The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (246 page)

King George V dies on January 20, 1936. His son succeeds him as King Edward VIII.

The new king stands somberly at the Cenotaph, November 11, 1936.

Edward VIII insists upon marrying an American woman with a tarnished past. Churchill, in a highly unpopular stand, supports him. Lord Beaverbrook’s
Daily Express
tells the tale.

Hermann Göring (
right
) with one of his warmest admirers, Sir Nevile Henderson, His Majesty’s ambassador to Nazi Germany.

As Hitler overruns the Rhineland, Sir John Simon, Anthony Eden, and Sir Robert Vansittart follow the coffin of Leopold von Hösch, the German ambassador to Britain.

Discussing Hitler’s Austrian Anschluss, Churchill and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax walk from the Foreign Office to Parliament, March 29, 1938.

Alfred Duff Cooper, First Lord of the Admiralty, resigns from Chamberlain’s cabinet in disgust over Munich

At the peak of the Munich crisis, September 1938, Winston Churchill gloomily leaves No. 10 Downing Street after conferring with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

At Chartwell in early 1939 Winston nails tiles to the roof of Orchard Cottage, which he designed and largely built as a retirement home for Clementine and him.

Clementine in 1939 with one of Chartwell’s two fox cubs, Charles-James and Victoria. With war imminent, both cubs were turned loose in the wild.

As Honorary RAF Commodore, Winston flies as copilot at Kenley, April 16, 1939.

Demands that Churchill be brought into the government had been swelling for three years. The
Daily Mail
ran this article on May 11, 1936, in reaction to Hitler’s seizure of the Rhineland.

By the spring of 1939, the dictators were overrunning Europe; Memel, Albania, and what was left of independent Czechoslovakia fell to Hitler and Mussolini. Now most of Fleet Street sounded the alarm.