Churchill’s Mobster Photo
Few led a life as varied, eventful, and as replete with accomplishments and failures, as did Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965). He is best known for his WWII leadership, during a stretch when Britain stood alone and defiant against the Nazi juggernaut. However, even before that supreme moment, Churchill had led a full life that would have exhausted most.
A poor student, his aristocratic father sent him to the army, a dumping ground back then for dim aristocratic kids. After three tries, he passed the entrance exams into Sandhurst, Britain’s military academy, and was commissioned in 1895. He took a side gig as a war reporter, and his news stories from various colonial campaigns earned him fame as a war correspondent.
Churchill entered politics and was elected to Parliament in 1900 as a Conservative MP, but switched to the Liberals, rising in their ranks to become the government’s youngest cabinet minister in 1908. During WWI he was criticized for a series of failures, culminating in the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign of 1915 that had been his brain child, and whose collapse forced him to resign in disgrace.
He switched back to the Conservatives in 1924, joining them as Chancellor of the Exchequer, quipping: “anyone can rat. It takes genius, however, to re-rat“. His stint as Chancellor proved disastrous, marked by a collapse in British exports, massive layoffs, labor turmoil, a general strike that paralyzed Britain, culminating in a Conservative defeat in 1929.
Churchill entered the 1930s with a poor political reputation, and he spent the decade in a political isolation that he described as his “wilderness years”. He devoted his time to writing, and to issuing warnings about the gathering Nazi menace that were ignored. He was vindicated when war broke out in 1939. Appointed Prime Minister in 1940, he cemented his place in history as Britain’s wartime leader.
One of his most famous wartime photos, in which he wielded a Thompson submachine gun while wearing a pinstriped suit, fedora, and chomping on a cigar, was taken while he visited troops to raise morale. Nazi propaganda tried to make hay of it, claiming he was more of a mobster than a statesman, but their effort backfired, and the photo ended up becoming a symbol of Churchill’s – and Britain’s – tenacity and defiance.