Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (28 page)

In 1922 Churchill presented a White Paper to the House of Commons laying out the government’s policy on Palestine, a document which, having been preoccupied with Ireland and domestic politics over the previous winter, he had played little part in writing. Drawn up in the aftermath of Arab disturbances, it was an attempt to soothe both sides by correcting their supposedly misguided ‘apprehensions’ about British intentions. The commitment to the Balfour Declaration was reaffirmed. However, it was not contemplated ‘that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home’, but merely ‘that such a Home should be founded
in Palestine
’. On the one hand it was stated that the Jewish people were in Palestine ‘as of right and not on sufferance’; on the other hand Zionist hopes that the land would become ‘as Jewish as England is English’ were said to be impracticable. The Jewish community was to be allowed to increase its numbers by immigration, yet this was not to be so great in volume as to exceed the country’s economic capacity to absorb new arrivals.
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The White Paper left many questions unanswered – the formula on immigration, for example, was evidently vague – but the Zionists swallowed it reluctantly.
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More encouraging from their point of view was the government’s defence of the controversial concession granted to Pinhas Rutenberg, a Jewish entrepreneur, for the exclusive production of electricity in Palestine. In the House of Commons, Churchill strongly defended both the Rutenberg concession and the Zionist role in the development of Palestine in general. His remarks were reminiscent of his insistence in
My African Journey
that indigenous populations had no right to remain idle, even if contented in their inactivity:

Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps towards the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell – a handful of philosophic people – in the wasted sun-scorched plains, letting the waters of the Jordan continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea.
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Later, in the 1930s, he declared during the course of an argument about Palestine ‘that the Arabs were barbaric hordes who ate little but camels’ dung’.
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Nevertheless, attempts to portray Churchill as a lifelong, ardent Zionist fail to convince, even though Zionists themselves often praised him for their own purposes.
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Churchill supported Zionism only insofar as it was compatible with British power, and over the coming years the aspiration for Jewish statehood was to conflict increasingly with imperial rule.

If, in some moods, Churchill was willing to advocate withdrawal from Mesopotamia and Palestine, this was in part because of his awareness that staying there might have consequences for the rest of the Empire. In the post-war years he frequently spoke of Britain’s position ‘as the greatest Mahommedan Power’.
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In 1920 the Muslim population of the Empire was 87 million, including 70 million in India and 13 million in Egypt.
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He believed that a policy hostile to the defeated Turks, and the retention of the former Ottoman territories, could alienate these people. In other words, he criticized ‘dreams of conquest and aggrandisement’ in the Middle East precisely because he wanted to avoid dissipating British power elsewhere.
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V

If his approach to ‘new enlargements’ was, like his treatment of Ireland, relatively pragmatic, his view of the established non-white territories of the Empire was less so. Egyptian, Indian and African issues prompted strong emotional responses in him. In 1919 an uprising broke out in Egypt after the British tried to clamp down on the nationalist Wafd party. At this point the Colonial Secretary was Lord Milner. He had bounced back from the difficult aftermath of his South African years to take office under Lloyd George during the war, and now led a commission to investigate the discontent. Its report, published in February 1921, recommended the abolition of the British protectorate (which had been established formally in 1914) and the granting of internal self-government to Egypt under a constitutional monarchy. Churchill fought against these proposals every step of the way and annoyed Curzon – who was himself uneasy about the policy – through his public pronouncements. Just before the Milner report came out, for example, Churchill spoke of his hope that in the future both Ireland and Egypt would unfold their destinies ‘peacefully and prosperously within the elastic circle of the British Empire’.
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This raised the hackles of the nationalists in Cairo, who did not wish Egypt to be part of the Empire at all but instead demanded full independence.
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In spite of Churchill’s ‘difficult and insolent’ behaviour the Milner plan was implemented in 1922.
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Not long beforehand Curzon complained that ‘the Jingoes in the Cabinet, of whom the strongest are the PM and Winston, want to concede nothing and to stamp out rebellion in Egypt by fire and sword’.
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To a high-minded imperialist like Curzon, nothing was more debased and insincere than vulgar, pseudo-patriotic ‘Jingoism’. Churchill, who deplored Jingoism too, would have recognized the insult.

