WINSTON Churchill was already of pensionable age when he became the leader of his country at the darkest time in its history.

Born in 1874, he was the descendant of the first Duke of Marlborough, of Glanvilles Wootton in Dorset.

As a young man, he was a soldier and a war journalist, reporting from the Battle of Omdurman and the Boer War.

He became a Conservative MP in 1900, but his first government experience came after he defected to the Liberals.

He served as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty, from which post he resigned in 1915 after the disastrous campaign in the Dardenelles.

Churchill became a soldier at the front for several months of the First World War before rejoining the government in 1916.

He defected back to the Conservatives in the 1920s. He made an unsuccessful Chancellor of the Exchequer and his career in the front-rank of politics seemed to be over in the 1930s.

But while he was in the political wilderness, he was warning of the threat posed by Germany under Adolf Hitler. After his warnings came true and Britain went to war, he returned to government as First Lord of the Admiralty.

When Neville Chamberlain resigned in May 1940, Churchill became the leader of a coalition government. He told the House of Commons shortly afterwards: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

That June, after France had collapsed to leave Britain standing alone against the Axis powers, he told the Commons: “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.”

The arrival of Russia and the USA as Allies in the war in 1941 gave hope that it really could be won decisively. In 1942, when the Germans were defeated in Egypt, Churchill declared: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Yet Churchill’s influence waned towards the end of the war. He was disappointed after talks with the USA and USSR about Europe’s post-war future. Poland, which Britain had gone to war to liberate, fell behind what Churchill would call the Iron Curtain.

He was shocked to lose the general election to the Labour Party in 1945. Back in office as Conservative Prime Minister in 1951, he clung to the premiership, believing he could be a force for peace in the Cold War world. But a stroke in 1951 left him debilitated and he resigned in April 1955, at the age of 80. He would live another decade.