Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (57 page)

In the 1930s, it almost seems that we are confronted with two Churchills: the far-sighted one who boldly warned against the rise of Germany, and the reactionary one who inveighed against constitutional progress. In his own mind there was no contradiction. In that undelivered 1943 speech he observed: ‘For ten years before the war, I warned our British people against Hitler and Gandhi.’
⁵²
Yet few modern commentators will be prepared to grant the equivalence. It is certainly possible to pluck out meritorious aspects of Churchill’s critique of the government’s Indian policy, such as his statements of concern for the Untouchables. One can even point to the massacres that attended independence and partition as a kind of vindication of his predictions of chaos. However, his belief that India was unsuited to democracy was to be conclusively disproved. (Admittedly, Pakistan’s relationship with democracy has been troubled, but it seems highly doubtful that its problems could have been avoided if British rule had been prolonged.) If his continued rearguard action against reform during World War II is not much to his credit, this pales almost into insignificance next to his failure to respond adequately to the Bengal famine. Here he displayed genuine callousness, and short-sightedness to boot. This terrible episode must, however, be viewed alongside the many positive aspects of his war leadership, not least his capacity to inspire peoples throughout the Empire and beyond in the struggle with fascist tyranny.

Even during the war itself, Churchill was forced to face the eclipse of Britain’s role as the superpowers rose. During his opposition years his attacks on ‘scuttle’ in its various forms may have been good politics but they do not look convincing in retrospect. Back in office after 1951 he found that the Empire’s atrophy could not be easily reversed. And some of the positions he adopted showed a retreat from diehardism, notably his (comparatively) conciliatory stance over Mau Mau. It is to his credit too that, in spite of his private encouragement of the Tory rebels, he finally bit the bullet and approved the treaty with Egypt. His efforts to foster the ‘special relationship’ with the United States are harder to judge. He deluded himself if he thought that this could ever approach an equal partnership. But if so it was a less damaging delusion than that which was to be suffered by Eden during the Suez crisis – the idea that bold unilateral action could be the means to reverse the tides of history and restore the British Empire to its place in the sun. Arguably, the achievement of Churchill’s final years was to cover a necessary and pragmatic retreat from Empire with a mixture of ‘no surrender’ bluster and sentimental appeal to Anglo-American unity.

However, his most significant achievement of all was something broader. ‘Change was in the air in the 1940s’, recalled Nelson Mandela in his memoirs. ‘The Atlantic Charter of 1941, signed by Roosevelt and Churchill, reaffirmed faith in the dignity of each human being and propagated a host of democratic principles.’ Although some in the West viewed the Charter as hollow rhetoric, he wrote, this was not true of ‘those of us in Africa’. Rather, he and his ANC colleagues were inspired by it: ‘We hoped that the government and ordinary South Africans would see that the principles they were fighting for were the same ones we were advocating at home.’
⁵³
This, of course, was an unintended consequence: Churchill did not mean the Charter to be interpreted as a promise of imperial liberation. But by putting his name to the crucial pledge of national self-determination, he helped unlock the forces of anti-colonialism. The spirit of freedom, which he articulated so eloquently on so many occasions, escaped the bounds he would have set upon it. The decline of Churchill’s Empire, much as the man himself regretted it, can be seen in part as a tribute to the power of beliefs that he himself prized dearly.

Notes

Abbreviations used in the notes (see bibliography for further details):

Unless otherwise stated, all Churchill’s speeches, statements and radio broadcasts cited are from
Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963
, ed. Robert Rhodes James.

PROLOGUE

1
The account here is taken from Michael Blundell’s
A Love Affair with the Sun: A Memoir of Seventy Years in Kenya
, Kenway Publications, Nairobi, 1994, pp. 108–10, with additional details from his earlier book,
So Rough a Wind
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1964, pp. 183–5. For a critique of Blundell’s liberal pretensions, see David Anderson,
Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2005, p. 54.

2
‘Arrest & Impeachment of Mr Churchill’,
Manchester Guardian
, 27 Sept. 1920.

3
Lord Winterton to Leo Amery, 11 June 1953, Leo Amery Papers, 2/1/49.

4
Ronald Hyam judges that Churchill ‘was not all that interested in the empire, apart from its rhetorical potentialities, and as distinct from what he regarded as the larger and more portentous issues of international relations’:
Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968
, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 172.

