Prime minister 1940-45 and 1951-55. In Parliament from 1900, as a Liberal until 1923, he held a number of ministerial offices, including First Lord of the Admiralty 1911-15 and chancellor of the Exchequer 1924-29. Absent from the cabinet in the 1930s, he returned Sept 1939 to lead a coalition government 1940-45, negotiating with Allied leaders in World War II to achieve the unconditional surrender of Germany 1945; he led a Conservative government 1951-55. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature 1953. He was born at Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, the elder son of Lord Randolph Churchill. Educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, he joined the army 1895. In the dual role of soldier and military correspondent he served in the Spanish-American War in Cuba, and then in India, Egypt, and South Africa, where he made a dramatic escape from imprisonment in Pretoria. In 1900 he was elected Conservative member of Parliament for Oldham, but he disagreed with Joseph Chamberlain's tariff-reform policy and joined the Liberals. In 1906 he won Northwest Manchester for the Liberals. He had in the meantime been appointed undersecretary of state for the colonies in the Henry Campbell-Bannerman administration. Herbert Asquith made Churchill president of the Board of Trade 1908, where he introduced legislation for the establishment of labour exchanges. As home secretary 1910, he lost much of his previously won reputation as a radical by his action in sending in the military to aid police against rioting miners in Tonypandy, S Wales. In 1911 Asquith appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty, a position he still held on the outbreak of World War I. He devised an ill-fated plan to attack the Dardanelles 1915 in order to relieve pressure on the Russians fighting Turkish troops in the Caucasus. The disaster of the Dardanelles expedition brought political attacks on Churchill that led to his demotion to the Duchy of Lancaster and to his resignation later that year. In 1915-16 he served in the trenches in France, but then resumed his parliamentary duties and was minister of munitions under David Lloyd George 1917, when he was concerned with the development of the tank. After the armistice he was secretary for war 1918-21 and then as colonial secretary played a leading part in the establishment of the Irish Free State. During the postwar years he was active in support of the Whites (anti-Bolsheviks) in Russia. In 1922-24 Churchill was out of Parliament. He left the Liberals 1923, and was returned for Epping as a Conservative 1924. Baldwin made him chancellor of the Exchequer, and he brought about Britain's return to the gold standard. During the General Strike of May 1926, Churchill edited the government newspaper the British Gazette and was prominent in the defeat of the strike. He was out of office 1929-39, and as a back-bench MP he disagreed with the Conservatives on India (he was opposed to any abdication of British power), rearmament (he repeatedly warned of the rate of German rearmament and Britain's unpreparedness), and Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. On the first day of World War II he went back to his old post at the Admiralty. In May 1940 he was called to the premiership as both prime minister and defence minister at the head of an all-party administration, and made a much-quoted "blood, tears, toil, and sweat" speech to the House of Commons. He had a close relationship with US president Roosevelt, and in Aug 1941 concluded the Atlantic Charter with him. He travelled to Washington DC; the Casablanca Conference, Morocco; Cairo, Egypt; Moscow, USSR; and the Tehran Conference, Iran, meeting the other leaders of the Allied war effort. He met Stalin and Roosevelt in the Crimea at the Yalta Conference Feb 1945 to draw up plans for the final defeat of Germany and for its occupation and control after its unconditional surrender. The coalition government was dissolved 23 May 1945, and Churchill formed a caretaker government drawn mainly from the Conservatives. In June he went to the Potsdam Conference in Germany to discuss the final stages of the war. He was already worried by Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe, the "iron curtain descending" as he later described it. But he could have no part in the eventual decisions of the conference, because in July his government was defeated in a general election and he had to return to Britain. He became leader of the opposition until the election Oct 1951, in which he again became prime minister until his resignation April 1955. His peacetime government saw an apparent abatement of the Cold War, and a revival in the country's economy. There was, however, little progress towards the united Europe of which Churchill had proclaimed himself an advocate. He remained in Parliament as MP for Woodford until the dissolution 1964. Knight of the Garter 1953. His home from 1922, Chartwell in Kent, is a museum. His books include a six-volume history of World War II (1948-54) and a four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956-58). The British government agreed 1995 to pay Winston Churchill's family ú13.25 million for his pre-1945 writings, the Chartwell papers. The offer followed a long-running legal battle to prevent the possible sale of the papers to a US university.
