Which British politician became Member of Parliament for Epping in October 1924?
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British_people.txt Epping_(UK_Parliament_constituency).txt United_Kingdom_general_election,_1924.txt Winston_Churchill.txt Austen_Chamberlain.txt
British people Epping (UK Parliament constituency) United Kingdom general election, 1924 Winston Churchill Austen Chamberlain
British people, or Britons, are the citizens of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown dependencies, and their descendants. :  British nationality law governs modern British citizenship and nationality, which can be acquired, for instance, by descent from British nationals. When used in a historical context, "British" or "Britons" can refer to the ancient Britons, the indigenous Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain, south of the River Forth.

Although early assertions of being British date from the Late Middle Ages, the creation of the united Kingdom of Great Britain      in 1707 triggered a sense of British national identity.  The notion of Britishness was forged during the Napoleonic Wars between Britain and the First French Empire, and developed further during the Victorian era.  The complex history of the formation of the United Kingdom created a "particular sense of nationhood and belonging" in Great Britain and Ireland; Britishness became "superimposed on much older identities", of English, Scots, Welsh and Irish cultures, whose distinctiveness still resists notions of a homogenised British identity.  Because of longstanding ethno-sectarian divisions, British identity in Northern Ireland is controversial, but it is held with strong conviction by unionists. 

Modern Britons are descended mainly from the varied ethnic groups that settled in the British Isles in and before the 11th century: Prehistoric, Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Normans.  Union facilitated migration, cultural and linguistic exchange, and intermarriage between the peoples of England, Scotland and Wales during the late Middle Ages, Early Modern period and beyond.   Since 1922 and earlier, there has been immigration to the United Kingdom by people from what is now the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth, mainland Europe and elsewhere; they and their descendants are mostly British citizens, with some assuming a British, dual or hyphenated identity. 

The British are a diverse, multi-national   and multicultural society, with "strong regional accents, expressions and identities".   The social structure of the United Kingdom has changed radically since the 19th century, with a decline in religious observance, enlargement of the middle class, and increased ethnic diversity. The population of the UK stands at around 62.5 million,  with a British diaspora of around 140 million concentrated in Australia, Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and the United States.

History of the term 

Greek and Roman writers, in the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, name the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland as the Priteni,  the origin of the Latin word Britannic. Parthenius, a 1st-century Ancient Greek grammarian, and the Etymologicum Genuinum, a 9th-century lexical encyclopaedia, describe Bretannus (the Latinised form of the Ancient Greek Βρεττανός) as the Celtic national forefather of the Britons.  It has been suggested that this name derives from a Gaulish description translated as "people of the forms", referring to the custom of tattooing or painting their bodies with blue woad. 

By 50 BC Greek geographers were using equivalents of Prettanikē as a collective name for the British Isles.  However, with the Roman conquest of Britain the Latin term Britannia was used for the island of Great Britain, and later Roman-occupied Britain south of Caledonia.   Following the Roman departure from Britain, the island of Great Britain was left open to invasion by pagan, seafaring warriors such as Saxons and Jutes, who gained control in areas around the south east. 

In this post-Roman period, as the Anglo-Saxons advanced, the Britons became confined to what would later be called Wales, Cornwall, North West England and Strathclyde.  However, the term Britannia persisted as the Latin name for the island. The Historia Brittonum claimed legendary origins as a prestigious genealogy for Brittonic kings, followed by the Historia Regum Britanniae which popularised this pseudo-history to support the claims of the Kings of England.

During the Middle Ages, and particularly in the Tudor period, the term "British" was used to refer to the Welsh people. At that time, it was "the long held belief that the Welsh were descendants of the ancient Britons and that they spoke 'the British tongue.  This notion was supported by texts such as the Historia Regum Britanniae, a pseudohistorical account of ancient British history, written in the mid-12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Historia Regum Britanniae chronicled the lives of legendary kings of the Britons in a narrative spanning 2000 years, beginning with the Trojans founding the ancient British nation and continuing until the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in the 7th century forced the Celtic Britons to the west, i.e. Wales and Cornwall. This legendary Celtic history of Great Britain is known as the Matter of Britain. The Matter of Britain, a national myth, was retold or reinterpreted in works by Gerald of Wales, a Cambro-Norman chronicler who in the 12th and 13th centuries used the term British to refer to the people later known as the Welsh. 

History 

Ancestral roots 

The indigenous people of the British Isles have a combination of Celtic, Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Norman ancestry.      Modern studies using DNA analysis, popularised by the geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer and others, increasingly suggest that three-quarters of Britons share a common ancestry with the hunter-gatherers who settled in Atlantic Europe during the Paleolithic era,  "after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands". 

Despite the separation of the British Isles from continental Europe following the last glacial period, the genetic record indicates that the British and Irish broadly share their closest common ancestry with the Basque people, who live in the Basque Country near the Pyrenees. Oppenheimer continues that the majority of the people of the British Isles share genetic commonalities with the Basques, ranging from highs of 90% in Wales to lows of 66% in East Anglia.

The genetic difference between western Britain and the East of England is thought to originate from two divergent prehistoric routes of immigration – one up the Atlantic coast, the other from continental Europe. Major immigrant settlement of the British Isles occurred during the Neolithic period, interpreted by Bryan Sykes—professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford—as the arrival of the Celts from the Iberian Peninsula, and the origin of Britain's and Ireland's Celtic tribes. 

Oppenheimer's opinion is that "..by far the majority of male gene types in the British Isles derive from Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal), ranging from a low of 59% in Fakenham, Norfolk to highs of 96% in Llangefni, north Wales".  The National Museum Wales states that "it is possible that future genetic studies of ancient and modern human DNA may help to inform our understanding of the subject" but "early studies have, so far, tended to produce implausible conclusions from very small numbers of people and using outdated assumptions about linguistics and archaeology." 

Between the 8th and 11th centuries, "three major cultural divisions" had emerged in Great Britain: the English, the Scots and the Welsh.  The English had been unified under a single nation state in 937 by King Athelstan of Wessex after the Battle of Brunanburh.  Before then, the English (known then in Old English as the Anglecynn) were under the governance of independent Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms which gradually coalesced into a Heptarchy of seven powerful states, the most powerful of which were Mercia and Wessex. Scottish historian and archaeologist Neil Oliver said that the Battle of Brunanburh would "define the shape of Britain into the modern era", it was a "showdown for two very different ethnic identities – a Norse Celtic alliance versus Anglo Saxon. It aimed to settle once and for all whether Britain would be controlled by a single imperial power or remain several separate independent kingdoms, a split in perceptions which is still very much with us today".  However, historian Simon Schama suggested that it was Edward I of England who was solely "responsible for provoking the peoples of Britain into an awareness of their nationhood" in the 13th century.  Scottish national identity, "a complex amalgam" of Gael, Pict, Norsemen and Anglo-Norman, was not finally forged until the Wars of Scottish Independence against the Kingdom of England in the late 13th and early 14th centuries.  

Though Wales was conquered by England, and its legal system replaced by that of the Kingdom of England under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542, the Welsh endured as a nation distinct from the English.  Later, with both an English Reformation and a Scottish Reformation, Edward VI of England, under the counsel of Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, advocated a union with the Kingdom of Scotland, joining England, Wales, and Scotland in a united Protestant Great Britain.  The Duke of Somerset supported the unification of the English, Welsh and Scots under the "indifferent old name of Britons" on the basis that their monarchies "both derived from a Pre-Roman British monarchy".

Following the death of Elizabeth I of England in 1603, the throne of England was inherited by James VI, King of Scots, so that the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland were united in a personal union under James VI of Scotland and I of England, an event referred to as the Union of the Crowns.  King James advocated full political union between England and Scotland,  and on 20 October 1604 proclaimed his assumption of the style "King of Great Britain", though this title was rejected by both the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland,   and so had no basis in either English law or Scots law.

Union and the development of Britishness 

Despite centuries of military and religious conflict, the Kingdoms of England and Scotland had been "drawing increasingly together" since the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and the Union of the Crowns in 1603.  A broadly shared language, island, monarch, religion and Bible (the Authorized King James Version) further contributed to a growing cultural alliance between the two sovereign realms and their peoples.  The Glorious Revolution of 1688 resulted in a pair of Acts of the English and Scottish legislatures—the Bill of Rights 1689 and Claim of Right Act 1689 respectively—which ensured that the shared constitutional monarchy of England and Scotland was held only by Protestants. Despite this, although popular with the monarchy and much of the aristocracy, attempts to unite the two states by Acts of Parliament in 1606, 1667, and 1689 were unsuccessful; increased political management of Scottish affairs from England had led to "criticism", and strained Anglo-Scottish relations.  

While English maritime explorations during the Age of Discovery gave new-found imperial power and wealth to the English and Welsh at the end of the 17th century, Scotland suffered from a long-standing weak economy. In response, the Scottish kingdom, in opposition to William II of Scotland (III of England), commenced the Darien Scheme, an attempt to establish a Scottish imperial outlet—the colony of New Caledonia—on the isthmus of Panama. However, through a combination of disease, Spanish hostility, Scottish mismanagement and opposition to the scheme by the East India Company and the English government (who did not want to provoke the Spanish into war)  this imperial venture ended in "catastrophic failure" with an estimated "25% of Scotland's total liquid capital" lost.

The events of the Darien Scheme, and the passing by the English Parliament of the Act of Settlement 1701 asserting the right to choose the order of succession for English, Scottish and Irish thrones, escalated political hostilities between England and Scotland, and neutralised calls for a united British people. The Parliament of Scotland responded by passing the Act of Security 1704, allowing it to appoint a different monarch to succeed to the Scottish crown from that of England, if it so wished. The English political perspective was that the appointment of a Jacobite monarchy in Scotland opened up the possibility of a Franco-Scottish military conquest of England during the Second Hundred Years' War and War of the Spanish Succession. The Parliament of England passed the Alien Act 1705, which provided that Scottish nationals in England were to be treated as aliens and estates held by Scots would be treated as alien property,  whilst also restricting the import of Scottish products into England and its colonies (about half of Scotland's trade).  However, the Act contained a provision that it would be suspended if the Parliament of Scotland entered into negotiations regarding the creation of a unified Parliament of Great Britain, which in turn would refund Scottish financial losses on the Darien Scheme.

Union of Scotland and England

Despite opposition from much of the Scottish and English populations,  a Treaty of Union was agreed in 1706 and was then ratified by the parliaments of both countries with the passing of the Acts of Union 1707. With effect from 1 May 1707, this created a new sovereign state called the "Kingdom of Great Britain".    This kingdom "began as a hostile merger", but led to a "full partnership in the most powerful going concern in the world"; historian Simon Schama stated that "it was one of the most astonishing transformations in European history". 

After 1707, a British national identity began to develop, though it was initially resisted, particularly by the English. The peoples of Great Britain had by the 1750s begun to assume a "layered identity": to think of themselves as simultaneously British and also Scottish, English, or Welsh.

The terms North Briton and South Briton were devised for the Scots and the English respectively, with the former gaining some preference in Scotland, particularly by the economists and philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment.   Indeed, it was the "Scots [who] played key roles in shaping the contours of British identity";  "their scepticism about the Union allowed the Scots the space and time in which
to dominate the construction of Britishness in its early crucial years",  drawing upon the notion of a shared "spirit of liberty common to both Saxon and Celt ... against the usurpation of the Church of Rome".  James Thomson was a poet and playwright born to a Church of Scotland minister in the Scottish Lowlands in 1700 who was interested in forging a common British culture and national identity in this way. In collaboration with Thomas Arne, they wrote Alfred, an opera about Alfred the Great's victory against the Vikings performed to Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1740 to commemorate the accession of George I and the birthday of Princess Augusta.  "Rule, Britannia!" was the climactic piece of the opera and quickly became a "jingoistic" British patriotic song celebrating "Britain's supremacy offshore".  An island country with a series of victories for the Royal Navy associated empire and naval warfare "inextricably with ideals of Britishness and Britain's place in the world". 

Britannia, the new national personification of Great Britain, was established in the 1750s as a representation of "nation and empire rather than any single national hero". On Britannia and British identity, historian Peter Borsay wrote: 

From the Union of 1707 through to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Great Britain was "involved in successive, very dangerous wars with Catholic France",  but which "all brought enough military and naval victories ... to flatter British pride".  As the Napoleonic Wars with the First French Empire advanced, "the English and Scottish learned to define themselves as similar primarily by virtue of not being French or Catholic".  In combination with sea power and empire, the notion of Britishness became more "closely bound up with Protestantism",  a cultural commonality through which the English, Scots and Welsh became "fused together, and remain[ed] so, despite their many cultural divergences". 

The neo-classical monuments that proliferated at the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th, such as The Kymin at Monmouth, were attempts to meld the concepts of Britishness with the Greco-Roman empires of classical antiquity. The new and expanding British Empire provided "unprecedented opportunities for upward mobility and the accumulations of wealth", and so the "Scottish, Welsh and Irish populations were prepared to suppress nationalist issues on pragmatic grounds". The British Empire was "crucial to the idea of a British identity and to the self-image of Britishness".  Indeed, the Scottish welcomed Britishness during the 19th century "for it offered a context within which they could hold on to their own identity whilst participating in, and benefiting from, the expansion of the [British] Empire". Similarly, the "new emphasis of Britishness was broadly welcomed by the Welsh who considered themselves to be the lineal descendants of the ancient Britons – a word that was still used to refer exclusively to the Welsh".  For the English, however, by the Victorian era their enthusiastic adoption of Britishness had meant that, for them, Britishness "meant the same as 'Englishness'",  so much so that "Englishness and Britishness" and "'England' and 'Britain' were used interchangeably in a variety of contexts".  Britishness came to borrow heavily from English political history because England had "always been the dominant component of the British Isles in terms of size, population and power"; Magna Carta, common law and hostility to continental Europe were English factors that influenced British sensibilities.  

Union with Ireland

The political union of the predominantly Catholic Kingdom of Ireland with Great Britain in 1800, coupled with the outbreak of peace with France in the early 19th century, challenged the previous century's concept of militant Protestant Britishness.  The new, expanded United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland meant that the state had to re-evaluate its position on the civil rights of Catholics, and extend its definition of Britishness to the Irish people.   Like the terms that had been invented at the time of the Acts of Union 1707, "West Briton" was introduced for the Irish after 1800. In 1832 Daniel O'Connell, an Irish politician who campaigned for Catholic Emancipation, stated in Britain's House of Commons: 

Ireland, from 1801 to 1923, was marked by a succession of economic and political mismanagement and neglect, which marginalised the Irish, and advanced Irish nationalism. In the forty years that followed the Union, successive British governments grappled with the problems of governing a country which had, as Benjamin Disraeli put it in 1844, "a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world".  Although the vast majority of Unionists in Ireland proclaimed themselves "simultaneously Irish and British", even for them there was a strain upon the adoption of Britishness after the Great Famine. 

War continued to be a unifying factor for the people of Great Britain: British jingoism re-emerged during the Boer Wars in southern Africa.   The experience of military, political and economic power from the rise of the British Empire led to a very specific drive in artistic technique, taste and sensibility for Britishness.  In 1887, Frederic Harrison wrote: 

The Catholic Relief Act 1829 reflected a "marked change in attitudes" in Great Britain towards Catholics and Catholicism.  A "significant" example of this was the collaboration between Augustus Welby Pugin, an "ardent Roman Catholic" and son of a Frenchman, and Sir Charles Barry, "a confirmed Protestant", in redesigning the Palace of Westminster—"the building that most enshrines ... Britain's national and imperial pre-tensions". Protestantism gave way to imperialism as the leading element of British national identity during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and as such, a series of royal, imperial and national celebrations were introduced to the British people to assert imperial British culture and give themselves a sense of uniqueness, superiority and national consciousness.  Empire Day and jubilees of Queen Victoria were introduced to the British middle class, but quickly "merged into a national 'tradition'". 

Modern period 

The First World War "reinforced the sense of Britishness" and patriotism in the early 20th century. Through war service (including conscription in Great Britain), "the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish fought as British". The aftermath of the war institutionalised British national commemoration through Remembrance Sunday and the Poppy Appeal. The Second World War had a similar unifying effect upon the British people,  however, its outcome was to recondition Britishness on a basis of democratic values and its marked contrast to Europeanism. Notions that the British "constituted an Island race, and that it stood for democracy were reinforced during the war and they were circulated in the country through Winston Churchill's speeches, history books and newspapers".

At its international zenith, "Britishness joined peoples around the world in shared traditions and common loyalties that were strenuously maintained".  But following the two world wars, the British Empire experienced rapid decolonisation. The secession of the Irish Free State from the United Kingdom meant that Britishness had lost "its Irish dimension" in 1922, and the shrinking empire supplanted by independence movements dwindled the appeal of British identity in the Commonwealth of Nations during the mid-20th century. 

Since the British Nationality Act 1948 and the subsequent mass immigration to the United Kingdom from the Commonwealth and elsewhere in the world, "the expression and experience of cultural life in Britain has become fragmented and reshaped by the influences of gender, ethnicity, class and region".  Furthermore, the United Kingdom's membership of the European Economic Community in 1973 eroded the concept of Britishness as distinct from continental Europe.   As such, since the 1970s "there has been a sense of crisis about what it has meant to be British",  exacerbated by growing demands for greater political autonomy for Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. 

The late 20th century saw major changes to the politics of the United Kingdom with the establishment of devolved national administrations for Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales following pre-legislative referendums.  Calls for greater autonomy for the four countries of the United Kingdom had existed since their original union with each other, but gathered pace in the 1960s and 1970s. Devolution has led to "increasingly assertive Scottish, Welsh and Irish national identities",  resulting in more diverse cultural expressions of Britishness,  or else its outright rejection: Gwynfor Evans, a Welsh nationalist politician active in the late 20th century, rebuffed Britishness as "a political synonym for Englishness which extends English culture over the Scots, Welsh and the Irish". 

In 2004 Sir Bernard Crick, political theorist and democratic socialist tasked with developing the life in the United Kingdom test said: 

Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, initiated a debate on British identity in 2006.  Brown's speech to the Fabian Society's Britishness Conference proposed that British values demand a new constitutional settlement and symbols to represent a modern patriotism, including a new youth community service scheme and a British Day to celebrate. One of the central issues identified at the Fabian Society conference was how the English identity fits within the framework of a devolved United Kingdom. An expression of Her Majesty's Government's initiative to promote Britishness was the inaugural Veterans' Day which was first held on 27 June 2006. As well as celebrating the achievements of armed forces veterans, Brown's speech at the first event for the celebration said: 

Geographic distribution 

Britons - people with British citizenship or of British descent - have a significant presence in a number of countries other than the United Kingdom, and in particular in those with historic connections to the British Empire. After the Age of Discovery the British were one of the earliest and largest communities to emigrate out of Europe, and the British Empire's expansion during the first half of the 19th century triggered an "extraordinary dispersion of the British people", resulting in particular concentrations "in Australasia and North America". 

