Roberts sums up Churchill’s overriding achievement in a single sentence: It was “not that he stopped a German invasion … but that he stopped the British government from making a peace.”

That turned out to be the whole ballgame. After the Battle of Britain was won and, first, the Russians and, then, the Americans came into the war, Churchill knew that “time and patience will give certain victory.” But it also meant a gradual relegation to second if not third place. Britain had entered the war as the most prestigious of the world’s great powers. By its conclusion, having lost about a quarter of its national wealth in fighting the war, Britain had become the fraction in the Big Two and a Half, and was effectively bust. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Roberts tells this story with great authority and not a little panache. He writes elegantly, with enjoyable flashes of tartness, and is in complete command both of his sources and the vast historiography. For a book of a thousand pages, there are surprisingly no longueurs . Roberts is admiring of Churchill, but not uncritically so. Often he lays out the various debates before the reader so that we can draw different conclusions to his own. Essentially a conservative realist, he sees political and military controversies through the lens of the art of the possible. Only once does he really bristle, when Churchill says of Stalin in 1945, “I like that man.” “Where was the Churchill of 1931,” he laments, “who had denounced Stalin’s ‘morning’s budget of death warrants’?”

Some may find Roberts’s emphasis on politics and war old-fashioned, indistinguishable, say, from the approach taken almost half a century ago by Henry Pelling. He is out of step with much of the best British history being written today, where the likes of Dominic Sandbrook, Or Rosenboim and John Bew have successfully blended cultural and intellectual history with the study of high politics. But it would be foolish to say Roberts made the wrong choice. He is Thucydidean in viewing decisions about war and politics, politics and war as the crux of the matter. A life defined by politics here rightly gets a political life. All told, it must surely be the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written.

Richard Aldous, the author of “Reagan and Thatcher” and “Schlesinger,” teaches at Bard.

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Winston Churchill; a biography

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