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Churchill IX
The Churchill Mk IX was the designation given to Mk IIIs and Mk IVs that had been upgraded, but that kept their original 6-pounder gun. In July 1944 the decision was made to add appliqué armour to all reworked Churchill tanks. At first they were to get 3/4in side armour, followed by frontal armour, and a modified gearbox, suspension and traverse equipment by December. The plan was also to install the cast/ welded turret designed for the Mk VII.
The basic Mk IX designation was for vehicles that got both the appliqué armour and the new turret introduced on the Mk VII and Mk VIII, presumably with the 75mm gun. A shortage of turrets meant that this plan was dropped in August 1944 and it is possible that none were produced with the new gun.
The Mk IX LT was the designation for tanks that received the thicker armour, but kept their original turrets.
Mk IVs that were upgraded early and received the 75mm gun but kept their original armour became the Mk VI.
Winston Churchill born
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, the British leader who guided Great Britain and the Allies through the crisis of World War II, is born at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England.
Churchill came from a prestigious family with a long history of military service and joined the British Fourth Hussars upon his father’s death in 1895. During the next five years, he enjoyed an illustrious military career, serving in India, the Sudan, and South Africa, and distinguishing himself several times in battle. In 1899, he resigned his commission to concentrate on his literary and political career and in 1900 was elected to Parliament as a Conservative MP from Oldham. In 1904, he joined the Liberals, serving in a number of important posts before being appointed Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, where he worked to bring the British navy to a readiness for the war he foresaw.
In 1915, in the second year of World War I, Churchill was held responsible for the disastrous Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns, and he was excluded from the war coalition government. He resigned and volunteered to command an infantry battalion in France. However, in 1917, he returned to politics as a cabinet member in the Liberal government of Lloyd George. From 1919 to 1921, he was secretary of state for war and in 1924 returned to the Conservative Party, where two years later he played a leading role in the defeat of the General Strike of 1926. Out of office from 1929 to 1939, Churchill issued unheeded warnings of the threat of German and Japanese aggression.
After the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Churchill was called back to his post as First Lord of the Admiralty and eight months later replaced the ineffectual Neville Chamberlain as prime minister of a new coalition government. In the first year of his administration, Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany, but Churchill promised his country and the world that the British people would “never surrender.” He rallied the British people to a resolute resistance and expertly orchestrated Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin into an alliance that eventually crushed the Axis.
In July 1945, 10 weeks after Germany’s defeat, his Conservative government suffered an electoral loss against Clement Attlee’s Labour Party, and Churchill resigned as prime minister. He became leader of the opposition and in 1951 was again elected prime minister. Two years later, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his six-volume historical study of World War II and for his political speeches. In 1955, he retired as prime minister but remained in Parliament until 1964, the year before his death.
Chapter 2. The Subsequent Reverse.
1. But the tyrant who, as we have said, ruled over the districts of the Orient, a thorough hater of the good and an enemy of every virtuous person, as he was, could no longer bear this and indeed he did not permit matters to go on in this way quite six months. Devising all possible means of destroying the peace, he first attempted to restrain us, under a pretext, from meeting in the cemeteries.
2. Then through the agency of some wicked men he sent an embassy to himself against us, inciting the citizens of Antioch to ask from him as a very great favor that he would by no means permit any of the Christians to dwell in their country and others were secretly induced to do the same thing. The author of all this in Antioch was Theotecnus, a violent and wicked man, who was an impostor, and whose character was foreign to his name. He appears to have been the curator of the city.
Ratification
By 1779 all the states had approved the Articles of Confederation except Maryland, but the prospects for acceptance looked bleak because claims to western lands by other states set Maryland in inflexible opposition. Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts claimed by their charters to extend to the “South Sea” or the Mississippi River. The charters of Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Rhode Island confined those states to a few hundred miles of the Atlantic. Land speculators in Maryland and these other “landless states” insisted that the West belonged to the United States, and they urged Congress to honor their claims to western lands. Maryland also supported the demands because nearby Virginia would clearly dominate its neighbor should its claims be accepted. Eventually Thomas Jefferson persuaded his state to yield its claims to the West, provided that the speculators’ demands were rejected and the West was divided into new states, which would be admitted into the Union on the basis of equality with the old. Virginia’s action persuaded Maryland to ratify the Articles, which went into effect on March 1, 1781.
