![]() It was to prove more important that as a democrat, he was disgusted by the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. He had opposed limited self-government for India because of equally romantic reasons, Britain's imperial history. He had returned to gold standard, for instance, because of romantic reasons, Britain's status as a great financial power. He resigned office in 1931 and entered what appeared to be a terminal political decline.Ĭhurchill was truly a romantic, but also truly a democrat. The Conservative Prime Minister appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer, but when he returned the country to the gold standard, it proved financially disastrous, and he further weakened his political position by opposing measures to grant India limited self-government. In 1924, Churchill rejoined the Conservatives. Despite his readmission to office in 1917, he failed to reestablish the reputation as a future national statesman he had won before the war. It was effectively to last nearly 25 years. It was a heroic failure that forced Churchill's resignation and led to his political eclipse. At Gallipoli in 1915, this Anglo-French force struggled to break the defenses that blocked access to Black Sea. Frustrated by the stalemate in Belgium and France, he initiated the Allies' only major effort to outflank the Germans on the Western Front by sending the navy, and later a large force of the army, to the Mediterranean. Thus it was as political head of the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 that he stepped onto the world stage.Ī passionate believer in the navy's historic strategic role, he immediately committed the Royal Naval division to an intervention in the Flanders campaign in 1914. He became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. ![]() In 1904 he left the Conservative Party to join the Liberals, in part out of calculation: the Liberals were the coming party, and in its ranks he soon achieved high office. Winston fought to restore his father's honor in Parliament (where it had been dented by the Conservative Party).Ĭhurchill entered Parliament in 1901 at age 26. ![]() His disapproval surly stung, but Churchill reacted by venerating his father's memory. He has a great talent for show-off, exaggeration and make-believe". Writing in August 1893 to Winston's grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Marlborough, he said the boy lacked "cleverness, knowledge and any capacity for settled work. Early in life, Winston determined to succeed where his father had failed. His father Lord Randolph Churchill was a brilliant political failure. Writing, however, never fully engaged his energies. His life of Marlborough is one of the great English biographies, and The History of the Second World War helped win him a Nobel Prize for literature. Thus he revealed two other aspects of his character: a literary bent and an interest in public affairs. "I felt as cool as I do now." In Cuba he was present as a war correspondent, and in India and the Sudan he was present as both a war correspondent and as a serving officer. Even at 24, Churchill was steely: "I never felt the slightest nervousness," he wrote to his mother. He took enthusiastically to soldiering (and perhaps even more enthusiastically to regimental polo playing) between 18. As a young man of undistinguished academic accomplishment - he was admitted to Sandhurst after two failed attempts - he entered the army as a cavalry officer. Churchill was born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace, the house built by the nation for Marlborough. His ancestor John Churchill had been created first Duke of Marlborough in 1702 for his victories against Louis XIV early in the War of the Spanish Succession. Winston Churchill came of a military dynasty.
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