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Churchill, Sir Winston 1874 -- 1965 British statesman, prime minister, and author. Born November 30, 1874, in Oxfordshire, England, the eldest son of Randolph Churchill. Winston Churchill is most notable for his parliamentary career, which spanned the reigns of six monarchs, from Queen Victoria to her great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II. His early military service included hand-to-hand combat in the Sudan, and he lived to see the use of atomic weapons as a means to end World War II. He was most familiar as a diplomat in his homburg hat and bowtie flashing the V-for-Victory sign with his index and middle fingers; but he was also a weekend artisan, building garden walls at his home at Chartwell, as well as an accomplished painter. His paintings were regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy, which held a one-man retrospective of his work in 1958. One of the greatest orators of the twentieth century, Churchill used words and phrases條ike blood, toil, tears, and sweat or the iron curtain hat have assumed a permanent place in the English lexicon. An example of his wit is his frequently quoted retort to Lady Astor who had told him, If I were to marry you, Id feed you poison, to which Churchill responded, And if I were your husband, Id take it. Churchills military career began almost immediately upon his graduation with honors from Sandhurst, the West Point of Great Britain. In March 1895, he was appointed to the Fourth Hussars as a sub-lieutenant, assigned to duty at the Aldershop camp in Hampshire. After attachment as an observer to an anti-insurrectionary Spanish force in Cuba, he served in Bangalore, India. His next assignments included the Tirah Expeditionary Force in 1898 and the Nile Expeditionary Force, where he participated in the famous cavalry charge at Omdurman. | 
