THE FORGOTTEN CHURCHILL: The boisterous, witty man we know as the Prime Minister who stared down Hitler also helped create the modern welfare state. An
often-forgotten fact.
First elected to Parliament in the fall of 1900, in the last weeks of Queen Victoria’s reign, he entered the cabinet at Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s invitation in April 1908. In the same year, after being refused in marriage by Ethel Barrymore (among other ladies), he married Clementine Hozier. Then came two world wars that changed many lives, and especially his.
What is forgotten, above all, is his role as a social reformer and a founder of the British welfare state. In 1908, as president of the national Board of Trade, Churchill invited a young William Beveridge onto his team: Beveridge was a Scottish civil servant who would one day design the British National Health Service. Nowadays, however, those who gaze at the carved slab inside the door of Westminster Abbey that reads “Remember Winston Churchill” seldom remember that. Even in 1965, when the slab was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II, a few months after his death, all that people remembered was the war hero who defied Hitler, with or without a cigar.
Read the whole thing; it's not as politically-motivated as it might seem from this little passage, covering not only Churchill's involvement in the establishment of the welfare system, but also his winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature and other notable achievements.
Read on.
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