Churchill’s public attitude to the concurrent disturbances in India to some extent contradicted his growing reputation as a diehard. The troubles arose because of the Government of India’s extension of wartime measures to suppress sedition, including drastic restrictions on freedom of expression. Since his return to India at the outbreak of war Gandhi had made no direct challenge to British rule, but in early 1919 he launched a campaign of satyagraha directed at the new law. To his distress, the campaign turned violent. Trains were derailed, telegraph wires cut, buildings burnt and property plundered. A number of Europeans were killed. This – as many British conservatives liked to emphasize – was the context for General Reginald Dyer’s decision to order his soldiers to shoot at an unarmed mob in Amritsar, the administrative capital of Punjab. Trapped within the Jallianwallah Bagh, a walled area near the Golden Temple, the crowd had little chance to escape. The official inquiry into the massacre led by Lord Hunter found that 1,650 rounds were fired and estimated that 379 people were killed. It is probable that around three times that many were wounded.
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In the aftermath, as peace was restored to the city, Dyer issued the so-called ‘crawling order’: Indians passing along a narrow lane where a female missionary had been attacked were to be forced to do so on their hands and knees. A few days after the massacre Gandhi called off his campaign, confessing to a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’ in having launched it before his supporters were spiritually ready for the practice of non-violence.
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In Britain, opinion on Dyer was bitterly divided between those who saw him as a monster and those who thought him the saviour of the Raj. The Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, was one of those who were horrified. Five years younger than Churchill, he was first elected to Parliament in the sweeping Liberal victory of 1906, and his career flourished under Asquith. Asquith himself, however, mocked his protégé as ‘the Assyrian’ – a slighting reference to Montagu’s Jewishness – in the stream of passionate letters that he poured out to his young confidante Venetia Stanley. In a further twist, Montagu married Stanley in 1915: ‘
this
breaks my heart’, the Prime Minister told her when he learnt of the engagement.
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Montagu lost office when Asquith fell in 1916, but was given a new job by Lloyd George shortly afterwards. His promotion to the India Office a few months later was as unpopular with Tories as Churchill’s simultaneous appointment to the Ministry of Munitions. He was a self-tormented individual whose private comments (not least about Churchill) often had an air of cynicism, but his interest in India was genuine and longstanding. In August 1917 he made an official declaration that the country should move towards ‘responsible government’, which implied an eventual move to Dominion status.
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The so-called Montagu–Chelmsford reforms that followed after the war were a severely limited but nonetheless significant step on the road to Indians taking charge of their own affairs. After Amritsar, Montagu attempted without success to stiffen the Hunter report’s criticisms of those responsible.
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When the report was debated in the Commons on 8 July 1920 he faced the impossible job of squaring his own convictions with the need to appease Dyer’s powerful supporters in Parliament. The previous day Churchill had told the House of the Army Council’s decision that Dyer, who had been removed from employment in India by the Commander-in-Chief, would not be offered a post elsewhere. (This meant that he would be placed on half pay but his status and rank would not be affected.) In response to this announcement there were passionate cries of ‘Why?’ and ‘Shame’.
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Montagu opened the debate in an electric atmosphere, with Dyer himself looking down from the gallery on to the packed benches. Although Montagu’s own commitment to the Empire was profound, his speech was not calculated to soothe the diehards. Although he paid lip service to Dyer’s ‘gallant’ personal record, he denounced his attempt to use the shootings to teach ‘a moral lesson’ to the whole Punjab as ‘a doctrine of terrorism’. He denounced the outrages that had taken place after the massacre, and demanded: ‘Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation and subordination, and frightfulness, or are you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill, of the people of your Indian Empire? I believe that to be the whole question at issue.’
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He persevered courageously as the mood became angrier and angrier. Some MPs seemed ready to hit him for his effrontery, and there was an undoubted anti-Semitic element in the response.
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‘A Jew, a foreigner, rounding on an Englishman and throwing him to the wolves – that was the feeling’, noted Austen Chamberlain, who was soon to become leader of the Conservatives himself.
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After Montagu sat down, things continued to go badly for the government until Churchill rose to speak. He proceeded, with great skill, to extract the government’s chestnuts from the fire. He first gave the House time to simmer down by delivering a long, dry exposition of the technicalities of how the conduct of military officers could be dealt with. He then turned to the merits of the case, about which he was unequivocal. The massacre, he claimed, was an episode ‘without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire’. He conceded that British officers who had to decide whether or not to open fire in such circumstances were in a difficult situation. However, Churchill made clear that it was the job of such officers to weigh up the situation appropriately. ‘ “I was confronted,” says General Dyer, “by a revolutionary army.” What is the chief characteristic of an army? Surely it is that it is armed. This crowd was unarmed. These are simple tests which it is not too much to expect officers in these difficult situations to apply.’

He went on to restate, in essence, the argument made by Montagu, albeit in a rather more emollient way:

There is surely one general prohibition which we can make. I mean a prohibition against what is called ‘frightfulness’. What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.

Furthermore, he said, the claim that the massacre had ‘saved India’ was not credible. Indeed, ‘Our reign in India or anywhere else has never stood on the basis of physical force alone, and it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it.’ Finally Churchill offered what he said was his personal opinion. This was that Dyer deserved not merely the loss of employment but to be subjected to ‘a distinct disciplinary act, namely, his being placed compulsorily on the retired list’. Churchill had in fact battled for this with the Army Council and lost; its military members sympathized with Dyer. He now said that such a solution was not really possible, given that Dyer’s actions had in effect been condoned subsequently by a succession of his superiors. Therefore he invited the House to endorse the Army Council’s ‘moderate and considered’ decision to deny Dyer future employment without formally disciplining him.
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The speech as a whole was utterly masterful. It emphasized that the massacre was horrible but also made the claim that it was unique.
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It criticized Dyer’s conduct severely, while at the same time stressing that he was not actually going to be punished. The effect was to calm the House, and although many MPs rebelled against the government, the hostile amendment put down by Dyer’s supporters was defeated.

Churchill, with no little skill, had distanced himself clearly from the position held by the diehards even while he assuaged their wrath. Yet his speech still received some criticism in Punjab itself. The
Tribune
, a newspaper published in Lahore, offered some trenchant comments: