Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (55 page)

EPILOGUE

In retirement, Churchill told his cousin, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, that his life’s work had ‘all been for nothing. [. . .] The Empire
I
believed in has gone.’
¹
This pessimism was surely in part the product of the depression induced by his departure from office and worsening health, but his gloom about British decline was not wholly misplaced. Even though his compatriots were benefiting from low inflation, full employment and increasing living standards, affluence at home seemed to some to be poor compensation for the concurrent collapse in influence abroad. That collapse, if inevitable in the long run, was dramatically accelerated by the actions of Anthony Eden. Churchill had expressed his own private doubts about his successor on his last night in Downing Street. Sitting on his bed after his dinner with the Queen, still wearing his knee-breeches and decorations, he was silent for several minutes before suddenly exclaiming, ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it.’
²

At first it seemed that this prediction would be falsified. Eden seemed glamorous, even dynamic, and won a decisive general election victory in May 1955, just weeks after taking over. Soon, however, he appeared to be drifting. One
Daily Telegraph
journalist lamented the absence of the ‘smack of firm government’.
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Living in the shadow of Churchill’s myth, Eden was greatly irritated by such comments, which does much to explain his spectacular over-reaction to the events of July 1956. He also, of course, had to contend with the right-wing Suez Group of backbenchers that Churchill had previously encouraged behind the scenes. His desperation to avoid any accusation of weakness conditioned his response to Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, which was owned by an Anglo-French company. This act – highly provocative but not illegal – came just weeks after the withdrawal of British troops under the 1954 treaty that Eden himself had negotiated. His determination to undo the humiliation by facing down Nasser was to lead him to disaster.

The government began planning military action while maintaining a façade of negotiation. Eden kept Churchill informed of developments. ‘I am pleased with the policy being pursued about Suez’, the latter told Clementine in early August, ‘We are going to do our utmost.’
⁴
On the 5th of that month the hawkish Harold Macmillan, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, visited Churchill at Chartwell. When Churchill asked his opinion of the government’s existing military plan, Macmillan said that it was not bold enough. As he recorded in his diary, he suggested involving Israel: ‘Surely, if we landed we must seek out the Egyptian forces; destroy them; and bring down Nasser’s Govt. Churchill seemed to agree with all this’.
⁵
Indeed, Churchill was so excited that the next day he rushed off to see Eden at Chequers. Eden’s wife Clarissa – who was also Churchill’s niece – recalled, ‘It turned out he had dictated “a plan” on the road and the secretary had miraculously managed to type it as they were going along.’ She was not impressed: ‘Naturally Anthony had covered everything Winston mentioned in his plan – which turned out to be Harold’s anyway.’
⁶
The following day the Prime Minister was in a bad mood, and Macmillan concluded ‘that the source of the trouble was the Churchill visit. Eden no doubt thought that I was conspiring with C against him.’
⁷
Even though Eden himself wanted to overthrow Nasser, he resented anyone else appearing to outdo his fervour. His longstanding resentment of Churchill was undoubtedly mixed up in this.

The Americans were not keen on Nasser, but neither were they eager to see him deposed by force. Eisenhower, running for re-election, wanted to present himself as the man who had restored peace to the world. Eden therefore made a show of exhausting the diplomatic options, but in October he decided to act behind the backs of the Americans. A secret pact with France and Israel committed the latter to invade Egypt. Anglo-French forces would then move in, under the guise of ‘separating the combatants’. Coming just days before November’s presidential election, the invasion was met with hostility in Washington. One of Eisenhower’s first reactions was to wonder ‘if the hand of Churchill’ was behind the operation, ‘inasmuch as this action is in the mid-Victorian style’.
⁸
In fact, Churchill would never have come up with a plan that involved deceiving the US government on such a scale. He was supportive of Eden in public, releasing a statement which spoke of his confidence that ‘our American friends will come to realize that, not for the first time, we have acted independently for the common good’.
⁹
However, American opposition quickly combined with a weakening British financial position to bring the invasion to an abrupt halt. Eden’s resignation, on grounds of ill-health, followed in January 1957. In private, Churchill said he thought the whole Suez operation had been appallingly badly conceived and carried out. Asked whether, had he still been Prime Minister, he would have done what Eden had, he replied, ‘I never would have dared; and if I had dared, I would certainly never have dared stop.’
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His friend Violet Bonham Carter recorded: ‘I think he is very sad about everything poor darling – & though he began by being critical & fully realizing the Govt’s blunder, he now cannot endure or admit defeat
for this country
’.
¹¹