The British Empire was "built on waves of migration overseas by British people",  who left the United Kingdom and "reached across the globe and permanently affected population structures in three continents". As a result of the British colonisation of the Americas, what became the United States was "easily the greatest single destination of emigrant British", but in Australia the British experienced a birth rate higher than "anything seen before" resulting in the displacement of indigenous Australians.

In colonies such as Southern Rhodesia, British East Africa and Cape Colony, permanently resident British communities were established and whilst never more than a numerical minority these Britons "exercised a dominant influence" upon the culture and politics of those lands. In Australia, Canada and New Zealand "people of British origin came to constitute the majority of the population" contributing to these states becoming integral to the Anglosphere.

The United Kingdom Census 1861 estimated the size of the overseas British to be around 2.5 million, but concluded that most of these were "not conventional settlers" but rather "travellers, merchants, professionals, and military personnel". By 1890, there were over 1.5 million further UK-born people living in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. A 2006 publication from the Institute for Public Policy Research estimated 5.6 million Britons lived outside of the United Kingdom.  

Australia 

From the beginning of Australia's colonial period until after the Second World War, people from the United Kingdom made up a large majority of people coming to Australia, meaning that many people born in Australia can trace their origins to Britain.  The colony of New South Wales, founded on 26 January 1788, was part of the eastern half of Australia claimed by the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1770, and initially settled by Britons through penal transportation. Together with another five largely self-governing Crown Colonies, the federation of Australia was achieved on 1 January 1901.

Its history of British dominance meant that Australia was "grounded in British culture and political traditions that had been transported to the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century and become part of colonial culture and politics". Australia maintains the Westminster system of Parliamentary Government and Elizabeth II as Queen of Australia. Until 1987, the national status of Australian citizens was formally described as "British Subject: Citizen of Australia". Britons continue to make up a substantial proportion of immigrants.

British overseas territories 

The people of the British overseas territories are British by citizenship, via origins or naturalisation. Along with aspects of common British identity, each of them has their own distinct identity shaped in the respective particular circumstances of political, economic, ethnic, social and cultural history. For instance, in the case of the Falkland Islanders, Lewis Clifton the Speaker of the Legislative Council of the Falkland Islands, explains: 
In contrast, for the majority of the Gibraltarians, who live in Gibraltar, there is an "insistence on their Britishness" which "carries excessive loyalty" to Britain.  The sovereignty of Gibraltar has been a point of contention in Spain–United Kingdom relations, but an overwhelming number of Gibraltarians embrace Britishness with strong conviction, in direct opposition to Spanish territorial claims.  

Canada 

Canada traces its statehood to the French, English and Scottish expeditions of North America from the late-15th century. France ceded nearly all of New France in 1763 after the Seven Years' War, and so after the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776, Quebec and Nova Scotia formed "the nucleus of the colonies that constituted Britain's remaining stake on the North American continent".  British North America attracted the United Empire Loyalists, Britons who migrated out of what they considered the "rebellious" United States, increasing the size of British communities in what was to become Canada.

In 1867 there was a union of three colonies with British North America which together formed the Canadian Confederation, a federal dominion.    This began an accretion of additional provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy from the United Kingdom, highlighted by the Statute of Westminster 1931 and culminating in the Canada Act 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the parliament of the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, it is recognised that there is a "continuing importance of Canada's long and close relationship with Britain";  large parts of Canada's modern population claim "British origins" and the cultural impact of the British upon Canada's institutions is profound. 

It was not until 1977 that the phrase "A Canadian citizen is a British subject" ceased to be used in Canadian passports.  The politics of Canada are strongly influenced by British political culture.   Although significant modifications have been made, Canada is governed by a democratic parliamentary framework comparable to the Westminster system, and retains Elizabeth II as The Queen of Canada and Head of State.   English is an official language used in Canada. 

Chile 

Chile, facing the Pacific Ocean, has a large British presence.  Over 50,000  British immigrants settled in Chile from 1840 to 1914. A significant number of them settled in Magallanes Province, especially in the city of Punta Arenas when it flourished as a major global seaport for ships crossing between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Strait of Magellan. Around 32,000 English settled in Valparaíso, influencing the port city to the extent of making it virtually a British colony during the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. However, the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 and the outbreak of the First World War drove many of them away from the city or back to Europe.

In Valparaíso, they created their largest and most important colony, bringing with them neighbourhoods of British character, schools, social clubs, sports clubs, business organisations and periodicals. Even today their influence is apparent in specific areas, such as the banks and the navy, as well as in certain social activities, such as football, horse racing, and the custom of drinking tea.

During the movement for independence (1818), it was mainly the British who formed the Chilean Navy, under the command of Lord Cochrane.

British investment helped Chile become prosperous and British seamen helped the Chilean navy become a strong force in the South Pacific. Chile won two wars, the first against the Peru-Bolivian Confederation and the second, the War of the Pacific, in 1878–79, against an alliance between Peru and Bolivia. The liberal-socialist "Revolution of 1891" introduced political reforms modelled on British parliamentary practice and lawmaking.

British immigrants were also important in the northern zone of the country during the saltpetre boom, in the ports of Iquique and Pisagua. The "King of Saltpetre", John Thomas North, was the principal tycoon of nitrate mining. The British legacy is reflected in the streets of the historic district of the city of Iquique, with the foundation of various institutions, such as the Club Hípico (Racing Club). Nevertheless, the British active presence came to an end with the saltpetre crisis during the 1930s.

Some Scots settled in the country's more temperate regions, where the climate and the forested landscape with glaciers and islands may have reminded them of their homeland (the Highlands and Northern Scotland) while English and Welsh made up the rest. The Irish immigrants, who were frequently confused with the British, arrived as merchants, tradesmen and sailors, settling along with the British in the main trading cities and ports.

An important contingent of British (principally Welsh) immigrants arrived between 1914 and 1950, settling in the present-day region of Magallanes. British families were established in other areas of the country, such as Santiago, Coquimbo, the Araucanía, and Chiloé.

The cultural legacy of the British in Chile is notable and has spread beyond the British Chilean community into society at large. Customs taken from the British include afternoon tea (called onces by Chileans), football, rugby union and horse racing. Another legacy is the widespread use of British personal names by Chileans.

Chile has the largest population of descendants of British settlers in Latin America. Over 700,000 Chileans may have British (English, Scottish and Welsh) origin, amounting to 4.5% of Chile's population. 

New Zealand 

A long-term result of James Cook's voyage of 1768–71,  a significant number of New Zealanders are of British descent, for whom a sense of Britishness has contributed to their identity.  As late as the 1950s, it was common for British New Zealanders to refer to themselves as British, such as when Prime Minister Keith Holyoake described Sir Edmund Hillary's successful ascent of Mount Everest as putting "the British race and New Zealand on top of the world".  New Zealand passports described nationals as "British Subject: Citizen of New Zealand" until 1974, when this was changed to "New Zealand citizen". 

In an interview with the New Zealand Listener in 2006, Don Brash, the then Leader of the Opposition, said:

The politics of New Zealand are strongly influenced by British political culture. Although significant modifications have been made, New Zealand is governed by a democratic parliamentary framework comparable to the Westminster system, and retains Elizabeth II as the head of the monarchy of New Zealand.  English is the dominant official language used in New Zealand. 

Hong Kong 

British nationality law as it pertains to Hong Kong has been unusual ever since Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842. From its beginning as a sparsely populated trading port to its modern role as a cosmopolitan international financial centre of over seven million people, the territory has attracted refugees, immigrants and expatriates alike searching for a new life.
Citizenship matters were complicated by the fact that British nationality law treated those born in Hong Kong as British subjects (although they did not enjoy full rights and citizenship), while the People's Republic of China (PRC) did not recognise Hong Kong Chinese as such. The main reason for this was that recognising these people as British was seen as a tacit acceptance of a series of historical treaties that the PRC labelled as "unequal", including the ones which ceded Hong Kong Island, the Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories to Britain. The British government, however, recognising the unique political situation of Hong Kong, granted 3.4 million Hong Kongers a new type of nationality known as British National (Overseas), which is established in accordance with the Hong Kong Act 1985. Among those 3.4 million people, there are many British Nationals (Overseas) who are eligible for full British citizenship. Both British Nationals (Overseas) and British citizens are British nationals and Commonwealth citizens according to the British Nationality Law, which enables them to various rights in the United Kingdom and the European Union.

South Africa 

The British arrived in the area which would become the modern-day South Africa during the early 18th century, yet substantial settlement only started end of the 18th century, in the Cape of Good Hope; the British first explored the area for conquests for or related to the Slave Trade. In the late 19th century, the discovery of gold and diamonds further encouraged colonisation of South Africa by the British, and the population of the British-South Africans rose substantially, although there was fierce rivalry between the British and Afrikaners (descendants of Dutch colonists) in the period known as the Boer Wars. When apartheid first started most British-South Africans were mostly keen on keeping and even strengthening its ties with the United Kingdom. The latest census in South Africa showed that there are almost 2 million British-South Africans; they make up about 40% of the total White South African demographic, and the greatest white British ancestry populations in South Africa are in the KwaZulu-Natal province and in cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Ireland 

Plantations of Ireland introduced large numbers of people from Great Britain to Ireland throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period. The resulting Protestant Ascendancy, the aristocratic class of the Lordship of Ireland, broadly identified themselves as Anglo-Irish.  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestant British settlers subjugated Catholic, Gaelic inhabitants in the north of Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster and the Williamite War in Ireland; it was "an explicit attempt to control Ireland strategically by introducing ethnic and religious elements loyal to the British interest in Ireland". 

The Ulster Scots people are an ethnic group of British origin in Ireland, broadly descended from Lowland Scots who settled in large numbers in the Province of Ulster during the planned process of colonisations of Ireland which took place in the reign of James VI of Scotland and I of England. Together with English and Welsh settlers, these Scots introduced Protestantism (particularly the Presbyterianism of the Church of Scotland) and the Ulster Scots and English languages to, mainly, northeastern Ireland. With the partition of Ireland and independence for what is now the Republic of Ireland some of these people found themselves no longer living within the United Kingdom.

Northern Ireland itself was, for many years, the site of a violent and bitter ethno-sectarian conflict—The Troubles—between those claiming to represent Irish nationalism, who are predominantly Roman Catholic, and those claiming to represent British unionism, who are predominantly Protestant.  Unionists want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, while nationalists desire a united Ireland.  

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, most of the paramilitary groups involved in the Troubles have ceased their armed campaigns, and constitutionally, the people of Northern Ireland have been recognised as "all persons born in Northern Ireland and having, at the time of their birth, at least one parent who is a British citizen, an Irish citizen or is otherwise entitled to reside in Northern Ireland without any restriction on their period of residence".  The Good Friday Agreement guarantees the "recognition of the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose".

United States 

An English presence in North America began with the Roanoke Colony and Colony of Virginia in the late-16th century, but the first successful English settlement was established in 1607, on the James River at Jamestown. By the 1610s an estimated 1,300 English people had travelled to North America, the "first of many millions from the British Isles".  In 1620 the Pilgrims established the English imperial venture of Plymouth Colony, beginning "a remarkable acceleration of permanent emigration from England" with over 60% of trans-Atlantic English migrants settling in the New England Colonies. During the 17th century an estimated 350,000 English and Welsh migrants arrived in North America, which in the century after the Acts of Union 1707 was surpassed in rate and number by Scottish and Irish migrants. 

The British policy of salutary neglect for its North American colonies intended to minimise trade restrictions as a way of ensuring they stayed loyal to British interests. This permitted the development of the American Dream, a cultural spirit distinct from that of its European founders.  The Thirteen Colonies of British America began an armed rebellion against British rule in 1775 when they rejected the right of the Parliament of Great Britain to govern them without representation; they proclaimed their independence in 1776, and constituted the first thirteen states of the United States of America, which became a sovereign state in 1781 with the ratification of the Articles of Confederation. The 1783 Treaty of Paris represented Great Britain's formal acknowledgement of the United States' sovereignty at the end of the American Revolutionary War. 

Nevertheless, longstanding cultural and historical ties have, in more modern times, resulted in the Special Relationship, the historically close political, diplomatic, and military co-operation between the United Kingdom and United States.  Linda Colley, a professor of history at Princeton University and specialist in Britishness, suggested that because of their colonial influence on the United States, the British find Americans a "mysterious and paradoxical people, physically distant but culturally close, engagingly similar yet irritatingly different". 

Today, 838,000 people in the United States identified themselves as born in Britain..

Culture 

Result from the expansion of the British Empire, British cultural influence can be observed in the language and culture of a geographically wide assortment of countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, the United States, and the British overseas territories. These states are sometimes collectively known as the Anglosphere. As well as the British influence on its empire, the empire also influenced British culture, particularly British cuisine. Innovations and movements within the wider-culture of Europe have also changed the United Kingdom; Humanism, Protestantism, and representative democracy have developed from broader Western culture.

As a result of the history of the formation of the United Kingdom, the cultures of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are diverse and have varying degrees of overlap and distinctiveness.

Cuisine 

Historically, British cuisine has meant "unfussy dishes made with quality local ingredients, matched with simple sauces to accentuate flavour, rather than disguise it".  It has been "vilified as unimaginative and heavy", and traditionally been limited in its international recognition to the full breakfast and the Christmas dinner.  This is despite British cuisine having absorbed the culinary influences of those who have settled in Britain, resulting in hybrid dishes such as the British Asian Chicken tikka masala, hailed by some as "Britain's true national dish". 

Celtic agriculture and animal breeding produced a wide variety of foodstuffs for Celts and Britons. The Anglo-Saxons developed meat and savoury herb stewing techniques before the practice became common in Europe. The Norman conquest of England introduced exotic spices into Britain in the Middle Ages. The British Empire facilitated a knowledge of India's food tradition of "strong, penetrating spices and herbs". Food rationing policies, imposed by the British government during wartime periods of the 20th century, are said to have been the stimulus for British cuisine's poor international reputation.

British dishes include fish and chips, the Sunday roast, and bangers and mash. British cuisine has several national and regional varieties, including English, Scottish and Welsh cuisine, each of which has developed its own regional or local dishes, many of which are geographically indicated foods such as Cheddar cheese, Cheshire cheese, the Yorkshire pudding, Arbroath Smokie, Cornish pasty and Welsh cakes.

The British are the second largest per capita tea consumers in the world, consuming an average of  per person each year.  British tea culture dates back to the 19th century, when India was part of the British Empire and British interests controlled tea production in the subcontinent.

Languages 

There is no single British language, though English is by far the main language spoken by British citizens, being spoken monolingually by more than 70% of the UK population. English is therefore the de facto official language of the United Kingdom.  However, under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, the Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Irish, Ulster Scots and Scots (or Lowland Scots) languages are officially recognised as Regional or Minority languages by the UK Government.  As indigenous languages which continue to be spoken as a first language by native inhabitants, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic have a different legal status from other minority languages. In some parts of the UK, some of these languages are commonly spoken as a first language; in wider areas, their use in a bilingual context is sometimes supported and/or promoted by central and/or local government policy. For naturalisation purposes, a competence standard of English, Scottish Gaelic or Welsh is required to pass the life in the United Kingdom test.  However, English is used routinely, and although considered culturally important, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh are much less used.

Throughout the United Kingdom there are distinctive spoken expressions and regional accents of English, which are seen to be symptomatic of a locality's culture and identity.  An awareness and knowledge of accents in the United Kingdom can "place, within a few miles, the locality in which a man or woman has grown up". 

Literature 

British literature is "one of the leading literatures in the world". The overwhelming part is written in the English language, but there are also pieces of literature written in Scots, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh.

Britain has a long history of famous and influential authors. It boasts some of the oldest pieces of literature in the Western world, such as the epic poem Beowulf, one of the oldest surviving written work in the English language. 

Famous authors include some of the world's most studied and praised writers. William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe defined England's Elizabethan period.  The British Romantic movement was one of the strongest and most recognisable in Europe. The poets William Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were amongst the pioneers of Romanticism in literature.  Other Romantic writers that followed these figure further enhanced the profile of Romanticism in Europe, such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.  Later periods like the Victorian Era saw a further flourishing of British writing, including Charles Dickens and William Thackeray. 

Women's literature in Britain has had a long and often troubled history, with many female writers producing work under a pen name, such as George Eliot.  Other great female novelists that contributed to world literature were the Brontë sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne. 

Non-fiction has also played an important role in the history of British letters, with the first dictionary of the English language being produced and compiled by Samuel Johnson, a graduate of Oxford University and a London resident. 

Media and music 

Although cinema, theatre, dance and live music are popular, the favourite pastime of the British is watching television.  Public broadcast television in the United Kingdom began in 1936, with the launch of the BBC Television Service (now BBC One). In the United Kingdom and the Crown dependencies, one must have a television licence to legally receive any broadcast television service, from any source. This includes the commercial channels, cable and satellite transmissions, and the Internet. Revenue generated from the television licence is used to provide radio, television and Internet content for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Welsh language television programmes for S4C. The BBC, the common abbreviation of the British Broadcasting Corporation,  is the world's largest broadcaster.  Unlike other broadcasters in the UK, it is a public service based, quasi-autonomous, statutory corporation run by the BBC Trust. Free-to-air terrestrial television channels available on a national basis are BBC One, BBC Two, ITV, Channel 4 (S4C in Wales), and Five.

100 Greatest British Television Programmes was a list compiled by the British Film Institute in 2000, chosen by a poll of industry professionals, to determine what were the greatest British television programmes of any genre ever to have been screened.  Topping the list was Fawlty Towers, a British sitcom set in a fictional Torquay hotel starring John Cleese.

"British musical tradition is essentially vocal", dominated by the music of England and Germanic culture,  most greatly influenced by hymns and Anglican church music.  However, the specific, traditional music of Wales and music of Scotland is distinct, and of the Celtic musical tradition.  In the United Kingdom, more people attend live music performances than football matches.  British rock was born in the mid-20th century out of the influence of rock and roll and rhythm and blues from the United States. Major early exports were The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks.  Together with other bands from the United Kingdom, these constituted the British Invasion, a popularisation of British pop and rock music in the United States. Into the 1970s heavy metal, new wave, and 2 tone. Britpop is a subgenre of alternative rock that emerged from the British independent music scene of the early 1990s and was characterised by bands reviving British guitar pop music of the 1960s and 1970s. Leading exponents of Britpop were Blur, Oasis and Pulp.  Also popularised in the United Kingdom during the 1990s were several domestically produced varieties of electronic dance music; acid house, UK hard house, jungle, UK garage which in turn have influenced grime and British hip hop in the 2000s. The BRIT Awards are the British Phonographic Industry's annual awards for both international and British popular music.

Religion 

Historically, Christianity "has been the most influential and important religion in Britain", and it remains the declared faith of the majority of the British people.  The influence of Christianity on British culture has been "widespread, extending beyond the spheres of prayer and worship. Churches and cathedrals make a significant contribution to the architectural landscape of the nation's cities and towns" whilst "many schools and hospitals were founded by men and women who were strongly influenced by Christian motives". Throughout the United Kingdom, Easter and Christmas, the "two most important events in the Christian calendar", are recognised as public holidays.

