| Name |
Winston Spencer-Churchill |
| Birth Registration |
Between 1 Oct 1940 and 31 Dec 1940 |
Wycombe Registration District, Buckinghamshire, England  |
- Winston S Churchill/Winston Spencer-Churchill, mother maiden name Digby, was born.
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| Born |
10 Oct 1940 |
Ellesborough, Buckinghamshire, England |
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| Gender |
Male |
| Name |
Winston Spencer Churchill |
| Group |
Descendant of Mayflower Passenger |
- Passenger or Descendant of the Mayflower
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| Group |
Descendant of Revolutionary War Veteran |
- DAR or SAR Eligible Descendant of a Revolutionary War Veteran
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| Group |
Hall Direct Descendant |
- A person who is a direct descendant of any colonial New England Hall Family
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| Group |
Halls of Middletown - DNA Family 006 |
- Descendants of John Hall and Esther Willicke of Middletown, Connecticut
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| Group |
Halls of Wallingford - DNA Family 032 |
- Descendants of John Hall and Jane Woolen of New Haven and Wallingford.
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| Group |
Mayflower - Dr. Samuel Fuller |
- Descendant of Dr. Samuel Fuller of the Mayflower
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| Group |
Mayflower - James Chilton |
- Descendant of James Chilton and Susanna Furner of the Mayflower
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| FindaGrave Memorial ID |
98757048 |
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| Obituary |
2 Mar 2010 |
London, Middlesex, England |
| Telegraph |
- Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill, who died today aged 69, never quite managed in 27 years as a Conservative MP to shrug off the burdens of having had the wartime leader as his grandfather and the ebullient, self-destructive Randolph Churchill for a father.
Faced with the choice of emulating Sir Winston or pursuing a career outside politics, he opted for the former, proved competent if mercurial, but lacked the exceptional flair to establish himself in his own right.
Churchill was at a disadvantage not only through his legacy but because his preoccupation with it led some to consider him bumptious; alone of more than 650 MPs, he insisted on signing Commons motions without using his Christian name.
He caused a furore in 1995 when he negotiated the payment to the Churchill family of £12.5 million in National Lottery funds for his grandfather's personal papers to remain at Churchill College, Cambridge, rather than be sold abroad, himself retaining the copyright for 20 years. It had not been widely appreciated, even among historians, that the papers were eligible for sale as the family had already received £393,000 for them in 1946.
There were suggestions that Churchill needed the cash to offset his losses as a "name" at Lloyds, to finance his divorce from his first wife or even to bail out his mother, Pamela Harriman, who had almost exhausted the £100 million railroad fortune of her final husband. The Churchill trustees insisted first that he would only receive some of the investment income, then said they would consider a request to fund the divorce.
Randolph Churchill had observed of his son: "His name is such a disadvantage", but young Winston saw both sides: "A famous name can be terrible if you are lousy, but if you are any good, it helps." It may have seen him bullied at school, but later it did secure him the best tables at restaurants. It did not always carry weight, however; when after the Gulf War he introduced himself to a squaddie in the desert, he received the reply: "Yes, and I'm Rommel."
It would have been difficult for Churchill to escape his legacy even had he tried. He was a favourite grandchild; Sir Winston once asked his tobacconist to send some cigars "of good quality, but not quite as good as mine" for his birthday, and he was a valued bricklayer's mate at Chartwell.
From his appearance as page at the wedding of the Duke of Marlborough's daughter Lady Sarah Spencer Churchill in May 1943, he was part of the Churchill legend. He was one of three generations of Churchills to attend the Coronation, as page to Viscount Portal; in his teens he dined with Aristotle Onassis and Greta Garbo; and he accompanied his father to the ceremony in 1963 at which President Kennedy signed the legislation making Sir Winston an American citizen. The pictures at his first wedding in July 1964 were the last taken of Sir Winston.
Churchill was frequently at the bedside during his grandfather's final coma; his elder son Randolph was born two days before the great man died. At the funeral he and his father walked beside the gun carriage, and afterward Lady Churchill came to stay. He kept the flame alive as a trustee of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, an honorary fellow of Churchill and an honorary LLD of Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, where Sir Winston's "Iron Curtain" speech was delivered.
He was quick to protect his grandfather's reputation. When in 1968 Rolf Hochhuth's play Soldiers accused Sir Winston of complicity in the wartime death of the Polish leader General Sikorski, Churchill led the protests against this "ungrounded libel"; he was trenchant four years later in attacking a BBC programme suggesting that Sir Winston connived in the sinking of the Lusitania, and in 1981 when the BBC (again) claimed he had planned biological warfare against Germany.
But his most celebrated defence of his grandfather came in the Commons on November 30 1978, when James Callaghan, recalling Sir Winston's role in the 1911 South Wales pit dispute, urged him not to pursue "the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy". Churchill demanded that the prime minister withdraw, as Sir Winston had not sent in troops as Labour tradition maintained; Speaker George Thomas declared that as an old boy of Tonypandy grammar school he had never imagined he would have the last word on the issue.
Churchill at the end of his parliamentary career produced His Father's Son, a supportive, but fair, biography of Randolph Churchill. But he also had his own reputation to protect. He sued successfully for libel several times, notably when the The Observer claimed during the Spycatcher affair that he was one of two Conservative MPs hired by MI5 to undermine Harold Wilson. However when lurid details of his affair with Soraya Khashoggi, British ex-wife of the Saudi arms dealer, appeared in the tabloids he had the sense not to sue.
Politically Churchill was a Right wing maverick, urging Mrs Thatcher to take a tougher line with the Russians and the unions and bring back hanging. But he was never predictable: in 1988 he rebelled against the ending of free sight and dental checks on the NHS and four years later he campaigned against Michael Heseltine's 31 pit closures.
Winston Spencer Churchill was born at Chequers on October 10 1940, days before the victorious conclusion to the Battle of Britain which his grandfather hailed as the nation's "finest hour". He was the only child of Randolph Churchill's wartime marriage to the young Pamela Digby, who would enjoy a near-scandalous romantic career and eventually, after outliving the much older Averell Harriman, become President Clinton's ambassador in Paris.
When his parents divorced in 1945, Churchill remained with his mother in Grosvenor Square, from where he had been taken to see his Aunt Mary (Soames) commanding an anti-aircraft battery in the park. At nine he was sent "because of his asthma" to Le Rosey in Switzerland, where he developed a lifelong expertise at winter sports — he went down the Cresta Run at 11 — before following his Digby forebears to Ludgrove and Eton – not Harrow, like Sir Winston. In 1954 he conveyed to his grandfather at Downing Street an 80th birthday gift of two watercolours of the 1879 Zululand campaign – a gift from Eton to "the greatest of all Harrovians".
After a brief, unpaid job as a copy reader on the Wall Street Journal while staying with his mother in New York, Churchill went up to Oxford. At Christ Church he avoided politics, concentrating on his skiing as secretary of the university team and coming third in the British championships. He became a keen amateur pilot. When he sought to fly around Africa with a friend, his grandfather objected; when young Winston pointed out that by that age he had charged with the 21st Lancers at Omdurman the old man conceded: "I suppose you have a point."
Graduating with a fourth in History, he followed his grandfather's young footsteps as a war correspondent. Over 12 years he saw action and observed conditions in the Yemen, Borneo, Vietnam, the Middle East — writing a successful book on the Six-Day War with his father — Czechoslovakia, Biafra — his reports of "indiscriminate bombing" sparking a parliamentary row — China and finally, for The Daily Telegraph, Portugal after the collapse of the Salazar regime.
He had narrow scrapes, mostly when flying his own plane; the one time he was attacked was by the Chicago police when reporting the 1968 Democratic Convention. He also — like his grandfather and father before him (though less lucratively) — began a series of North American lecture tours which continued for three decades.
In 1961 Sir Winston introduced him to the Commons, but when the former Prime Minister announced his retirement from the House two years later, Churchill eschewed his seat at Woodford. In the 1964 election (the only one in the 20th century, 1997 apart, not fought by a Churchill) he was personal assistant to Edward Heath, and in September 1967 he was selected to challenge an 8,300 Labour majority at Manchester Gorton.
Churchill fought a strong by-election campaign, falling short by just 577 votes . He had expected to do well; visiting the Beyer-Peacock locomotive works, he noted that every engineer had a copy of his election address taped above his machine. An elderly Guardian reporter cautioned: "Aye, lad, but never forget: Monty had a picture of Rommel in his bloody caravan."
When Randolph Churchill died in 1968, Churchill wanted to take on the biography of Sir Winston that his father had begun. But Lord Hartwell, proprietor of the Telegraph, with whom the decision lay, engaged the academic Martin Gilbert, who went on to produce a classic.
In June 1970, less than six years after his grandfather had left the Commons, Churchill was elected for Stretford, Lancashire, overturning a Labour majority of 3,365. Despite a tight race in October 1974 he represented Stretford, and its successor Davyhulme, until the constituency was abolished in 1997, leaving him without a seat.
