Introducing The Real WINSTON CHURCHILL – WOLVOMAN80 (PART ONE)

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill is considered by many to be among the greatest Britain’s that ever lived. In fact a poll by the BBC in 2002 listed Winston Churchill as the Greatest Britain to have ever lived. He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955 and even now he is still one of the most recognizable politicians in the world.

He led Britain to victory in the Second World War. His ideologies included economic liberalism and British imperialism; he was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924 before joining the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. Churchill represented five constituencies during his career as a Member of Parliament.

He is famous for his wit and ability to lift an audience his words.

His speeches are nearly as famous as the man himself and they are believed to have motivated the nation through the hard times of the second world war most famously his Finest Hour speech. In which he said

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote in his diary on the superbly well-judged manner in which the President made his offer of immediate military assistance, despite Alanbrooke’s being ever ready to highlight what he perceived to be Churchill’s contradictory motivations and flawed character during the war. For example, in his diary entry for 10 September 1944:

… And the wonderful thing is that 3/4 of the population of the world imagine that Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other 1/4 have no idea what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war! It is far better that the world should never know, and never suspect the feet of clay of this otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again … Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the same human being.

So the question is who was Winston Churchill? The answer is a shocking one.

Winston Churchill was born at his home in Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, on 30 November 1874. He was born at a time that Great Britain held huge power over the rest of the world. Queen Victoria had just been crowned Empress of India. He was a direct descendant of the Dukes of Marlborough and his family were among the highest levels of the British aristocracy, and thus he was born into the country’s governing elite. His paternal grandfather, John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough, had been a Member of Parliament for ten years, His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had been elected Conservative MP for Woodstock in 1873 and his mother, Jerome Churchill (née Jerome), was from an American family whose substantial wealth derived from finance. The couple had met in August 1873, and were engaged three days later, marrying at the British Embassy in Paris in April 1874. The couple lived beyond their income and were frequently in debt; according to the biographer Sebastian Haffner, the family were “rich by normal standards but poor by those of the rich”.

Aged seven, Winston began boarding at St. George’s School in Ascot, Berkshire; he hated it and did poorly academically and regularly misbehaved.

In September 1884 he moved to Brunswick School in Hove; there, his academic performance improved but he continued to misbehave.

He narrowly passed the entrance exam which allowed him to begin studies at the elite Harrow School in April 1888. There, his academics remained high and he excelled particularly in history—but teachers complained that he was unpunctual and careless. He wrote poetry and letters which were published in the school magazine, and won a fencing competition. His father insisted that he be prepared for a career in the military, and so Churchill’s last three years at Harrow were spent in the army form. He performed poorly in most of his exams.

On January 24, 1895 after an attempted round-the-world journey failed to cure him of his syphilis. Winston Churchill’s father Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill died like Winston Churchill he is a man of much mystery surrounding him.

Early In 1899 at the invitation of prominent politician Robert Ascroft, Churchill runs for Parliament as part of the Conservative Party. He lost the election but impressed many with his campaigning skills and so his career in politics begins.

Winston Churchill joined the British army in 1893 and developed a keen interest in war correspondence. This led Churchill to work as a war correspondent for The Morning Post and the Daily Mail, in which he was to cover the occurrences of the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa. Soon after his arrival in South Africa, he accompanied a scouting expedition on an armored train. The train was ambushed by the Boers and on 15 November 1899, Churchill was captured and imprisoned in a Prisoner of War (POW) camp. He managed to escape, and with the assistance of an English mine manager, made his way to Delagoa Bay. Upon his return to England he was hailed as a hero.

In the year 1900 Churchill won a seat in the British House of Commons. After a fall-out within his party, Churchill switches to the Liberal Party four years later.

On September 12, 1908 he married Clementine Hozier, who he met at a ball four years earlier, in a packed St. Margaret’s Church at Westminster Abbey. They will go on to have five children together.

From February 1910 to October 1911 Winston Churchill was Home Secretary. Riots erupted in November 1910 in the south Wales town Tonypandy Due to a dispute between workers and the mine owners, culminating in strikes that ultimately lasted almost a year.

When the strikers clashed with local police, Churchill – – sent in soldiers.

There were allegations that shots were fired by the soldiers to control the rioters.

His actions left him unpopular in South Wales.

But a year later soldiers were again called in, this time to strike-related riots in Liverpool. On this occasion the soldiers did fire their weapons and two people were killed.

Nine years later and Churchill is by now Secretary of State for Air and War. He deployed tanks and an estimated 10,000 troops to Glasgow during a period of widespread strikes and civil unrest amid fear of a Bolshevist revolt.

In 1919 when he was Secretary of State for War he urged the use of chemical weapons – primarily against Kurds and Afghans.

“I cannot understand this squeamishness about the use of gas,” He wrote in a memo “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes,” he continued.

In January 1924, the first Labour Government had taken office amid fears of threats to the Constitution. Churchill was noted at the time for being particularly hostile to socialism. He believed that the Labour Party as a socialist party, did not fully support the existing British Constitution.

In 1924 Churchill accepted the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin’s Unionist government, a position once held by his father, he formally rejoined the Conservative Party.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer Churchill oversaw Britain’s disastrous return to the Gold Standard, which resulted in deflation, unemployment, and the miners’ strike that led to the General Strike of 1926.

The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 general election. He spent much of the next few years concentrating on his writing. These years are regularly referred to as his wilderness years, it is at this time that highly respected historian claims that Winston Churchill was struggling to keep funding his huge country estate and his private staff of between 20 to 30 people including cooks, nanny’s, gardeners cleaners and so on.

David Irving claims that Churchill was in this time financed by a primarily Jewish group of businessmen called the focus. He claims that the same group that financed Churchill also propelled him from political wilderness. It was at this time Churchill began his anti Nazi Germany speeches. He attempted to portray himself as an isolated voice warning of the need to rearm against Germany. Though he had a small following in the House of Commons during much of the 1930s by second half of the decade the anti Nazi German group that called themselves the Churchill Group consisted of only himself, Duncan Sandys and Brendan Bracken.

Churchill received information from inside sources including his neighbour, Major Desmond Morton, with Ramsay MacDonald’s approval.

Lord Swinton the Secretary of State for Air responsible for Britain air defences in the lead up to war also passed information to Churchill at the time.

Churchill was a fierce critic of what he seen as Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler and in private letters to Lloyd George and Lord Moyne just before the Munich Agreement, he wrote that the government was faced with a choice between “war and shame” and that having chosen shame would later get war on less favourable terms.

Hitler would later bomb Holland and invade Poland before Chamberlain declared war. The Nazi parties reasoning for these invasions were national defence and security. Upon declaring war a period known as the phoney war begun.

On 10 May 1940, hours before the German invasion of France by a lightning advance through the Low Countries, it became clear that, following failure in Norway, the country had no confidence in Chamberlain’s prosecution of the war and so Chamberlain resigned. The commonly accepted version of events states that Lord Halifax turned down the post of prime minister because he believed he could not govern effectively as a member of the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons. Although a prime minister does not traditionally advise the King on a prime minister’s own successor, Chamberlain wanted someone who would command the support of all three major parties in the House of Commons. A meeting between Chamberlain, Halifax, Churchill and David Margesson, the government Chief Whip, led to the recommendation of Churchill, and, as constitutional monarch, George VI asked Churchill to be prime minister. Churchill’s first act was to write to Chamberlain to thank him for his support.

Chamberlain had long enjoyed excellent health, except for occasional attacks of gout, but by July 1940, he was in almost constant pain. He sought treatment, and later that month entered hospital for surgery. Surgeons discovered that he was suffering from terminal bowel cancer, but they concealed it from him, instead telling him that he would not require further surgery. Chamberlain resumed work in mid-August. He returned to his office on 9 September. However, renewed pain, compounded by the night-time bombing of London which forced him to go to an air raid shelter and denied him rest, sapped his energy, and he left London for the last time on 19 September, returning to Highfield Park in Heckfield. He offered his resignation to Churchill on 22 September. The Prime Minister was initially reluctant to accept; but as both men realised that Chamberlain would never return to work, Churchill finally allowed him to resign. The Prime Minister asked if Chamberlain would accept the highest order of British chivalry, the Order of the Garter, of which his brother had been a member. Chamberlain refused. He said he would “prefer to die plain ‘Mr. Chamberlain’ like my father before me, unadorned by any title”

9 November 1940 at the age of 71 Neville Chamberlain died.

A few days before his death, Neville Chamberlain wrote,

So far as my personal reputation is concerned, I am not in the least disturbed about it. The letters which I am still receiving in such vast quantities so unanimously dwell on the same point, namely without Munich the war would have been lost and the Empire destroyed in 1938 … I do not feel the opposite view … has a chance of survival. Even if nothing further were to be published giving the true inside story of the past two years I should not fear the historian’s verdict.

Neville Chamberlain was not the only one to do what he could to avoid a full scale world war.

Files that were released in 2008 reveal that shortly after the outbreak of war Britain’s Foreign Secretary Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax helped with the travel arrangements of John Lonsdale Bryans, who believed he could bring down Hitler by making contact with prominent anti-Nazi Germans including Ulrich von Hassell, the former German ambassador in Rome.

Initially Lonsdale Bryans thought he could drum up support for an anti-Nazi coup in Germany. But he subsequently changed tactic and tried to contact Adolf Hitler in a bid to negotiate a peace.

Halifax met Hitler in 1937 and was criticised for being too close to the cause of appeasement. Shortly after Churchill took over as Prime Minister in 1940 he was moved from the Foreign Office to the British Embassy in Washington.

Hitler was always keen to do business with Britain and was hesitant to attack but on the 7th of September 1940 after numerous attacks on German cities and civilians by British forces Germany retaliated. An over looked fact is that throughout World War 2 British and American forces killed over ten times the amount of German civilians as German forces killed British civilians.

Historian David Olusoga said he believes Winston Churchill was complicit in a number of atrocities committed in Africa in the early 20th century. Speaking at the Oxfordshire Literary Festival Mr. Olusoga, who co-presents Civilisations on the BBC alongside Simon Schama and Mary Beard, says claims about the darker side of the former Prime Minister’s past are often drowned out by his status as a wartime leader. Mr. Olusoga argued that although Churchill was remembered as being a great politician, he was “largely responsible” for war crimes in Africa.