Christianity remains the major religion of the population of the United Kingdom in the 21st century, followed by Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and then Judaism in terms of numbers of adherents. The 2007 Tearfund Survey revealed 53% identified themselves as Christian, which was similar to the 2004 British Social Attitudes Survey,   and to the United Kingdom Census 2001 in which 71.6% said that Christianity was their religion, However, the Tearfund Survey showed only one in ten Britons attend church weekly.  Secularism was advanced in Britain during the Age of Enlightenment, and modern British organisations such as the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society offer the opportunity for their members to "debate and explore the moral and philosophical issues in a non-religious setting".

The Treaty of Union that led to the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain ensured that there would be a Protestant succession as well as a link between church and state that still remains. The Church of England (Anglican) is legally recognised as the established church, and so retains representation in the Parliament of the United Kingdom through the Lords Spiritual, whilst the British monarch is a member of the church as well as its Supreme Governor.   The Church of England also retains the right to draft legislative measures (related to religious administration) through the General Synod that can then be passed into law by Parliament. The Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is the second largest Christian church with around five million members, mainly in England.  There are also growing Orthodox, Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, with Pentecostal churches in England now third after the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in terms of church attendance.  Other large Christian groups include Methodists and Baptists.

The Presbyterian Church of Scotland (known informally as The Kirk), is recognised as the national church of Scotland and not subject to state control. The British monarch is an ordinary member and is required to swear an oath to "defend the security" of the church upon his or her accession. The Roman Catholic Church in Scotland is Scotland's second largest Christian church, with followers representing a sixth of the population of Scotland.  The Scottish Episcopal Church, which is part of the Anglican Communion, dates from the final establishment of Presbyterianism in Scotland in 1690, when it split from the Church of Scotland over matters of theology and ritual. Further splits in the Church of Scotland, especially in the 19th century, led to the creation of other Presbyterian churches in Scotland, including the Free Church of Scotland. In the 1920s, the Church in Wales became independent from the Church of England and became 'disestablished' but remains in the Anglican Communion. Methodism and other Protestant churches have had a major presence in Wales. The main religious groups in Northern Ireland are organised on an all-Ireland basis. Though collectively Protestants constitute the overall majority,  the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland is the largest single church. The Presbyterian Church in Ireland, closely linked to the Church of Scotland in terms of theology and history, is the second largest church followed by the Church of Ireland (Anglican) which was disestablished in the 19th century.

Sport 

Sport is an important element of British culture, and is one of the most popular leisure activities of Britons. Within the United Kingdom, nearly half of all adults partake in one or more sporting activity each week.  Some of the major sports in the United Kingdom "were invented by the British",  including football, rugby union, rugby league and cricket, and "exported various other games" including tennis, badminton, boxing, golf, snooker and squash. 

In most sports, separate organisations, teams and clubs represent the individual countries of the United Kingdom at international level, though in some sports, like rugby union, an all-Ireland team represents both Northern Ireland and the Republic, and the British and Irish Lions represent the isles as a whole. The UK is represented by a single team at the Olympic Games and at the 2012 Summer Olympics, the Great Britain team won 65 medals: 29 gold (the most since the 1908 Summer Olympics), 17 silver and 19 bronze, ranking them 3rd.  In total, sportsmen and women from the UK "hold over 50 world titles in a variety of sports, such as professional boxing, rowing, snooker, squash and motorcycle sports".

A 2006 poll found that association football was the most popular sport in the UK.  In England 320 football clubs are affiliated to The Football Association (FA) and more than 42,000 clubs to regional or district associations. The FA, founded in 1863, and the Football League, founded in 1888, were both the first of their kind in the world. In Scotland there are 78 full and associate clubs and nearly 6,000 registered clubs under the jurisdiction of the Scottish Football Association.  Two Welsh clubs play in England's Football League, one in the Premier league, and others at non-league level, whilst the Welsh Football League contains 20 semi-professional clubs. In Northern Ireland, 12 semi-professional clubs play in the IFA Premiership, the second oldest league in the world.

Recreational fishing, particularly angling, is one of the most popular participation activities in the United Kingdom, with an estimated 3—4 million anglers in the country.  The most widely practised form of angling in England and Wales is for coarse fish while in Scotland angling is usually for salmon and trout.

Visual art and architecture 

For centuries, artists and architects in Britain were overwhelmingly influenced by Western art history. Amongst the first visual artists credited for developing a distinctly British aesthetic and artistic style is William Hogarth.  The experience of military, political and economic power from the rise of the British Empire, led to a very specific drive in artistic technique, taste and sensibility in the United Kingdom. Britons used their art "to illustrate their knowledge and command of the natural world", whilst the permanent settlers in British North America, Australasia, and South Africa "embarked upon a search for distinctive artistic expression appropriate to their sense of national identity". The empire has been "at the centre, rather than in the margins, of the history of British art", and imperial British visual arts have been fundamental to the construction, celebration and expression of Britishness.

British attitudes to modern art were "polarised" at the end of the 19th century.  Modernist movements were both cherished and vilified by artists and critics; Impressionism was initially regarded by "many conservative critics" as a "subversive foreign influence", but became "fully assimilated" into British art during the early-20th century. Representational art was described by Herbert Read during the interwar period as "necessarily... revolutionary", and was studied and produced to such an extent that by the 1950s, Classicism was effectively void in British visual art. Post-modern, contemporary British art, particularly that of the Young British Artists, has been pre-occupied with postcolonialism, and "characterised by a fundamental concern with material culture ... perceived as a post-imperial cultural anxiety".

Architecture of the United Kingdom is diverse; most influential developments have usually taken place in England, but Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have at various times played leading roles in architectural history.  Although there are prehistoric and classical structures in the British Isles, British architecture effectively begins with the first Anglo-Saxon Christian churches, built soon after Augustine of Canterbury arrived in Great Britain in 597. Norman architecture was built on a vast scale from the 11th century onwards in the form of castles and churches to help impose Norman authority upon their dominion. English Gothic architecture, which flourished between 1180 until around 1520, was initially imported from France, but quickly developed its own unique qualities. Secular medieval architecture throughout Britain has left a legacy of large stone castles, with the "finest examples" being found lining both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border, dating from the Wars of Scottish Independence of the 14th century.  The invention of gunpowder and canons made castles redundant, and the English Renaissance which followed facilitiated the development of new artistic styles for domestic architecture: Tudor style, English Baroque, The Queen Anne Style and Palladian. Georgian and Neoclassical architecture advanced after the Scottish Enlightenment. Outwith the United Kingdom, the influence of British architecture is particularly strong in South India,  the result of British rule in India in the 19th century. The Indian cities of Bangalore, Chennai, and Mumbai each have courts, hotels and train stations designed in British architectural styles of Gothic Revivalism and neoclassicism.

Political culture 

British political culture is tied closely with its institutions and civics, and a "subtle fusion of new and old values".  The principle of constitutional monarchy, with its notions of stable parliamentary government and political liberalism, "have come to dominate British culture".  These views have been reinforced by Sir Bernard Crick who said:  

British political institutions include the Westminster system, the Commonwealth of Nations and Privy Council of the United Kingdom.  Although the Privy Council is primarily a British institution, officials from other Commonwealth realms are also appointed to the body.  The most notable continuing instance is the Prime Minister of New Zealand, its senior politicians, Chief Justice and Court of Appeal judges are conventionally made Privy Counsellors, as the prime ministers and chief justices of Canada and Australia used to be.  Prime Ministers of Commonwealth countries which retain the British monarch as their sovereign continue to be sworn as Privy Counsellors.

Universal suffrage for all males over 21 was granted in 1918 and for adult women in 1928 after the Suffragette movement.  Politics in the United Kingdom is multi-party, with three dominant political parties: the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party. The social structure of Britain, specifically social class, has "long been pre-eminent among the factors used to explain party allegiance", and still persists as "the dominant basis" of party political allegiance for Britons.  The Conservative Party is descended from the historic Tory Party (founded in England in 1678), and is a centre-right conservative political party,  which traditionally draws support from the middle classes.  The Labour Party (founded by Scotsman Keir Hardie) grew out of the trade union movement and socialist political parties of the 19th century, and continues to describe itself as a "democratic socialist party".  Labour states that it stands for the representation of the low-paid working class, who have traditionally been its members and voters. The Scottish National Party is the third largest political party in the UK in terms of both party membership and representation in parliament, having won 56 out of 59 Scottish seats at the 2015 General Election. The Liberal Democrats are a liberal political party, and third largest in England in terms of membership and MPs elected. It is descended from the Liberal Party, a major ruling party of 19th century Britain through to the First World War, when it was supplanted by the Labour Party. The Liberal Democrats have historically drawn support from wide and "differing social backgrounds".  There are over 300 other, smaller political parties in the United Kingdom registered to the Electoral Commission.  

Classification 

According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, there are broadly two interpretations of British identity, with ethnic and civic dimensions:

Of the two perspectives of British identity, the civic definition has become "the dominant idea ... by far", and in this capacity, Britishness is sometimes considered an institutional or overarching state identity. This has been used to explain why first-, second- and third-generation immigrants are more likely to describe themselves as British, rather than English, Scottish or Welsh, because it is an "institutional, inclusive" identity, that can be acquired through naturalisation and British nationality law;  the vast majority of people in the United Kingdom who are from an ethnic minority feel British. 

However, this attitude is more common in England than in Scotland or Wales; "white English people perceived themselves as English first and as British second, and most people from ethnic minority backgrounds perceived themselves as British, but none identified as English, a label they associated exclusively with white people". Contrawise, in Scotland and Wales, White British and ethnic minority people both identified more strongly with Scotland and Wales than with Britain. 

Studies and surveys have "reported that the majority of the Scots and Welsh see themselves as both Scottish/Welsh and British though with some differences in emphasis". The Commission for Racial Equality found that with respect to notions of nationality in Britain, "the most basic, objective and uncontroversial conception of the British people is one that includes the English, the Scots and the Welsh". However, "English participants tended to think of themselves as indistinguishably English or British, while both Scottish and Welsh participants identified themselves much more readily as Scottish or Welsh than as British".

Some persons opted "to combine both identities" as "they felt Scottish or Welsh, but held a British passport and were therefore British", whereas others saw themselves as exclusively Scottish or exclusively Welsh and "felt quite divorced from the British, whom they saw as the English".  Commentators have described this latter phenomenon as "nationalism", a rejection of British identity because some Scots and Welsh interpret it as "cultural imperialism imposed" upon the United Kingdom by "English ruling elites",  or else a response to a historical misappropriation of equating the word "English" with "British",  which has "brought about a desire among Scots, Welsh and Irish to learn more about their heritage and distinguish themselves from the broader British identity". Epping was a parliamentary constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1885 to 1974. It elected one Member of Parliament (MP) by the first past the post system of election. The constituency was abolished for the February 1974 general election and divided between the seats of Chingford, Epping Forest and Harlow.

Its most prominent MP was Winston Churchill, who served as Prime Minister during the Second World War for the latter part of his tenure in the seat. In the 1955 and 1959 general elections, the celebrated cricket commentator and journalist John Arlott stood as the Liberal Party candidate.

Boundaries

1885-1918: The Sessional Divisions of Epping, Harlow, and Ongar, and part of the Sessional Division of Dunmow.

1918-1945: The Urban Districts of Buckhurst Hill, Chingford, Epping, Loughton, Waltham Holy Cross, Wanstead, and Woodford, and the Rural District of Epping.

1945-1974: The Municipal Borough of Chingford, the Urban Districts of Epping and Waltham Holy Cross, and the Rural District of Epping.

Areas covered

Members of Parliament

Election results 

Elections in the 1880s 

Elections in the 1890s 

Elections in the 1900s 

Elections in the 1910s 

General Election 1914/15:

Another General Election was required to take place before the end of 1915. The political parties had been making preparations for an election to take place and by the July 1914, the following candidates had been selected; 
*Unionist: Rt Hon. Amelius Richard Mark Lockwood
*Liberal: 

*endorsed by the Coalition Government

Elections in the 1920s 

Elections in the 1930s 

Elections in the 1940s 

General Election 1939/40:

Another General Election was required to take place before the end of 1940. The political parties had been making preparations for an election to take place from 1939 and by the end of this year, the following candidates had been selected; 
*Conservative: Winston Churchill
*Labour: Leon MacLaren 

Elections in the 1950s 

Elections in the 1960s 

Elections in the 1970s The 1924 United Kingdom general election was held on Wednesday 29 October 1924, as a result of the electoral defeat of the Labour minority government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, in the House of Commons on a motion of no confidence.  It was the third general election to be held in less than two years.

The Conservatives, led by Stanley Baldwin, performed dramatically better, in electoral terms, than in the 1923 general election and obtained a large parliamentary majority of 209. Labour, led by Ramsay MacDonald, lost 40 seats. The election also saw the Liberal Party, led by H. H. Asquith, lose 118 of their 158 seats which helped to polarise British politics between the Labour Party and Conservative Party.  

The fourth party in terms of number of candidates, number of seats and number of votes were not a party but a group of former National Liberals standing under the Constitutionalist label. They favoured Conservative/Liberal co-operation. Three of the seven Constitutionalists elected, including Winston Churchill, had been opposed by official Liberal candidates, and sat as Conservatives after the election. The other four sat as Liberals. 

The Conservative landslide victory and the Labour defeat in this general election has been, in part, attributed to the Zinoviev letter, a forgery, which was published in the Daily Mail four days before the election. However, it is difficult to prove that this had a major impact on the election result. The Labour vote increased by around one million popular votes in comparison to the 1923 general election, however, the increase in the number of popular votes for the Labour Party may be due, in part, to the party putting up eighty-seven more candidates than it did in the previous year's general election.

It is widely speculated that the combination of Labour forming its first government in January 1924 and the Zinoviev letter helped to stir up anti-socialist fears in Britain among many traditional anti-socialist Liberal voters, who then switched their support to the Conservative Party. This partly helps to explain the poor performance of the Liberal Party in the general election. The party also had financial difficulties which allowed it to contest only 339 seats, a lack of distinctive policies after the Conservative Party dropped their support for protected trade, and poor leadership under Asquith.

Results 

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Total votes cast: 15,856,215. Turnout 77.0%.  All parties shown. The only Irish Nationalist candidate was elected unopposed. The Conservatives include the Ulster Unionists.

Votes summary 

Seats summary Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill,  (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a non-academic historian, a writer (as Winston S. Churchill), and an artist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.

Churchill was born into the family of the Dukes of Marlborough, a branch of the Spencer family. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer; his mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American socialite. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, the Anglo–Sudan War, and the Second Boer War. He gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns.

At the forefront of politics for fifty years, he held many political and cabinet positions. Before the First World War, he served as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, and First Lord of the Admiralty as part of Asquith's Liberal government. During the war, he continued as First Lord of the Admiralty until the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign caused his departure from government. He then briefly resumed active army service on the Western Front as commander of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He returned to government under Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, then Secretary of State for the Colonies. After two years out of Parliament, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Baldwin's Conservative government of 1924–1929, controversially returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-war parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure on the UK economy.

Out of office and politically "in the wilderness" during the 1930s because of his opposition to increased home rule for India and his resistance to the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII, Churchill took the lead in warning about Nazi Germany and in campaigning for rearmament. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain on 10 May 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister. His speeches and radio broadcasts helped inspire British resistance, especially during the difficult days of 1940–41 when the British Commonwealth and Empire stood almost alone in its active opposition to Adolf Hitler. He led Britain as Prime Minister until victory over Nazi Germany had been secured.

After the Conservative Party lost the 1945 election, he became Leader of the Opposition to the Labour Government. He publicly warned of an "Iron Curtain" of Soviet influence in Europe and promoted European unity. After winning the 1951 election, Churchill again became Prime Minister. His second term was preoccupied by foreign affairs, including the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau Uprising, Korean War, and a UK-backed coup d'état in Iran. Domestically his government laid great emphasis on house-building. Churchill suffered a serious stroke in 1953 and retired as Prime Minister in 1955, although he remained a Member of Parliament until 1964. Upon his death aged ninety in 1965, Elizabeth II granted him the honour of a state funeral, which saw one of the largest assemblies of world statesmen in history.  Named the Greatest Briton of all time in a 2002 poll, Churchill is widely regarded as being among the most influential people in British history, consistently ranking well in opinion polls of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom.

Family and early life

Born into the aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough, a branch of the noble Spencer family, Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, like his father, used the surname "Churchill" in public life.  His ancestor George Spencer had changed his surname to Spencer-Churchill in 1817 when he became Duke of Marlborough, to highlight his descent from John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the third son of John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough, was a politician; and his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill ( Jennie Jerome) was the daughter of American millionaire Leonard Jerome. Churchill was born on 30 November 1874, two months prematurely, in a bedroom in Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire.  

From age two to six, he lived in Dublin, where his grandfather had been appointed Viceroy and employed Churchill's father as his private secretary. Churchill's brother, John Strange Spencer-Churchill, was born during this time in Ireland. It has been claimed that the young Churchill first developed his fascination with military matters from watching the many parades pass by the Vice Regal Lodge (now Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of the President of Ireland).  

Churchill's earliest exposure to education occurred in Dublin, where a governess tried teaching him reading, writing, and arithmetic (his first reading book was called 'Reading Without Tears'). With limited contact with his parents, Churchill became very close to his nanny, 'Mrs' Elizabeth Ann Everest, whom he called 'Old Woom' (some references 'Woomany' ). She served as his confidante, nurse, and mother substitute.  The two spent many happy hours playing in Phoenix Park.  

Independent and rebellious by nature, Churchill generally had a poor academic record in school.  He was educated at three independent schools: St. George's School, Ascot, Berkshire; Brunswick School in Hove, near Brighton (the school has since been renamed Stoke Brunswick School and relocated to Ashurst Wood in West Sussex); and at Harrow School from 17 April 1888. Within weeks of his arrival at Harrow, Churchill had joined the Harrow Rifle Corps. 

When young Winston started attending Harrow School, he was listed under the S's as Spencer Churchill. At that time Winston was a stocky boy with red hair who talked with a stutter and a lisp. Winston did so well in mathematics in his Harrow entrance exam that he was put in the top division for that subject. In his first year at Harrow he was recognized as being the best in his division for history. Winston entered the school, however, as the boy with the lowest grades in the lowest class, and he remained in that position. Winston never even made it into the upper school because he would not study the classics.  Though he did poorly in his schoolwork, he grew to love the English language. He hated Harrow. His mother rarely visited him, and he wrote letters begging her either to come to the school or to allow him to come home. His relationship with his father was distant; he once remarked that they barely spoke to one another.  His father died on 24 January 1895, aged 45, leaving Churchill with the conviction that he too would die young and so should be quick about making his mark on the world. 

At age 18, while visiting his aunt Lady Wimborne in Bournemouth, Winston nearly died when he fell from a bridge over a seaside chine (either Branksome Dene or Alum Chine) at a height of 29 feet.  As a result of injuries sustained in the fall, he was unconscious for three days and bedridden for three months. 

Winston Churchill was a member of the freemasons and a member of the Loyal Waterloo Lodge of the National Independent Order of Odd Fellows.  