Revealed: secret affair with a socialite that nearly wrecked Churchill’s career
The image of Britain’s greatest wartime leader may need a spot of revisionism. A hitherto unreleased interview with his key aide confirms that Sir Winston Churchill had a secret affair with a socialite that had the potential to wreck his career and damage his country at its hour of greatest need.
The revelations, which paint Churchill’s relationship with his wife, Clementine, often depicted as the formidable power behind his throne, in a more complex light, are made in a new Secret History documentary based on research carried out by Richard Toye, professor of history at Exeter University, and Warren Dockter, an international historian at Aberystwyth University.
The two academics discovered that in autumn 1985 Churchill’s former private secretary, Sir John “Jock” Colville, gave a frank interview to archivists at Churchill College in Cambridge which has never been aired – until now. It confirms what has long been rumoured – that Churchill engaged in an affair with a glamorous aristocrat, Lady Doris Castlerosse – something that would later leave him vulnerable to her manipulation.
In the interview Colville disclosed: “Now this is a somewhat scandalous story and therefore not to be handed out for a great many years … Winston Churchill was … not a highly sexed man at all, and I don’t think that in his 60 or 55 years’ married life he ever slipped up, except on this one occasion when Lady Churchill was not with him and by moonlight in the south of France … he certainly had an affair, a brief affair with … Castlerosse as I think she was called … Doris Castlerosse, yes, that’s right.”
Churchill spent four holidays with Castlerosse, the great-aunt of model Cara Delevingne, in the south of France during the 1930s when he was out of office. During this time Churchill painted at least two portraits of his lover – he only ever painted one of his wife, Clementine – and they continued to meet at her home back in London.
“My mother had many stories to tell about [the affair] when they stayed in my aunt’s house in Berkeley Square,” Doris’s niece, Caroline Delevingne, recalls in the Delevingne family’s first televised interview about the affair. “When Winston was coming to visit her, the staff were all given the day off. That’s one of the stories my mother told me … and after that, the next day … Doris confided in my mother about it, they were, as I said, good friends as well as being sisters-in-law, and so, yes, it was known that they were having an affair.”
But when war threatened and Churchill’s career revived, he ended the relationship. Castlerosse moved to Venice, had a relationship with a female American millionaire, and then moved to the US. As her looks and fortune declined, and war came, she was desperate to return home. Her ex-lover provided her with an opportunity. In 1942 Churchill was visiting President Roosevelt for a vital meeting. The UK needed America’s support to defeat Hitler.
Castlerosse, armed with one of Churchill’s paintings of her, which would help corroborate her claims of an affair, something that had the potential to scandalise society and undermine the prime minister’s standing, successfully pressed her former lover into securing her a rare seat on a flight home. Castlerosse died at the Dorchester hotel from an overdose of sleeping tablets shortly after her return to London. When her death became known, Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill’s fixer, was believed to have retrieved the compromising painting from her brother Dudley. The affair remained buried until the late 1950s, when some of Castlerosse’s love letters to Churchill were shared with Clementine. “She was worried about it for months afterwards,” Toye said. “Clementine would say to Colville, ‘I always thought Winston had been faithful’, and Colville tried to reassure her by saying many husbands on a moonlit night in the south of France have strayed it’s not such a big deal.”
Toye said confirmation of the affair was historically important. “I wouldn’t claim it radically changes our view of Churchill, but it does change our view of the Churchills’ marriage. In spite of their ups and downs, the view has been that he never wavered and this clearly changes the picture … Future Churchill biographers will have to engage with it.”
Churchill’s Secret Affair airs on Sunday, 4 March, at 8pm on Channel 4
Meet the Woman Behind Winston Churchill
It was supposed to be a mundane morning. It was 1909 and Winston Churchill, a British member of parliament, had just arrived in Bristol with his new wife, Clementine. Their task was to greet local party members during a routine political stop.
But suddenly, the low-key event turned deadly. A militant suffragist came out of nowhere and began to attack Winston. He had previously taken a public stance against votes for women, much to his wife’s chagrin. Clementine watched in horror as her husband grappled with the woman. The attacker shoved him toward a moving train𠅋ut Clementine pushed through a pile of luggage and literally grabbed him by the coattails, saving his life.
It wasn’t the only time Clementine Churchill would whisk her husband out of danger. During the course of their 57-year-long marriage, Clementine helped her husband get out of political and personal trouble repeatedly. Though she kept a low profile, she was the driving force behind the seemingly bulletproof British prime minister𠅊nd Winston himself credited her as the primary driver behind his astonishingly successful life.
