Churchill lived a long life, over ninety years – years in which the world saw enormous change; social, cultural and political.!
Early Life
Winston Churchill came from a long line of English aristocrat-politicians.
His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was descended from the First Duke of Marlborough and was himself a well-known figure in Tory politics in the 1870s and 1880s.
John Winston Lennon was born on this day (October 9, 1940) and was named John after his grandfather and Winston after the popular Prime Minister.
His mother, born Jennie Jerome, was an American heiress whose father was a stock speculator and part-owner of The New York Times. (Rich American girls like Jerome who married European noblemen were known as “dollar princesses.”)
Did you know?
Sir Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his six-volume history of World War II.
Churchill was born at the family’s estate near Oxford on November 30, 1874. He was educated at the Harrow prep school, where he performed so poorly that he did not even bother to apply to Oxford or Cambridge.
Instead, in 1893 young Winston Churchill headed off to military school at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
Battles and Books
After he left Sandhurst, Churchill traveled