The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (148 page)

Churchill’s departure left the shadow chancellorship vacant. To fill the void, Baldwin appointed Neville Chamberlain.

C
hurchill’s parliamentary career had come to resemble the Greek legend of Sisyphus, who was condemned to toil up a steep hill pushing a huge stone which, just before he reached the top, always rolled back to the bottom. Twice he had been regarded as England’s next prime minister, first as a Liberal, then as a Conservative. Now he was once more cut off from all inner political councils. But during those first months in the wilderness he felt unfettered, exhilarated, free to loose verbal thunderbolts whenever so moved. Young MPs who thought they had heard Churchillian philippics at their most venomous now learned otherwise. When Gandhi arrived in Delhi to meet Irwin, Winston thundered: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.” And even as die-hard back-benchers howled with appreciative laughter, they were shocked at the cruel attack on MacDonald, the titular prime minister, who was permitting Baldwin to run his government. Winston told the House: “I spoke the other day, after he had been defeated in an important division, about his wonderful skill in falling without hurting himself. He falls, but he comes up again smiling, a little dishevelled but still smiling.” Then, staring at MacDonald across the well, he continued: “I remember when I was a child being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder.’ My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”
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Epping staunchly supported its member. His constituents, he wrote Clementine, were “loving, ardent, and unanimous.” Indeed, he believed there was “no doubt that the whole spirit of the Conservative party is with me, and that much of their dissatisfaction with S.B. turns itself into favour with me.” This was no illusion; that same week the party’s principal agent wrote Neville Chamberlain: “Many of our supporters are worried about the question of India. They lean much more towards the views of Mr Churchill than to those expressed by Mr Baldwin in the House of Commons.” Nevertheless, when a Gandhi-Irwin pact was signed in early March—the Mahatma agreed to call off all
satyãgraha
and attend the round-table conference in London to discuss India’s future—Baldwin endorsed it. He opened the House debate on March 12 and was followed by Wedgwood Benn, who accused Winston of advocating a policy of “the lathi, the bayonet, the machine-gun and artillery.” Churchill reminded the House of his speech in the Dyer debate and his repeated opposition to “brutal force in India,” and pointed out that most of the Indians who had died over the past year had been killed, not by British troops, but in “religious fights” between Moslems and Hindus. It was all true. Yet the feeling persisted that he was scheming for power. Leo Amery wrote in his diary that upon leaving Parliament he had “heard Winston haranguing a press correspondent in the Lobby to the effect that he was not going to let India be betrayed without telling England all about it. I am afraid we are in for some difficulties over the India business. Winston has chosen his moment and his excuse for separating with the Party very adroitly.”
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He enjoyed frequent successes. At his urging Lord Lloyd agreed to challenge Baldwin in the party’s India Committee, and at one point Lloyd mustered a majority of diehards against the round table. “Winston has done a good deal to corrupt them,” Dawson wrote Irwin. Churchill’s eloquent plea for the Untouchables was particularly effective. (“A multitude as big as a nation, men, women and children deprived of hope and of the status of humanity. Their plight is worse than that of slaves, because they have been taught to consent not only to a physical but to a psychic servitude and prostration.”) The
Daily Mail
and the
Daily Express
provided him with such full coverage that Baldwin, like virtually all leaders stung by a free press, protested. “What the proprietorship of the papers is aiming at,” he charged, “is power and power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot.” At the Albert Hall, Tory back-benchers heard Churchill describe how dissent was being suppressed by the alliance of political chieftains now sharing the same nest. Baldwin had “decided that we are to work with the Socialists, and that we must make our action conform with theirs. We therefore have against us at the present time the official machinery of all the three great parties in the State. We meet under a ban. Every Member of Parliament or Peer who comes here must face the displeasure of the party Whips.” In the House, despite jeers, hostile interruptions, and outbursts, he roared until he was heard: “By your actions you have produced misery such as India has not seen for half a century. You have poisoned relations between the Mohammedans and the Hindus.” Then he flourished photographs of Indian corpses mutilated in the communal killings, pictures taken on the spot which were, he cried, “so revolting that no paper would be able to publish them.” All spring and throughout the summer he kept up his drumfire, and in the
Daily Mail
of September 7, when Gandhi was on his way to London—no other Indian politician accompanied him; he alone would speak for India’s 350 million—Churchill warned that the round table would lead to “nothing but further surrenders of British authority.” Without the “guidance and control” of the Raj, he wrote, such “pure savagery” as the Cawnpore killings would be repeated all over the sub-continent, an inevitable consequence of unchecked Hinduism and its “whole apparatus,” as represented at Benares on the Ganges, “with its palaces and temples, its shrines and its burning ghats, its priests and ascetics, its mysterious practices and multiform ritual… unchanged through the centuries, untouched by the West.”
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This was Churchill at his most effective. His prose soared. His commitment was total. At that time, on that issue, he was speaking for most Englishmen. And yet…

