Biography

• Born on 30th November 1874 at Blenheim Palace near Oxford.
• Graduate of the Royal Military Academy (1894) then began military service at the same time working as a war correspondent. He quit military service in 1899 and turned to politics, journalism and writing. He was a Conservative member of Parliament in the House of Commons from 1900 to 1905; he pursued various activities in the Government between 1906 and 1929 (amongst others 1908 Secretary of Trade, 1910 Home Secretary; 1917 Minister of Munitions; 1919 to 1922 Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air; 1924 to 1929 Chancellor of the Exchequer). In the thirties he concentrated on his writing.
• After the outbreak of World War II he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty; during the war years (1940 to 1945) and from 1951 to 1955 he was Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party.
• He played an active role in the building up of the North Atlantic Pact and the Council of Europe. His speech in Zürich on 19th September 1946, in which he called for the establishment of the united states of Europe as a European peace project, has become famous.
• In 1953 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his memoires of World War II.
• Died on 24th January 1965.