Out of office and politically "in the wilderness" during the 1930s because of his opposition to increased home rule for India and his resistance to the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII, Churchill took the lead in warning about Nazi Germany and in campaigning for rearmament. After two years out of Parliament, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Baldwin's Conservative government of 1924–1929, controversially returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-war parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure on the UK economy. He returned to government under Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, then Secretary of State for the Colonies. He then briefly resumed active army service on the Western Front as commander of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. During the war, he continued as First Lord of the Admiralty until the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign caused his departure from government. Before the First World War, he served as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, and First Lord of the Admiralty as part of Asquith's Liberal government. He gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns.Īt the forefront of politics for fifty years, he held many political and cabinet positions. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, the Anglo–Sudan War, and the Second Boer War. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer his mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American socialite. In 1963, he was the first of only eight people to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.Ĭhurchill was born into the family of the Dukes of Marlborough, a branch of the Spencer family. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his overall, lifetime body of work. Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a non-academic historian, a writer (as Winston S.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, RA (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955.
The Lord Chatfield ( Coordination of Defence)