British general elections, postponed during the war, were held in July 1945. The wartime coalition government had broken apart after the defeat of Germany, and Churchill ran in the election as a Conservative. The results were announced while Churchill was attending the Potsdam Conference, the last conference between the United States, Britain, and the USSR. Given Churchill’s popularity as wartime leader, he did not expect to be defeated. Churchill himself was reelected, but the Labour Party gained a majority in Parliament because the British public opinion sought social and economic reforms that the Conservatives had resisted. The electorate did not wish to return to the slump and unemployment of the 1930s; they also blamed the Conservatives for waiting too long to resist Hitler.
Churchill’s place at the Potsdam Conference was taken over by the new prime minister, Labour leader Clement Richard Attlee. Churchill retired as prime minister in deep disappointment. When his wife suggested that his party’s defeat might prove to be a blessing in disguise, he replied that, if so, it was certainly well disguised.
After the Labour victory, Churchill began rebuilding the shattered fabric of his party as leader of the opposition. He delivered a series of speeches that encouraged Anglo-American solidarity and the unity of Western Europe against the growing Communist threat. In 1946, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, he defined the barrier thrown up by the USSR around the nations of eastern Europe as the “iron curtain.” He began to write his six-volume work, The Second World War (1948-1954), a comprehensive first-person account of his wartime statesmanship.
In 1951 Churchill’s efforts to revitalize the Conservative Party were rewarded, and he again became prime minister. He worked to reduce the danger of nuclear warfare, vainly seeking a summit conference between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. In 1953 Queen Elizabeth II conferred on him the Knighthood of the Garter, and he became Sir Winston Churchill. In the same year he won the Nobel Prize for literature for his historical and biographical works and for his oratory. In November 1954, on Churchill’s 80th birthday, the House of Commons honored him on the eve of his retirement. In April 1955 he resigned as prime minister but remained a member of the House of Commons.
In his retirement, Churchill worked on completing A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956-1958), a four-volume work begun in the late 1930s but postponed during World War II. He devoted much of his leisure in his later years to his favorite pastime of painting, ultimately producing more than 500 canvases. The Royal Academy of Arts featured his works in 1959. In 1963 the U.S. Congress made Churchill an honorary citizen of the United States. Churchill died peacefully at his town house in London, two months after his 90th birthday. Following a state funeral service that was attended by dozens of world leaders at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, he was buried near Blenheim Palace.
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