It was all as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The public was distracted by the growing financial crisis. The House had wearied of India. Lloyd George had to enter the hospital for a major operation; Churchill, ostracized, left for Chartwell. Britain therefore was deprived of the two authentic geniuses in its public life; “as we have said several times in the last few days,” Hoare wrote Neville Chamberlain on August 31, “we have had some great good luck in the absence of Winston and L.G.” Thus Baldwin and MacDonald were free to pursue their separate grails: business as usual for Baldwin; disarmament for MacDonald. Winston returned and spent six months trying to pry them apart, but Baldwin ignored him, attending the round-table talks and accepting Labour’s lead in the conferences with Gandhi, while MacDonald—who never forgave him for the Boneless Wonder gibe—lost his poise but once. Baited by Brendan Bracken, who was quoting Churchill, the prime minister glared at Bracken and shouted, “You swine!”—an indiscretion which, Dawson being away for the time, appeared in
The Times,
to Winston’s delight. Some senior Tories worried about their restless back-benchers. Sir Malcolm Hailey wrote of the round-table discussion that he was “beginning to feel” that Baldwin “may not have been quite correct in believing that he could carry the whole of the Conservative Party in any decision at which he might arrive.” He concluded, however, that “the general block” of Tory MPs were likelier to follow the leader than be “swayed by the very extreme views of Winston Churchill.” Seeing Winston isolated, others were reluctant to join him in Coventry. Churchill, their elders told them, was a rogue elephant, an opportunist; his pleas for Indian minorities, his support of Indian self-government on the local level, and his prediction of a bloodbath should the Raj leave were dismissed as wily diversions or hyperbole. He wrote Boothby: “Politics are very interesting. My late colleagues are more interested in doing me in than in any trifling questions connected with India or tariffs.”
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They were careful not to accost him in the House, where he was at his most dangerous. After one of his most effective speeches, Wedgwood Benn completely ignored his arguments and evasively replied that although Winston had “entered the Irish Conference with a dripping sword, he emerged with a dripping pen, and I am not without hope that even here, as he did in the Irish case, he will come in this matter to a better judgment.” Baldwin blunted his thrusts with sweeping generalizations. Ignoring the issue of Indian independence, he said that it was England’s aim to introduce “self-governing institutions” to the subcontinent “with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible Government in India as an integral part of the British Empire”—an Empire which, although he did not say so, the Statute of Westminster, not to mention future events, would eventually dismantle. He said: “We have impregnated India ourselves with Western ideas, and, for good or ill, we are reaping the fruits of our own work.” But only a fraction of the subcontinent’s population had been exposed to Western thought, and it was this elite which would rule India when the Raj pulled out.
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Baldwin thought the House should agree “to keep India out of party politics.” It had been in party politics for three centuries; if Parliament couldn’t determine the future of the Raj, who should? He was “firmly convinced” that such articles as Churchill’s pieces in the
Daily Mail
“will do more to lose India for the British Empire, will do more to cause a revolutionary spirit, than anything that can be done in any way by anyone else.” Even though “the rank and file refuse to face facts,” he said, “the leader has to look at them, and he has to warn his people.” It was “the supreme duty of a political figure to tell the people of the country the truth, because truth is greater than tactics.” The question which stumped Pontius Pilate held no mysteries for Stanley Baldwin, and in his gentlest, most civil manner he advised his colleagues to keep their opinions in this matter to themselves and leave all decisions to him, the prime minister, and the secretary of state for India.
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Churchill entering the political wilderness over the India issue

But Churchill had the bone in his teeth, and wouldn’t yield it until events wrenched it from him. Intricate efforts to resolve the Indian question continued on what he called their “downward slurge,” ending in the Government of India Act of 1935, the longest single piece of legislation ever to emerge from the House of Commons—“a gigantic split,” said Churchill, “of jumbled crochet work.” He had fought it for three years in what was probably the most brilliant parliamentary performance of his life. He lost, but so did everyone else; the act’s ultimate objective, an all-India federation which would weave together all the provinces and states on the subcontinent, was rejected by the congress, the Moslems, and the Indian princes. Nevertheless, it was a long step toward dissolution of the Raj. British India was destined to vanish in Winston’s own lifetime. A harbinger was the welcome England extended to Gandhi when he arrived in the fall of 1931, clad only in his homespun shawl and swaddling dhoti, a long loincloth worn by Indian men at home but never, until now, seen in Britain. Had the phrase Radical Chic existed then, it would have described the Mahatma’s reception. He planted trees, gave unsolicited advice on a thousand topics, was extolled by Anglican clergymen, entered the goat which supplied his milk in an English dairy show and was awarded first place, had lunch with Lady Astor, and was invited to tea with the King and Queen. Everyone of consequence clamored to meet Gandhi, with one exception. Churchill refused to see him. Winston was roundly criticized for this, though he had company outside Britain. On December 13 the Mahatma called at the Vatican for an audience with the pope and was turned away. The reason, he was told, was his “inadequate clothing.”
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