Winston Churchill's lifelong affair with newspapers is the subject of an exhibition Churchill and the Press at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet war Rooms, in London. His birth in 1874 was announced in an advertisement on page one of The Times. His death in 1965 forced the small ads off the paper's front page, something even the Coronation 12 years earlier had not been a big enough story to do. His marriage to Clementine Hosier in 1908 was a picture splash on the fronts of both the Daily Graphic and the Daily Mirror.

Journalism was also an important source of income for Churchill, from when he was a 25-year-old subaltern in South Africa in the 1890s filing reports to the Morning Post, to his being a contracted columnist for several Fleet Street papers during his 1930s “wilderness years”.

But, according to the exhibition, all the newspapers missed perhaps the biggest Churchill scoop of them all - thanks to his news management. This was the day in December 1943 when he lay on what he, his doctors and family believed was his deathbed. “If I die, don't worry,” he told his daughter Sarah. “The war is won.”

In February of that year pneumonia had been diagnosed and he stayed in bed for a week with a fever. But the world was focused on Poona where Gandhi was fasting, and journalists missed the significance of Churchill's absence from the public eye.

Towards the end of the year he was visiting Eisenhower in Tunisia and awoke on December 12 with a temperature of 101F (38.3C). His physician, Lord Moran, diagnosed a return of the pneumonia, and his heart began to show signs of strain. By December 15 his pulse was irregular, and at 6pm he suffered a mild heart attack. Moran told Harold Macmillan, the British government representative in North Africa, that the PM might be dying.

But that night Churchill rallied, his pulse steadied and the palpitations ceased. By the morning of December 16 he was recovering, and two days later was promising his wife not to smoke, and to drink only weak whisky and soda. The press never got a whiff of how close the world had come to a new turmoil.

Churchill had a cavalier way with the press, and was even a Fleet Street editor himself, for ten days. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1926 when the General Strike was called, and Fleet Street's presses fell silent.

The day before, May 3, Churchill had decided that there had to be an emergency newspaper and warned editors, who refused any responsibility, that it would be produced by volunteers. He took over the offices of the Morning Post, and arriving at midnight he supervised the first four-page issue of the British Gazette with a print run of 230,000, distributed by air and rail. Two days later 250,000 were printed, by May 11 a million copies were rolling off and the volunteer journalists were feeling the strain of the Chancellor's editorship: “He butts in at the busiest hours and insists on changing commas and full stops until the staff is furious,” one complained. The final issue announcing the end of the strike on May 13 sold 2,209,000 copies.

“Make your minds perfectly clear,” he told the House of Commons, “that if ever you let loose upon us again another general strike, we will loose upon you another British Gazette.”

When the Conservatives lost the 1929 general election Churchill began ten years out of power, and he made Fleet Street his platform and his means of income. He had contracts with several papers, but was never afraid to voice opinions contrary to the editorial stance of the paper.

His anti-appeasement opinions lost him favour with a number of editors and proprietors, including his old friend Lord Beaverbrook who wrote to him in 1938 ending his Evening Standard contract, saying: “Your views on foreign affairs and the part which this country should play are entirely opposed to those held by us.” Their personal friendship, however, was not harmed, and Beaverbrook was in Churchill's Cabinet in various roles throughout the war.

Churchill's 40-year romance with journalism made him aware enough to use the press when he became Prime Minister, so that the desperate evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 was turned into a morale-boosting heroic rescue, and the Dambusters' raid on the Ruhr in 1943 was reported as having paralysed Germany's industrial heart. “The war is not fought to amuse newspapers,” he told the Australian Prime Minister John Curtin in 1943, “but to save peoples.”

— Churchill and the Press is at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet war Rooms, King Charles Street, London SW1A 2AQ (www.iwm.org.uk) until May 11.