Churchill joined the Liberal Party 1904 and as part of a Liberal government made the begining of the welfare state by making a minimum wage and labor exchanges. But many believe that he was born a conservative. Churchill’s life was always marked by mood swings. As a schoolboy, the young Winston was punished for taking sugar from the school pantry. His response was to go to the headmaster’s study and kick his straw hat to pieces. Similar qualities first brought him to the attention of the British public when, after being made a POW in South Africa, he crawled through a latrine window to escape his prison camp and went on the run. After he lost power in the 1945, Churchill grew frustrated and bored, and would shoot into big bad moods. His family would describe him as having ‘black dog.’ To escape, he threw himself into writing his ‘War Memoirs’. Despite a speech obstruction and a weak voice, Churchill showed signs of a gift for public speaking even as a boy. In his first year at Harrow, he won a school competition by saying 1300 lines of poetry from memory. Churchill was a skilled writer throughout his life and constantly wrote newspaper articles and books, both in and out of office. Churchill showed ruthless determination in pursuing this goal. He urged the use of gas on the German civilian population in response to ‘doodle-bug’ raids on south-east England. He also ordered the sinking of French ships at Oran, when the French military command refused to hand them over to British command.