The Truth About Winston Churchill D
Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine, were married for 58 years, but the couple hid a disturbing secret behind bedroom doors. Although most people get Winston Churchill’s life in Parliament wrong, it was certainly no surprise he went into politics. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was an MP for the Conservative Party, while his mother, Jenny Lady Randolph Churchill, was a vivacious American socialite.
Still, this is where the predictable part of Churchill’s life ends. Though Churchill’s early life looked idyllic, it wasn’t. His father and his mother had a chilly relationship and spent most of their time away from each other and their son. Maybe it was a parental neglect, but Churchill’s next moves were anything but promising.
It might surprise you to know that Winston Churchill was a famously poor student. Sent to boarding school in Berkshire, Churchill was shoddy both academically and behaviorally. And though his father desperately wanted him to go to the illustrious Royal Military College, Sandhurst, it took him three tries to finally get in.
When Churchill emerged from Sandhurst, it was into a violent rite of adulthood. In January 1895, Churchill’s father passed. And less than a month later, the young ambitious man went into the British Army as a second lieutenant. Still following the path his late father wanted for him. Hungry for combat, he used his mother’s connections to get posted to an active zone and was soon sending reports to the Daily Graphic in London.
It awoke something in him. While working as a journalist for the Morning Post, Winston Churchill predicted the outbreak of the Second Boer Conflict and traveled to South Africa in 1899 to cover it. He ended up with much more than he bargained for. When the Battle of Chieveley occurred, his train got derailed by shelling and the Boers captured him as a POW.
It was here though that Churchill showed the beginnings of the metal that would guide Britain through World War II. After spending months in the POW camp, Churchill ended up escaping in the middle of the night after climbing over a wall. But this was when the hard part began.
Having no clear plan about where he wanted to go, Churchill spent his next days traveling around, stowing himself in freight trains and mines to hide from the Boers. Eventually, and with much publicity, he made it safely in the Portuguese held East Africa. Before long, he tried to capitalize on this press. For some time, Winston Churchill had been determined to be a member of Parliament like his father.
However, he only saw limited success at the beginning, possibly because he called himself a liberal in all but name, who nonetheless supported the Conservative Party. But after escaping from the POW camp, Churchill tried again at the age of 25 and narrowly won Oldham’s 1900 election. It was the beginning of his path and the beginning of his infamy.
For the next years in Parliament, Winston Churchill nominally represented the Conservatives but increasingly clashed with their ideas and members as he drifted even closer to the Liberals. Eventually, the tension between Churchill and his party members was so pronounced the ambitious Churchill doubted he’d ever get a cabinet seat.
So, he jumped ship to the Liberals in 1904, a highly controversial move at the time. And while Churchill was busy setting fire to his political relationships, fate quietly introduced him to the one partnership he wouldn’t spend the next decade trying to escape. Winston Churchill first met Clementine Hozier in 1904 at a ball hosted by the Earl and Countess of Crew.
Clementine, the daughter of Lady Blanche Ogilvy, was strikingly beautiful, a fact Churchill couldn’t help but notice even on their first meeting. At first, nothing much happened between Winston and Clementine, but when they met again in March of 1908, after being seated together at a dinner party, Winston got the opportunity not just to witness Clementine’s beauty, but also her wit and character.
Smitten, Churchill proposed after a courtship of 5 months, and they married later that year. But, it was no fairy tale. As World War I ramped up, Winston Churchill was drawn more and more into Britain’s politics, and not always with stellar results. In 1911, he became First Lord of the Admiralty, but the promotion was accompanied by utter embarrassment.
When Churchill tried and disastrously failed to beat Turkey in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, he took most of the blame from both sides of the aisle. The consequences were his worst nightmare. Under pressure from the rest of the government, Asquith removed Churchill from his post, and in November, Churchill resigned from the government.
For months, a frustrated Churchill tried desperately to get back into some kind of office, and keep himself busy, even briefly returning to active service on the Western Front, where he faced down shelling and shrapnel nearly daily. But, Churchill wanted to direct the war, not carry it out.
And once he got an idea in his head, the British bulldog wouldn’t let it go. In 1916, Britain got a new Prime Minister in Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill immediately began convincing Asquith’s successor to take a chance on him. George complied, appointing him as Minister of Munitions in 1917, and then as Secretary of State for both war and air as the conflict wrapped up.
After stumbling at the start, Churchill emerged from World War more powerful than ever. Except now he had everything to lose. Churchill’s endless devotion to his country often puts a strain on his marriage to Clementine, even as the pair remained devoted. Nonetheless, they went on to have five children: Diana, Randolph, Sarah, Marigold, and Mary.
