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‘You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life’: The unforgettable life, times and pithy quotations of Winston Churchill, 150 years on from his birth

Amie-Elizabeth White

On the 150th anniversary of the great man’s birth, we pay tribute to Sir Winston Churchill using his own words, as compiled by Amie Elizabeth White and Octavia Pollock.

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‘For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle’

In an address at the inaugural meeting of the Free Trade League, 1904

‘It goes without saying that a gentleman does not have a ham sandwich without mustard’

His finest hour: saluting Whitehall crowds after victory is declared. Credit: Bridgeman

‘My dear, you are ugly and, what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly’

To Bessie Braddock MP, 1946, after she told him, ‘Winston, you are drunk’.

‘We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm’

Donning tropical garb in Egypt, 1898. His newspaper reports on the Nile War earned an admonition from the Prince of Wales. Credit: Christie’s Images / Bridgeman

‘You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life’

‘I am a man of simple tastes, easily satisfied with the best’

‘Sometimes, when Fortune scowls most spitefully, she is preparing her most dazzling gifts’

‘Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential’

US President Franklin D Roosevelt, Russian Marshal Josef Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, November 28 to December 1, 1943 . (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

‘We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out’

‘When I get to Heaven, I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject’

At his easel in Florida, US, in 1946: painting gave his mind welcome relief. Credit: Bettmann via Getty

‘We are still masters of our fate. We still are captain of our souls’

To the House of Commons, 1941, adapting the last lines of Invictus by William Ernest Henry

‘It is all chance or destiny and our wayward footsteps are best planted without too much calculation’

In a letter to his wife, Clementine, from the trenches at Flanders, 1915

Sir Winston Churchill as an officer in the South African Light Horse, 1899. He was among the first British troops into Ladysmith and Pretoria, during the Boer war. British Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

‘To discuss good food and, after good food has been discussed, to discuss a good topic–with myself the chief conversationalist’

On his version of a great dinner party

‘This is the lesson: never give in, never give in… in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense’

At the Harrow annual songfest, 1941

Sir Winston and lady Clementine Churchill with grandchildren 1951. Credit: Universal History Archive / Bridgeman

‘One step more, one effort more and all the prizes you have fought for from dawn to dusk may be gained’

At the Manchester Free Trade Hall, 1910

‘Unteachable from infancy to tomb — there is the first and main characteristic of mankind’

In a letter to Lord Beaverbrook, 1928

Sign of the times: the V for Victory salute came from a Belgian radio broadcaster urging his compatriots to chalk it up everywhere in January 1941, in defiance of the occupying German army; it stands not only for Victory, but also vrijheid, freedom in Flemish. The BBC took up the idea and Churchill popularised it from July that year. Credit: Alamy

‘I hope that the raw material is as good as the method of distribution’

On his face being broadcast on American television, 1952

‘My ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me’

On his most prized victory

The April 29, 1940 cover of Life magazine featuring Winston Churchill just a couple of weeks before he became Prime Minister. Credit: Alamy

‘I’m so bored with it all’

His final words to his son-in-law, Christopher Soames

The State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill.

Life and times of Winston Churchill

November 30, 1874
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill is born, the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill, third son of the Duke of Marlborough, and the American Jennie Jerome.

1888
Enrols at Harrow School and joins the Harrow Rifle Corps. Aged 17, he tells his friend Murland Evans: ‘I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London… In the high position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the Capital and save the Empire’.

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874 – 1965) aged 7, later British statesman and prime minister. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

1893
Falls 29ft from a bridge when attempting to jump onto a tree playing hare and hounds, rupturing a kidney, and is unconscious for three days.

1894
Passes out of Sandhurst, 20th out of a class of 130.

1895
His father dies in January. Is commissioned into the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars in February. In November, travels to Cuba, where an insurrection is in place; on his birthday, ‘for the first time I saw shots fired in anger and heard bullets strike flesh or whistle through the air’. He receives the Spanish Cross of the Order of Military Merit and develops his taste for Cuban cigars.

1898
Publishes his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War, about his experiences serving on the North-West Frontier in India. Seeking adventure, he is posted to South Africa as a war correspondent, joining a cavalry charge at Omdurman with the 21st Lancers and escaping a Boer prisoner-of-war camp.

1900
Is elected Conservative MP for Oldham.

1904
Crosses the floor to the Liberal Party.

1905
Is named Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies.

1908
Marries Clementine Hozier after they discover a shared passion for politics at a dinner party he had not wished to attend and to which she was invited only after someone else fell ill. Pol Roger is served at the wedding.

Sir Winston Churchill standing on a tram as he speaks to the public during the North West Manchester election campaign in 1908. He campaigned unsuccessfully in Manchester in April 1908, but was elected a few weeks later in Dundee. From ‘Winston Churchill: His Life in Pictures’ by Ben Tucker (Sagall, 1945). Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images

1911
Is appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Sets out to visit every capital ship and every Royal Navy base in the UK, spending eight of his first 12 months in office aboard the Admiralty yacht Enchantress.

1915
Resigns after the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and takes up painting to combat depression.

1916
Returns to government at David Lloyd George’s invitation and serves as Minister of Munitions.

1922
Buys Chartwell in Kent; later remarks that: ‘A day away from Chartwell is a day wasted’.

Battening down the hatches: helping tile the roof of his beloved Chartwell, Kent, in 1939. Original publication: Picture Post – 90 – Churchill – pub. 1939 (Photo by Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

1925
Crosses the floor back to the Conservatives, noting subsequently that ‘anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat’.

1932 Visits Germany and begins campaign to rebuild Britain’s air defences, recognising the Nazi threat, but is dubbed a warmonger.

1939
Is again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, on the day Britain declares war on Germany.

May 10, 1940
Becomes Prime Minister following resignation of Neville Chamberlain, and also takes on role of Minister of Defence. Convinces the cabinet to fight on, saying: ‘Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished’.

 

Watching the enemy: in a Royal Artillery observation post north of Florence, Italy, 1944. (Photo by CPT TANNER – NO 2 ARMY FILM AND/IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS/AFP via Getty Images)

1945
Meets Odette Pol-Roger at a celebratory lunch in Paris; he later names one of his racehorses after the Champagne and it wins on Boxing Day 1952 at Kempton Park, earning a note of congratulation from the Queen. Resigns office to make way for Clement Attlee.

1948
Publishes The Gathering Storm, the first of six volumes on the Second World War, finally stabilising his finances (one of his daughters once noted that the family ‘lived from pen to mouth’).

January 24, 1965
Dies. He appears on the Country Life Frontispiece on January 28 and the magazine pays tribute to his life as a countryman, his skill on horseback, his enthusiasm for painting and his love of roses. A state funeral is held on January 30.

Country Life’S frontispiece of Sir Winston Churchill on the occasion of his death.