On this day 135 years ago, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born. He had poor results at school until he was moved to Harrow School where he joined the Harrow Rifle Corps and became the school’s fencing champion. After leaving school he passed the entrance examination to Sandhurst Royal Military College on his third attempt, and began a career in the army. To supplement his income he became a war correspondent.
Churchill’s war correspondence and his escapades in various battles made him famous, and he was elected to Parliament in 1900. At the start of the first world war he was First Lord of the Admiralty, but much of the responsibility for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign lay with him, and he was forced to withdraw from the war cabinet. After the war, his political career continued, but he gradually became isolated as a result of his idiosyncratic nature.
Churchill’s great opportunity came with the outbreak of the second world war in 1939, when he was appointed to the war cabinet, and when Neville Chamberlain resigned as prime minister in 1940, Churchill, with his strong military background, became the obvious choice to succeed him. Churchill’s fighting spirit and eloquent rhetoric helped England through the darkest hours of the war. He died in 1965 at the age of 90.