Clementine Churchill outside the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, London. (Credit: W. G. Phillips/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
Clementine’s life is a success story in and of itself. Born to aristocratic parents, her early life was lonely and marked by rumor and scandal. Clementine’s parents, Lady Blanche Hozier and Henry Montague Hozier, despised one another and were so famously unfaithful that associates assumed none of their children were fathered by Henry. He left Blanche when Clementine was six years old, plunging her mother𠅊 notorious gambler—into relative poverty.
This presented not just financial problems, but social ones. Though it was customary for women of Clementine’s class to become debutantes, Blanche, fearing her bad reputation could harm her daughter, hesitated to launch her into society. Instead, a wealthy aunt did the honors.
In a 2002 interview, Clementine’s daughter Mary blamed that period for her mother’s lifelong anxiety and lack of confidence. The tragic death of Clementine’s 16-year-old sister, Kitty, from typhoid fever, also affected her deeply. Clementine was sent to stay with an aunt during Kitty’s illness, and did not realize she was saying goodbye forever. The incident𠅊nd the effects of an unhappy, neglected childhood—stayed with her for the rest of her life.
In 1904, when Clementine was 19, she attended a dance at which 29-year-old Winston Churchill was present. Already a member of parliament, Winston was best known for his noticeable ambition and his dramatic escape from captivity during the Second Boer War. Clementine was not impressed, especially when he did not ask her to dance. “Winston just stared,” she recalled later. “He never uttered one word and was very gauche.”
The engagement picture of Winston Churchill and Clementine Hozier. (Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
Four years later, Clementine ran into Winston at a dinner party. This time, she liked him more𠅊nd he liked her. After a few months of courtship, they married in 1908.
Like Clementine, Winston had survived a lonely childhood. His parents were cold and distant, leaving him at school for long periods of time and neglecting him his closest childhood relationship was with his nanny. A spendthrift, Winston was perpetually in debt, but his ambition went further than money. He wanted a career in politics, and he clawed his way into Parliament with a series of dramatic wartime exploits that brought him more and more fame and controversy.
Clementine was ambitious, too𠅋ut, cleaving to the social customs of the early 20th century, she poured those instincts into her husband instead of herself. “She once said early in life she would have loved to have been a statesman in her own right if only she had been born with trousers rather than petticoats,” Clementine’s biographer, Sonia Purnell, told NPR.
Clementine never became a statesman, but she helped create one. She steadfastly supported her husband, even when he risked nearly everything to become prime minister. When he insisted on volunteering to fight in the trenches of World War I to redeem himself after championing a disastrous campaign in Gallipoli, she supported him𠅎ven warning him not to come back too quickly. She advised him on complex political issues and befriended his allies. And she boosted his confidence during his many bouts with depression, which he called his 𠇋lack dog.”
Mrs. Winston Churchill, with her daughters Mary and Sarah, after her investiture by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, where she became a Dame of the British Empire, 1946. (Credit: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Though Clementine had five children with Winston, she spent little time with them. Instead, she threw her efforts behind her husband. However, the tragic fate of her daughter Marigold, who died when she was two years old, deeply traumatized both Winston and Clementine. When her next daughter, Mary, was born a few years later, the couple resolved to raise her differently. She was the only Churchill child who grew up without grappling with alcohol, divorce or suicide: The couple’s oldest daughter, Diana, killed herself with a drug overdose in the 1960s. Randolph struggled with suicide, and Sarah married three times, once without her parent’s knowledge or approval.
The couple spent much of their time apart due to Winston’s demanding schedule, but maintained a lively correspondence. “I tell Clemmie everything,” Winstononfided in Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Clementine was Winston’s rock, but their marriage was anything but peaceful. She loathed his frequent absences and locked horns with him over her more liberal political views. Their arguments became the stuff of family legend, as when Clementine hurled a plate of spinach at him during a spat over money. And sometimes Clementine could not take the stress. She suffered from at least one breakdown and took frequent solo vacations. During one in 1935, she apparently had an affair with an artist named Terence Philip.
Everything Churchill
One thousand kilometres north of Winnipeg is a place that feels like another world. At first glance, Churchill is a northern town like any other. But take another look and you’ll see Churchill is a one-of-a-kind Manitoba destination. Lying along the migration path of polar bears and beluga whales, Churchill draws wildlife enthusiasts from all over the globe.
Fall is prime time to see polar bears in Churchill.