With most of them born just before, during, or just after World War I. The children were beacons of hope in the ruined world, but they weren’t immune from tragedy themselves. By 1921, Churchill was Secretary of State for the Colonies and continued to draw power into his orbit.
But that year, he had a brutal reckoning. That May, his mother passed. And then just months later, his daughter Marigold suffered from sepsis and perished, leaving Churchill and his wife utterly bereft. Reportedly, Marigold’s end haunted him for the rest of his days. But for Churchill, it was ever forward no matter the cost.
In the early 1920s, the Liberals and Churchill lost multiple elections as the political tide turned back against them. So Churchill did what he’d always done. In 1924, he switched back to a conservative ticket under Stanley Baldwin. Once more, Churchill had backed the right horse.
And when Baldwin became Prime Minister, Churchill became Chancellor despite zero experience in economics. Still, with Churchill’s way of living, there were as many downs as ups. In the early 1930s, Winston Churchill went over to Germany to visit some of the battlefields of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. Unfortunately, his health couldn’t stand the journey.
In Blenheim, he contracted paratyphoid fever and had to spend two weeks in a sanitarium, only to have the fever recur weeks later and cause a hemorrhaging ulcer. But, while his health was failing, Churchill was about to meet the greatest enemy of his life. During his trip around Germany, Churchill went to Munich and met Ernst Hanfstaengl, who just so happened to be a friend of the rising political star, Adolf Hitler.
Indeed, knowing Churchill’s political prowess, Hanfstaengl tried to arrange a meeting with the two men, only for Adolf to dismiss the idea saying, “What on earth would I talk to him about?” Nonetheless, the two men would become very well acquainted. In January of 1933, Adolf officially came into power in Germany, and Churchill’s life went from circling the drain to taking a new powerful current.
In particular, Churchill immediately recognized the danger Germany posed, soon urging the government to ramp up Air Force spending and other military budgets to keep pace with them. Churchill would have to get a whole lot louder before anyone listened. Although Winston Churchill could read the writing on the wall, almost no one else in power was willing to even try.
In 1938, Churchill was appalled when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain earned popularity for drawing up the Munich Pact with Germany, appeasing the Reich’s constant expansion. As Churchill said to boos in the House of Commons, the pact was a total and unmitigated defeat, and you were given the choice between war and dishonor.
You chose dishonor and will have war. They would all find out how right he was. With Germany’s subsequent invasion of Poland, Britain realized its massive error and finally declared war on the aggressor country in September 1939. Accordingly, Churchill took back up the position of First Lord of the Admiralty and joined Neville Chamberlain’s war cabinet since he was clearly one of the few who had a handle on the situation.
But, it wouldn’t be enough. Not yet. Britain’s delayed reaction to Germany was costly. And when the Germans took Norway and then invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands soon after Poland, the House of Commons tore itself apart. The opposition refused to work with Chamberlain anymore.
And in a panic, the Conservatives and King George the VI put forward Winston Churchill as the new Prime Minister. Churchill’s reaction was exactly what it needed to be. Where other people might shy away from this enormous responsibility, even peace, Winston Churchill was only relieved.
He had been predicting the conflict for nearly a decade and believed his entire life, all its experiences, had been a preparation for this hour and this trial. The issue was, despite this self-belief, Churchill still needed to convince some people in the government. He won them over in a surprising way.
Churchill is now famous as one of the greatest orators in history. And his speeches from this time onward ignited the government and the nation, drawing them to his side. This included the first speech he ever delivered as Prime Minister, where he boomed, “I would say to the House that I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
” But, as always, Churchill was an unlikely candidate for the fame he earned. As it happened, Churchill had suffered from a speech impediment since childhood, speaking with a lateral lisp that made him elide the letter S. Yet, he used this impediment to his advantage. Through his fiery words, Churchill would go on to introduce phrases like, “We shall fight them on the beaches”, the Battle of Britain, and “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
” But, his commitment would take a harrowing toll. In the coming months, Winston Churchill endured the capture of France and then the Blitz on his home soil. Though he believed in his country, he felt little hope that the allies could fully succeed without America entering the conflict, and he kept close ties with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
So, when America finally did join the fight after Pearl Harbor, Churchill hastily traveled to North America to plan organized attacks. But, this is where it all caught up with him. On December 26, 1942, all the stress Churchill had been pushing through finally pushed back. After attending a meeting of the US Congress, he suffered a heart attack, and his concerned doctor insisted on several weeks of bed rest.
Instead, however, he took a train to Ottawa, Canada and gave a speech to the parliament there. He should have listened. Even as the conflict turned in the allies’ favor, Churchill’s health kept declining. By early 1943, with the war machine humming along and the Prime Minister constantly on the move, he became so deathly ill with pneumonia that he was finally forced into a month of bed rest.