‘After Suez’, according to Clementine Churchill, her husband ‘specifically set out to mend fences with the United States’, through visits, public statements, and discussions with key American figures.
¹²
His faith in Anglo-American unity was undimmed, and his four-volume
History of the English-Speaking Peoples
, published between April 1956 and March 1958, formed a testament to it. He had originally conceived it in the 1930s and, as he explained then, ‘What is common to the history of the whole race will form the staple of a narrative comprising their origin, their rise, their quarrels and their comradeship, which I trust may long continue.’
¹³
After it had been put on ice during the war, work began again in 1953. Much of it was written by ghost-writers.
¹⁴
In 1963 President Kennedy awarded Churchill honorary citizenship of the United States. In his statement of thanks – probably drafted for him – the former prime minister rejected ‘the view that Britain and the Commonwealth should now be relegated to a tame and minor role in the world’. He added: ‘Mr President, your action illuminates the theme of unity of the English-speaking peoples, to which I have devoted a large part of my life.’
¹⁵
It is worth comparing these comments with a remark he made in a letter to his brother over sixty years earlier, in which he spoke of ‘this great Empire of ours – to the maintenance of which I shall devote my life’.
¹⁶
Naturally, he viewed maintenance of the Empire and the unity of the English-speaking peoples as wholly compatible, indeed mutually reinforcing. But it is interesting to note how, as the Empire declined, the theme of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ eclipsed it in his public rhetoric at the last.

Eden was replaced as Prime Minister by Harold Macmillan, whose government’s approach to the Empire was unromantic: if the costs of holding a particular territory outweighed the benefits it should be dispensed with. After Macmillan secured a third term for the Tories in 1959, he appointed Iain Macleod as Colonial Secretary. The differences between the Macleod era and what had gone before can be overstated but, even if he was simply bringing earlier policies to their logical conclusion, he did so at a greatly accelerated rate. By the time Macmillan moved him in 1961, appointing him as Conservative Party Chairman and Leader of the House of Commons, the key decisions had already been taken. Nigeria gained independence in 1960; Tanganyika, Kenya, Nyasaland (as Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia) soon followed in its wake. Even the Prime Minister himself may have been alarmed at what he had unleashed. Nevertheless, Macmillan made his own contribution to the spirit of reform with his famous speech to the South African parliament in 1960, making clear the British government’s disapproval of apartheid. ‘The wind of change is blowing through the continent’, he said. ‘Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.’
¹⁷
Churchill saw this as needless antagonism of the South African government. ‘Why go and pick a quarrel with these chaps’, he asked.
¹⁸
Violet Bonham Carter noted that ‘he is alas very anti-black & didn’t like Harold’s Cape Town speech’.
¹⁹
He was also sceptical about the government’s 1961 decision to apply for membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), a course of action seen by many as a betrayal of Britain’s Commonwealth links. Robert Menzies wrote to him expressing his fears regarding this, and also criticizing what he saw as the dictatorial tendencies of Kwame Nkrumah as President of Ghana. Churchill sent what was, at this stage in his life, an unusually long reply, agreeing completely with Menzies. He thought Ghana would leave the Commonwealth, although he was ‘not convinced that would be a great loss’.
²⁰
When Montgomery visited Churchill in hospital after a fall in 1962, he asked him if he favoured Britain joining the EEC. He received a straight ‘No’. However, when Monty told the press of this, Churchill’s secretary put out a statement reiterating Churchill’s formal position, which was supportive of the government, while emphasizing that Britain’s Commonwealth role should not be put in jeopardy. Britain should apply, because the negotiation process was the only way of finding out whether the conditions of membership were acceptable.
²¹

