Winny

His teachers said he would never amount to anything. After his first term at boarding school, a teacher wrote a blunt letter home. The boy, the note said, never focused on his work and was never on time.

The tardy boy became a tardy man. Always late, but too important to be left behind. If his speech ran long, dinner parties waited, trains were held, and generals cooled their heels, even royalty waited.

Early in this man's extraordinary career he was reported to be the highest paid journalist in the world. He was originally trained as an Army officer at Sand Hurst, that's the British equivalent of West Point. His first " public" adventure began in India. British General Sir Bindon Blood had been dispatched with three brigades to put down a revolt. The only way the young military man could get to go was as a war correspondent. The London Daily Telegram paid five pounds per column and another paper bought three hundred words each day.

His colorful dispatches put him in the public eye and his courage served him well. The fight at one point became so heavy that the special correspondent found himself commanding a rear guard action. There was talk of a medal, but better yet, there was his best selling book about the war campaign. It quickly paid more that he earned from four years as an officer.

There were other campaigns, more war stories, his style and descriptive powers were developing. Eventually the money he made paid for his first political campaign.

 From there, the career of Winston Churchill is well known.