Speech impediment

Churchill had a lateral lisp that continued throughout his career, reported consistently by journalists of the time and later. Authors writing in the 1920s and 1930s, before sound recording became common, also mentioned Churchill having a stutter, describing it in terms such as "severe" or "agonising".  The Churchill Centre and Museum says the majority of records show his impediment was a lateral lisp, while Churchill's stutter is a myth. 

His dentures were specially designed to aid his speech (Demosthenes' pebbles).  After many years of public speeches carefully prepared not only to inspire, but also to avoid hesitations, he could finally state, "My impediment is no hindrance". 

Marriage and children

Churchill met his future wife, Clementine Hozier, in 1904 at a ball in Crewe House, home of the Earl of Crewe and Crewe's wife Margaret Primrose (daughter of Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, and Hannah Rothschild).  In 1908, they met again at a dinner party hosted by Susan Jeune, Baroness St Helier. Churchill found himself seated beside Clementine, and they soon began a lifelong romance.  He proposed to Clementine during a house party at Blenheim Palace on 10 August 1908, in a small Temple of Diana. 

On 12 September 1908, he and Clementine were married in St. Margaret's, Westminster. The church was packed; the Bishop of St Asaph conducted the service.  The couple spent their honeymoon at Highgrove House in Eastcote.  In March 1909, the couple moved to a house at 33 Eccleston Square.

Their first child, Diana, was born in London on 11 July 1909. After the pregnancy, Clementine moved to Sussex to recover, while Diana stayed in London with her nanny.  On 28 May 1911, their second child, Randolph, was born at 33 Eccleston Square. 

Their third child, Sarah, was born on 7 October 1914 at Admiralty House. The birth was marked with anxiety for Clementine, as Churchill had been sent to Antwerp by the Cabinet to "stiffen the resistance of the beleaguered city" after news that the Belgians intended to surrender the town. 

Clementine gave birth to her fourth child, Marigold Frances Churchill, on 15 November 1918, four days after the official end of the First World War.  In the early days of August 1921, the Churchills' children were entrusted to a French nursery governess in Kent named Mlle. Rose. Clementine, meanwhile, travelled to Eaton Hall to play tennis with Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, and his family. While still under the care of Mlle. Rose, Marigold had a cold, but was reported to have recovered from the illness. As the illness progressed with hardly any notice, it turned into septicaemia. Following advice from a landlady, Rose sent for Clementine. However the illness proved fatal on 23 August 1921, and Marigold was buried in the Kensal Green Cemetery three days later. 

On 15 September 1922, the Churchills' last child, Mary, was born. Later that month, the Churchills bought Chartwell, which would be their home until Winston's death in 1965.  

Military service

After Churchill left Harrow in 1893, he applied to attend the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He tried three times before passing the entrance exam; he applied to be trained for the cavalry rather than the infantry because the required grade was lower and he was not required to learn mathematics, which he disliked. He graduated eighth out of a class of 150 in December 1894,  and although he could now have transferred to an infantry regiment as his father had wished, chose to remain with the cavalry and was commissioned as a cornet (second lieutenant) in the 4th Queen's Own Hussars on 20 February 1895. In 1941, he received the honour of being appointed Regimental Colonel of the 4th Hussars, an honour which was increased after the Second World War when he was appointed as Colonel-in-Chief; this privilege is usually reserved for members of the royal family.

Churchill's pay as a second lieutenant in the 4th Hussars was £300 annually. However, he believed that he needed at least a further £500 (equivalent to £55,000 in 2012 terms)  to support a style of life equal to that of other officers of the regiment. His mother provided an allowance of £400 per year, but this was repeatedly overspent. According to biographer Roy Jenkins, this is one reason why he took an interest in war correspondence.  He did not intend to follow a conventional career of promotion through army ranks, but rather to seek out all possible chances of military action, using his mother's and family influence in high society to arrange postings to active campaigns. His writings brought him to the attention of the public, and earned him significant additional income. He acted as a war correspondent for several London newspapers  and wrote his own books about the campaigns.

Cuba

In 1895, during the Cuban War of Independence, Churchill, and fellow officer Reginald Barnes, travelled to Cuba to observe the Spanish fight the Cuban guerrillas; he had obtained a commission to write about the conflict from the Daily Graphic. He came under fire on his twenty-first birthday, the first of about 50 times during his life, and the Spanish awarded him his first medal.  Churchill had fond memories of Cuba as a "... large, rich, beautiful island ...".  While there, he soon acquired a taste for Havana cigars, which he would smoke for the rest of his life. While in New York, he stayed at the home of Bourke Cockran, an admirer of his mother. Bourke was an established American politician, and a member of the House of Representatives. He greatly influenced Churchill, both in his approach to oratory and politics, and encouraging a love of America. 

He soon received word that his nanny, Mrs Everest, was dying; he then returned to England and stayed with her for a week until she died. He wrote in his journal, "She was my favourite friend." In My Early Life he wrote: "She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived." 

India and self-education

In early October 1896, he was transferred to Bombay, British India. He was considered one of the best polo players in his regiment and led his team to many prestigious tournament victories.  On arrival Churchill badly wrenched his shoulder while leaping from the boat, an injury which would plague him throughout his life and would later require him to play polo with his upper arm strapped to his side. 

Churchill came to Bangalore in 1896 as a young army officer. In his book, 'My Early Life', he describes Bangalore as a city with excellent weather, and his allotted house as ‘a magnificent pink and white stucco palace in the middle of a large and beautiful garden' with servants, dhobi (to wash clothes), gardener, watchman and a water-carrier. It was in Bangalore he met Pamela Plowden, daughter of a civil servant; she became his first love. He privately described most British women in India as “nasty” and scoffed at their belief in their own beauty. His letters home show him to have been obsessed with British politics, advocating a centrist coalition between Lord Rosebery and Joseph Chamberlain, and critical of Lord Lansdowne’s proposal for increased spending on the army (opposition to which had been one of Lord Randolph’s reasons for resigning in December 1886; Churchill preferred Britain to concentrate on keeping a strong Royal Navy).

Partly at his mother’s urging, Churchill passed the long hot afternoons reading. He read multi-volume historical works by Gibbon ("The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire") and Macaulay ("History of England”) as well as Plato’s "Republic" and works of economics. He toyed with the idea of studying for a degree in history, politics and economics, but regretted he did not have enough knowledge of Latin and Greek which were then a requirement of university entrance. He also read Winwood Reade’s work “The Martyrdom of Man”, writing to his mother that its critique of religion confirmed what he had reluctantly come to believe. Churchill believed that religion, although mostly not literally true, was a useful “crutch” until men were ready to rely on reason alone. He also wrote to his old headmaster James Welldon, now Bishop of Calcutta, opposing Christian missions in India. Churchill argued that the State was perfectly entitled to dictate the doctrines of the Established Church of England and advocated non-denominational teaching in schools, by secular teachers, based on the Bible and “Hymns Ancient and Modern”. Keith Robbins writes that Churchill’s opinions were largely formed at this time, and without the “scrutiny and criticism” to which they would have been subjected at a university, although he also suggests that Churchill’s love of the English language might not have flourished to the same degree under university conditions.  John Charmley concurs, commenting that Churchill’s self-education had not given him any training in the weighing of arguments and the absorption of the views of others, although he also points out that Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor in the 1940s, recorded Churchill's sympathy for adults who educated themselves later in life. 

With some reluctance because of the weight and cost, his mother also sent out copies of Parliamentary debates of the last few generations. Churchill would write down his opinion of each issue (e.g. the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875) before reading the debate, and then record his opinion again. He was highly critical of Lord Salisbury’s Conservative-dominated Government, in power from the autumn of 1895, writing to his mother in March 1897, in an obvious echo of what he perceived his late father’s position to have been, that he was a Liberal in all but name, remaining a “Tory Democrat” solely because of the issue of Irish Home Rule. 

North-West Frontier

In 1897, Churchill attempted to travel to both report on and, if necessary, fight in the Greco-Turkish War, but this conflict effectively ended before he could arrive. Later, while preparing for a leave in England, he heard that three brigades of the British Army were going to fight against a Pashtun tribe in the North West Frontier of India and he asked his superior officer if he could join the fight.  In 1899 he departed for the North West Frontier to fight in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. He fought under the command of General Jeffery, the commander of the second brigade operating in Malakand, in the Frontier region of British India. Jeffery sent him with fifteen scouts to explore the Mamund Valley; while on reconnaissance, they encountered an enemy tribe, dismounted from their horses and opened fire. After an hour of shooting, their reinforcements, the 35th Sikhs arrived, the firing gradually ceased and the brigade and the Sikhs marched on. Hundreds of tribesmen then ambushed them and opened fire, forcing them to retreat. As they were retreating, four men were carrying an injured officer, but the fierceness of the fight forced them to leave him behind. The man who was left behind was slashed to death before Churchill's eyes; afterwards he wrote of the killer, "I forgot everything else at this moment except a desire to kill this man." However, the Sikhs' numbers were being depleted, so the next commanding officer told Churchill to get the rest of the men to safety.

Before he left, he asked for a note so that he would not be charged with desertion.  He received the note, quickly signed, headed up the hill and alerted the other brigade, whereupon they then engaged the army. The fighting in the region dragged on for another two weeks before the dead could be recovered. He wrote in his journal: "Whether it was worth it I cannot tell."   An account of the Siege of Malakand was published in December 1900 as The Story of the Malakand Field Force. He received £600 for his account. During the campaign, he also wrote articles for the newspapers The Pioneer and The Daily Telegraph.  His account of the battle was one of his first published stories, for which he received £5 per column from The Daily Telegraph. 

Sudan

Churchill was transferred to Egypt in 1898. He visited Luxor before joining an attachment of the 21st Lancers serving in the Sudan under the command of General Herbert Kitchener. During this time he encountered two military officers with whom he would work during the First World War: Douglas Haig, then a captain, and David Beatty, then a gunboat lieutenant.  While in the Sudan, he participated in what has been described as the last meaningful British cavalry charge, at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898.  He also worked as a war correspondent for the Morning Post. By October 1898, he had returned to Britain and begun his two-volume work, The River War, an account of the conquest of the Sudan which was published the following year. Churchill resigned from the British Army effective from 5 May 1899.

Oldham

He soon had his first opportunity to begin a Parliamentary career, when he was invited by Robert Ascroft to be the second Conservative Party candidate in Ascroft's Oldham constituency. Ascroft's sudden death caused a double by-election and Churchill was one of the candidates. In the midst of a national trend against the Conservatives, both seats were lost; however, Churchill impressed by his vigorous campaigning.

South Africa

Having failed at Oldham, Churchill looked about for some other opportunity to advance his career. On 12 October 1899, the Second Boer War between Britain and the Boer Republics broke out and he obtained a commission to act as war correspondent for The Morning Post with a salary of £250 per month. He rushed to sail on the same ship as the newly appointed British commander, Sir Redvers Buller. After some weeks in exposed areas, he accompanied a scouting expedition in an armoured train, leading to his capture and imprisonment in a POW camp in Pretoria (converted school building for Pretoria High School for Girls). His actions during the ambush of the train led to speculation that he would be awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award to members of the armed forces for gallantry in the face of the enemy, but this was not possible, as he was a civilian.

He escaped from the prison camp and, with the assistance of an English mine manager, travelled almost 300 mi to safety in Portuguese East Africa.  His escape made him a minor national hero for a time in Britain though, instead of returning home, he rejoined General Buller's army on its march to relieve the British at the Siege of Ladysmith and take Pretoria.  This time, although continuing as a war correspondent, he gained a commission in the South African Light Horse. He was among the first British troops into Ladysmith and Pretoria. He and his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, were able to get ahead of the rest of the troops in Pretoria, where they demanded and received the surrender of 52 Boer prison camp guards. 

In 1900, Churchill returned to England on the , the same ship on which he had set sail for South Africa eight months earlier. The same year he published London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and a second volume of Boer war experiences, Ian Hamilton's March. 

Territorial Service and advancement

In 1900, he retired from the regular army, and in 1902 joined the Imperial Yeomanry, where he was commissioned as a Captain in the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars on 4 January 1902.  In that same year, he was initiated into Freemasonry at Studholme Lodge #1591, London, and raised to the Third Degree on 25 March 1902.   In April 1905, he was promoted to Major and appointed to command of the Henley Squadron of the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars.  In September 1916, he transferred to the territorial reserves of officers, where he remained until retiring in 1924, at the age of fifty.

Western Front

After his resignation from the government in 1915, Churchill rejoined the British Army, attempting to obtain an appointment as brigade commander, but settling for command of a battalion. After spending some time as a Major with the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards, he was appointed Lieutenant-Colonel, commanding the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers (part of the 9th (Scottish) Division), on 1 January 1916. Correspondence with his wife shows that his intent in taking up active service was to rehabilitate his reputation, but this was balanced by the serious risk of being killed. During his period of command, his battalion was stationed at Ploegsteert but did not take part in any set battle. Although he disapproved strongly of the mass slaughter involved in many Western Front actions, he exposed himself to danger by making excursions to the front line or into No Man's Land. 

Political career to the Second World War, 1900–39

Early years in Parliament

Churchill stood again for the seat of Oldham at the 1900 general election.  After winning the seat, he went on a speaking tour throughout Britain and the United States, raising £10,000 for himself (about £ today). From 1903 until 1905, Churchill was also engaged in writing Lord Randolph Churchill, a two-volume biography of his father which was published in 1906 and received much critical acclaim. 

In Parliament, he became associated with a faction of the Conservative Party led by Lord Hugh Cecil; the Hughligans. During his first parliamentary session, he opposed the government's military expenditure  and Joseph Chamberlain's proposal of extensive tariffs, which were intended to protect Britain's economic dominance. His own constituency effectively deselected him, although he continued to sit for Oldham until the next general election. In the months leading up to his ultimate change of party from the Conservatives to the Liberals, Churchill made a number of evocative speeches against the principles of Protectionism; ‘to think you can make a man richer by putting on a tax is like a man thinking that he can stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle.' [Winston Churchill, Speech to the Free Trade League, 19 February 1904.] As a result of his disagreement with leading members of the Conservative Party over tariff reform, he made the decision to cross the floor. After the Whitsun recess in 1904, he crossed the floor to sit as a member of the Liberal Party. As a Liberal, he continued to campaign for free trade. When the Liberals took office with Henry Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister, in December 1905, Churchill became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, dealing mainly with South Africa after the Boer War. As Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1905 to 1908, Churchill's primary focus was on settling the Transvaal Constitution, which was accepted by Parliament in 1907. This was essential for providing stability in South Africa. He campaigned in line with the Liberal Government to install responsible rather than representative government. This would alleviate pressure from the British government to control domestic affairs, including issues of race, in the Transvaal, delegating a greater proportion of power to the Boers themselves.

Following his deselection in the seat of Oldham, Churchill was invited to stand for Manchester North West. He won the seat at the 1906 general election with a majority of 1,214 and represented the seat for two years.  When Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded by H. H. Asquith in 1908, Churchill was promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Under the law at the time, a newly appointed Cabinet Minister was obliged to seek re-election at a by-election; Churchill lost his seat but was soon back as a member for Dundee constituency. As President of the Board of Trade he joined newly appointed Chancellor Lloyd George in opposing First Lord of the Admiralty Reginald McKenna's proposed huge expenditure for the construction of Navy dreadnought warships, and in supporting the Liberal reforms. In 1908, he introduced the Trade Boards Bill setting up the first minimum wages in Britain.  In 1909, he set up Labour Exchanges to help unemployed people find work.  He helped draft the first unemployment pension legislation, the National Insurance Act of 1911.  As a supporter of eugenics, he participated in the drafting of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913; however, the Act, in the form eventually passed, rejected his preferred method of sterilisation of the feeble-minded in favour of their confinement in institutions. 

Churchill also assisted in passing the People's Budget,  becoming President of the Budget League, an organisation set up in response to the opposition's Budget Protest League.  The budget included the introduction of new taxes on the wealthy to allow for the creation of new social welfare programmes. After the budget bill was passed by the Commons in 1909 it was vetoed by the House of Lords. The Liberals then fought and won two general elections in January and December 1910 to gain a mandate for their reforms. The budget was passed after the first election, and after the second election the Parliament Act 1911, for which Churchill also campaigned, was passed. In 1910, he was promoted to Home Secretary. His term was controversial after his responses to the Cambrian Colliery dispute, the Siege of Sidney Street and the suffragettes.

The People's Budget attempted to introduce a heavy tax on land value, inspired by the economist and philosopher Henry George.  In 1909, Churchill made several speeches with strong Georgist rhetoric,  stating that land ownership is at the source of all monopoly.  Furthermore, Churchill emphasizes the difference between productive investment in capital (which he supports) and land speculation which gains an unearned income and has only negative consequences to society at large ("an evil"). 

In 1910, a number of coal miners in the Rhondda Valley began what has come to be known as the Tonypandy Riot. The Chief Constable of Glamorgan requested troops be sent in to help police quell the rioting. Churchill, learning that the troops were already travelling, allowed them to go as far as Swindon and Cardiff, but blocked their deployment. On 9 November, The Times criticised this decision. In spite of this, the rumour persists that Churchill had ordered troops to attack, and his reputation in Wales and in Labour circles never recovered. 

In early January 1911, Churchill made a controversial visit to the Siege of Sidney Street in London. There is some uncertainty as to whether he attempted to give operational commands, and his presence attracted much criticism. After an inquest, Arthur Balfour remarked, "he [Churchill] and a photographer were both risking valuable lives. I understand what the photographer was doing, but what was the right honourable gentleman doing?"  A biographer, Roy Jenkins, suggests that he went simply because "he could not resist going to see the fun himself" and that he did not issue commands.  Another account said the police had the miscreants—Latvian anarchists wanted for murder—surrounded in a house, but Churchill called in the Scots Guards from the Tower of London and, dressed in top hat and astrakhan collar greatcoat, directed operations. The house caught fire and Churchill prevented the fire brigade from dousing the flames so that the men inside were burned to death. "I thought it better to let the house burn down rather than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals." 

Churchill's proposed solution to the suffragette issue was a referendum on the issue, but this found no favour with Asquith and women's suffrage remained unresolved until after the First World War. 

First Lord of the Admiralty (1911–15)

In October 1911, Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and continued in the post into the First World War. While serving in this position, he put strong emphasis on modernisation and was also in favour of using aeroplanes in combat. He undertook flying lessons himself.  He launched a programme to replace coal power with oil power. When he assumed his position, oil was already being used on submarines and destroyers, but most ships were still coal-powered, though oil was sprayed on the coals to boost maximum speed. Churchill began this programme by ordering that the upcoming s were to be built with oil-fired engines. He established a Royal Commission chaired by Admiral Sir John Fisher, which confirmed the benefits of oil over coal in three classified reports, and judged that ample supplies of oil existed, but recommended that oil reserves be maintained in the event of war. The delegation then travelled to the Persian Gulf, and the government, largely through Churchill's advice, eventually invested in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, bought most of its stock, and negotiated a secret contract for a 20-year supply.  

