It is 150 years since the birth of one of the most popular leaders of the 20th century. Winston Churchill (1874-1965) He was the born leader of the United Kingdom in good times and bad, the strategist, the great orator, the fighter against Nazi fascism; but also, the colonialist and racist politician, the writer and painter, and the cigar and wine hedonist.
polyhedral personality, with lights (the most widespread) and shadows (the most hidden)Churchill and his cigar are a fundamental image of the history of the last century. Named in this century as “the greatest of the British”, he remains very much alive in the country’s collective memory. These following are some of its many facets.
1. The son of a good family
Winston Churchill was born on November 30, 1874 at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, then owned by his grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill and his mother was a young American woman named Jennie Jerome. He was a happy child until his father sent him to an expensive school in Ascot. He became a rebel who dissented capriciously. In 1888 he entered Harrow school. He was not a good student: “He was brilliant, but he only studied when he wanted to.” Being the son of an upper class family, he could always choose his destiny. Aristocratic origin, but the inheritance his father left him when he died was insignificant (his mother had spent almost everything).
2. The one-woman man
On September 12, 1908, Churchill contracted marriage to Clementine Hozierbright and beautiful but not exactly wealthy. They had five children: Diana, Randolph, Sara, Marigold and Mary. When not in London, the Churchills lived at Chartwell House in Kent. They bought the house in 1922 and lived there until his death in 1965.
3. The cigar politician
In 1893, Churchill entered the Sandhurst Military Academy for his third year. When he finished, he joined the Fourth Hussars cavalry regiment. He served in Cuba, Sudan and India, where he spent much of his time playing polo, the only ball sport in which he was ever interested. It was during his time in Cuban lands (still Spanish) that he developed his love for cigars. For the rest of his life he smoked eight or nine a day. At home he had between 3,000 and 4,000 cigars, mostly ‘Romeo and Juliet’, his favorite brand. “In two days his consumption of cigars was equivalent to my weekly salary,” said one of his servants. He rarely took a drag: he chewed the end until it went out and then lit it again. He got so much pleasure that during World War II they made him a special oxygen mask, for a non-pressurized flight at high altitude, which allowed him to continue smoking his cigar.
4. The statesman who “drew” maps
As minister for the colonies, Churchill played an important role in establishing the artificial borders of the modern Middle East. This occurred following the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in which Great Britain and France agreed to divide up the Middle East, ignoring ethnic and religious boundaries. Legend has it for years that the pronounced zigzag on the border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia was born from hiccup or sneeze Churchill had while drawing the map. It wasn’t true. He drew it this way to provide his nation with an uninterrupted air corridor between both countries.
5. The president who wanted to kill Hitler
Churchill fought and defeated Hitler (actually the US and the USSR did). He Fuhrer It was almost his obsession. So much so that He was involved in Hitler’s ‘Operation Valkyrie’ assassination attempt. In 2022, a leak from MI5, the United Kingdom’s internal spy service, revealed the details of a great conspiracy that could have rewritten history, in the middle of World War II. The documents show that one of the conspirators managed to escape. It was the lawyer Otto John, 45 years old, who left Berlin hidden for Madrid four days after the failed attack against the Nazi leader. He had been recruited as an agent by MI6 two years before the attempt on Hitler’s life.
6. The owner of a “black dog”
Churchill had a dog that accompanied him throughout his life. No, it wasn’t an animal. He suffered from manic depression and it was this condition that he called his “black dog.” When it arrived, his life stopped. He spent a lot of time in bed and He lost his appetite and ability to concentrate, and had suicidal thoughts.. His friend Lord Beaverbrook once said that he was always “at the top of the wheel of confidence or at the bottom of intense depression.” From depression he could go on to mental hyperactivity, working until the wee hours of the morning. Of course, perhaps it was the effect of the amphetamines that, at least during the last years of the war, his doctor prescribed him. All to avoid another depressive episode.
7. The racist and colonialist leader
But it’s not all praise and applause. Churchill made big mistakes and was a son of his time and his country, that power that was failing. However, of the nearly 1,600 books about the British leader, few reveal his darkest facets. “The cult of Churchill is quite recent: it was built in the eighties, under Margaret Thatcher. During the Falklands War against Argentina, the country needed a patriotic figure, so it used Churchill. Hundreds of books, documentaries and films invent the myth,” said Tariq Ali, writer and film director, in an interview with 20minutes in 2023. “Calling him racist is one of the mildest criticisms. Let us remember that his slogan was Keep England white (Keep England White),” Ali explains.
8. The man who spoiled Franco
Churchill had a sincere sympathy for Spain, possibly of a rather historical nature. When the Spanish Civil War breaks out, the United Kingdom adopts a non-intervention stance from the beginning. For the prime minister “it was political suicide to commit the country to a war in which any false step could mean endangering essential aspects for the Empire, such as the plaza of Gibraltar or the tacit control of the strait itself,” according to the historian Emilio Sáenz-Francés San Baldomero. Furthermore, Churchill was always a convinced anti-communist. About the Spanish war (in his words, the “Spanish ulcer”) he wrote six speeches in parliament or in public forums, ten journalistic articles and dozens of letters and personal notes. in his book Churchill and Spainhistorian Richard Wigg shows that the tolerance shown towards Spanish trade in times of war allowed the reconstruction of the Spanish gold reserves that helped the dictatorship to survive his international ostracism between 1945 and 1950.
9. The “vengeful toy soldier boy”
Churchill is, we see, a figure full of chiaroscuros. He participated in several colonial wars, supported death squads during Irish independence, used repressive measures against the working class and used gas against the Kurds in Iraq. Not everyone has forgotten its other side. “The actor Richard Burton described him as a “bad man, a vengeful toy soldier boy. “In an interview he said he hated him. The Welsh have not forgotten how much they suffered because of him,” says Ali.
10. The man who lost his peace
After the Second World War, Churchill lost the elections. The Labor Party won, and began the construction of the British Welfare State (it is told in Ken Loach’s documentary, The spirit of 45). Churchill was widely criticized, satirized and even forgotten. In this way he was leader of the opposition between 1945 and 1951, when he won by surprise and became prime minister again. He resigned in 1955. Ten years later he died.
11. The writer who painted
After the First World War he had to assume a secondary role. In 1924 he returned to the Conservatives and in 1925 he was appointed Minister of Finance. His popularity dropped and he ended up withdrawing from politics. Between 1929 and 1939 he continued to belong to Parliament, but he basically dedicated himself to painting and writing. Because Churchill was a great writer and He even won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.a fact that has been somewhat buried by his biography as a statesman. Interestingly, there was another Winston Churchill writer. This was American. Today of yankee Nobody remembers, but at that time, the two writers were often confused and that is why they agreed that the British would publish as “Winston S. Churchill” and the American as “Winston Churchill.”
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