Churchill Born: Britain's Future Wartime Leader Arrives

Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire on November 30, 1874, two months premature, during a ball his mother was attending. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a mercurial politician who served briefly as Chancellor of the Exchequer before destroying his own career; his mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American socialite from Brooklyn. Churchill was a mediocre student who failed the entrance examination to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst twice before passing on his third attempt. His father reportedly considered him too slow for a career in law and steered him toward the army as a lesser alternative. Churchill turned military service into journalism, covering colonial wars in Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa while still in his twenties. He escaped from a Boer War prison camp in 1899 by climbing over a wall, hiding in a coal mine for three days, and riding freight trains to Portuguese East Africa, an adventure that made him a national celebrity at twenty-five. He entered Parliament the following year and spent the next four decades oscillating between triumph and disaster: he presided over the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign in World War I, crossed the floor of the House of Commons twice, spent a decade in political exile during the 1930s warning about Hitler while his own party ignored him, and was finally called to lead Britain as Prime Minister in May 1940 at the age of sixty-five. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his war memoirs and historical writing. He had been writing, in one form or another, his entire life.