Winston Churchill, prime minister of the United Kingdom during the Second World War and again in the 1950s, was a man of prolific achievements as a statesman, writer, and orator. He’s also remembered for the ever-present cigar he clenched between his fingers or in his mouth. In fact, his affection for cigar smoking was so great he once made a poetic comparison about it: “Smoking cigars is like falling in love. First you are attracted to the shape; you stay with it for the flavor; and you must always remember never, never, let the flame go out.”
That’s just one of the many clever witticisms and ringing declarations he made during his very long life that you’ll encounter at America’s National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri. The museum is both a comprehensive compendium of exhibits honoring Churchill’s legacy and a fascinating exploration of the world he lived in. And this would be a very good year to make a visit: The sesquicentennial of Churchill’s birth on November 30, 1874, will take place this fall.
Of course, the most common question visitors ask is, “How did a small town in Missouri become the site for such a prestigious museum, one that the United Kingdom itself would be proud to have within its borders?” And the answer is simple: At the invitation of President Harry Truman, a Missouri native, Churchill visited Fulton’s Westminster College in 1946, where he delivered a speech he called “The Sinews of Peace.” More commonly, the speech is known for its mention for the first time of the term “Iron Curtain,” where Churchill warned of the rising dangers of communism and the expanding Soviet empire. Since Churchill’s visit, a cavalcade of world leaders, including Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Margaret Thatcher, as well as dozens of prime ministers, ambassadors, and other dignitaries, have made their way to Fulton to deliver lectures at the college.
A Life That Left a Mark
In honor of a man who had a profound impact on the world in so many ways, the museum takes a chronological approach to displaying the high points of his life, beginning with his childhood in a household of privilege and social status as the nephew to the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill had a lackluster performance in school before going on to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
After graduation, he saw subsequent action in places like India and Sudan, where he participated in the British Army’s last cavalry charge. During the Boer War in 1899 in South Africa, Churchill was captured and kept as a prisoner of war, despite the fact he was serving as a newspaper correspondent. Two weeks later, he scaled a wall in his prison and escaped, traveling by night for more than 300 miles with a “dead or alive” price on his head, finally reaching Portuguese territory in what is now Mozambique. His vivid accounts of his capture and escape were dramatized in the British Press.
In 1900, at age 25, Churchill was elected to Parliament, beginning a 55-year career of public service, which also included several roles in ministerial positions. His career had its ups and downs — During World War I Churchill pushed for but failed to achieve a seizure of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli Peninsula connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea.
In 1915, in the midst of World War I, he was sent to the front in France and given command of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers, who were skeptical of a failed politician leading them. He won their trust by leading night patrols into the “No Man’s Land” between the two armies’ trenches. One companion once said, “He never fell when a shell went off; he never ducked when a bullet went past with its loud crack. He used to say ‘It’s no damn use ducking; the bullet has gone a long way past you by now.’”
In the 1920s, Churchill returned to roles in parliamentary and ministerial positions, and increasingly started raising the alarm about Germany’s growing military might, to no avail, since the British government preferred to focus on domestic matters.
Churchill also devoted time to lecture tours and writing — he’d already made his mark as a skilled writer as a war correspondent during the Boer War, and he began composing a multi-volume history of the First World War as well as his own memoirs during these years.
He also became a prolific painter during this period, taking up the brush at age 40, and transporting his painting supplies wherever he traveled. He completed more than 500 paintings, including many landscapes. And he was quite good at it. Pablo Picasso himself once commented that with training and a lifetime of commitment, Churchill could have become an artist of first merit.
But the Churchill remembered by the world and revered even today by Britons is the man who became Prime Minister in 1940 and led his nation through World War II, in particular the prolonged defense of the country against Germany’s large-scale aerial attacks. In speeches like his famous “Never Give In” address, Churchill successfully rallied his countrymen to resist an invasion of their homeland by the Nazis.
The rooms devoted to these years are perhaps the most gripping of the entire museum. Chilling films portray goose-stepping Nazi soldiers and thousands of ordinary Germans offering the “Sieg Heil” salute to Hitler. Photos document the devastation left behind in London and other cities by the Luftwaffe’s bombs, of people sleeping in subways, and of Churchill striding amongst ordinary civilians after a bomb attack, wearing a top hat and carrying a cane. Preparations for D-Day, the largest seaborne invasion in history, and its launch on June 6, 1944, are also documented.
An astounding fact of history is that Churchill lost his bid for re-election as prime minister in 1945. He did regain the position in 1951, serving until 1955; his visit to Fulton took place during those interim years. An entire room is devoted to that visit: On display is the leather chair and lectern he used during his speech, as well as a film recording his time in Fulton, including his ride through the town in an open-air car with President Truman. Subsequent exhibits are devoted to the growing Cold War that accelerated among the former allies during Churchill’s final tenure in office.
Churchill remained involved in politics, but the pace of his life slowed. He spent more time at his estate at Chartwell in Kent, which included lakes with geese and ducks, a dairy herd, and pedigreed pigs. An animal lover, he surrounded himself in his home with pets. His secretary once entered his bed chamber and found Churchill working in bed with a bird on his head, a cat across his ankles, and a dog at his side.
When Churchill died at age 90 in 1965, he was given a state funeral, the first given to a commoner in more than a century.
Inside the Museum
The details of Churchill’s career are described at length in the museum’s displays alongside period photos and such artifacts as rows of toy soldiers (Churchill had 1,500 of them as a child) and Axis War souvenirs like a German Luger pistol and holster. But there are also more interactive displays, such as a periscope that takes a peep into a World War I’s “No Man’s Land” and a simulated World War II aerial bombardment that invites you to “grab the Spitfire’s joystick and press the firing button.” Other exhibits encourage visitors to test their deciphering skills on an Enigma Machine like the one used by British intelligence officers to unravel coded German communications. And there’s a Cold War “Spy versus Spy” game challenging participants to find secret information hidden in the displays.
