Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (3 page)

Therefore, this book does not adopt a purely biographical approach but explores Churchill’s career within the context of the experiences and opinions of his contemporaries. It looks at attitudes and ideas as well as events and policies; crucially, it also examines the way in which Churchill was perceived and his messages understood not only in Britain but throughout the Empire. He must be seen not only through his own words but also through the eyes of his contemporaries. One such figure who recurs repeatedly in our story is Leo Amery. It was said of him that had he been half a head taller, and his speeches half an hour shorter, he could have been Prime Minister.
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As it was, he ended up – after some vicissitudes in the two men’s relations – as Churchill’s Secretary of State for India in 1940–45. At the end of the war he was to suffer an appalling personal tragedy when his son was hanged for treason. For our purposes his career forms a useful counterpoint to that of Churchill. Moreover, for decades Amery maintained in his diary that Churchill was ‘not really interested in the Empire’.
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In fact, they both shared a strong commitment to the Empire, but that commitment took a very different form for each of them. Other figures that recur in these pages include the Canadian politician W. L. Mackenzie King and the South African J. C. Smuts as well, inescapably, as two key founders of modern India: M. K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Opinion of Churchill in the non-white parts of the Empire is a neglected area of study.
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One insight that emerges from it is that colonial nationalist reactions to him were often far more subtle and nuanced than later criticisms from some individuals within the former Empire might lead one to expect.

Churchill’s Empire – the picture he kept in his head and which he relayed in his speeches and writings – was a selective and sometimes superficial construct. This was in part because his direct experience of the Empire was incomplete. He saw much of Canada and the Middle East, and visited East Africa in 1907, but he did not return to India after the 1890s, or to South Africa after 1900, and never visited West Africa, Australia, New Zealand, or Britain’s Far Eastern possessions.
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Nevertheless, by the standards of most people at the time, his experience was wide indeed. This book relates how it interacted with other influences – intellectual, social and political – to shape the man that he became. It also shows how he in turn shaped, for good and ill, the world in which we live today.

Acknowledgements

While researching and writing this book I have accumulated many debts of gratitude. The first is to Jamie Wendell, who volunteered to act as a research assistant during the summer of 2007. His intelligence and capacity for hard work made him an ideal researcher, and the completion of the project was greatly speeded by his help. I am also grateful to my erstwhile colleagues at Homerton College, Cambridge, and my current ones at the University of Exeter. Both have been excellent places to work. I am glad as well to have had the assistance of numerous librarians and archivists, in particular Allen Packwood and his team at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge. Quotations from the writings of Winston Churchill are reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London, on behalf of The Estate of Winston Churchill. Copyright Winston S. Churchill. A Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2008–9 ensured that I could complete the book in a timely fashion.

Ahmed Abu-Zayed, David Anderson, Daniel Branch, Bruce Coleman, Michael Duffy, Andrew Thorpe and Stuart Ward all provided me with helpful information. Ronald Hyam, Stacey Hynd and Martin Thomas helped save me from error by reading the manuscript, in whole or in part. The guidance of all of them has been invaluable; any errors that remain are, of course, my own responsibility.

I am grateful too to my agent, Natasha Fairweather, and her assistants at A. P. Watt. Georgina Morley and Natasha Martin at Macmillan provided me with encouragement and thoughtful detailed guidance. Trevor Horwood made an excellent job of the copyediting.

My parents Janet and John Toye were, as ever, highly supportive throughout. So was my wife, Kristine, who read the entire manuscript with an eagle eye. It is to her and our sons Sven and Tristan that I dedicate this book.

PART ONE

Rationalism and Machine Guns

1

LEARNING TO THINK IMPERIALLY, 1874–1897

In June 1939 the MP and diarist Harold Nicolson attended a dinner at which Winston Churchill was the guest of honour. Also present was the celebrated American columnist Walter Lippmann. Lippmann told the assembled company that Joseph Kennedy, the appeasement-minded US ambassador to Britain, ‘had informed him that war was inevitable’ and that the British would ‘be licked’. According to Nicolson, this reported defeatism prompted Churchill into ‘a magnificent oration’, during which he sat hunched, ‘waving his whisky-and-soda to mark his periods, stubbing his cigar with the other hand’. He did not deny that the coming war would bring ‘dire peril and fierce ordeals’, but said that these would merely steel the British people and enhance their will for victory. He addressed Lippmann:

Yet supposing (as I do not for one moment suppose) that Mr Kennedy were correct in his tragic utterance, then I for one would willingly lay down my life in combat, rather than, in fear of defeat, surrender to the menaces of these most sinister men. It will then be for you, for the Americans, to preserve and to maintain the great heritage of the English-speaking peoples. It will be for you to think imperially, which means to think always of something higher and more vast than one’s own national interests.

Churchill reached a stirring peroration in which he envisaged the torch of liberty continuing to burn ‘untarnished and (I trust and hope) undismayed’. And then, as Nicolson noted laconically, discussion moved to the topic of the giant panda.
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Churchill’s injunction to the Americans to ‘think imperially’ was an echo of Joseph Chamberlain’s injunction to the British people thirty-five years earlier.
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Chamberlain made his remark during his crusade to integrate the British Empire as an economic bloc – a campaign that Churchill had opposed, to the point of leaving the Conservatives for the Liberals in order to combat it. He now gave his own construction of imperialism, which – doubtless with historic US anti-imperialism in mind – he defined simply as meaning to take responsibility in international affairs. That, though, was very different from his own past (and future) interpretations of the word. But where had his own ideas come from? His biographers, when they comment on such questions at all, tend to content themselves with generalizations such as ‘Churchill absorbed the spirit of imperialism with the air he breathed’,
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or observe that he accepted contemporary ideas of Anglo-Saxon superiority ‘unquestioningly’.
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It is possible to discuss his early influences with a little more precision than this. This chapter will explore how it was that Winston Churchill learnt to think imperially, a story that is more complex than is often assumed.

