Primary School Assembly on Winston Churchill
This year the whole country will remember Winston Churchill. There will be lots of events
and lots of TV programmes celebrating this great politician, soldier, journalist and writer.
The reason this year has been chosen is because Churchill died 50 years ago on Jan 24th
1965.
Most people would agree that he was the greatest leader this country has ever had and
Churchill is most remembered for being Prime Minster during the Second World War.
Boris Johnson, Mayor of London recently wrote that Churchill ‘led [the] country to victory
against all odds and against one of the most disgusting tyrannies the world had seen.’
There are still many people alive who remember him, who remember listening to him on
the radio and reading his speeches in the newspapers. In 2002 there was a vote to find the
Greatest Briton. Winston Churchill won that vote.
So what was he like as a child?
Well he was certainly confident. As a child he was lively, inquisitive, far too ready to take
risks, and sometimes a bit bossy. He was also clever, thoughtful, affectionate and loyal. He
loved to be with his cousins of which there were many. On one occasion he was staying at
Canford Manor in Dorset, home of his Aunt and Uncle, Lord and Lady Wimborne. He was
playing a game of chase with his cousins and they managed to trap him on a footbridge, a
very high footbridge. Winston decided he had to escape – capture was unthinkable – so he
simply jumped off the bridge. He woke up three days later surrounded by his family, all of
whom thought he might die.
As far as Winston was concerned school was a very serious mistake on the part of his
parents. He really could not see why he should be in lessons when the outside world was
there to be explored. Winston was not always the best behaved pupil and from time to time
got into trouble. When he was older he did understand just how very important it was to
get a good education and he knew that he hadn’t been the perfect pupil. He once said
‘Personally I am always willing to learn although I do not always like being taught.’
Winston had far more success as a soldier than he ever did at school. He fought in several
wars and was shot at many times. He was very brave. In 1899 he went to South Africa to
report on the war for a newspaper called the Morning Post. In November he was travelling
by train which was attacked and Winston was captured. Nothing had changed since he was
a child and he simply had to escape, which he did in December. Later during this war, the
Boer War, he joined the South Africa Light Horse along with his cousin the 9th Duke of
Marlborough. Years later the Duke remembered that Churchill had with him an excellent
supply of food and wine from Fortnum and Mason, a famous shop in London. When
Churchill went to fight in the First World War his cousin, the 9th Duke, regularly sent him
hampers of goodies from Fortnum and Mason in London.
As an adult Churchill was still confident and ready to take risks. The fact that he was brave
meant he could and did take some very difficult decisions during the war, good decisions.
The fact that Churchill was a soldier meant that he could think about problems from a
soldier’s point of view. This was very important. He spent a lot of time talking to the men in
charge of the armed forces and visiting the men fighting all over the world. He was very
hard working and made sure he had a very detailed knowledge of what was happening and
he certainly wasn’t short of ideas of what to do to try and win the war. One of the Generals
once said that Winston’s ideas could be brilliant or bonkers. This did not stop Churchill and
he set up a whole department whose job it was simply to think of new inventions, new plans
or new weapons that could help win the war.
All his life Churchill was fascinated by new technology and by aeroplanes in particular. He
took lessons to become a pilot. His wife, Clementine, was very worried about this because
flying was dangerous at that time. Like Clementine the 9th Duke, Winston’s cousin, wanted
Churchill to stop flying and wrote to him in 1913 saying ‘I do not suppose that I shall get the
chance of writing you many more letters if you continue your journeys in the air.’ Winston
did not just see flying as an exciting way to travel but he also realised that in a war
aeroplanes would be really important and he was right. In the First World War aeroplanes
were first used to see what the enemy was getting up to and then later in the war to fight.
Two of the cousins who chased Churchill on to the bridge when they were children, became
pilots during the First World War. In the Second World War it was the RAF that fought the
Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, rescuing the country from invasion. Of this
Churchill rightly said ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to
so few.’ The ‘many’ were the people in the country and the ‘few’ were the men of the RAF.
As Prime Minster probably one of the most important things he did during the war was talk
about it. His speeches were worth listening to and more importantly his speeches inspired
others to greatness. One of his most famous speeches was made shortly after he became
Prime Minister.
4th June 1940 WSC ‘Wars are not won by evacuations.’
‘We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we
shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our
Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing
grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall
never surrender.’
Churchill was born when Queen Victoria was on the throne and in total he served six
monarchs. Kings, Queens, Princes, Presidents and Prime Ministers from all over the world
came to his funeral, 30th Jan 1965, at St Pauls’ Cathedral in London.
Churchill was and still is considered to be a great man. He was a great writer, a great soldier
and a great leader. He was also a great family man and a great friend. He loved this country
and it is right that the country remembers him.
With grateful thanks to:The Churchill family, The Guest family, Boris Johnson, Gordon Wise of Curtis Brown,
Allen Packwood of the Churchill Archives and Churchill Centre, Rupert Lancaster of Hodder
and Stoughton
All quotations used are copyright to the people or trusts or archives noted throughout the
writing.