Winston Churchill -- the Last

Winston Churchill -- the Last Years

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, at the Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire to Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome. His father was a very important Tory politician. He first studied at Harrow and prior to his military career he was sent to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. While he was in the army, he participated in three battles, one of them being the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan.

Among his main interests, while serving in the army, were reading and writing, and thus he wrote two books based on his experiences on the battlefield. Two of his most famous books, The Story of the Malakand Field Force and The River War were based on these experiences. It was his writing skill which got him out of the army in 1899, when he started working as a war correspondent. He worked for the Morning Post and for the Daily Telegraph as well. One of his greatest adventures while working as a correspondent was the fact that during the Boer Wars, he was captured and held hostage until he managed to escape. The following year, 1900 marked Churchill's debut in the political life, that being the year when he became a Conservative member of parliament for Oldham. In 1904, because of various dissatisfactions with the Conservative Party, he changed sides, and joined the Liberal Party, winning a seat in the North West Manchester General Elections in 1906. Under Henry Campbell-Bannerman's new Liberal government, he was appointed Under-Secretary of State for Colonies. In 1908, when Henry Campbell-Bannerman was replaced by Herbert Asquith, he was appointed President of the Board of Trade. Some of the immediate changes he made during his years as President of the Board Trade were to create facilities for working place people, and to create employment exchanges.

In what concerns Churchill's life during the World War I, he saw a major drawback when he applied a wrong strategy and tried to make the Navy the key point of the war. This is the moment when he lost his Admiral title. Still, he had a major comeback with the Second World War, when his political career actually began. After that, he became Prime Minister and during this period he was at the peak of his political career. Winston Churchill served as the Prime Minister of Great Britain twice: once between 1940 and 1945 and the second time between 1950 and 1955.

However, although he excelled in his political life, what is little known about him is his personal life after he stepped down from the helm of the country in 1955. Winston Churchill resigned in April 1955, when he realized that he could no longer serve as Prime Minister, given that his health was severely affected by the series of strokes he had been dealing with since early 1949. The first stroke was a mild one, but in June 1953 he suffered another one. This one, however, was not so mild and it left the Prime Minister of Great Britain with serious problems in what concerns his ability to walk and talk properly. To cover up his serious health problems, the members of Parliament were told that he was suffering from exhaustion, he was 78 years old at the time, and that he needed to take some time off to recover. Things got even more serious with time and old age and two years later, one of the greatest British politicians stepped down from the political scene as a consequence of suffering another mild stroke in December 1956. By 1959, there was little left from what Winston Churchill had once been and during the elections of that year, his majority fell with about a thousand, given that most of the voters were unwilling to give their vote to a 85-year-old man who could barely speak anymore.