Another episode of Churchill’s retirement is worth noting, if only for its oddity.
²²
This was his contribution to the 1957 motion picture
Something of Value
. The movie was adapted from the Robert Ruark’s book of the same name, and told the story of a white settler (Rock Hudson) and his one-time boyhood friend (Sidney Poitier), a Kikuyu who becomes involved in Mau Mau. When the director, Richard Brooks, visited Kenya to scout for locations an African lawyer he met introduced him to the anthropologist Louis Leakey. Leakey in turn took him to meet the imprisoned Jomo Kenyatta, later independent Kenya’s first President. Between them they persuaded Brooks that Ruark’s novel, which was sympathetic to the white settler viewpoint, did not portray the situation in the country accurately, and that he should change his script. ‘Leakey and Kenyatta said that unless the Europeans could get along with the Africans, the Europeans would have to get out of Africa’, recollected Brooks. ‘Leakey told me that might be difficult to believe, so he gave me a book written by Winston Churchill which said the same thing.’ Although Brooks’s interpretation of it might seem hard to recognize, the book was
My African Journey
. Deeply impressed by what he read, the director spent months trying to get hold of Churchill on the telephone. When at last he did so, he overcame the former Prime Minister’s initial scepticism and persuaded him to provide a short, filmed prologue.
²³
‘Forty-nine years ago I visited Africa’, Churchill said in this. ‘In my book
My African Journey
I wrote “the problems of East Africa are the problems of the world”. This was true in nineteen-hundred and seven. It is true today.’ However, this introductory monologue went down badly with test audiences. As Brooks recalled, a difficult meeting with MGM studio executives followed:

One of them said, ‘Before we start talking about what we think is rotten about this movie, I want to tell you something right now. You have got to get rid of this fucking Englishman. . .’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? Who?’ He said, ‘The guy at the beginning of the movie! That’s who! Out! Out of the picture!’ I said, ‘Are you talking about Sir Winston Churchill?’ He said, ‘Whoever the fuck he is, I don’t care!’ I said, ‘He’s the greatest statesman in the world.’ He said, ‘I don’t care. Out of the movie!’
²⁴

And so the Greatest Living Englishman ended up on the cutting-room floor.
²⁵

In 1964, not long before his ninetieth birthday, Churchill finally left the House of Commons. Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won the general election that took place that October and thereafter continued the decolonization agenda. On 10 January 1965 Churchill suffered a massive stroke, and lingered on for two weeks before passing away on the anniversary of Lord Randolph’s death. Around the world there was an outpouring of emotion. As on his retirement, there were dissenting voices. A few days before he died, the Iraqi newspaper
Al-Thawra al-Arabiyya
printed an unpleasant cartoon captioned ‘Churchill Struggles with Death’. It showed Churchill sitting with his ‘daughter’ Israel on his knee, demanding to take her with him. ‘Imperialism’, in the guise of Uncle Sam and John Bull, insists that he leave her behind ‘so that we may torment the Arabs with her’.
²⁶
Eamon De Valera, now holding the largely ceremonial post of President of Ireland, acknowledged that ‘Sir Winston Churchill was a great Englishman, one of the greatest of his time’. But he added that ‘we in Ireland had to regard Sir Winston over a long period as a dangerous adversary. The fact that he did not violate our neutrality during the war must always stand to his credit, though he indicated that, in certain circumstances, he was prepared to do so.’
²⁷
Neither he nor the Taoiseach, Seán Lemass, attended Churchill’s funeral, and the Minister of External Affairs was sent instead.
²⁸
The ambivalent Irish attitude was nicely captured by University College Dublin’s Literary and Historical Society, which resolved to send a telegram of sympathy to Clementine Churchill ‘by 59 votes to 23, with nine abstentions’.
²⁹
There was also a hint of such ambivalence to be found in India. President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan talked of the Indian people’s ‘profound sorrow’, but former minister Krishna Menon saw fit to recall Churchill’s ‘belligerent days against Indian nationalism’. (Nehru had died the previous year but had stated that he would attend Churchill’s funeral were he to outlive his old adversary and fellow Harrovian.) African reaction was somewhat less equivocal. Nkrumah of Ghana spoke of his ‘deep regret’.
³⁰
Michael Okpara was one of several leading Nigerian politicians who paid tribute: ‘He said Sir Winston’s qualities were admired by all African nationalists who could not agree with him on the question of their complete freedom.’
³¹