First World War and the Post-War Coalition

On 5 October 1914, Churchill went to Antwerp, which the Belgian government proposed to evacuate. The Royal Marine Brigade was there and at Churchill's urgings the 1st and 2nd Naval Brigades were also committed. Antwerp fell on 10 October with the loss of 2500 men. At the time he was attacked for squandering resources.  It is more likely that his actions prolonged the resistance by a week (Belgium had proposed surrendering Antwerp on 3 October) and that this time saved Calais and Dunkirk. 

Churchill was involved with the development of the tank, which was financed from the Navy budget. He appointed the Landships Committee, which oversaw the design and production of the first British tanks. In 1915, he was one of the political and military engineers of the disastrous Gallipoli landings in the Dardanelles during the First World War. He took much of the blame for the fiasco, and when Prime Minister Asquith formed an all-party coalition government, the Conservatives demanded his demotion as the price for entry. 

For several months Churchill served in the sinecure of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. However, on 15 November 1915 he resigned from the government, feeling his energies were not being used.  Although remaining a member of parliament, on 5 January 1916 he was given the temporary British Army rank of lieutenant colonel  and served for several months on the Western Front, commanding the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.   While in command at Ploegsteert he personally made 36 forays into no man's land. In March 1916, Churchill returned to England after he had become restless in France and wished to speak again in the House of Commons.  Future prime minister David Lloyd George acidly commented: "You will one day discover that the state of mind revealed in (your) letter is the reason why you do not win trust even where you command admiration. In every line of it, national interests are completely overshadowed by your personal concern."  In July 1917, Churchill was appointed Minister of Munitions, and in January 1919, Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air. He was the main architect of the Ten Year Rule, a principle that allowed the Treasury to dominate and control strategic, foreign and financial policies under the assumption that "there would be no great European war for the next five or ten years". 

A major preoccupation of his tenure in the War Office was the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Churchill was a staunch advocate of foreign intervention, declaring that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle".  He secured, from a divided and loosely organised Cabinet, intensification and prolongation of the British involvement beyond the wishes of any major group in Parliament or the nation—and in the face of the bitter hostility of Labour. In 1920, after the last British forces had been withdrawn, Churchill was instrumental in having arms sent to the Poles when they invaded Ukraine. He was also instrumental in having para-military forces (Black and Tans and Auxiliaries) intervene in the Irish War of Independence.  He became Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1921 and was a signatory of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State. Churchill was involved in the lengthy negotiations of the treaty and, to protect British maritime interests, he engineered part of the Irish Free State agreement to include three Treaty Ports—Queenstown (Cobh), Berehaven and Lough Swilly—which could be used as Atlantic bases by the Royal Navy.  In 1938, however, under the terms of the Chamberlain-De Valera Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement, the bases were returned to Ireland.

In 1919, Churchill sanctioned the use of tear gas on Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq.  Though the British did consider the use of non-lethal poison gas in putting down Kurdish rebellions, it was not used, as conventional bombing was considered effective.

In 1923, Churchill acted as a paid consultant for Burmah Oil (now BP plc) to lobby the British government to allow Burmah to have exclusive rights to Persian (Iranian) oil resources, which were successfully granted. 

In September, the Conservative Party withdrew from the Coalition government, following a meeting of backbenchers dissatisfied with the handling of the Chanak Crisis, a move that precipitated the looming November 1922 general election. Churchill fell ill during the campaign, and had to have an appendectomy. This made it difficult for him to campaign, and a further setback was the internal division which continued to beset the Liberal Party. He came fourth in the poll for Dundee, losing to prohibitionist Edwin Scrymgeour. Churchill later quipped that he left Dundee "without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix". He stood for the Liberals again in the 1923 general election, losing in Leicester.

Constitutionalist

In January 1924, the first Labour Government had taken office amongst fears of threats to the Constitution. Churchill was noted at the time for being particularly hostile to socialism. He believed that the Labour Party as a socialist party, did not fully support the existing British Constitution. In March 1924 Churchill sought election at the Westminster Abbey by-election, 1924. He had originally sought the backing of the local Unionist association which happened to be called the Westminster Abbey Constitutional Association. He adopted the term 'Constitutionalist' to describe himself during the by-election campaign.  After the by-election Churchill continued to use the term and talked about setting up a Constitutionalist Party. Any plans that Churchill may have had to create a Constitutionalist Party were shelved with the calling of another general election. Churchill and 11 others decided to use the label Constitutionalist rather than Liberal or Unionist.   He was returned at Epping against a Liberal and with the support of the Unionists. After the election the seven Constitutionalist candidates, including Churchill, who were elected did not act or vote as a group. When Churchill accepted the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Unionist government the description 'Constitutionalist' dropped out of use.

Rejoining the Conservative Party

Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–29)

He formally rejoined the Conservative Party, commenting wryly that "anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat." 
Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer oversaw Britain's disastrous return to the Gold Standard, which resulted in deflation, unemployment, and the miners' strike that led to the General Strike of 1926.  His decision, announced in the 1924 Budget, came after long consultation with various economists including John Maynard Keynes, the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Otto Niemeyer and the board of the Bank of England. This decision prompted Keynes to write The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, arguing that the return to the gold standard at the pre-war parity in 1925 (£1=$4.86) would lead to a world depression. However, the decision was generally popular and seen as 'sound economics' although it was opposed by Lord Beaverbrook and the Federation of British Industries. 

Churchill later regarded this as the greatest mistake of his life; in discussions at the time with former Chancellor Reginald McKenna, Churchill acknowledged that the return to the gold standard and the resulting 'dear money' policy was economically bad. In those discussions he maintained the policy as fundamentally political—a return to the pre-war conditions in which he believed.  In his speech on the Bill he said "I will tell you what it [the return to the Gold Standard] will shackle us to. It will shackle us to reality." 

The return to the pre-war exchange rate and to the Gold Standard depressed industries. The most affected was the coal industry, already suffering from declining output as shipping switched to oil. As basic British industries like cotton came under more competition in export markets, the return to the pre-war exchange was estimated to add up to 10% in costs to the industry. In July 1925, a Commission of Inquiry reported generally favouring the miners rather than the mine owners' position. 

Baldwin, with Churchill's support proposed a subsidy to the industry while a Royal Commission prepared a further report. That Commission solved nothing and the miners' dispute led to the General Strike of 1926. Churchill edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette.  Churchill was one of the more hawkish members of the Cabinet and recommended that the route of food convoys from the docks into London should be guarded by tanks, armoured cars and hidden machine guns. This was rejected by the Cabinet.  Exaggerated accounts of Churchill's belligerency during the strike soon began to circulate. Immediately afterwards the New Statesman claimed that Churchill had been leader of a "war party" in the Cabinet and had wished to use military force against the strikers. He consulted the Attorney-General Sir Douglas Hogg, who advised that although he had a good case for Criminal libel, it would be inadvisable to have confidential Cabinet discussions aired in open court. Churchill agreed to let the matter drop. 

Later economists, as well as people at the time, also criticised Churchill's budget measures. These were seen as assisting the generally prosperous rentier banking and salaried classes (to which Churchill and his associates generally belonged) at the expense of manufacturers and exporters which were known then to be suffering from imports and from competition in traditional export markets,  and as paring the Armed Forces, and especially the Royal Navy, too heavily. 

Political isolation

The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 general election. Churchill did not seek election to the Conservative Business Committee, the official leadership of the Conservative MPs. Over the next two years, Churchill became estranged from Conservative leadership over the issues of protective tariffs and Indian Home Rule, by his political views and by his friendships with press barons, financiers and people whose character was seen as dubious. When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931, Churchill was not invited to join the Cabinet. He was at the low-point in his career, in a period known as "the wilderness years".

He spent much of the next few years concentrating on his writing, works including Marlborough: His Life and Times—a biography of his ancestor John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough—and A History of the English Speaking Peoples (though the latter was not published until well after the Second World War), Great Contemporaries and many newspaper articles and collections of speeches. He was one of the best paid writers of his time. His political views, set forth in his 1930 Romanes Lecture and published as Parliamentary Government and the Economic Problem (republished in 1932 in his collection of essays "Thoughts and Adventures") involved abandoning universal suffrage, a return to a property franchise, proportional representation for the major cities and an economic 'sub parliament'. 

Indian independence

Churchill opposed Gandhi's peaceful disobedience revolt and the Indian Independence movement in the 1920s and 30s, arguing that the Round Table Conference "was a frightful prospect".  In response to Gandhi's civil disobedience campaign, Churchill proclaimed in 1920 that Gandhi "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back."   Later reports indicate that Churchill favoured letting Gandhi die if he went on a hunger strike.  During the first half of the 1930s, Churchill was outspoken in his opposition to granting Dominion status to India. He was a founder of the India Defence League, a group dedicated to the preservation of British power in India. Churchill brooked no moderation. "The truth is," he declared in 1930, "that Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed."  In speeches and press articles in this period, he forecast widespread unemployment in Britain and civil strife in India should independence be granted.  The Viceroy Lord Irwin, who had been appointed by the prior Conservative Government, engaged in the Round Table Conference in early 1931 and then announced the Government's policy that India should be granted Dominion Status. In this the Government was supported by the Liberal Party and, officially at least, by the Conservative Party. Churchill denounced the Round Table Conference.

At a meeting of the West Essex Conservative Association, specially convened so that Churchill could explain his position, he said "It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace ... to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor."   He called the Indian National Congress leaders "Brahmins who mouth and patter principles of Western Liberalism". 

Two incidents damaged Churchill's reputation greatly within the Conservative Party in this period. Both were taken as attacks on the Conservative front bench. The first was his speech on the eve of the St George by-election in April 1931. In a secure Conservative seat, the official Conservative candidate Duff Cooper was opposed by an independent Conservative. The independent was supported by Lord Rothermere, Lord Beaverbrook and their respective newspapers. Although arranged before the by-election was set,  Churchill's speech was seen as supporting the independent candidate and as a part of the press baron's campaign against Baldwin. Baldwin's position was strengthened when Duff Cooper won, and when the civil disobedience campaign in India ceased with the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. The second issue was a claim by Churchill that Sir Samuel Hoare and Lord Derby had pressured the Manchester Chamber of Commerce to change evidence it had given to the Joint Select Committee considering the Government of India Bill, and in doing so had breached Parliamentary privilege. He had the matter referred to the House of Commons Privilege Committee which, after investigations in which Churchill gave evidence, reported to the House that there had been no breach.  The report was debated on 13 June. Churchill was unable to find a single supporter in the House and the debate ended without a division.

Churchill permanently broke with Stanley Baldwin over Indian independence and never again held any office while Baldwin was prime minister. Some historians see his basic attitude to India as being set out in his book My Early Life (1930).  Another source of controversy about Churchill's attitude towards Indian affairs arises over what some historians term the Indian 'nationalist approach' to the Bengal famine of 1943, which has sought to place significant blame on Churchill's wartime government for the excessive mortality of up to four million people.    While some commentators point to the disruption of the traditional marketing system and maladministration at the provincial level,  Arthur Herman, author of Churchill and Gandhi, contends, 'The real cause was the fall of Burma to the Japanese, which cut off India's main supply of rice imports when domestic sources fell short ... [though] it is true that Churchill opposed diverting food supplies and transports from other theatres to India to cover the shortfall: this was wartime.'  In response to an urgent request by the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, and Viceroy of India, Wavell, to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, if food was so scarce, "why Gandhi hadn't died yet."  In July 1940, newly in office, he welcomed reports of the emerging conflict between the Muslim League and the Indian Congress, hoping "it would be bitter and bloody".

German and Italian rearmament and conflicts in Afro-Eurasia

Beginning in 1932, when he opposed those who advocated giving Germany the right to military parity with France, Churchill spoke often of the dangers of Germany's rearmament.  He later, particularly in The Gathering Storm, portrayed himself as being for a time, a lone voice calling on Britain to strengthen itself to counter the belligerence of Germany.  However Lord Lloyd was the first to so agitate. 

In 1932, Churchill accepted the presidency of the newly founded New Commonwealth Society, a peace organisation which he described in 1937 as "one of the few peace societies that advocates the use of force, if possible overwhelming force, to support public international law". 

Churchill's attitude towards the fascist dictators was ambiguous. After the First World War defeat of Germany, a new danger occupied conservatives' political consciousness—the spread of communism. A newspaper article penned by Churchill and published on 4 February 1920, had warned that "civilisation" was threatened by the Bolsheviks, a movement which he linked through historical precedence to Jewish conspiracy.  He wrote in part:

This movement among Jews is not new ... but a "world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality." 

In 1931, he warned against the League of Nations opposing the Japanese in Manchuria: "I hope we shall try in England to understand the position of Japan, an ancient state ... On the one side they have the dark menace of Soviet Russia. On the other the chaos of China, four or five provinces of which are being tortured under communist rule."  In contemporary newspaper articles he referred to the Spanish Republican government as a communist front, and Franco's army as the "Anti-red movement."  He supported the Hoare-Laval Pact and continued up until 1937 to praise Benito Mussolini.  He regarded Mussolini's regime as a bulwark against the perceived threat of communist revolution, going as far (in 1933) as to call Mussolini the "Roman genius ... the greatest lawgiver among men." However, he stressed that the UK must stick with its tradition of Parliamentary democracy, not adopt fascism. 

Speaking in the House of Commons in 1937, Churchill said, "I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and Nazism, I would choose communism."  In a 1935 essay titled "Hitler and his Choice", which was republished in his 1937 book Great Contemporaries, Churchill expressed a hope that Hitler, if he so chose, and despite his rise to power through dictatorial action, hatred and cruelty, might yet "go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation and brought it back serene, helpful and strong to the forefront of the European family circle."  Churchill's first major speech on defence on 7 February 1934 stressed the need to rebuild the Royal Air Force and to create a Ministry of Defence; his second, on 13 July urged a renewed role for the League of Nations. These three topics remained his themes until early 1936. In 1935, he was one of the founding members of The Focus, which brought together people of differing political backgrounds and occupations who were united in seeking "the defence of freedom and peace."  The Focus led to the formation of the much wider Arms and the Covenant Movement in 1936.

Churchill, holidaying in Spain when the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland in February 1936, returned to a divided Britain. The Labour opposition was adamant in opposing sanctions and the National Government was divided between advocates of economic sanctions and those who said that even these would lead to a humiliating backdown by Britain as France would not support any intervention.  Churchill's speech on 9 March was measured, and praised by Neville Chamberlain as constructive. But within weeks Churchill was passed over for the post of Minister for Co-ordination of Defence in favour of Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip.  A. J. P. Taylor called this "an appointment rightly described as the most extraordinary since Caligula made his horse a consul."  In June 1936, Churchill organised a deputation of senior Conservatives who shared his concern to see Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax. He had tried to have delegates from the other two parties and later wrote, "If the leaders of the Labour and Liberal oppositions had come with us there might have been a political situation so intense as to enforce remedial action."  As it was, the meeting achieved little, Baldwin arguing that the Government was doing all it could, given the anti-war feeling of the electorate.

On 12 November, Churchill returned to the topic. Speaking in the Address in Reply debate, after giving some specific instances of Germany's war preparedness, he said "The Government simply cannot make up their mind or they cannot get the prime minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful for impotency. And so we go on preparing more months more years precious perhaps vital for the greatness of Britain for the locusts to eat." 

R. R. James called this one of Churchill's most brilliant speeches during this period, Baldwin's reply sounding weak and disturbing the House. The exchange gave new encouragement to the Arms and the Covenant Movement. 

Abdication crisis

In June 1936, Walter Monckton told Churchill that the rumours that King Edward VIII intended to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson were true. Churchill then advised against the marriage and said he regarded Mrs Simpson's existing marriage as a 'safeguard'.  In November, he declined Lord Salisbury's invitation to be part of a delegation of senior Conservative backbenchers who met with Baldwin to discuss the matter. On 25 November he, Attlee and Labour leader Archibald Sinclair met with Baldwin, were told officially of the King's intention, and asked whether they would form an administration if Baldwin and the National Government resigned should the King not take the Ministry's advice. Both Attlee and Sinclair said they would not take office if invited to do so. Churchill's reply was that his attitude was a little different but he would support the government. 

The Abdication crisis became public, coming to a head in the first two weeks of December 1936. At this time, Churchill publicly gave his support to the King. The first public meeting of the Arms and the Covenant Movement was on 3 December. Churchill was a major speaker and later wrote that in replying to the Vote of Thanks, he made a declaration 'on the spur of the moment' asking for delay before any decision was made by either the King or his Cabinet.  Later that night Churchill saw the draft of the King's proposed wireless broadcast and spoke with Beaverbrook and the King's solicitor about it. On 4 December, he met with the King and again urged delay in any decision about abdication. On 5 December, he issued a lengthy statement implying that the Ministry was applying unconstitutional pressure on the King to force him to make a hasty decision.  On 7 December, he tried to address the Commons to plead for delay. He was shouted down. Seemingly staggered by the unanimous hostility of all Members, he left. 

Churchill's reputation in Parliament and England as a whole was badly damaged. Some such as Alistair Cooke saw him as trying to build a King's Party.  Others like Harold Macmillan were dismayed by the damage Churchill's support for the King had done to the Arms and the Covenant Movement.  Churchill himself later wrote "I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended."  Historians are divided about Churchill's motives in his support for Edward VIII. Some such as A. J. P. Taylor see it as being an attempt to 'overthrow the government of feeble men'.  Others such as R. R. James see Churchill's motives as entirely honourable and disinterested, that he felt deeply for the King. 

Return from exile

Churchill later sought to portray himself as an isolated voice warning of the need to rearm against Germany. While it is true that he had a small following in the House of Commons during much of the 1930s, he was given privileged information by some elements within the Government, particularly by disaffected civil servants in the War Ministry. The "Churchill group" in the latter half of the decade consisted of only himself, Duncan Sandys and Brendan Bracken. It was isolated from the other main factions within the Conservative Party pressing for faster rearmament and a stronger foreign policy;  one meeting of anti-Chamberlain forces decided that Churchill would make a good Minister of Supply. 

Even during the time Churchill was campaigning against Indian independence, he received official and otherwise secret information. From 1932, Churchill's neighbour, Major Desmond Morton, with Ramsay MacDonald's approval, gave Churchill information on German air power.  From 1930 onwards Morton headed a department of the Committee of Imperial Defence charged with researching the defence preparedness of other nations. Lord Swinton as Secretary of State for Air, and with Baldwin's approval, in 1934 gave Churchill access to official and otherwise secret information.

Swinton did so, knowing Churchill would remain a critic of the government, but believing that an informed critic was better than one relying on rumour and hearsay.  Churchill was a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Adolf Hitler  and in private letters to Lloyd George (13 August) and Lord Moyne (11 September) just before the Munich Agreement, he wrote that the government were faced with a choice between "war and shame" and that having chosen shame would later get war on less favourable terms.   

First term as prime minister (1940–45)

Return to the Admiralty

On 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany following the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, the same position he had held during the first part of the First World War. As such he was a member of Chamberlain's small War Cabinet.   

