Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (19 page)

Elgin, the departmental boss, was later described by Edward Marsh, Churchill’s new private secretary, as ‘a rugged old thane of antique virtue and simplicity’.
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He was in fact only fifty-six, although his manner may have seemed to belie this. The grandson of the better known Seventh Earl, of Elgin Marbles fame, he has deservedly been rescued by a leading scholar from the condescension of posterity; his personal reticence and unwillingness to defend himself against critics disguised his considerable administrative (if not political) ability.
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From 1894 to 1899 he achieved a generally sound record as Viceroy of India. He was not a notable enthusiast for the forward policy; at the time of the frontier wars, Churchill wrote that he was a member of ‘that party in the State which has clung passionately, vainly, and often unwisely to a policy of peace and retrenchment’. But the younger man did not doubt his future chief’s earnestness.
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Marsh’s description of their relationship is telling, if a little guarded. Churchill, he wrote, regarded Elgin ‘with impatient respect, recognizing his four-square stability and his canniness, but desiderating initiative and dash. What Elgin thought of Winston was his own secret, but I imagine that their qualified esteem was mutual.’
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In March 1906 Flora Lugard, the formidable wife of Sir Frederick, High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria, wrote of ‘how Lord Elgin is keeping that wild Winston in check within the office’.
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Harry Verney, one of Elgin’s private secretaries, later recalled one of the ways in which this was achieved. There were two main doors to Elgin’s office, one from the private secretaries’ room and one from the corridor. Churchill wanted constant access to Elgin and liked to barge in on him without warning from the corridor entrance. Elgin wanted him curbed and, without confronting him directly, gave instructions that he was only to enter via the anteroom. In Verney’s recollection, ‘Churchill’s room was on the floor below Lord Elgin’s, and as soon as Churchill had set off to invade his Chief, Marsh telephoned me and all hands were summoned to block the way from the passage and persuade a surprised Under Secretary that the only access was through our room if and when the Secretary of State was disengaged. It worked.’
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In such ways the two ministers avoided serious acrimony. This, in the face of Churchill’s opinionated hyperactivity, was no small tribute to Elgin’s tact. But there was an underlying uneasiness. Churchill repeatedly thanked Elgin for his indulgence and for what he had learnt from him about the conduct of official business; Elgin felt some admiration for this ‘curious and impulsive creature’, yet often found his subordinate’s behaviour profoundly trying.
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‘Qualified esteem’ was just about right.

The advent of the new government triggered a general election, held in January and February 1906. While battle raged on the hustings, Churchill and Elgin had to start dealing straight away with Colonial Office problems that were themselves controversial. The key issue for them was South Africa and, immediately, the question of the workers from China who had been imported into the Transvaal in order to meet the labour shortage there. Many Liberals attacked this as ‘Chinese Slavery’. On the one hand, there was genuine concern about the pay and conditions of the indentured labourers on the Rand, and on the other there was an appeal to baser instincts: the fear that Chinese workers were taking white men’s jobs. There was also a generalized hostility to the capitalist mine-owners who benefited from the system. Yet that system could not be ended merely by the stroke of a pen. Nearly fifteen thousand new Chinese were due to arrive in South Africa under contracts agreed before the Tories fell from office, and to halt their arrival might involve the government in expensive compensation claims. At the risk of alienating Radical MPs, the Cabinet took the pragmatic decision to allow these workers to come.
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Churchill claimed to ‘hate Chinese Labour as much as I honour the Flag’.
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Aware of its complexities, though, he did not make this a central issue in his own election campaign in Manchester. Afterwards, Chamberlain was forced to withdraw the false allegation that gangs of Liberals dressed up as Chinamen had paraded through the streets of the constituency ‘accompanied by an agent got up as a slave-driver’.
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Churchill did refer in public to ‘the battle of white labour against the whole force of the capitalist interest in South Africa’, but the slogans used on his posters were innocuous: ‘Churchill and Free Trade’, ‘Cheap Food’, and ‘A United Empire’.
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His election address promised that the government would ‘restrict’ the system of Chinese Labour and ‘put down its abuses’ but – on Elgin’s advice – he did not make any firm pledge to end it.
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He won the seat by a substantial margin, part of a crushing Liberal victory nationwide. In February, during one of Churchill’s early appearances at the despatch box, he made it clear that, undesirable as the current state of affairs might be, the government would not take instant action to deport the Chinese. To laughter, he declared that as the labourers had entered their contracts voluntarily and for a limited period, and were paid wages they found adequate, the system could not ‘in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude’.
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The
Liverpool Daily Courier
printed a cartoon of Churchill hoisting himself into the Colonial Office with the aid of a Chinaman’s pigtail. The legend ran: ‘Mr Winston Churchill’s autobiography will describe the thrilling story of how he climbed into office with the aid of his patent terminological inexactitude.’
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Such anger was understandable, given the language that had been used by other Liberals, but it was unfair to Churchill personally. During the election he had made clear to the voters that the conditions of the Chinese, although ‘servile and improper’, did not constitute slavery.