Adventure on the edge of the Arctic
Your first clue that Churchill is a place for adventurers is the fact that there are no roads that lead here. Coming by plane or train are the only ways to get to this remote town on the shores of Hudson Bay. Churchill hotels and eco-lodges welcome those seeking once-in-a-lifetime outdoor experiences watching polar bears, beluga whales and also the northern lights, which are visible here up to 300 nights of the year.
Nature, Northern Lights & Learning
Experience travel in a new northern light with a learning vacation at an active research facility and discover nature, culture and history.
Polar Bear Helicopter Sightseeing Tours
Hudson Bay Helicopters specializes in 60-90 minute tours of olar bears and more in Churchill Manitoba.
Your Northern Adventure Starts Here
Your adventure begins at Parks Canada's Visitor Centre in Churchill—your window to the remote historic sites just beyond your reach.
Experience the beluga whales this summer in Churchill! Make fast friends with these sociable whales during your multiple excursions on the Churchill River.
Polar Bears, Belugas & More
Come into the Hudson Bay on one of our unique vessels to see super pods of friendly beluga whales! Choose your life-changing adventure now.
The northern lights can be experienced in Churchill 300 days a year.
Churchill’s culture and history are equally fascinating. See where retreating glaciers etched marks on rocks that are billions of years old. Tour a 300 year-old stone fort established by the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Go on a thrilling dogsled ride and learn about the importance of this mode of transportation to the people in the North. Admire intricate carvings and other Inuit art and artifacts at the Itsanitaq Museum. From hiking through vibrant fireweed to a shipwreck or seeing the town’s character brought to life in colourful murals, don’t be surprised if Churchill surprises you.
Fighting Jack Churchill
In wartime, the line between outstanding bravery and outright folly is finely drawn. So too is the line between taking the initiative in battle and taking unacceptable risks. On the whole, survival is the sole judge of which of the two it is.
Jack Churchill (1906 – 1996), sometimes known as “Fighting Jack” or “Mad Jack” Churchill is an outstanding example of how some individual officers fought World War Two in their own way and on their own terms, and succeeded. He led from the front, and his unique skills and boldness contributed to his own survival and that of his troops.
His frequently quoted motto gives a clue to his attitude: “Any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed”. Jack Churchill also added bagpipes and a bow and arrows to his prerequisites for battle.
Churchill was born in 1906 into a background that was very typical for the period. His father held senior administrative and engineering posts in the colonial service, being based at various times in Ceylon and Hong Kong. The family was back in England at Dormansland, Surrey, at the time of Jack’s birth. Although his father’s family came from Oxfordshire, his name, like that of his younger brothers, reflects ancestry on the Anglo-Scottish border and in the Highlands: he was christened John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill.
Jack and his brothers, Thomas Bell Lindsay Churchill (1907–1990) and Robert Alec Farquhar Churchill (1911 – 1942) would all achieve fame through their exploits in WWII. Like Jack, Tom joined the Manchester Regiment and then the Commandos, becoming a Major-General youngest brother Robert (‘Buster’) became a Royal Navy Lieutenant, serving in the Fleet Air Arm. He died in action in 1942.
Jack Churchill was educated at the Dragon School Oxford, King William’s College on the Isle of Man and Sandhurst. In 1926 he was commissioned into the 2nd Battalion, the Manchester Regiment. The start of an adventurous career began when he joined his battalion in Rangoon and was sent to do a signals course in Poona.
On completion, he drove a Zenith motorcycle 1,500 miles across the Indian subcontinent, crashing into a water buffalo at one point. In Burma, he used to cross railway bridges that had open sleepers by stepping onto the sleepers and pushing his bike along the rails.
While with his regiment he became an excellent bagpipe player under the tutorship of the Pipe Major of the Cameron Highlanders. He was also awarded the first of his service medals: the Indian General Service Medal with Burma Clasp.
Back in England, army life seemed dull and Churchill left in order to travel and build a career as an actor and entertainer. He is said to have had a role in the 1924 film “The Thief of Baghdad”, in which he showed off his archery skills. He also represented Great Britain in Norway at the World Archery Championships in 1939.
When war broke out, having remained on the reserve officer list, he was recalled to the colours. His regiment was part of the Expeditionary Force to France. Churchill used his bow and arrows while on patrol, knowing that the bow was an extraordinarily effective weapon in skilled hands as it was silent and accurate up to 200 yards.
When his company was trapped after the Battle of l’Epinette (near Bethune), Churchill killed the first approaching Nazi soldier with his longbow, then used two machine guns to fight back until they ran out of ammunition. He managed to get the remainder of his company to safety by leading them through the enemy lines at night, despite being shot in the shoulder.