In this position, he proved to be one of the highest-profile ministers during the so-called "Phoney War," when the only noticeable action was at sea and the USSR's attack on Finland. Churchill advocated the pre-emptive occupation of the neutral Norwegian iron-ore port of Narvik and the iron mines in Kiruna, Sweden, early in the war. However, Chamberlain and the rest of the War Cabinet disagreed, and the operation was delayed until the successful German invasion of Norway.

"We shall never surrender"

On 10 May 1940, hours before the German invasion of France by a lightning advance through the Low Countries, it became clear that, following failure in Norway, the country had no confidence in Chamberlain's prosecution of the war and so Chamberlain resigned. The commonly accepted version of events states that Lord Halifax turned down the post of prime minister because he believed he could not govern effectively as a member of the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons. Although the prime minister does not traditionally advise the King on the former's successor, Chamberlain wanted someone who would command the support of all three major parties in the House of Commons. A meeting between Chamberlain, Halifax, Churchill and David Margesson, the government Chief Whip, led to the recommendation of Churchill, and, as constitutional monarch, George VI asked Churchill to be prime minister. Churchill's first act was to write to Chamberlain to thank him for his support. 

In June 1940, to encourage the neutral Irish state to join with the Allies, Churchill indicated to the Taoiseach Éamon de Valera that the United Kingdom would push for Irish unity, but believing that Churchill could not deliver, de Valera declined the offer.  The British did not inform the Government of Northern Ireland that they had made the offer to the Dublin government, and De Valera's rejection was not publicised until 1970.

Churchill was still unpopular among many Conservatives and the Establishment,  who opposed his replacing Chamberlain; the former prime minister remained party leader until dying in November. Churchill probably could not have won a majority in any of the political parties in the House of Commons, and the House of Lords was completely silent when it learned of his appointment.  An American visitor reported in late 1940 that, "Everywhere I went in London people admired [Churchill's] energy, his courage, his singleness of purpose. People said they didn't know what Britain would do without him. He was obviously respected. But no one felt he would be Prime Minister after the war. He was simply the right man in the right job at the right time. The time being the time of a desperate war with Britain's enemies." 

An element of British public and political sentiment favoured a negotiated peace with Germany, among them Halifax as Foreign Secretary, but Churchill refused to consider an armistice.  Although at times personally pessimistic about Britain's chances for victory—Churchill told Hastings Ismay on 12 June 1940 that "[y]ou and I will be dead in three months' time" —his use of rhetoric hardened public opinion against a peaceful resolution and prepared the British for a long war.  Coining the general term for the upcoming battle, Churchill stated in his "finest hour" speech to the House of Commons on 18 June, "I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin."  By refusing an armistice with Germany, Churchill kept resistance alive in the British Empire and created the basis for the later Allied counter-attacks of 1942–45, with Britain serving as a platform for the supply of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Western Europe.

In response to previous criticisms that there had been no clear single minister in charge of the prosecution of the war Churchill created and took the additional position of Minister of Defence, making him the most powerful wartime prime minister in British history. He immediately put his friend and confidant, industrialist and newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, in charge of aircraft production. It was Beaverbrook's business acumen that allowed Britain to quickly gear up aircraft production and engineering, which eventually made the difference in the war. 

The war energised Churchill, who was 65 years old when he became Prime Minister. An American journalist wrote in 1941: "The responsibilities which are his now must be greater than those carried by any other human being on earth. One would think such a weight would have a crushing effect upon him. Not at all. The last time I saw him, while the Battle of Britain was still raging, he looked twenty years younger than before the war began ... His uplifted spirit is transmitted to the people". Churchill's speeches were a great inspiration to the embattled British. His first as prime minister was the famous, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech. One historian has called its effect on Parliament as "electrifying". The House of Commons that had ignored him during the 1930s "was now listening, and cheering". Churchill followed that closely with two other equally famous ones, given just before the Battle of Britain. One included the words:

The other:

At the height of the Battle of Britain, his bracing survey of the situation included the memorable line "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few", which engendered the enduring nickname The Few for the RAF fighter pilots who won it.  He first spoke these famous words upon his exit from No. 11 Group's underground bunker at RAF Uxbridge, now known as the Battle of Britain Bunker on 16 August 1940. One of his most memorable war speeches came on 10 November 1942 at the Lord Mayor's Luncheon at Mansion House in London, in response to the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Churchill stated:

Without having much in the way of sustenance or good news to offer the British people, he took a risk in deliberately choosing to emphasise the dangers instead.

"Rhetorical power", wrote Churchill, "is neither wholly bestowed, nor wholly acquired, but cultivated." Not all were impressed by his oratory. Robert Menzies, prime minister of Australia and himself a gifted phrase-maker, said of Churchill during the Second World War: "His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way." Another associate wrote: "He is ... the slave of the words which his mind forms about ideas ... And he can convince himself of almost every truth if it is once allowed thus to start on its wild career through his rhetorical machinery." 

Mental and physical health

Since the appearance in 1966 of Lord Moran's memoir of his years as Churchill's doctor, with its claim that "Black Dog" was the name Churchill gave to "the prolonged fits of depression from which he suffered",  many authors have suggested that throughout his life Churchill was a victim of, or at risk from, clinical depression. Formulated in this way, Churchill's mental health history contains unmistakable echoes of the seminal interpretation of Lord Moran's Black Dog revelations made by Dr Anthony Storr.  In drawing so heavily on Moran for what he took to be the latter's totally reliable, first-hand clinical evidence of Churchill's lifelong struggle with "prolonged and recurrent depression" and its associated "despair", Storr produced a seemingly authoritative and persuasive diagnostic essay that, in the words of John Ramsden, "strongly influenced all later accounts." 

However, Storr was not aware that Moran, as Moran's biographer Professor Richard Lovell has shown and contrary to the impression created in Moran's book, kept no diary, in the dictionary sense of the word, during his years as Churchill's doctor. Nor was Storr aware that Moran's book as published was a much rewritten account which mixed together Moran's contemporaneous jottings with later material acquired from other sources.  As Wilfred Attenborough has demonstrated, the key Black Dog 'diary' entry for 14 August 1944 was an arbitrarily dated pastiche in which the explicit reference to Black Dog—the first of the few in the book (with an associated footnote definition of the term)—was taken, not from anything Churchill had said to Moran, but from much later claims made to Moran by Brendan Bracken (a non-clinician, of course) in 1958.  Although seemingly unnoticed by Dr Storr and those he influenced, Moran later on in his book retracts his earlier suggestion, also derived from Brendan Bracken, that, towards the end of the Second World War, Churchill was succumbing to "the inborn melancholia of the Churchill blood"; also unnoticed by Storr et al., Moran, in his final chapter, states that Churchill, before the start of the First World War, "had managed to extirpate bouts of depression from his system". 

Despite the difficulties with Moran's book, the many illustrations it provides of a Churchill understandably plunged into temporary low mood by military defeats and other severely adverse developments constitute a compelling portrait of a great man reacting to, but not significantly impeded by, worry and overstrain, a compelling portrait that is entirely consistent with the portraits of others who worked closely with Churchill.  Moreover, it can be readily deduced from Moran's book that Churchill did not receive medication for depression—the amphetamine that Moran prescribed for special occasions, especially for big speeches from the autumn of 1953 onwards, was to combat the effects of Churchill's stroke of that year. 

Churchill himself seems, in a long life, to have written about Black Dog on one occasion only: the reference, a backward-looking one, occurs in a private handwritten letter to Clementine Churchill dated July 1911 which reports the successful treatment of a relative's depression by a doctor in Germany.  His ministerial circumstances at that date, the very limited treatments available for serious depression pre-1911, the fact of the relative's being "complete cured", and, not least, the evident deep interest Churchill took in the fact of the complete cure, can be shown to point to Churchill's pre-1911 Black Dog depression's having been a form of mild (i.e. non-psychotic) anxiety-depression,  as that term is defined by Professor Edward Shorter. 

There is serious doubt about the reliability of the evidential foundations of the dominant, essentially Storrian, perception that Churchill's mental health was an open-and-shut case of clinical depression. Moran himself leaned strongly in the direction of his patient's being "by nature very apprehensive";  close associates of Churchill have disputed the idea that apprehension was a defining feature of Churchill's temperament, although they readily concede that he was noticeably worried and anxious about some matters, especially in the buildup to important speeches in the House of Commons and elsewhere.  And Churchill himself all but openly acknowledged in his book 'Painting as a Pastime' that he was prey to the "worry and mental overstrain [experienced] by persons who, over prolonged periods, have to bear exceptional responsibilities and discharge duties upon a very large scale".  The fact that he found a remedy in painting and bricklaying is a strong indicator that the condition as he defined it did not amount to 'clinical depression', certainly not as that term was understood during the lifetimes of himself and Lord Moran. 

According to Lord Moran, during the war years Churchill sought solace in his tumbler of whisky and soda and his cigar. Churchill was also a very emotional man, unafraid to shed tears when appropriate. During some of his broadcast speeches it was noticed that he was trying to hold back the tears. Nevertheless, although the fall of Tobruk was, by Churchill's own account "one of the heaviest blows" he received during the war,  there seem to have been no tears. Certainly, the next day Moran found him animated and vigorous.  Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who had been present when President Roosevelt broke the news of the tragedy to Churchill, focused afterwards in his diary on the superbly well judged manner in which the President made his offer of immediate military assistance,  despite Alanbrooke's being ever ready to highlight what he perceived to be Churchill's contradictory motivations and flawed character during the war. For example, in his diary  entry for 10 September 1944:

Alanbrooke, in the words of Paul Reid, "was egalitarian: he criticized everybody, American and British". 

Churchill's physical health became more fragile during the war, as shown by a mild heart attack he suffered in December 1941 at the White House and also in December 1943 when he contracted pneumonia. Despite this, he travelled over 100000 mi throughout the war to meet other national leaders. For security, he usually travelled using the alias Colonel Warden. 

Relations with the United States

Churchill's good relationship with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt—between 1939 and 1945 they exchanged an estimated 1700 letters and telegrams and met 11 times; Churchill estimated that they had 120 days of close personal contact —helped secure vital food, oil and munitions via the North Atlantic shipping routes.  It was for this reason that Churchill was relieved when Roosevelt was re-elected in 1940. Upon re-election, Roosevelt immediately set about implementing a new method of providing military hardware and shipping to Britain without the need for monetary payment. Roosevelt persuaded Congress that repayment for this immensely costly service would take the form of defending the US; and so Lend-Lease was born. Churchill had 12 strategic conferences with Roosevelt which covered the Atlantic Charter, Europe first strategy, the Declaration by the United Nations and other war policies.
After Pearl Harbor was attacked, Churchill's first thought in anticipation of US help was, "We have won the war!"  On 26 December 1941, Churchill addressed a joint meeting of the US Congress, asking of Germany and Japan, "What kind of people do they think we are?"  Churchill initiated the Special Operations Executive (SOE) under Hugh Dalton's Ministry of Economic Warfare, which established, conducted and fostered covert, subversive and partisan operations in occupied territories with notable success; and also the Commandos which established the pattern for most of the world's current Special Forces. The Russians referred to him as the "British Bulldog".

Churchill was party to treaties that would redraw post-Second World War European and Asian boundaries. These were discussed as early as 1943. At the Second Quebec Conference in 1944 he drafted and, together with Roosevelt, signed a less-harsh version of the original Morgenthau Plan, in which they pledged to convert Germany after its unconditional surrender "into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character."  Proposals for European boundaries and settlements were officially agreed to by President Harry S. Truman, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at Potsdam. Churchill's strong relationship with Harry Truman was also of great significance to both countries. While he clearly regretted the loss of his close friend and counterpart Roosevelt, Churchill was enormously supportive of Truman in his first days in office, calling him, "the type of leader the world needs when it needs him most." 

Relations with the Soviet Union

When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill, a vehement anti-communist, famously stated "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons," regarding his policy toward Stalin.  Soon, British supplies and tanks were flowing to help the Soviet Union. 

The Casablanca Conference, a meeting of Allied powers held in Casablanca, Morocco, on 14 January through 23 January 1943, produced what was to be known as the "Casablanca Declaration". In attendance were Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle. Joseph Stalin had bowed out, citing the need for his presence in the Soviet Union to attend to the Stalingrad crisis. It was in Casablanca that the Allies made a unified commitment to continue the war through to the "unconditional surrender" of the Axis powers. In private, however, Churchill did not fully subscribe to the doctrine of "unconditional surrender," and was taken by surprise when Franklin Roosevelt announced this to the world as Allied consensus.  

The settlement concerning the borders of Poland, that is, the boundary between Poland and the Soviet Union and between Germany and Poland, was viewed as a betrayal in Poland during the post-war years, as it was established against the views of the Polish government in exile. It was Winston Churchill, who tried to motivate Mikołajczyk, who was prime minister of the Polish government in exile, to accept Stalin's wishes, but Mikołajczyk refused. Churchill was convinced that the only way to alleviate tensions between the two populations was the transfer of people, to match the national borders.

As he expounded in the House of Commons on 15 December 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, insofar as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble ... A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions."   However the resulting expulsions of Germans were carried out in a way which resulted in much hardship and, according to a 1966 report by the West German Ministry of Refugees and Displaced Persons, the death of over 2.1 million. Churchill opposed the effective annexation of Poland by the Soviet Union and wrote bitterly about it in his books, but he was unable to prevent it at the conferences. 

During October 1944, he and Eden were in Moscow to meet with the Russian leadership. At this point, Russian forces were beginning to advance into various eastern European countries. Churchill held the view that until everything was formally and properly worked out at the Yalta conference, there had to be a temporary, war-time, working agreement with regard to who would run what. The most significant of these meetings was held on 9 October 1944 in the Kremlin between Churchill and Stalin. During the meeting, Poland and the Balkan problems were discussed.Resis, Albert. The Churchill-Stalin Secret "Percentages" Agreement on the Balkans, Moscow, October 1944. The American Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 2. (April 1978), pp. 368–87 [http://www.jstor.org/pss/1862322 in JSTOR] Churchill told Stalin:

Stalin agreed to this Percentages agreement, ticking a piece of paper as he heard the translation. In 1958, five years after the account of this meeting was published (in The Second World War), authorities of the Soviet Union denied that Stalin accepted the "imperialist proposal".

One of the conclusions of the Yalta Conference was that the Allies would return all Soviet citizens that found themselves in the Allied zone to the Soviet Union. This immediately affected the Soviet prisoners of war liberated by the Allies, but was also extended to all Eastern European refugees.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called the Operation Keelhaul "the last secret" of the Second World War.  The operation decided the fate of up to two million post-war refugees fleeing eastern Europe.

Dresden bombings controversy

Between 13–15 February 1945, British and US bombers attacked the German city of Dresden, which was crowded with German wounded and refugees.  There were an unknown number of refugees in Dresden, so historians Matthias Neutzner, Götz Bergander and Frederick Taylor have used historical sources and deductive reasoning to estimate that the number of refugees in the city and surrounding suburbs was around 200,000 or less on the first night of the bombing. Because of the cultural importance of the city, and of the number of civilian casualties close to the end of the war, this remains one of the most controversial Western Allied actions of the war. Following the bombing Churchill stated in a top-secret telegram:

On reflection, under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff and in response to the views expressed by Sir Charles Portal (Chief of the Air Staff) and Sir Arthur Harris (AOC-in-C of RAF Bomber Command), among others, Churchill withdrew his memo and issued a new one.   This final version of the memo completed on 1 April 1945, stated: 

Ultimately, responsibility for the British part of the attack lay with Churchill, which is why he has been criticised for allowing the bombings to occur. German historian Jörg Friedrich claims that Churchill's decision was a "war crime",  and writing in 2006 the philosopher A. C. Grayling questioned the whole strategic bombing campaign by the RAF, presenting the argument that although it was not a war crime it was a moral crime that undermines the Allies' contention that they fought a just war.  On the other hand, it has also been asserted that Churchill's involvement in the bombing of Dresden was based on the strategic and tactical aspects of winning the war. The destruction of Dresden, while immense, was designed to expedite the defeat of Germany. As historian and journalist Max Hastings wrote in an article subtitled "the Allied Bombing of Dresden": "I believe it is wrong to describe strategic bombing as a war crime, for this might be held to suggest some moral equivalence with the deeds of the Nazis. Bombing represented a sincere, albeit mistaken, attempt to bring about Germany's military defeat." British historian Frederick Taylor asserts that "All sides bombed each other's cities during the war. Half a million Soviet citizens, for example, died from German bombing during the invasion and occupation of Russia. That's roughly equivalent to the number of German citizens who died from Allied raids." 

End of the Second World War 

In June 1944, the Allied Forces invaded Normandy and pushed the Nazi forces back into Germany on a broad front over the coming year. After being attacked on three fronts by the Allies, and in spite of Allied failures, such as Operation Market Garden, and German counter-attacks, including the Battle of the Bulge, Germany was eventually defeated. On 7 May 1945 at the SHAEF headquarters in Rheims the Allies accepted Germany's surrender. On the same day in a BBC news flash John Snagge announced that 8 May would be Victory in Europe Day.  On Victory in Europe Day, Churchill broadcast to the nation that Germany had surrendered and that a final cease fire on all fronts in Europe would come into effect at one minute past midnight that night.   Afterwards, Churchill told a huge crowd in Whitehall: "This is your victory." The people shouted: "No, it is yours", and Churchill then conducted them in the singing of "Land of Hope and Glory". In the evening he made another broadcast to the nation asserting the defeat of Japan in the coming months. The Japanese later surrendered on 15 August 1945.

Soon after VE day there came a dispute with Britain over French mandates Syria and Lebanon known as the Levant which quickly developed into a major diplomatic incident.  In May, Charles de Gaulle had sent more French troops to re-establish their presence provoking an outbreak of nationalism. On 20 May, French troops opened fire on demonstrators in Damascus with artillery and dropped bombs from the air.  Finally, on 31 May, with the death toll exceeding a thousand Syrians Churchill decided to act and sent de Gaulle an ultimatum saying, "In order to avoid a collision between British and French forces, we request you immediately to order French troops to cease fire and withdraw to their barracks".  This was ignored by both De Gaulle and the French forces and thus Churchill ordered British troops and armoured cars under General Bernard Paget to invade Syria from nearby Transjordan. The invasion went ahead and the British swiftly moved in cutting the French General Fernand Oliva-Roget's telephone line with his base at Beirut. Eventually, heavily outnumbered, Oliva-Roget ordered his men back to their bases near the coast who were then escorted by the British. A furious row then broke out between Britain and France.

Churchill's relationship with de Gaulle was at this time rock bottom in spite of his efforts to preserve French interests at Yalta and a visit to Paris the previous year. In January he told a colleague that he believed that de Gaulle was "a great danger to peace and for Great Britain. After five years of experience, I am convinced that he is the worst enemy of France in her troubles ... he is one of the greatest dangers to European peace.... I am sure that in the long run no understanding will be reached with General de Gaulle". In France, there were accusations that Britain had armed the demonstrators and De Gaulle raged against 'Churchill's ultimatum', saying that "the whole thing stank of oil".

As Europe celebrated peace at the end of six years of war, Churchill was concerned with the possibility that the celebrations would soon be brutally interrupted.  He concluded that the UK and the US must anticipate the Red Army ignoring previously agreed frontiers and agreements in Europe, and prepare to "impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire." According to the Operation Unthinkable plan ordered by Churchill and developed by the British Armed Forces, the Third World War could have started on 1 July 1945 with a sudden attack against the allied Soviet troops. The plan was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee as militarily unfeasible.

In opposition, 1945–51

Caretaker government and 1945 election

With a general election looming (there had been none for almost a decade), and with the Labour Ministers refusing to continue the wartime coalition, Churchill resigned as Prime Minister on 23 May. Later that day, he accepted the King's invitation to form a new government, known officially as the National Government, like the Conservative-dominated coalition of the 1930s, but in practice known as the Churchill caretaker ministry. The government contained Conservatives, National Liberals and a few non-party figures such as Sir John Anderson and Lord Woolton, but not Labour or Archibald Sinclair's Official Liberals. Although Churchill continued to carry out the functions of Prime Minister, including exchanging messages with the US administration about the upcoming Potsdam Conference, he was not formally reappointed until 28 May. 

Although polling day was 5 July, the results of the 1945 election did not become known until 26 July, owing to the need to collect the votes of those serving overseas. Clementine, who together with his daughter Mary had been at the count at Churchill's constituency in Essex (although unopposed by the major parties, Churchill had been returned with a much-reduced majority against an independent candidate) returned to meet her husband for lunch. To her suggestion that election defeat might be "a blessing in disguise" he retorted that "at the moment it seems very effectively disguised". That afternoon Churchill's doctor Lord Moran commiserated with him on the "ingratitude" of the British public, to which Churchill replied "I wouldn't call it that. They have had a very hard time". Having lost the election, despite enjoying much support amongst the British population, he resigned as Prime Minister that evening, this time handing over to a Labour Government.   Many reasons for his defeat have been given, key among them being that a desire for post-war reform was widespread amongst the population and that the man who had led Britain in war was not seen as the man to lead the nation in peace.  Although the Conservative Party was unpopular, many electors appear to have wanted Churchill to continue as Prime Minister whatever the outcome, or to have wrongly believed that this would be possible. 

On the morning of 27 July, Churchill held a farewell Cabinet. On the way out of the Cabinet Room he told Eden "Thirty years of my life have been passed in this room. I shall never sit in it again. You will, but I shall not".  However, contrary to expectations, Churchill did not hand over the Conservative leadership to Anthony Eden, who became his deputy but who was disinclined to challenge his leadership. It would be another decade before Churchill finally did hand over the reins. 

Opposition leader

For six years he was to serve as the Leader of the Opposition. During these years Churchill continued to influence world affairs. During his 1946 trip  to the United States, Churchill famously lost a lot of money in a poker game with Harry Truman and his advisors.  (He also liked to play Bezique, which he learned while serving in the Boer War.)

During this trip he gave his Iron Curtain speech about the USSR and the creation of the Eastern Bloc. Speaking on 5 March 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, he declared:

Churchill told the Irish Ambassador to London in 1946 "I said a few words in parliament the other day about your country because I still hope for a united Ireland. You must get those fellows in the north in, though; you can't do it by force. There is not, and never was, any bitterness in my heart towards your country." He later said "You know I have had many invitations to visit Ulster but I have refused them all. I don't want to go there at all, I would much rather go to southern Ireland. Maybe I'll buy another horse with an entry in the Irish Derby." 

He continued to lead his party after losing the 1950 general election.

European unity

In the summer of 1930, inspired by the ideas being floated by Aristide Briand and by his recent tour of the US in the autumn of 1929, Churchill wrote an article lamenting the instability which had been caused by the independence of Poland and the disintegration of Austria-Hungary into petty states, and called for a "United States of Europe", although he wrote that Britain was "with Europe but not of it". 

Ideas about closer European union continued to circulate, driven by Paul-Henri Spaak, from 1942 onwards.  As early as March 1943 a Churchill speech on postwar reconstruction annoyed the US administration not only by not mentioning China as a great power but by proposing a purely European "Council of Europe". Harry Hopkins passed on President Roosevelt's concerns, warning Eden that it would "give free ammunition to (US) isolationists" who might propose an American "regional council". Churchill urged Eden, on a visit to the US at the time, to "listen politely" but give "no countenance" to Roosevelt's proposals for the US, UK, USSR and Chiang Kai-Shek's China to act together to enforce "Global Collective Security" with the Japanese and French Empires taken into international trusteeship. 

Now out of office, Churchill gave a speech at Zurich on 19 September 1946 in which he called for "a kind of United States of Europe" centred around a Franco-German partnership, with Britain and the Commonwealth, and perhaps the US, as "friends and sponsors of the new Europe". "The Times" wrote of him "startling the world" with "outrageous propositions" and warned that there was as yet little appetite for such unity, and that he appeared to be assuming a permanent division between Eastern and Western Europe, and urged "more humdrum" economic agreements. The speech was praised by Leo Amery and by Count Coudenhove-Kalergi who wrote that it would galvanise governments into action.  

Churchill expressed similar sentiments at a meeting of the Primrose League at the Albert Hall on 18 May 1947. He declared "let Europe arise" but was "absolutely clear" that "we shall allow no wedge to be driven between Britain and the United States". Churchill's speeches helped to encourage the foundation of the Council of Europe. 

In June 1950, Churchill was strongly critical of the Attlee Government's failure to send British representatives to Paris (to discuss the Schuman Plan for setting up the European Coal and Steel Community), declaring that les absents ont toujours tort and calling it "a squalid attitude" which "derange(d) the balance of Europe", and risked Germany dominating the new grouping. He called for world unity through the UN (against the backdrop of the communist invasion of South Korea), whilst stressing that Britain was uniquely placed to exert leadership through her links to the Commonwealth, the US and Europe.  However, Churchill did not want Britain to actually join any federal grouping. Jenkins, p. 810 and pp. 819–14  In September 1951 a declaration of the American, French and British foreign ministers welcomed the Schuman plan, stressing that it would revive economic growth and encourage the development of a democratic Germany, part of the Atlantic community. 

After returning as Prime Minister, Churchill issued a note for the Cabinet on 29 November 1951. He listed British Foreign Policy priorities as Commonwealth unity and consolidation, "fraternal association" of the English-speaking world (i.e. the Commonwealth and the US), then thirdly "United Europe, to which we are a closely—and specially-related ally and friend … (it is) only when plans for uniting Europe take a federal form that we cannot take part, because we cannot subordinate ourselves or the control of British policy to federal authorities". 

In 1956, after retiring as Prime Minister, Churchill went to Aachen to receive the Charlemagne Prize for his contribution to European Unity.  Churchill is today listed as one of the "Founding fathers of the European Union", a claim which in Boris Johnson's view contains "a very large dollop of truth".  However, Johnson suggests that if Churchill had been in power in 1950 he might have led Europe down the path of inter-governmental cooperation rather than federalism.

In July 1962 Field-Marshal Montgomery told the press that the aged Churchill, whom he had just visited in hospital where he was being treated for a broken hip, was opposed to Macmillan’s negotiations for Britain to enter the EEC (which would, in the event, be vetoed by the French President, General de Gaulle, the following January). Churchill told his granddaughter Edwina that Montgomery’s behaviour in leaking a private conversation was “monstrous”. 

Second term as prime minister (1951–55)

Return to government

Domestic policy

After the general election of October 1951, Churchill again became prime minister, and his second government lasted until his resignation in April 1955. He also held the office of Minister of Defence from October 1951 until 1 March 1952, when he handed the portfolio to Field Marshal Alexander. 

In domestic affairs, various reforms were introduced such as the Mines and Quarries Act of 1954 and the Housing Repairs and Rent Act of 1955. The former measure consolidated legislation dealing with the employment of young persons and women in mines and quarries, together with safety, health, and welfare. The latter measure extended previous housing Acts, and set out details in defining housing units as "unfit for human habitation."  In addition, tax allowances were raised,  construction of council housing was accelerated, and pensions and national assistance benefits were increased.  Controversially, however, charges for prescription medicines were introduced. 

Housing was an issue the Conservatives were widely recognised to have made their own, after the Churchill government of the early 1950s, with Harold Macmillan as Minister for Housing, gave housing construction far higher political priority than it had received under the Attlee administration (where housing had been attached to the portfolio of Health Minister Aneurin Bevan, whose attention was concentrated on his responsibilities for the National Health Service). Macmillan had accepted Churchill's challenge to meet the latter's ambitious public commitment to build 300,000 new homes a year, and achieved the target a year ahead of schedule. 

Colonial affairs

Kenya and Malaya

Churchill's domestic priorities in his last government were overshadowed by a series of foreign policy crises, which were partly the result of the continued decline of British military and imperial prestige and power. Being a strong proponent of Britain as an international power, Churchill would often meet such moments with direct action.  One example was his dispatch of British troops to Kenya to deal with the Mau Mau rebellion.  Trying to retain what he could of the Empire, he once stated that, "I will not preside over a dismemberment."

This was followed by events which became known as the Malayan Emergency.  In Malaya, a rebellion against British rule had been in progress since 1948.  Once again, Churchill's government inherited a crisis, and Churchill chose to use direct military action against those in rebellion while attempting to build an alliance with those who were not. While the rebellion was slowly being defeated, it was equally clear that colonial rule from Britain was no longer sustainable.

Relations with the US and the quest for a summit

In the early 1950s Britain was still attempting to remain a third major power on the world stage. This was "the time when Britain stood up to the United States as strongly as she was ever to do in the postwar world".  However, Churchill devoted much of his time in office to Anglo-American relations and attempted to maintain the Special Relationship. He made four official transatlantic visits to America during his second term as prime minister. 

Churchill and Eden visited Washington in January 1952. The Truman Administration was supporting the plans for a European Defence Community (EDC), hoping that this would allow controlled West German rearmament and enable American troop reductions. Churchill affected to believe that the proposed EDC would not work, scoffing at the supposed difficulties of language. Churchill asked in vain for a US military commitment to support Britain's position in Egypt and Middle East (where the Truman Administration had recently pressured Attlee not to intervene against Mossadeq in Iran); this did not meet with American approval—the US expected British support to fight communism in Korea, but saw any US commitment to the Middle East as supporting British imperialism, and were unpersuaded that this would help prevent pro-Soviet regimes from coming to power. 

By early 1953, the Cabinet's Foreign Policy priority was Egypt and nationalist, anti-imperialist Egyptian Revolution.  After Stalin's death Churchill, the last of the wartime Big Three, wrote to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had just assumed office as US President, on 11 March proposing a summit meeting with the Soviets; Eisenhower wrote back pouring cold water on the suggestions as the Soviets might use it for propaganda.  

Some of Churchill's colleagues hoped that he might retire after the Queen's Coronation in May 1953. Eden wrote to his son on 10 April "W gets daily older & is apt to ... waste a great deal of time ... the outside world has little idea how difficult that becomes. Please make me retire before I am 80!" However, Eden's serious illness (he nearly died after a series of botched operations on his bile duct) allowed Churchill to take control of foreign affairs from April 1953.  

After further discouragement from President Eisenhower (this was the McCarthy era in the US, in which Secretary of State Dulles took a Manichean view of the Cold War), Churchill announced his plans in the House of Commons on 11 May. The US Embassy in London noted that this was a rare occasion on which Churchill did not mention Anglo-American solidarity in a speech. Ministers like Lord Salisbury (acting Foreign Secretary) and Nutting were concerned at the irritation caused to the Americans and the French, although Selwyn Lloyd supported Churchill's initiative, as did most Conservatives. In his diary a year later, Eden wrote of Churchill's actions with fury. 

Stroke and resignation

Churchill had suffered a mild stroke while on holiday in the south of France in the summer of 1949. By the time he formed his next government he was slowing down noticeably enough for George VI, as early as December 1951, to consider inviting Churchill to retire in the following year in favour of Anthony Eden,  but it is not recorded if the king made that approach before his own death in February 1952.

The strain of carrying the Premiership and Foreign Office contributed to his second stroke at 10 Downing Street after dinner on the evening of 23 June 1953. Despite being partially paralysed down one side, he presided over a Cabinet meeting the next morning without anybody noticing his incapacity. Thereafter his condition deteriorated, and it was thought that he might not survive the weekend. Had Eden been fit, Churchill's premiership would most likely have been over. News of this was kept from the public and from Parliament, who were told that Churchill was suffering from exhaustion. He went to his country home, Chartwell, to recuperate, and by the end of June he astonished his doctors by being able, dripping with perspiration, to lift himself upright from his chair. He joked that news of his illness had chased the trial of the serial killer John Christie off the front pages.   

Churchill was still keen to pursue a meeting with the Soviets and was open to the idea of a reunified Germany. He refused to condemn the Soviet crushing of East Germany, commenting on 10 July 1953 that "The Russians were surprisingly patient about the disturbances in East Germany". He thought this might have been the reason for the removal of Beria.  Churchill returned to public life in October 1953 to make a speech at the Conservative Party conference at Margate. In December 1953 Churchill met Eisenhower in Bermuda. 

Churchill was cross about friction between Eden and Dulles (June 1954). On the trip home from another Anglo-American conference, the diplomat Pierson Dixon compared US actions in Guatemala to Soviet policy in Korea and Greece, causing Churchill to retort that Guatemala was a "bloody place" he'd "never heard of". Churchill was still keen for a trip to Moscow, and threatened to resign, provoking a crisis in the Cabinet when Lord Salisbury threatened to resign if Churchill had his way. In the end the Soviets proposed a five power conference, which did not meet until after Churchill had retired. By the autumn Churchill was again postponing his resignation.   Eden, now partly recovered from his operations, became a major figure on the world stage in 1954, helping to negotiate peace in Indo-China, an agreement with Egypt and to broker an agreement between the countries of Western Europe after the French rejection of the EDC. 

Aware that he was slowing down both physically and mentally, Churchill at last retired as prime minister in 1955 and was succeeded by Anthony Eden. He suffered another mild stroke in December 1956.

Retirement and death (1955–65)

Elizabeth II offered to create Churchill Duke of London, but this was declined as a result of the objections of his son Randolph, who would have inherited the title on his father's death.  He did, however, accept a knighthood as Garter Knight. After leaving the premiership, Churchill spent less time in parliament until he stood down at the 1964 general election.
Churchill spent most of his retirement at Chartwell and at his home in Hyde Park Gate, in London, and became a habitué of high society on the French Riviera. 

Although publicly supportive, Churchill was privately scathing about Eden's Suez Invasion. His wife believed that he had made a number of visits to the US in the following years in an attempt to help repair Anglo-American relations. 

By the time of the 1959 general election Churchill seldom attended the House of Commons. Despite the Conservative landslide, his own majority fell by more than a thousand. It is widely believed that as his mental and physical faculties decayed, he began to lose the battle he had supposedly fought for so long against the so-called "Black Dog" of depression. However, as was suggested in a previous section of this article, the nature, incidence and severity of Churchill's Black Dog is problematical. Anthony Montague Browne, Personal Secretary to Churchill during the latter's final ten years of life, wrote that he never heard Churchill make reference to Black Dog, and he vigorously contested the suggestion that the former prime minister, his health progressively ravaged by advanced old age, multiple strokes and other serious illness, was, independently of circumstances, afflicted also by inherent depression. 

There was speculation that Churchill may have had Alzheimer's disease in his last years, although others maintain that his reduced mental capacity was simply the cumulative result of the ten strokes and the increasing deafness he suffered from during the period 1949–1963.  In 1963, US President John F. Kennedy, acting under authorisation granted by an Act of Congress, proclaimed him an Honorary Citizen of the United States,  but he was unable to attend the White House ceremony.

Despite poor health, Churchill still tried to remain active in public life, and on St George's Day 1964, sent a message of congratulations to the surviving veterans of the 1918 Zeebrugge Raid who were attending a service of commemoration in Deal, Kent, where two casualties of the raid were buried in the Hamilton Road Cemetery. On 15 January 1965, Churchill suffered a severe stroke that left him gravely ill. He died at his London home nine days later, at age 90, on the morning of Sunday 24 January 1965, 70 years to the day after his father's death.Jenkins, p. 911

Funeral

Churchill's funeral plan had been initiated in 1953, after he suffered a major stroke, under the name Operation Hope Not. The purpose was to commemorate Churchill "on a scale befitting his position in history", as the Queen declared.  The funeral was the largest state funeral in world history up to that time, with representatives from 112 nations; only China did not send an emissary. In Europe 350 million people, including 25 million in Britain, watched the funeral on television, and only Ireland did not broadcast it live.  By decree of the Queen, his body lay in state in Westminster Hall for three days and a state funeral service was held at St Paul's Cathedral on 30 January 1965.  One of the largest assemblages of statesmen in the world was gathered for the service.  Unusually, the Queen attended the funeral because Churchill was the first commoner since William Gladstone to lie-in-State.  As Churchill's lead-lined coffin passed up the River Thames from Tower Pier to Festival Pier on the , dockers lowered their crane jibs in a salute. 

The Royal Artillery fired the 19-gun salute due a head of government, and the RAF staged a fly-by of sixteen English Electric Lightning fighters. The coffin was then taken the short distance to Waterloo station where it was loaded onto a specially prepared and painted carriage as part of the funeral train for its rail journey to ,  seven miles north-west of Oxford. 
The funeral train of Pullman coaches carrying his family mourners was hauled by Battle of Britain class steam locomotive No. 34051 Winston Churchill. In the fields along the route, and at the stations through which the train passed, thousands stood in silence to pay their last respects.  At Churchill's request, he was buried in the family plot at St Martin's Church, Bladon, near Woodstock, not far from his birthplace at Blenheim Palace. Churchill's funeral van—former Southern Railway van S2464S—is now part of a preservation project with the Swanage Railway, having been repatriated to the UK in 2007 from the US, to where it had been exported in 1965. 

Later in 1965 a memorial to Churchill, cut by the engraver Reynolds Stone, was placed in Westminster Abbey. 

Artist, historian, and writer

Churchill was an accomplished artist and took great pleasure in painting, especially after his resignation as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915.  He found a haven in art to overcome the spells of depression which he suffered throughout his life. As William Rees-Mogg has stated, "In his own life, he had to suffer the 'black dog' of depression. In his landscapes and still lives there is no sign of depression."  Churchill was persuaded and taught to paint by his artist friend, Paul Maze, whom he met during the First World War. Maze was a great influence on Churchill's painting and became a lifelong painting companion. 

Churchill's best known paintings are impressionist landscapes, many of which were painted while on holiday in the South of France, Egypt or Morocco. Using the pseudonym "Charles Morin", he continued his hobby throughout his life and painted hundreds of paintings, many of which are on show in the studio at Chartwell as well as private collections.  Most of his paintings are oil-based and feature landscapes, but he also did a number of interior scenes and portraits. In 1925 Lord Duveen, Kenneth Clark, and Oswald Birley selected his Winter Sunshine as the prize winner in a contest for anonymous amateur artists. Due to obvious time constraints, Churchill attempted only one painting during the Second World War. He completed the painting from the tower of the Villa Taylor in Marrakesh. 

Some of his paintings can today be seen in the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art. Emery Reves was Churchill's American publisher, as well as a close friend  and Churchill often visited Emery and his wife at their villa, La Pausa, in the South of France, which had originally been built in 1927 for Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel by her lover Bendor, 2nd Duke of Westminster. The villa was rebuilt within the museum in 1985 with a gallery of Churchill paintings and memorabilia.  

Despite his lifelong fame and upper-class origins, Churchill always struggled to keep his income at a level which would fund his extravagant lifestyle. MPs before 1946 received only a nominal salary (and in fact did not receive anything at all until the Parliament Act 1911) so many had secondary professions from which to earn a living.  From his first book in 1898 until his second stint as Prime Minister, Churchill's income while out of office was almost entirely made from writing books and opinion pieces for newspapers and magazines. The most famous of his newspaper articles are those that appeared in the Evening Standard from 1936 warning of the rise of Hitler and the danger of the policy of appeasement.

Churchill was also a prolific writer of books, under the pen name "Winston S. Churchill", which he used by agreement with the American novelist of the same name to avoid confusion between their works. His output included a novel, two biographies, three volumes of memoirs, and several histories. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values".  Two of his most famous works, published after his first premiership brought his international fame to new heights, were his six-volume memoir The Second World War and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples; a four-volume history covering the period from Caesar's invasions of Britain (55 BC) to the beginning of the First World War (1914).  A number of volumes of Churchill's speeches were also published. the first of which, Into Battle, was published in the United States under the title Blood, Sweat and Tears, and was included in Life Magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944. 

Churchill was also an amateur bricklayer, constructing buildings and garden walls at his country home at Chartwell, where he also bred butterflies.  As part of this hobby Churchill joined the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers,  but was expelled because of his membership of the Conservative Party.

Honours

In addition to the honour of a state funeral, Churchill received a wide range of awards and other honours, including the following, chronologically:
* Churchill was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1941
* In 1945, while Churchill was mentioned by Halvdan Koht as one of seven appropriate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Peace, the nomination went to Cordell Hull. 
* In 1953, Churchill received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his numerous published works, especially his six-volume set The Second World War.
* In a BBC poll of the "100 Greatest Britons" in 2002, he was proclaimed "The Greatest of Them All" based on approximately a million votes from BBC viewers.  Churchill was also rated as one of the most influential leaders in history by TIME.  Churchill College, Cambridge was founded in 1958 in his honour.
* In 1963, Churchill was named an Honorary Citizen of the United States by Public Law 88-6/H.R. 4374 (approved/enacted 9 April 1963).  
* On 29 November 1995, during a visit to the United Kingdom, President Bill Clinton of the United States announced to both Houses of Parliament that an  would be named the . This was the first United States warship to be named after a non-citizen of the United States since 1975.

Honorary degrees

* University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States (LLD) in 1941 
* Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (LLD) in 1943
* McGill University in Montreal, Canada (LLD) in 1944
* Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, United States 5 March 1946
* Leiden University in Leiden, Netherlands, honorary doctorate in 1946 
* University of Miami in Miami, Florida, United States in 1947
* University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark (PhD) in 1950

Ancestry

Portrayal in film and television

Churchill has been portrayed in film and television on multiple occasions. Portrayals of Churchill include Dudley Field Malone (An American in Paris, 1951); Peter Sellers (The Man Who Never Was, 1956); Richard Burton (Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years, 1961); Simon Ward (Young Winston, 1972); Warren Clarke (Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, 1974); Wensley Pithey (Edward and Mrs Simpson, 1978); Timothy West (Churchill and the Generals, 1979, Hiroshima, 1995); William Hootkins (The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, 1981); Robert Hardy (Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, 1981, War and Remembrance, 1989); Bob Hoskins (World War II: When Lions Roared 1994); Albert Finney (The Gathering Storm 2002); Ian Mune (Ike: Countdown to D-Day, 2004); Rod Taylor (Inglourious Basterds, 2009); Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009); Ian McNeice (Doctor Who: "Victory of the Daleks"; "The Pandorica Opens"; "The Wedding of River Song" in 2010 and 2011); Timothy Spall (The King's Speech, 2010),;  Michael Gambon (Churchill's Secret, 2016) and John Lithgow (The Crown, 2016). Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain KG (16 October 1863 – 17 March 1937) was a British statesman, son of Joseph Chamberlain and half-brother of Neville Chamberlain.

He stood for the Liberal Unionist party, which merged with the Conservatives in 1912, and led the Conservatives in the Commons in 1921-22. As Foreign Secretary, he negotiated the Locarno Pact (1925), aimed at preventing war between France and Germany, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was one of the few MPs supporting Winston Churchill's appeals for rearmament against the German threat in the 1930s.

Early life and career 

Austen Chamberlain was born in Birmingham, the second child and eldest son of Joseph Chamberlain, then a rising industrialist and political radical, later Mayor of Birmingham and a dominant figure in Liberal and Unionist politics at the end of the 19th century. His mother, the former Harriet Kenrick, died in childbirth, leaving his father so shaken that for almost 25 years he maintained a distance from his first-born son. In 1868, his father married Harriet's cousin, Florence, and had further children, the oldest of whom, Neville, would become Prime Minister in the year of Austen's death.

Austen was educated first at Rugby School, before passing on to Trinity College, Cambridge.  While at Trinity College, he became a lifelong friend of F. S. Oliver, a future advocate of Imperial Federation and, after 1909, a prominent member of the Round Table movement. Chamberlain made his first political address in 1884 at a meeting of the university's Political Society and was vice-president of the Cambridge Union Society.

It would seem that from an early age his father had intended for politics to be Austen's future path, and with that in mind, he was sent first to France, where he studied at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and developed a lasting admiration for the French people and culture. For nine months, he was shown the brilliance of Paris under the Third Republic, and he met and dined with the likes of Georges Clemenceau and Alexandre Ribot.

From Paris, Austen was sent to Berlin for twelve months, to imbibe the political culture of the other great European power, Germany. Though in his letters home to Beatrice and Neville, he showed an obvious preference for France and the lifestyle he had left behind there, Chamberlain undertook to learn German and learn from his experience in the capital of the Second Reich. Among others, Austen met and dined with the "Iron Chancellor", Otto von Bismarck, an experience that was to hold a special place in his heart for the duration of his life.

While attending the University of Berlin, Austen developed a suspicion of the growing nationalism in Germany based upon his experience of the lecturing style of Heinrich von Treitschke, who opened up to him "a new side of the German character - a narrow-minded, proud, intolerant Prussian chauvinism", the consequences of which he was later to ponder during the First World War and the crises of the 1930s.

Austen returned to the United Kingdom in 1888, lured largely by the prize of a parliamentary constituency. He was first elected to parliament as a member of his father's own Liberal Unionist Party in 1892, sitting for the seat of East Worcestershire. Owing to the prominence of his father and the alliance between the anti-Home Rule Liberal Unionists and Conservatives, Chamberlain was returned unopposed on 30 March, and at the first sitting of the new session, he walked up the floor of the house flanked by his father and his uncle, Richard.

Owing to the dissolution of parliament and the 1892 general election that August, Chamberlain was unable to make his maiden speech until April 1893, but, when delivered, it was acclaimed by the four-time Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone as "one of the best speeches which has been made". That Chamberlain was speaking against Gladstone's own Second Home Rule Bill does not seem to have dampened the enthusiasm of the Prime Minister, who responded by publicly congratulating both Austen and his father, Joseph, on such an excellent performance. That was highly significant, given the bad blood existing between Joseph Chamberlain and his former leader.

Appointed a junior Whip of the Liberal Unionists after the general election, Austen's main role was to act as his father's "standard bearer" in matters of policy. Following the Conservative and Unionist landslide win in the election of 1895, Chamberlain was appointed a Civil Lord of the Admiralty, holding that post until 1900, when he became Financial Secretary to the Treasury. In 1902, following the retirement of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, Chamberlain was promoted to the position of Postmaster General by the new premier, the Conservative Arthur Balfour.

In the wake of the struggle between his father and Balfour, Austen Chamberlain became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1903. Austen's appointment was largely a compromise solution to the bitter division of the two Unionist heavyweights, which threatened to split the coalition between supporters of Chamberlain's Imperial Tariff campaign and Balfour's more cautious advocacy of protectionism. While Austen supported his father’s programme, his influence within the cabinet was diminished following the departure of the senior Chamberlain to become backbenchers. Facing a resurgent Liberal opposition and the threat of an internal party split, Balfour eventually took the Unionists into opposition in December 1905, and in the ensuing rout in the election of 1906, Austen found himself one of the few surviving Liberal Unionists in the House of Commons.

After his father's stroke and enforced retirement from active politics a few months later, Austen became the effective leader of the tariff reform campaign within the Unionist Party, and thus, he was a contender for the eventual leadership of the party itself.

Leadership questions 

With the Unionists in disarray after two successive electoral defeats in 1910, Balfour was forced from his position as party leader in November 1911. Chamberlain was one of the leading candidates to succeed as Conservative leader even though he was still technically a member of the Liberal Unionist wing of the coalition (the two parties merged formally only in 1912).

Chamberlain was opposed by Canadian-born Andrew Bonar Law, Walter Long and Irish Unionist Edward Carson.

Given their standing in the party, only Chamberlain and Long had a realistic chance of success and though Balfour had intended Chamberlain to succeed him, it became clear from an early canvass of the sitting MPs that Long would be elected by a slender margin.

After a short period of internal party campaigning, Chamberlain determined to withdraw from the contest for the good of the still-divided party. He succeeded in persuading Long to withdraw with him in favour of Bonar Law, who was subsequently chosen by unanimous vote as a compromise candidate.

Chamberlain's action, while it prevented him from attaining the party leadership and, arguably, the premiership, did a great deal to maintain unity within the Conservative and Liberal Unionist parties at a time of great uncertainty and strain.

Irish Home Rule

In the last years before the outbreak of World War I, Chamberlain was concerned with one issue above all others: Home Rule for Ireland. The issue that had prompted his father to leave the Liberal Party in the 1880s now threatened to spill over into outright civil war, with the government of H. H. Asquith committed to the passage of a Third Home Rule Bill. Chamberlain was resolutely opposed to the dissolution of the Union with Ireland. The strain then was added the death of his father in July 1914, only a few days after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria began the train of events that led to the war

First World War

Pressure from the Conservative opposition, in part led by Chamberlain, eventually resulted in the formation of the wartime coalition government, in 1915. Chamberlain joined the cabinet as Secretary of State for India. Like other politicians, including Arthur Balfour and George Curzon, Chamberlain supported the invasion of Mesopotamia to increase British prestige in the region, thus discouraging a German-inspired Muslim revolt in India. 

Chamberlain remained at the India Office after David Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as Prime Minister in late 1916, but following inquiries into the failure of the Mesopotamian campaign (undertaken by the separately-administered Indian Army) in 1915, including the loss of the British garrison during the Siege of Kut, Chamberlain resigned his post in 1917; as the minister ultimately responsible, the fault lay with him. He was widely acclaimed for such a principled act. 

After Lloyd George's Paris speech (12 November 1917) at which he said that "when he saw the appalling casualty lists he wish(ed) it had not been necessary to win so many ("victories")" there was talk of Chamberlain withdrawing support from the government. Lloyd George survived by claiming that the aim of the new inter-Allied Supreme War Council was purely to "coordinate" policy, not to overrule the British generals, who still enjoyed a good deal of support from Conservatives. 

Later, he returned to government and became a member of the War Cabinet in April 1918 as Minister without Portfolio, replacing Lord Milner, who had become Secretary of State for War.

Following the victory of the Lloyd George coalition in the elections of 1918, Chamberlain was again appointed to the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer in January 1919 and immediately faced the huge task of restoring Britain's finances after four years of wartime expenditure.

Leadership 

Citing ill health, Bonar Law retired from the leadership of the Conservative branch of the Lloyd George government in the spring of 1921. His seniority and the general dislike of Curzon, his counterpart in the House of Lords, helped Chamberlain to both succeed Bonar Law as Leader of the House of Commons and take over in the office of Lord Privy Seal. He was succeeded at the Exchequer by Sir Robert Horne; it seemed that after ten years of waiting, Austen would again be given the opportunity of succeeding to the premiership.

The Lloyd George coalition was beginning to falter, following numerous scandals and the unsuccessful conclusion of the Anglo-Irish War, and it was widely believed that it would not survive until the next general election. He had previously had little regard for Lloyd George, but the opportunity of working closely with the "Welsh Wizard" gave Chamberlain a new insight into his nominal superior in the government (by now, the Conservative Party was by far the largest partner in the government).

It was an unfortunate change of allegiance for Chamberlain, for by late 1921, the Conservative backbenchers were growing more and more restless for an end to the coalition and a return to single-party (Conservative) government. Conservatives in the House of Lords began, in public, to oppose the coalition, disregarding calls for support from Chamberlain. In the country at large, Conservative candidates began to oppose the coalition at by-elections, and discontent spread to the House of Commons.

In the autumn of 1922, Chamberlain faced a backbench revolt, largely led by Baldwin, designed to oust Lloyd George, and when he summoned the Carlton Club meeting 19 October 1922, of Conservative MPs, a motion was there passed for fighting the forthcoming election as an independent party. Chamberlain resigned the party leadership rather than act against what he believed to be his duty. He was succeeded by Bonar Law, whose views and intentions he had predicted the evening before the vote at a private meeting. Bonar Law formed a government shortly thereafter, but Chamberlain was not given a post, but it seems that he would not have accepted a position even if he had been offered one.

Austen and Neville Chamberlain and Iain Duncan Smith are the only three Conservative leaders not to lead the party into a general election. Until William Hague in 1997, Austen was the only Conservative leader in the 20th century not to become Prime Minister.

Foreign Secretary

After the second resignation of Bonar Law in May 1923 (Law died from throat cancer later that year), Chamberlain was passed over again for the leadership of the party in favour of Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin offered Chamberlain the post of Lord Privy Seal, but Chamberlain insisted other former ministers from the Coalition to be included as well; Baldwin refused. However, Chamberlain returned to government when Baldwin formed his second ministry following success in the election of October 1924, serving in the important office of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1924 to 1929. Chamberlain was largely allowed a free hand by the easy-going Baldwin.

It is as Foreign Secretary that Chamberlain's place in history was finally assured. In a difficult period in international relations, Chamberlain faced not only a split in the entente cordiale by the French invasion of the Ruhr but also the controversy over the 1924 Geneva Protocol, which threatened to dilute British sovereignty over the issue of League of Nations economic sanctions.

Locarno Pact 

Despite the importance to history of other pressing issues, his reputation chiefly rests on his part in the negotiations over what came to be known as the Locarno Pact of 1925. Seeking to maintain the postwar status quo in the West, Chamberlain responded favourably to the approaches of German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann for a British guarantee of Germany's western borders. Besides promoting Franco-German reconciliation, Chamberlain's main motive was to create a situation in which Germany could pursue territorial revisionism in Eastern Europe peacefully. 

Chamberlain's understanding was that if Franco-German relations improved, France would gradually abandon the Cordon sanitaire, the French alliance system in Eastern Europe between the wars. Once France had abandoned its allies in Eastern Europe as the price of better relations with the Reich, the Poles and Czechoslovaks would have no Great Power ally to protect them, would be forced to adjust to German demands. Chamberlain believed that they would peacefully hand over the territories claimed by Germany such as the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig. Promoting territorial revisionism in Eastern Europe in Germany's favour was one of Chamberlain's principal reasons for Locarno.

Together with Aristide Briand of France, Chamberlain and Stresemann met at the town of Locarno in October 1925 and signed a mutual agreement (together with representatives from Belgium and Italy) to settle all differences between the nations by arbitration, not war. For his services, Chamberlain was not only awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but also made a Knight of the Order of the Garter. He was the first ordinary Knight of the Garter since Elizabethan times (Sir Henry Lee) to die without having been made a peer. He was the 871st Knight of the Garter.

Chamberlain also secured Britain's accession to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which theoretically outlawed war as an instrument of policy. Chamberlain famously said that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was "a man with whom business could be done". 

Later career 

Following his less-satisfactory engagement in issues in the Far East and Egypt, and the resignation of Baldwin’s government after the election of 1929, Chamberlain resigned his position as Foreign Secretary and went into retirement. He briefly returned to government in 1931 as First Lord of the Admiralty in Ramsay MacDonald's first National Government, but soon retired after having been forced to deal with the unfortunate Invergordon Mutiny.

Over the next six years as a senior backbencher, he gave strong support to the National Government on domestic issues but was critical on foreign policy. In 1935 l, the government faced a parliamentary rebellion over the Hoare-Laval Pact; his opposition to the vote of censure is widely believed to have been instrumental in saving the government from defeat on the floor of the House.

Chamberlain was again briefly considered for the post of Foreign Secretary but was passed over once the crisis was over for being too old for the job.  Instead, his advice was sought as to the suitability of his former Parliamentary Private Secretary, now Minister for the League of Nations, Anthony Eden for the post. Churchill claimed, in his memoirs, that if the crisis had ended differently Chamberlain may have been called upon as a respected statesman to form a government of his own, but this view is not widely supported, and it may be partly from Chamberlain's position as the first public champion of what later became Churchill's great cause, opposition to appeasement of Adolf Hitler.

Calls for rearmament

From 1934 to 1937, Chamberlain was, with Winston Churchill, Roger Keyes and Leo Amery, the most prominent voice calling for British rearmament in the face of a growing threat from Nazi Germany. In addition to speaking eloquently in Parliament on the matter, he was the chairman of two Conservative parliamentary delegations in late 1936 that met with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to remonstrate with him about his government's delay in rearming the British defence forces.  More respected then than Churchill, Chamberlain became something of an icon to young Conservatives, as the last survivor of the Victorian high politics.

Though he never again served in a government, he survived in good health until March 1937, dying just ten weeks before his younger half-brother, Neville, became the first and only member of the Chamberlain dynasty to become Prime Minister.

Chamberlain died at the age of 73 in his London home, 24 Egerton Terrace, on 16 March 1937. He is buried in East Finchley Cemetery in London.

His estate was probated at £45,044, a relatively modest sum for such a famous public figure. Much of his father's fortune had been lost in an attempt to grow sisal in the West Indies in the early 1890s, and unlike Neville, he never went into business to make money for himself.

His personal and political papers are housed in the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham.

Personal life 

In 1906, Chamberlain married Ivy Muriel Dundas (-1941), daughter of Colonel Henry Dundas.   They had two sons, Joseph and Lawrence, and a daughter, Diane.   During the 1920s, Chamberlain lived at a house called Twytt's Ghyll in Fir Toll Road, Mayfield, East Sussex. He sold the house in 1929. R.C.G. Foster said, "He kept himself quite aloof from the village and was not popular with his neighbours". He had an interest in rock gardening.  At his death, his estate was valued for probate at £45,044 18/1. 

Styles of address

*1863-1892: Mr Joseph Austen Chamberlain
*1892-1902: Mr Joseph Austen Chamberlain MP
*1902-1925: The Rt Hon Joseph Austen Chamberlain MP
*1925-1937: The Rt Hon Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain KG MP
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