Winston Churchill

Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, in the week the German army broke through in France, and his speeches that summer are widely credited with holding British resolve together. He also won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for his histories and oratory.

He was given a state funeral, the first for a commoner since Gladstone. At his request he was buried not in Westminster Abbey but in the small country churchyard at Bladon, beside his parents and within sight of Blenheim Palace, where he was born.