Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (36 page)

Churchill quickly established a phenomenal work-rate, although he was no slave to formality. One late-night visitor to the Admiralty found him walking about in his socks, smoking a big cigar and with a whisky and soda on his desk; he seemed a little drunk.
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As ever in need of money, he even found time – with the help of assistants – to labour on his
History of the English-Speaking Peoples
, although it was not completed until after the war. His political fortunes continued to rise, bolstered by strong performances on the radio and in the Commons. Harold Nicolson described how in one speech ‘he sounded every note from deep preoccupation to flippancy, from resolution to sheer boyishness. One could feel the spirits of the House rising with every word. [. . .] In those twenty minutes Churchill brought himself nearer the post of Prime Minister than he has ever been before.’
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I

Churchill’s preoccupation with the submarine menace brought Ireland firmly back into the field of his concern at the oubreak of war. The IRA was engaged in a bombing campaign on the British mainland. ‘If they throw bombs in London,’ he asked, ‘why should they not supply petrol to U-boats?’
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As Churchill had feared, moreover, De Valera’s government committed Éire – as the Free State was officially named in 1937 – to neutrality. It was, however, willing to provide covert cooperation to the British (and Éire also remained a rich source of recruits). But Churchill did not recognize Ireland’s right to remain neutral in the first place. Its status was ambiguous, the 1937 constitution failing to make clear whether or not it was a republic. On Churchill’s reading of the situation, Éire was technically committed by the King’s declaration of war. ‘It is not a Dominion’, he wrote. ‘They themselves repudiate this idea. It is certainly under the Crown. [. . .] Legally I believe they are at “at war but skulking”.’
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At the end of October he told the War Cabinet that Ireland ‘should be told clearly that she was at a parting of the ways, and it should be brought home to her what she stood to lose in being declared a foreign power’. If things ‘came to such a pass that Eire was expelled from the Commonwealth’, Britain should insist on regaining the so-called treaty ports. (These ports, Queens-town, Berehaven and Lough Swilly, had been reserved for Britain’s use in 1921 but had been returned to Éire, against Churchill’s urging, in 1938.) Churchill’s argument had no effect, however. Chamberlain pointed out that De Valera was probably right to claim that no Irish government could survive if it departed from neutrality, and seizure of the ports would be seen in the USA and India as ‘high-handed and unwarranted’.
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During a subsequent meeting with the secret services Churchill urged ‘that complete censorship should be imposed on Eire and when opposition was raised on the grounds that this might antagonise the Irish government, he said dramatically, “What is that to the sinking of one of our warships?” ’
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His table-thumping approach was not to everyone’s taste. Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for the Dominions, complained privately about Churchill’s wish to ‘drive Eire out of the Empire’. Eden, who had resigned as Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary in 1938, was a political ally of Churchill, but as Oliver Harvey, one of his confidants in the Foreign Office, recorded: ‘A.E. is beginning to doubt whether Churchill could ever be P.M. so bad is his judgement in such matters.’
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Nevertheless, Churchill’s outbursts must be kept in proportion, not least in relation to Eden’s own epic tantrums. In part, they were a way of venting emotion at a time of great stress, and he was usually persuaded to see reason. Security cooperation from Dublin and the failure to find evidence of U-boat activity on Ireland’s west coast in due course assuaged his fears.
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The IRA, which was the enemy of the Irish government as much as of the British, was ruthlessly suppressed by De Valera. However, Churchill did not buy the idea that Irish unification would end bitterness towards Britain and bring Éire into the war on the side of the Allies. At the start of the war he wrote, ‘They [the Irish] will not unite at the present time, and we cannot in any circumstances sell the loyalists of Northern Ireland.’
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According to Eden, ‘Winston’s attitude over India’ was ‘just as bad’ as his attitude to Ireland.
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One of Churchill’s decisions at the Admiralty casts interesting light on his approach to Indian issues. A few weeks into the war he wrote a note on ‘Employment of Indians or Colonial Natives in the Royal Navy’. He began with an apparently unambiguous statement: ‘There must be no discrimination on grounds of race or colour.’ Yet he continued, ‘In practice much inconvenience would arise if this theoretical equality had many examples.’ Cases should be judged on their merits – that is to say, ‘from the point of view of smooth administration’. He concluded: ‘I cannot see any objections to Indians serving on HM ships where they are qualified and needed, or if their virtues so deserve rising to be Admirals of the Fleet. But not too many of them please.’
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This final sentence plainly undermined his initial declaration, for if there was to be
no
discrimination how could the numbers be kept down? The ambivalence was in some ways more revealing than notorious remarks such as his description of the Indians as ‘the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans’.
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It perfectly encapsulated the double standard whereby nominal racial equality within the Empire was vitiated by the supposedly ‘practical’ considerations that would attend its full enforcement. Individuals’ qualifications in the end took second place to ‘smooth administration’, which too many promotions based on merit might disrupt. This was certainly not apartheid, but it was an official endorsement of the glass ceiling. Not surprisingly, no Indian rose to become an Admiral of the Fleet in the Royal Navy during World War II.