5
John Barnes and David Nicholson (eds.),
The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries, 1929–1945
, Hutchinson, London, 1988, p. 993 (entry for 4 Aug. 1944).

6
Mark Pottle (ed.),
Daring to Hope: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1946–1969
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2000, p. 137 (entry for 29–30 May 1954).

7
WSC, minute of 23 Jan. 1906, NA, CO 446/52/2224, quoted in Ronald Hyam,
Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office, 1905–1908: The Watershed of the Empire-Commonwealth
, Macmillan, London, 1968, p. 208.

8
‘Conference of Prime Ministers and representatives of the United Kingdom, the Dominions and India, held in June, July and August, 1921’, Cmd. 1474, August 1921, p. 39. It should be noted that ‘Secretary of State for the Colonies’ was the formal title of the office. In this book, however, the simpler term ‘Colonial Secretary’ is used frequently. Similarly, the Secretary of State for the Dominions (a post which existed between 1925 and 1947) is often referred to here as the ‘Dominions Secretary’. These usages, although informal, were regularly deployed by contemporaries.

9
Speech of N. M. Samarth, Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. II, no. 31, 9 Feb. 1922, p. 2319, copy in NA, CO 533/287.

10
Ashley Jackson makes this point persuasively. It is, however, more common to assert that the Empire reached its maximum extent during the interwar years:
The British Empire and the Second World War
, Hambledon Continuum, London, 2006, p. 5.

11
Technically, South Africa after 1910 was a ‘union’ and Southern Ireland from 1922–49 was a ‘free state’, but in effect both had Dominion status.

12
For more detailed explanations see Alan Palmer,
Dictionary of the British Empire and Commonwealth
, John Murray, London, 1996, pp. 87, 109, 172.

13
See, for example, Peter Clarke,
The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire
, Allen Lane, London, 2007, p. 506.

14
WSC,
Lord Randolph Churchill
[originally published by Macmillan, London, 1906], CW, vol. VI, p. 487.

15
J. E. C. Welldon, ‘The Imperial Aspects of Education’ (paper delivered on 14 May 1895),
Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute
, 26 (1894–5), pp. 322–39, at 324–5.

16
Speech of 21 Feb. 1942,
Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru
, vol. XII, B. R. Publishing Corporation, Delhi, 1979, p. 134.

17
This can be seen especially on the left, for example Clive Ponting,
Churchill
, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1994, p. 23. For a right-wing critic’s take on Churchill’s Victorian mindset, see John Charmley,
Churchill, The End of Glory: A Political Biography
, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1993, p. 16.

18
John Colville, preface to WSC,
The River War
, Sceptre, London, 1987 (first published 1899), pp. 9–10.

19
Roland Quinault, ‘Churchill and Black Africa’,
History Today
, June 2005, pp. 31–6, at 36.

20
W. L. Mackenzie King diary, 5 March 1932.

21
Mark Pottle (ed.),
Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1914–1945
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, p. 252 (entry for 6 Jan. 1943).

22
Kirk Emmert’s
Winston S. Churchill on Empire
(Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC, 1989) does not offer such a survey but rather attempts to outline Churchill’s views on Empire ‘as he would have had he set out his views systematically’ (p. xvii). Raymond A. Callahan’s
Churchill: Retreat from Empire
(Scholarly Resources Inc., Wilmington, DE, 1984) deals only with the years 1940–55.

23
In the former category, Ronald Hyam, ‘Churchill and the British Empire’, in Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.),
Churchill
, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993, pp. 167–85, an extended version of which will be published in Hyam’s forthcoming book
Understanding the British Empire
, and Piers Brendon, ‘Churchill and Empire’, unpublished lecture. (I am grateful to Dr Brendon for providing me with a copy of his text.) Of the numerous books in the latter category, special mention must be made here of Hyam’s magisterial
Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office, 1905–1908
. He did consider writing a book on Churchill and the Empire more broadly but was discouraged by the comparative paucity of archival records for Churchill’s second Colonial Office period in 1921–2: letter to the author, 25 Oct. 2008.

24
Norman Rose,
Churchill: An Unruly Life
, Simon & Schuster, London, 1994, p. 40.

25
‘Mr Churchill – Imperialist!’ (review of
My African Journey
),
Observer
, 6 Dec. 1908.

26
See ‘Men and Things’,
Palestine Post
, 10 Oct. 1948.