Sir Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill and a descendent of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough.

Educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, he was commissioned in the 4th Queens’s Own Hussars in 1895.

He served in the 1897 Malakand and 1898 Nile campaign and as a London newspaper correspondent in the Boer War was captured but escaped with a $25 reward offered for his recapture.

In 1900, he entered parliament as a Conservative MP, but crossed the flour of the House to join the Liberal majority in 1906.

He was Secretary of State for War and Air from 1919 to 1921, but then found himself out of favor and was excluded from the Cabinet.

Neville Chamberlain at last steeped down and Churchill began his “walk with destiny” as Prime Minster of the coalition.

He was the first premier since the Duke of Wellington to have first hand experience of battle, and also he was an accomplished orator, able to convince the people by a parliamentary statement or radio broadcast, that even in the blackest moments Great Britain would eventually be victorious.

In the general election of 1945 Churchill was rejected by the British electorate; but by 1951 at the age of 77, he was Prime Minster again.

In 1955 he finally relinquished the premiership to Anthony Eden at the age of 81, its post war recovery was nearly complete.
Sir Winston Churchill

Anwar Sadat

Anwar Sadat
On October 6th, 1981, Egyptian President Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat was shot by gunmen who open fire at a military parade for the eight anniversary of the Yom Kippur war.

Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize are not, as a rule, assassinated, but there is always the fatal exception.

Anwar Sadat is best remembered as the first Arab leader to make an official visit to Israel, where he met with Israeli prime minister and spoke before the Knesset in Jerusalem on November 19th, 1977, creating an unprecedented rapport between former enemies.

He had not however, always played the peacemaker.

He ascent to world renown began when, as a career officer in the Egyptian Army, he took part in the 1952 coup which dethroned King Farouk and led to the appointment of Gamal Abdal Nasser as president of Egypt.

He was a key figure in the wars with Israel in 1950s and 1960s and after Nasser died in 1970, succeeded by Him as president.

In 1973, he launched the final Yom Kippur War against Israel and although Israel emerged victorious, some initial successes helped restore the Egyptian morale, and paved the way for the peace settlement several years later that would be both Sadat’s crowning historical achievement and also the direct cause of his death.
Anwar Sadat

George Lansbury (1859-1940)

George Lansbury (1859-1940)
Born in Suffolk and a railway worker at the age of fourteen, Lansbury became a poor law guardian in 1892 and a borough councilor in 1903.

He was elected to parliament in 1910 but resigned two years later to fight a by election, which he lost, on a women’s suffrage ticket.

Mayor of Poplar (1919-20), in 1921 he and other councilor were imprisoned for six weeks for refusing to raise the country rate because Poplar was too poor to pay it.

He edited the socialist Daily Herald (1919-22) and then his own Lansbury Labor Weekly (1925-27).

Entering parliament again in 1922, he served under Ramsay MacDonald as the first commissioner of works (1929-31), in which capacity he created the Lido on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London.

When MacDonald abandoned Labor to head the national government (1930), Lansbury became leader of the Labor Party and of the opposition.

As a committed pacifist, he resigned when the Labor Party conference voted, despite the risk of war, to support sanctions impressed imposed on Italy for its attack on Ethiopia (1935).

In a vain attempt to avert conflict with the fascist powers, he voted both Hitler and Mussolini in 1937.
George Lansbury (1859-1940)