When it came to Indian politics, the focus of Eden’s comment, Churchill did not trouble to pay lip service to progressive attitudes. Lord Linlithgow, the conservative, stiff-mannered Viceroy, had with tactless constitutional correctness simply announced that India was at war, without consulting its political leaders or the governments of the provinces. The nationalists were divided. Gandhi, of course, opposed violence but was prepared to give moral support to the British unconditionally. The official Congress leadership, by contrast, was potentially prepared to support the war effort if its conditions on the future of India were met. They were not to be satisfied, though, with Linlithgow’s reiteration, coupled with other assurances, that Dominion status remained the British aim. The Congress provincial governments resigned, and it was in due course resolved that Britain was ‘carrying on the war fundamentally for Imperialist ends’, to which Congress would not become a party.
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M. A. Jinnah’s Muslim League supported the war, however. Jinnah told Linlithgow that ‘he was extremely doubtful as to the capacity of India and Indians to look after themselves. [. . .] If the British should by any chance be beaten in the war and driven out of India, India would break into a hundred pieces in three months and lie open, in addition, to external invasion.’
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The Marquess of Zetland, the Secretary of State for India, pressed Linlithgow to put forward new constitutional proposals to win over Congress. When the issue was discussed by ministers in February 1940, Churchill asked: ‘Was it fair that Parliament and the War Cabinet should have to involve themselves in these complications in the midst of a great war?’ Linlithgow would doubtless have to see Gandhi, he said, but should not go beyond previous statements. Zetland and Linlithgow had told Gandhi that communal divisions must be settled before Dominion status could proceed. However:

The First Lord said that he did not share the anxiety to encourage and promote unity between the Hindu and Moslem communities. Such unity was, in fact, almost out of the realm of practical politics, while, if it were to be brought about, the immediate result would be that the united communities would join in showing us the door. He regarded the Hindu–Moslem feud as a bulwark of British rule in India.
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The traditional justification for the Raj was that only British rule could keep the different communities from each other’s throats. Churchill was now openly arguing that they had to be kept at each other’s throats in order to sustain British rule.

On 24 March, at its annual meeting in Lahore, the Muslim League took a momentous step. It passed a resolution declaring that ‘the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the north-western and eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute “independent states” ’.
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Perhaps, in making this demand for partition, Jinnah was simply trying to acquire a bargaining chip in order to improve the position of Muslims within a future united India; but it took on a life of its own, and the stage was set for the eventual creation of Pakistan. Zetland was disturbed by the Lahore resolution, but Churchill was sanguine. ‘His view was that the awakening of a new spirit of self-reliance and self-assertiveness on the part of the different communities, of which the Moslem League’s resolution was a sign, constituted a hopeful development.’
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According to the Chancellor, Sir John Simon, who was himself something of a hardliner, ‘Winston rejoiced in the quarrel which had broken out afresh between Hindus and Moslems, said he hoped it would remain bitter and bloody and was glad that we had made the suggestion of Dominion status which was acting as a cat among the pigeons.’
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The Cabinet deferred any major step for the time being.

II

The developing war soon pushed imperial issues into the background. On 8 April the Germans invaded Norway and Denmark. The Cabinet, after some dithering, sent troops for operations at Narvik and Trondheim. These proved to be a fiasco but Churchill, who had by now been appointed chairman of the government’s Military Co-ordination Committee, successfully escaped the blame. In an unpublished draft of his memoirs he confessed ‘it was a marvel – I really do not know how – [that] I survived and maintained my position in public esteem while all the blame was thrown on poor Mr Chamberlain’.
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In the Commons debate that followed the disaster, Leo Amery – who had not been included in the government at the outbreak of war – delivered one of the most dramatic lines against the Prime Minister. Sensing he had the mood of the House with him, he ‘cast prudence to the winds’ and quoted Oliver Cromwell’s words in dismissal of the Long Parliament: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’
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In the vote that followed the government’s majority was slashed to 81, and a reconstruction of the government appeared inevitable. Chamberlain hoped to remain Prime Minister, though, and it was only when it became clear that the Labour Party would not serve under him as part of a coalition that he determined to resign. The two plausible successors – as the only candidates likely to be acceptable to Labour – were Churchill and Halifax. The latter was Chamberlain’s favoured candidate, but he ruled himself out, not least on the grounds that it would be hard for him to lead the government from the House of Lords. On 10 May, as Germany launched its invasion of Belgium and Holland, the King asked Churchill to form a government. In a justly famous passage he recalled how, on his first night as Prime Minister, he went to bed at 3 a.m. with a deep sense of relief: ‘I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’
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Trial it was, for he was quickly forced to take some appallingly tough strategic decisions, having to balance French requests for more fighter squadrons against the danger, as he put it, of denuding ‘still further the heart of the Empire’.
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Churchill created a broad-based administration stretching, as he boasted, ‘from Lord Lloyd of Dolobran on the Right to Miss [Ellen] Wilkinson on the Left’.
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Chamberlain remained in the Cabinet and continued to lead the Conservative Party until his resignation through terminal ill-health in the autumn. Lloyd became Colonial Secretary, although he too would be dead within a year. Amery became Secretary of State for India and Burma, and Lord Caldecote Dominions Secretary, although he was quickly replaced by Lord Cranborne. Reaction to the new government was generally positive but not universally so. The Labour Party conference, which was meeting at Bournemouth, debated whether or not to endorse its leaders’ decision to join the coalition. Emrys Hughes, a future MP who was to publish a sceptical biography of Churchill after the war, spoke in opposition. ‘Churchill would tell you honestly that he does stand for imperialism, which this Conference is against. [. . .] He is out for an imperialist policy, and so is Lord Lloyd, who is now in the Government.’ Hughes was followed by J. J. Toole of the Bury Labour Party, who boldly declared, to cries of protest, that Churchill was ‘the one man who has been right’ about Hitlerism. He added: ‘If it is an imperialist war, it is Hitler’s imperialist war.’
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The conference voted overwhelmingly to join the coalition.