Winston Churchill - Success is not final, failure is not fatal - Short Story

 

Winston Churchill

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

-Winston Churchill

Churchill, the British Prime Minister during World War II, is widely regarded as the country’s greatest Prime Minister of all time.

As a young boy, he sat for the entrance examination for Harrow School, a public school in London. When he took the Latin paper, a young Churchill carefully wrote the title, his name, and the number 1 followed by a dot — and nothing else!

Despite this, he was accepted at Harrow but placed at the bottom division. He generally did badly and was often punished for poor work and lack of effort. He failed some courses several times and refused to study the classics — Latin and Ancient Greek. But he excelled in English and also sometimes topped his class in History and Mathematics.

Churchill attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and joined the army at age 20. In 1899, at age 25, he entered politics but failed to get elected, and subsequently worked as a newspaper war correspondent.

Churchill was elected to Parliament in 1900 and became Prime Minister only 40 years later, during World War II. Britain had lost confidence in the way Neville Chamberlain, who was then Prime Minister, was handling the war. On 10 May 1940, Chamberlain resigned.

Chamberlain wanted a successor who would command the support of all three major parties in the House of Commons. After meeting with the other two party leaders, he asked Churchill to be Prime Minister and form an all-party government.

Two lesser-known facts about Churchill are worth highlighting: (1) he became Prime Minister again from 1951 to 1955; and (2) he also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his many books on English and world history.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

-Winston Churchill