Churchill, Butler and Dunkirk

Winston Churchill did not leave politics once the war ended. He stayed on as a Member of Parliament for years afterward, only standing down in 1964, a career in the Commons that had begun long before the war and continued long after it. He died the following year, in 1965, and was given a state funeral in recognition of what he had done for the country.

His reputation only grew with time: decades later, in 2002, the public voted him the greatest Briton of all time, a recognition that placed his wartime leadership above every other figure in the history of the country.

Two other names sit in the same years. R A Butler became a Conservative MP and went on to take charge of education, overseeing the Act that brought in free secondary schooling. And the wartime evacuation of British troops from the beaches gave the language a phrase still used today: the Dunkirk spirit, for pulling together against the odds.