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That episode is well known; but it was small beer compared to the (now strangely forgotten) row that broke out the following month. By this time the government had arrived at a moderate policy. It had decided not to end the existing labour contracts, although no more would be issued; to modify the rules so as to prevent abuses; to repatriate all Chinese workers who wished to go home; and to allow the Transvaal itself, once it had gained self-government, to decide whether the system should continue into the future. This last point was subject to the proviso that the government in London would, if necessary, exercise its right to veto any legislation that a future Transvaal parliament might pass regarding Chinese labour, and Churchill made this clear in the Commons in February.
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During a debate in March, he was stung by Chamberlain into repeating the point in a more provocative way. No matter how well a proposal from the Transvaal was supported by public opinion there, he said, the home government would not shrink from vetoing anything that offended the principles of liberty and decency.
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Traditionally, the use of the Crown’s right of veto of colonial governments’ decisions was restricted to matters affecting the rights of British subjects elsewhere or Britain’s relations with foreign powers. It now seemed as though Churchill was claiming a general right to interfere in the business of any self-governing colony that offended Liberal ministers’ sense of right and wrong. South African shares fell on the Stock Exchange, which Churchill unconvincingly tried to blame on ‘the lugubrious and pessimistic orations’ of Balfour and Chamberlain.
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British South Africans were outraged by the speech. ‘The Cabinet must not forget it is dealing with its own flesh and blood’, declared the
Rand Mail
: ‘We will not forgo the birthright of freedom we have inherited.’ Another South African paper, the
Star
, thought the speech ‘a gratuitous insult to every self-governing colony’. There was even discussion of ‘cutting the painter’ tying South Africa to the motherland, although no paper openly advocated this.
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One New Zealand paper claimed that Churchill’s ‘deplorable indiscretion’ had ‘aroused a keen resentment far beyond the limits of South Africa’.
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In Britain, the
Pall Mall Gazette
derisively labelled Churchill ‘The Blenheim Pup’.
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Chamberlain said – with considerable chutzpah, given that he was an ex-Liberal himself – that Churchill’s speech was ‘inconsistent with declared Liberal principles’. By these he meant the ideal of self-government, but he might better have said that Liberal principles were inconsistent.
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For Churchill had come up hard against a central dilemma of Liberal colonial policy. One could intervene to protect the indigenous population (and non-natives such as the Chinese) and thus stand accused of stripping white minorities of their hereditary freedoms. Or one could do nothing, which would lead to charges at home of permitting abuses under the British flag. Churchill had a very clear sense that the more opportunistic of his opponents would adopt and adapt these alternative lines of attack exactly as they saw fit.
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Within the Empire, he won some support from Liberal opinion. The
Toronto Daily Star
ridiculed the idea that colonial self-government as a whole was in danger, and pointed out that the South African colonies were a special case. ‘If they were treated as Canada or Australia is treated, they would complain loudly of neglect, and it would be said that the “Little Englanders’ ” Government was neglecting Imperial interests.’
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A week later, in a much better-known incident, Churchill provoked further upset. It had been revealed that Lord Milner, during his now-expired term as High Commissioner for South Africa, had sanctioned the unlawful flogging of Chinese workers. A Liberal backbencher, William Byles, moved a motion deploring Milner’s conduct. From the government’s point of view it was unhelpful to stir up bad feeling against a widely admired figure, especially given that ‘our excitable British friends’ in South Africa would resent the criticism. So with the consent of his colleagues Churchill moved an amendment, condemning the flogging but deprecating the censure of individuals in the interests of peace and reconciliation.
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But even though the amendment was carried, the attempt to smooth things over misfired. His speech, which in rehearsal had seemed full of generosity of spirit towards the now-eclipsed Milner, came across in performance, Edward Marsh recalled, as the ‘taunting [of] a discredited statesman with the evil days on which he had fallen’.
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It also went down badly with the British South Africans, both as a slight on Milner (whose racial views were at any rate thought by them to be dangerously progressive) and as an interference with ‘the native problem’, which the local whites felt was theirs alone to deal with.
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The
Cape Times
, observing that a few years earlier Churchill had shared Milner’s ideas, described the speech as nauseous, hypocritical and unprincipled.
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Churchill, however, defended himself, telling Selborne that ‘no other course but the one adopted by me, would have prevented Lord Milner from being censured formally by the House of Commons. We interfered to parry the blow – & did parry it, much to the disgust of many of our own supporters.’
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South African affairs continued to go wrong. A Zulu rebellion had recently broken out in the British colony of Natal, and at the end of March 1906 the Colonial Office was informed that twelve rebels had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death by court martial. In response, perhaps at Churchill’s instance, a telegram was sent requesting the executions be delayed pending the receipt of further information.
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The colonists were soon ‘boiling with indignation’ at a move they saw as endangering the white population.
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The Natal government resigned, although the resignations were quickly rescinded when the Colonial Office backed down, allowing the sentences to be carried out. In the Commons, Churchill denied there had been any U-turn, stressing that the request for information had been perfectly proper and that this had not implied criticism of the Natal authorities or any intention to veto their decision.
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The executions, of course, provoked the anger of Radicals, which demonstrated the government’s difficulty in satisfying opinion in the Empire and on its own backbenches at the same time. Churchill’s mood was inevitably affected. In May, Lady Lugard reported, ‘He seemed irritable, ill, and out of spirits – and very much oppressed by the questions which he had to answer in the House of Commons.’
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