The displays can make for riveting reading. Take the description of a World War I trench, for example, where you learn the rats grew to be the size of cats and where the smell of rotting corpses, overflowing latrines, and unwashed bodies became overpowering. Or the description of an aerial dogfight described as “swirling chaos” so intense that pilots would sometimes need to be lifted from their seats after landing. There’s a 14-year-old survivor’s description of the nuclear blast at Hiroshima, as well as copies of letters interspersed here and there between Churchill and his wife, Clementine, as well as one from his disapproving father, scolding his son for his performance in school and in particular for his “slovenly, happy-go-lucky, harum-scarum style of work.”
And you’ll learn some surprising, and quite entertaining facts about Winston Churchill, the man. For instance, he once was struck by an automobile in New York City. In a full-page newspaper account, Churchill estimated that the car weighed 2,400 pounds and was traveling at 35 miles per hour, causing him to absorb 6,000 foot-pounds of force, the equivalent of falling 30 feet onto a pavement. “I do not understand why I was not broken like an egg-shell or squashed like a gooseberry,” Churchill wrote. “I certainly must be very tough, or very lucky or both.”
Even Bigger Surprises
But perhaps the biggest surprises of all lie outside.
Atop the museum itself sits an authentic 17th century English church designed by Sir Christopher Wren. The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, was founded in the late 11th or early 12th century within the historic City of London, serving as a medieval parish church, surviving the English Civil War and Black Plague. Shakespeare lived about a block away, and the poet John Milton’s wife was a member of the parish. This structure, however, was destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was rebuilt using a design by Wren, who also designed 55 other churches, not to mention the magnificent St. Paul’s Cathedral.
That structure stood just a short distance from St. Paul’s until December of 1940 when it once again was destroyed by fire by an incendiary bomb dropped during a German air raid. Only its outer walls, columns and bell tower remained standing. That church lay in ruins until 1965 when its remains were transported stone by stone to Fulton and reconstructed according to Wren’s original design. The church’s interior was also meticulously re-created. Churchill himself was aware of the plans to move the church and gave the reconstruction his stamp of approval, calling the bold move “an imaginative concept.”
The church, now serving as the chapel for Westminster College and used for other special events, is currently under renovation, and until spring of 2025 only its exterior can be viewed.
Nearby on the lawn outside the church’s entrance is an eye-catching sculpture designed by Edwina Sandys, Churchill’s granddaughter, using eight 4×5-foot segments of the original Berlin Wall, covered by colorful graffiti on the side that faced West Berlin, its residents objecting to the forced separation of their city. Sandys used this section, which originally lay near the Brandenburg Gate, because of its repeated use of the German word “Unwahr,” which means “lies,” or “untruths.” Into these sections of the wall, Sandys carved the outlines of two huge human forms, symbolizing freedom’s “Breakthrough,” the piece’s title. Appropriately, this piece representing the fall of the Iron Curtain lies on the campus where Winston Churchill first used that phrase.
Churchill’s Legacy
Tim Riley, director and curator of the museum, finds three qualities that were fundamental in Churchill’s success. “His resilience, his vision, and his audacity combined together are what set him apart from other leaders,” he says. “The combination of those three qualities are what makes him extraordinary.”
Regarding Churchill’s resilience, Riley says, “He both succeeded and failed in life, but he never stopped trying. Every time he was knocked down, he got back up, usually stronger.” As for Churchill’s vision, Riley says, “He had a way of almost looking around corners to see what was coming down the road in the global theater — Churchill, for example, was the one who warned the world about the looming threats represented both by Hitler and by communism. And he certainly was audacious in both his actions and thoughts. He foresaw what actions needed to be taken and what steps were necessary to get there. He simply wouldn’t be deterred from whatever it took to get there.”
Even though the world today may seem vastly different from the one Churchill lived in, we still see similarities to what the prime minister faced in the middle of the twentieth century in the rise today of both demagogues and autocratic regimes as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s threats towards Taiwan. “Mark Twain once said ‘History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme. We certainly seem to be finding ourselves in a rhyming moment,” Riley says. But as Riley also points out, we need only look to Churchill’s words for a potential solution. “He said, ‘Study history, study history. In history, lies all the secrets of statecraft.’” And America’s Churchill Museum is certainly one such place where that history can be studied.
Marking Churchill’s Birthday
To celebrate Churchill’s 150th birthday, the museum in Fulton is offering a special exhibition entitled “Churchill and Blenheim Palace,” showcasing the magnificent ancestral home of the Churchill family and the Dukes of Marlborough. Although his immediate family never resided there, Churchill was born there on November 30, 1874, at a time when his grandfather was the seventh Duke of Marlborough. A miniature reproduction of the palace in Oxfordshire is the centerpiece of the exhibition as well as well as items pulled from the Fulton museum’s archives and other materials lent from Blenheim Palace and private individuals.
The exhibition runs from September 18, 2024, until January 12, 2025. Go to nationalchurchillmuseum.org for more details.
Adjacent to the special exhibition, a semi-permanent display of Churchill’s artwork features several of his paintings. Among them are “Firth of Forth,” depicting the British naval fleet along the coast of Scotland around 1925, “Leaning Palm, Jamaica,” and “View of Miami at Sunset,” painted just weeks prior to Churchill’s visit to Fulton.
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