In the House he successfully promoted a Bill requiring drivers to take out insurance for their passengers, and became a key member of the Parliamentary ski team and chairman of the Commons Flying Club (as a volunteer St John Ambulance pilot he flew several kidneys overseas for emergency operations).
Julian Amery, Minister of Housing and Construction, appointed him his Parliamentary private secretary; in February 1972 Churchill became embroiled in a furore after "planting" tame parliamentary questions supplied to order by Amery's civil servants.
Churchill moved with Amery to the Foreign Office later that year. But he wanted to take a hawkish line on world issues — particularly the Middle East and human rights in the Communist bloc — and after publicly questioning the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, he resigned in November 1973. He strongly defended the Army in Ulster, demanded the return of the death penalty for terrorism and, in 1975, forced the sacking of two announcers on the BBC Portuguese service for broadcasting pro-communist propaganda.
This activity impressed Margaret Thatcher, and in November 1976 she appointed him a front-bench defence spokesman. The role did not come naturally to him; his manner was staccato rather than persuasive, and he had a tendency to say what other Tories only thought, as when he accused the Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen of "treacherous" talk over Rhodesia, and urged China to form a common front with Britain against the Soviets.
In November 1978 Mrs Thatcher sacked him "with great personal sadness" for voting against sanctions on Rhodesia; though he did not know it, his chance of a ministerial career had gone. Churchill hoped his stand would earn him a place on the party's backbench defence committee; he was heavily defeated, but was elected to the 1922 Committee executive by the new intake after the Conservatives returned to power in 1979, remaining on it for seven years.
Late that year, Churchill's two-year affair with Mrs Khashoggi hit the headlines after three police officers were tried at the Old Bailey on blackmail charges and Churchill figured as "Mr X". The tabloids had a field day, the Daily Star dwelling on a 100mph drive along an American freeway with Mrs Khashoggi — referred to by the Telegraph in one of its more unfortunate misprints as Mrs Khashaggi — telling him: "The faster you go, the more I'll take off." Churchill, who was with his wife on a humanitarian mission to Kampuchea when the story broke, returned to accuse the Star of a "farrago of lies".
Politically he attempted to compensate by campaigning for tougher trade union legislation ; by asserting (23 years before Tony Blair went to war over the issue) that Iraq could produce an atom bomb; and by launching an air taxi business with his wife.
He jeopardised his relationship with Mrs Thatcher by attacking first her policy over Rhodesia and then her sacking of the Navy Minister Keith Speed for resisting the cuts which would later be blamed for encouraging the Argentine invasion of the Falklands; he even accused her of having done less for defence than Harold Wilson.
But on the eve of the conflict he was appointed Conservative coordinator on defence and disarmament, to rally the party behind government policies. In the short term he was an effective cheerleader for the war; over three years his vigorous attacks on CND helped turn back the unilateralist tide in public opinion; he also organised Radio Free Kabul, broadcasting dissident propaganda to Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
In his later years in Parliament, Churchill pressed hard for Britain to intervene in Bosnia; campaigned for a better deal for British pensioners overseas; and demanded an end to the "relentless flow" of Asian immigrants in an inflammatory speech whose statistics he immediately had to retract.
When the Davyhulme constituency disappeared, and as the row broke over the Churchill papers, he made few efforts to find another seat.
Winston Churchill married first, in 1964, Minnie d'Erlanger; they had two sons and two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1997, in which year he married, secondly, Luce Engelen.
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| Died |
2 Mar 2010 |
Westminster, Middlesex, England |
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| Obituary |
3 Mar 2010 |
London, Middlesex, England |
| Independent |
- Winston Churchill: Tory MP who never emerged from his grandfather's shadow
Winston Churchill, the former Conservative MP and grandson of the Second World War Prime Minister, who died yesterday after a two-year battle against cancer, was the Conservative MP for Stretford and then Davyhulme in Greater Manchester for 27 years.
Born at the Prime Minister's residence, Chequers, in October 1940, during the Battle of Britain, Churchill was the son of Randolph Churchill and the well-known socialite Pamela Digby who, as Pamela Harriman, was later the US Ambassador in Paris. His time at Chequers had a profound impact on him. There was the sound of gunfire, the flurry of official activity, and, on the other hand, there was the kindness of his grandfather. With his parents' divorce in 1946 and his subsequent minimal contact with them, his fondest childhood memories were, for the most part, with his grandfather who frequently played with him and, on one occasion, scoured London for a clockwork train set. Upon its arrival he proceeded to go down on his hands and knees to play with it.
