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The claim that British prime minister Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room at a dance has been circulating on Internet-based trivia lists for as long as we can remember. Given that Churchill was one of the most important figures of the 20th century — a long-lived statesman of international prominence whose career spanned two world wars and beyond — this would seem like a fairly easy item to verify, but once again things were deceptively less simple than they appeared at first blush. To research this type of item (an anecdote about a famous figure), we generally first turn to the most recent biography of that person we can find, which in this case was Roy Jenkins' 900-page Churchill: A Biography (2001). The brief description of Churchill's birth found there mentioned nothing more remarkable than that he was born two months prematurely (labor having been brought on when his mother took a fall) in a singularly bleak-looking bedroom at Blenheim Palace: Well, maybe the author had to leave some things out in order to keep an already sprawling biography from spanning more than one volume, and the item we were looking for was one of them. So we tried other Churchill biographies, but they scarcely noted the circumstances of his birth at all, saving their detailed narratives for later portions of his life: A volume entitled The Private Lives of Winston Churchill sounded promising, and there we found the suggestion that Churchill hadn't been born prematurely at all and that the story about his mother's taking a fall may have been concocted to cover a pre-marital dalliance: Still nothing about a dance or a ladies' room, though; only the unsatisfying notation that Winston's birth was notably uncomplicated. We pressed on. William Manchester's The Last Lion also suggested Winston's premature birth was a fiction promulgated to obscure a pre-wedding pregnancy, a ruse that supposedly fooled no one: But, more important for our purposes, Manchester also included an account of the birth itself, one which was clearly in the ballpark of what we were looking for: That's not quite enough for us to label this one as true. Winston's mother may have been attending a dance when she went into labor and delivered him in the palace where the dance was held, but he wasn't actually born until more than 24 hours later, long after the dance had ended and all the guests had departed. And the room where the birth took place wasn't a ladies' bathroom at all but ordinary living quarters temporarily pressed into service as a place to store coats, as can be seen in photographs of Blenheim Palace. The confusion may stem from the fact that 'cloakroom' is sometimes employed as a euphemism for 'lavatory' in the UK, but in this case 'cloakroom' was clearly used in its literal sense. Intriguing circumstances, but still a fair bit short of the more captivating rumor.
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