I

Churchill’s first public speech was made in defence of the Empire – the Empire Palace of Varieties in London’s Leicester Square. It was November 1894. He was a cadet at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and about to turn twenty. The theatre concerned was one of his favourite haunts, even though his beloved former nurse, Mrs Everest, had warned him against going there: ‘it is too awful to think of, it can only lead to wickedness and everything bad’.
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Morality campaigners shared her anxieties, and were now opposing the renewal of the Empire’s music and dancing licence. They alleged that prostitutes solicited there, and that the dancing on stage ‘was designed to excite impure thought and passion’.
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Regarded by the young Churchill as detestable prudes, the puritans were particularly exercised by the theatre’s Promenade, a space behind the dress circle in which men and women mingled freely and even drank alcohol. As a condition of renewing the licence, the London County Council insisted that no liquor be served in the auditorium, so the management erected canvas screens between the Promenade and the adjoining bars. The next Saturday, Churchill, on weekend leave, was there when the infuriated crowd ‘rushed upon these flimsy barricades and tore them to pieces’.
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Indeed, he afterwards boasted to his brother, ‘It was I who led the rioters’.
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He later recalled how, ‘Mounting on the débris and indeed partially emerging from it, I addressed the tumultuous crowd.’ He did not make worthy arguments about the traditions of British freedom but instead won the applause of the mob by appealing ‘directly to sentiment and even passion’.
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Then everyone spilled out into the night air, with the violent assistance of the theatre’s ‘chuckers out’.
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But the riot was to no avail: the barricades were soon built again in brick.

Churchill’s second speech, nearly three years later, was a rather more sober affair. It was to a Primrose League fête near Bath. The League was a national organization that aimed to marshal mass support for the Conservative Party. It was inclusive, insofar as working men (even if non-voters) and women could join, but also deeply hierarchical. (Churchill, who joined at the age of thirteen, achieved the rank of ‘knight’ two years later.)
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As he reminded the Bath gathering, the League’s mission was to teach the British people ‘the splendour of their Empire, the nature of their Constitution, and the importance of their fleet’. His speech was notable as his first attempt to draw attention to himself politically, in the hope of finding a Tory seat in Parliament. In terms of the imperial sentiments he expressed, it is interesting for two reasons. First, Churchill was aware that many people believed that the Empire, in what was Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee year, had already reached its apogee, and from now on could only decline. Second, he radiated confidence (as his audience would surely have expected) that Britain’s mission would continue unabated. To cheers from his audience, he declared: ‘Do not believe these croakers but give the lie to their dismal croaking by showing by our actions that the vigour and vitality of our race is unimpaired and that our determination is to uphold the Empire that we have inherited from our fathers as Englishmen’. In his view, the British would ‘continue to pursue that course marked out for us by an all-wise hand and carry out our mission of bearing peace, civilisation and good government to the uttermost ends of the earth’.
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Much had happened to Churchill in the interval between these two speeches. In January 1895 his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, died at the age of forty-five from a degenerative illness, possibly syphilis, his once-stellar political career having long since imploded. Then, having received an army commission – and following an adventurous trip to the United States and Cuba – the younger Churchill had been posted to India. There he had helped while away the tedium with an ambitious programme of self-education, trying to teach himself what he thought he had missed out on by not going to university. It is tempting to explain the contrast between the Leicester Square high-jinks and the high imperialism of the Bath meeting (which Churchill addressed while home on leave) as a symptom of these developments. In this interpretation, Churchill’s new-found seriousness and direct experience of the Empire merged with a determination to vindicate his father’s memory and at the same time achieve political fame in his own right. Conviction, reinforced by a wide reading of authors such as Edward Gibbon, dovetailed with a self-interested realization that a young man could draw attention to himself through daring exploits in the farther reaches of the British-ruled world. There is plenty of truth to be found in this view – which Churchill rather encouraged in his memoirs – but it is not the whole truth. Although he may not have been fully aware of it himself, Churchill’s imperial consciousness began to form long before the autodidact phase of his early twenties.

As an adult, Churchill wrote that he had taken his politics ‘almost unquestioningly’ from his father.
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This claim was perfectly sincere, but it cannot be accepted completely at face value, as an examination of Lord Randolph’s thought and career will show. He was born in 1849, the third son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough. He grew up to be an able but erratic youth, who could be genuinely charming but also witheringly scornful when (as often) he was displeased. He studied at Oxford University and was praised by his examiners for his knowledge of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
– and Winston Churchill later read Gibbon in part because he had been told of its influence on Lord Randolph.
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In 1873 Lord Randolph met and fell in love with Jennie Jerome, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a well-known New York businessman, but it took some time for the couple to overcome their parents’ opposition to their marriage. The wedding eventually took place in April 1874, a few months after Lord Randolph had been elected as Conservative MP for Woodstock – a position he owed largely to his father’s powerful local influence. A mere seven and a half months after the nuptials, Jennie gave birth to Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill at Blenheim Palace, the spectacularly grand Marlborough family seat. The announcement in
The Times
claimed, perhaps not wholly plausibly, that the birth was premature.
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