This ended when, at the age of eight, suffering from asthma, he was prescribed a sojourn in Switzerland and then enrolled at Le Rosey, the famous private élite school where he learnt to speak fluent French and to ski well. Later, his time at Eton was not so happy. He was mocked for his lingering French accent and suffering frequent beatings.
Churchill was heavily influenced by his father and by his illustrious grandfather, and it was difficult for him to tread in their footsteps. He was haunted by both his father's successes and his failures. Randolph had a good war, being part of the Special Operations Executive mission to Tito's partisans in German-occupied Yugoslavia. He was, however, was less successful in politics. After standing unsuccessfully for Parliament before the war he was elected unopposed, because of the wartime party truce, as Member for Preston. He lost this seat during the Labour landslide of 1945. Undeterred, he stood against Labour's Michael Foot at Plymouth Devonport in the elections of 1950 and 1951, only to face defeat once again.
Winston followed in his father's steps, being educated at Eton and studying at Christ Church College, Oxford, although his educational career was not particularly distinguished. He, too, went on to become a journalist in the 1960s, notably as a war correspondent in Africa and in the Middle East. During the Six Day War in 1967, an account of which he published, he met and was impressed by the Israeli military leader, Moshe Dayan.
Churchill then went into politics. After an unsuccessful by-election in Manchester, Gorton in 1967 he was elected MP for the nearby constituency of Stretford in 1970, holding it until the 1983 election, when boundary changes made his seat marginal and it was lost to Labour. He transferred to the new Davyhulme constituency, which he represented until it was abolished for the 1997 general election.
Although well-known by virtue of his family name and history, he never achieved high office. The high point of his time in the Commons was as assistant shadow spokesman on defence, from 1976-78. Mrs Thatcher sacked him for defying the Tory whips in voting against the renewal of economic sanctions on Ian Smith's Rhodesia. There was some muttering in constituency associations at the time that "you can't sack a Churchill", yet she managed it with ease.
Like the earlier Churchills, he was something of a maverick. When Michael Heseltine was seeking pit closures in 1992, Churchill came out in defiance of the government, before eventually being persuaded to abstain. In May 1993 he created a storm by criticising the "relentless flow" of immigrants to Britain from the Indian subcontinent. He was publicly reprimanded by the then Home Secretary and future Conservative leader, Michael Howard.
He was also the subject of controversy in 1995 when he and his family sold a large archive of Second World War papers relating to his grandfather to Churchill College, Cambridge for £13.5m. The transaction was paid for out of National Lottery funds and critics said the sum was excessive for documents which many believed should already belong to the nation. He maintained that the papers were his family's property. The collection consisted of official and personal documents, including early drafts of some of the former PM's most celebrated wartime speeches, drafts of letters to Stalin and Roosevelt, among others, as well as cabinet papers. Official documents released in 2004 suggested the government could have bought the papers for a fraction of their ultimate price.
After leaving Parliament, Churchill was a much sought-after speaker on the lecture circuit and wrote many articles in support of the Iraq War and the fight against Islamic terrorism. He also edited a compilation of his grandfather's famous speeches entitled Never Give In.
In 2007, he acted as a spokesman, and later became president, for the pressure group UK National Defence Association, which campaigned for more support for the armed forces.
Churchill's personal life was no less tranquil. He first married in July 1964 to Mary "Minnie" Caroline d'Erlanger, daughter of the banker Sir Gerard John Regis d'Erlanger. They had four children, two boys (Randolph and John) and two girls (Jennie and Marina). However, their marriage was dissolved in 1997 due to Churchill's extra-marital relationships, notably with Soraya Khashoggi, the former wife of the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Later in 1997, he married Luce Engelen, a Belgian-born jewellery maker.
Martin Childs
Winston Spencer Churchill, politician: born Chequers, England 10 October 1940; Conservative MP for Stretford 1970-83, Davyhulme 1983-97; married 1964 Mary (Minnie) d'Erlanger (marriage dissolved 1997; two sons, two daughters), 1997 Luce Engelen; died London 2 March 2010.
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| Buried |
Aft 2 Mar 2010 |
Saint Martin's Churchyard, Bladon, Oxfordshire, England |
| Person ID |
I14320 |
New England Hall Families Master Tree |
| Last Modified |
21 Nov 2020 |
1940 - 2010 (69 years)
