Winston Churchill Aged 4
1. Winston celebrated his 21st birthday being shot at by anti-Spanish guerrillas in Cuba.
2. His father Randolph was a superstar of Victorian politics who believed Winston would amount to nothing and become ‘a social wastrel’. He promptly died before he could be proved wrong.
3. Winston served under his nemesis Kitchener in the Sudan. While there he was part of one of the last ever cavalry charges in British military history.
4. In 1899 Winston was captured by the Boers and incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp. He escaped and made his way across hundreds of miles of Savanna to rejoin the British lines.
5. Winston’s mother Jennie Jerome was a famous American socialite and reported invented of the Manhattan cocktail.
6. In 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He earned more in his life from writing than anything else.
7. Winston was a sickly child and convinced he would die young (and therefore needed to make his name quickly). In fact he lived to ninety!
8. Winston had a lisp and originally was a terrible public speaker.
9. In 1908 Winston introduced the Trade Boards Bill setting up the first minimum wages in Britain.
10. In 1909, Winston set up Labour Exchanges to help unemployed people find work. He helped draft the first unemployment pension legislation, the National Insurance Act of 1911. Churchill also assisted in passing the ‘People’s Budget’, which included the introduction of new taxes on the wealthy to allow for the creation of new social welfare programmes.
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