Commandos in action during the Vågsøy raid
Churchill was a natural for the commandos, and in 1941 he was second in command of the unit that raided the Nazi garrisons, stores and fish oil factories at Vågsøy in Norway. Sir John Hammerton, in his 9-volume “History of the Second World War” noted that Churchill encouraged his men by playing his bagpipes. In fact, Churchill leaped into action playing the “March of the Cameron Men” on the pipes and then hurled the first grenade before charging onwards. He was wearing a basket-hilted sword of the claybeg type.
Jack Churchill leads his men, sword in hand (right of picture)
Some remarkable film footage shows both the raid and Jack Churchill playing his bagpipes on deck afterwards, while the rest of the unit dances a Highland fling. Churchill was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery in battle during this raid and the Battle of l’Epinette.
The remainder of Churchill’s war experience was just as astonishing. He led troops through Sicily and during the Salerno landings, encouraging them as always with the sound of the bagpipes. Using just his claybeg, he was responsible for the capture of 42 German troops and a mortar crew. Although recommended for the Victoria Cross, he was actually awarded the DSO. Twice.
Later he fought in Yugoslavia, where he was captured and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He is said to have been playing “Will ye no come back again” on the bagpipes when a grenade exploded nearby, knocking him out.
Jack Churchill playing the bagpipes
By this time, Jack Churchill was a colonel and his captors assumed at first that he was related to Winston Churchill. He received no preferential treatment though, but was chained up in a cell with various Austrian dignitaries. He tunnelled his way out only to be recaptured and sent to a POW camp in Austria. Unsurprisingly, he managed to escape again and walked across the Brenner Pass to Italy.
Churchill nearly served in the Pacific too, having been sent to Burma where fighting was intensifying. However, by the time he arrived there the war was over, prompting his oft-quoted comment: “If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years!”
After the war, Churchill served with the Seaforth Highlanders and then the Highland Light Infantry, saving the lives of 500 patients and staff at the Hadasseh Hospital near Jerusalem. On his return to England, he became involved in the Army Apprentices scheme, refurbished steamboats, and continued motorcycling.
When on his way home on the train from one of his jobs, he used to take passengers by surprise by suddenly flinging his briefcase out of the window. What they didn’t know was that he was aiming it accurately into his garden as the train passed. At home, according to his son, he was a peace-loving and unassuming man. “People are less likely to shoot you if you smile at them,” was another of his favourite sayings.
He was made the hero of a comic strip and the subject of several books, including one by his brother Tom and a compilation volume by the Norwegian Royal Explorers Club. Espen Lazarus, co-founder of the club, said: “I would rate Jack Churchill as one of, if not the most, inspirational and impressive people we have researched in relation to the book”.
John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar died at the age of 89 in Surrey. It’s doubtful we shall see his like again!
For film footage of Jack Churchill on the Vågsøy commando raid, see…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srONN0g-6j4
Miriam Bibby BA MPhil FSA Scot is a historian, Egyptologist and archaeologist with a special interest in equine history. Miriam has worked as a museum curator, university academic, editor and heritage management consultant. She is currently completing her PhD at the University of Glasgow.
Winston Churchill’s History-Making Funeral
On a pale gray winter morning, Big Ben’s distinctive chimes echoed through the London silence. After tolling the time at 9:45 a.m., the British icon would remain uncharacteristically quiet for the rest of the day out of respect for another of the country’s towering figures—Sir Winston Churchill. Below the mighty bell, the flag-draped coffin of the wartime prime minister rested on a gun carriage as the biting wind carried the roars of cannons thundering 90 shots, one for each year of Churchill’s life, in nearby Hyde Park.
Upon command, a single drum began to beat. Then came the rhythmic pounding of boots upon pavement as more than 100 members of the Royal Navy moved in lockstep as they drew the cortege of the man who had led the country as prime minister through World War II and later from 1951 to 1955. Military bands played dirges and somber marches as Churchill’s body was pulled through the streets of London accompanied by servicemen from nearly 20 different military units. Four majors of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars were required just to carry Churchill’s litany of medals, orders and decorations.
Churchill became the first civilian in the 20th century to receive the honor normally reserved for kings and queens and only the second prime minister to be given a state funeral, William Gladstone being the first in 1898. For three days and for three nights, Churchill lay in state in 900-year-old Westminster Hall as more than 300,000 mourners filed past the casket, hewn from English oaks taken from his family estate, in muffled silence.