Even so, when D-Day rolled around, he came up with a ridiculous idea. Despite his health troubles, when it was clear the allies could seal the to with the Normandy invasion, Winston Churchill was determined not to miss out on one second of the action. He was set on crossing the channel on the day itself, or if need be, the day after.
Eventually, the king had to step in and veto his prime minister, much to Churchill’s dismay. But as the war wound down, Churchill made an error that would dog him forever. In order to wrap up the conflict as quick as possible, Winston Churchill helped initiate the bombings over Dresden from February 13th to 15th, 1945.
A city that was at the time full of civilian refugees from the Eastern Front. After reports of excessive civilian casualties, Churchill came to regret the move and rallied against “miracles of terror and wanton destruction.” Still, it did lead to the desired effect. In May of 1945, Germany officially surrendered for Victory in Europe Day, and Churchill appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace with the royal family before an enormous crowd.
Later at Whitehall, he told another crowd, “God bless you all. This is your victory.” And they responded with a rousing rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” But the end of World War II also spelled the end of Churchill’s apex. In the summer of 1945, the ever-determined Churchill sought re-election again and failed.
The public saw him as a politician for war, not peace, and voted in the Labour Party instead. He didn’t go gently. According to his daughter, the lunch where he realized he was beaten was an occasion of stygian gloom. While his wife Clementine tried to cheer him up by saying it might be a blessing in disguise, Churchill snapped back with characteristic wit, “At the moment, it seems very effectively disguised.
Yet, he had one last victory in him. After living through the beginnings of the USSR, he popularized the term Iron Curtain. Winston Churchill got back into power with the Conservatives in 1951, becoming Prime Minister again at nearly 77 years old. Having devoted his life to public service, Churchill just couldn’t let his influence go.
Until, that is, he was forced to. By the time he took office for the second time, the still ailing Churchill had suffered several minor strokes, and King George VI likely would have asked him to step down if the ruler hadn’t perished in 1952. It nearly spelled disaster. In June of 1953, Churchill experienced another stroke, a serious one this time, and the government had to hush it up as he recuperated for months.
When the end came, it wasn’t even really the end. In April 1955, Churchill finally retired as Prime Minister, but incredibly, he still remained an MP for almost a decade longer. He held on until the bitter end. On January 10th, 1965, just months after stepping down as an MP, Churchill suffered yet another stroke, what would be his last.
He passed on January 24th at his home, and the country responded with all the honors they could heap on him, including a full state funeral and a funeral ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Churchill left this world a hero, but we have since realized he was all too human. Churchill’s marriage to Clementine lasted through two World Wars, but the stresses of his position, not to mention the tragedy of their daughter Marigold, put them through violent ups and downs.
According to some, they were both unfaithful to the other at points in their lives. With Churchill allegedly having an affair with socialite Doris Castle Ross in the 1930s, and Clementine engaging in a romantic yacht trip with her supposed lover Lord Moyne around the same time. Winston Churchill, especially in his later years, exhibited more and more insecurity and vulnerability.
Most infamously, when the modernist painter Graham Sutherland made a less than flattering portrait of him in 1954, Churchill called it filthy and malignant. When Parliament gave it to Churchill to display in his home, he kept it hidden, and his wife or his personal secretary soon destroyed it. He was keeping other secrets behind closed doors, too.
To keep his depression in check during his most critical years, Churchill depended on amphetamines. In the 1940s, with World War II raging, his doctor would often give him prescriptions to keep the Prime Minister from slipping into lethargy, then switch to a barbiturate when it was time for Churchill to go to bed.
His personal struggles, however, are just the beginning. Although he often opposed violence against the people in Britain’s colonies, Churchill’s stance towards colonialism was complacently paternalistic. As noted, he deeply disliked the idea of Indian home rule, believing that Britain knew best when it came to their colonies.
And he sneered at figures like Gandhi. Famously, Churchill called Gandhi a seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, and suggested he’d let him perish in a hunger strike. Unfortunately, it gets worse. Churchill’s handling of the Bengal famine of 1943 went beyond complacency and into horror.
While food shortages ravaged Bengal in 1942, Churchill’s government failed to realize the seriousness of the issue and neglected to send food over. By 1943, the famine had taken out an estimated 3.8 million people, a black mark that more than rivals Churchill’s actions in Dresden.
Winston Churchill is such a looming figure of the 20th century that we often feel his reputation begins and ends at British hero, when in fact, his history is far more complicated than that. Emotionally volatile, academically underwhelming, and caught in a constant struggle for power, in the end, Churchill’s life is one of human pain, cruel failure, and rare, beautiful triumph.
Thanks for watching History Exposed. If you love uncovering the best stories in history, hit like and subscribe to keep exploring with us. If you enjoyed this video, check out the videos on screen for more amazing history content.