Churchill’s funeral cortege, January 30, 1965
Before dawn on the morning of the funeral, a million people began to gather along the cortege route. They watched in silence as the gun carriage rolled through the British capital and past the offices where Churchill had served as the First Lord of the Admiralty during two world wars, past the Fleet Street newspaper offices where he had once been an ink-stained scribe, past 10 Downing Street where he had guided the country through its darkest hours against the Nazi threat and past Trafalgar Square where Londoners celebrated when news of victory finally arrived in 1945.
After an hour, the procession finished its journey from Britain’s political heart to its religious soul, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Much like Churchill himself, St. Paul’s had become a symbol of steely British determination during World War II as it managed to withstand the worst of the Nazi bombing during the Blitz.
Such was the country’s admiration for Churchill that Queen Elizabeth II broke with monarchical tradition to attend a funeral for someone outside of the royal family. Even more unusual, the queen gave precedence to one of her subjects and arrived at the cathedral before the former prime minister’s casket.
Gathered inside St. Paul’s to celebrate Churchill’s extraordinary life were dignitaries from an unprecedented 112 countries—including six monarchs, six presidents and 16 prime ministers—which made the state funeral the largest in history at that time. In addition to the 3,000 congregating under St. Paul’s dome, an estimated television audience of 350 million people𠅊 tenth of the world’s population—watched the funeral service, which featured some of Churchill’s favorite hymns. As the mourners sang the �ttle Hymn of the Republic,” a shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds, beamed through the cathedral’s windows and fell on the Union Jack cloaking the casket.
Churchill lying in state in Westminster Hall, part of the Houses of Parliament
Following the service, Churchill’s coffin was carried down the west steps of St. Paul’s and returned to the gun carriage, which continued on to a pier outside the Tower of London where the Royal Artillery fired a 19-gun salute. The funeral procession then took to the water as the casket was carried aboard the launch Havengore for a short sail up the River Thames. In a meticulously orchestrated event that had been choreographed for years, perhaps the day’s best-remembered moment was also an unscripted one. As 16 Royal Air Force fighter jets roared overhead in tight formations, London’s dock workers dipped their cranes lining the south bank of the Thames one by one as if the mammoth machines were bowing their heads to Churchill.
After the Havengore docked upstream, the former prime minister’s casket was taken to Waterloo Station and placed on a specially prepared train with five Pullman coaches filled with family and friends for Churchill’s final journey. As the locomotive chugged along the 60-mile journey to Oxfordshire, mourners with bowed heads and hats over their hearts stood silently on station platforms along with uniformed World War II veterans with arms raised in salute.
Not far from Blenheim Palace where he was born 90 years earlier, Churchill’s life came full circle. In a private ceremony at a quiet churchyard in the village of Bladon, Churchill’s body was lowered into the small family plot and covered with the soil that he had preserved to be British.
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Programs & Events
A new publication traces the origin of the "Special Relationship" and recounts the remarkable story of a big idea, a small college, and a global effort to move an historic church from London to Fulton, Missouri. "It's full of deep research but is never dry and the result is an interesting, absorbing and accessible book - a real tribute to the 'Sinews of Peace' speech." -J. Murphy, The Bookbag (U.K.)
Sinews of Peace: The Power of Prose, a virtual exhibition examining the near-final draft of the "Iron Curtain" speech in the collection of America's National Churchill Museum. Typewritten with final hand-written additions dictated by Churchill to his secretary Jo Sturdee, the draft reveals Churchill's last-minute changes, rhetorical flourishes, and edits to the famous speech. The exhibit was created by America’s National Churchill Museum and students at Westminster College in Fulton, MO. Virtual exhibit made possible by the Anson Cutts Gallery Endowment.
The Board of Trustees of Westminster College has unanimously appointed Donald P. Lofe, Jr., to be the historic college’s 23rd president. The Board cited the major progress the 170-year-old liberal arts college has made under Lofe’s leadership as Interim President, even during an exceptionally challenging year and in the midst of the pandemic.
Welcome to the website of America's National Churchill Museum located on the campus of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Here you will find information and resources describing who Winston Churchill was, what he did during the course of his long life and why his legacy continues to inspire new generations today, more than fifty years after his death.
In addition to this virtual treasury of Churchillian knowledge you will find details of the Museum itself and a description and flavor of our permanent exhibition and how we tell Churchill's story as part of an engaging exploration of his role as a man of three centuries.
