*
Busy though the domestic scene was, politically the summer was even more demanding. The Imperial Conference opened in London on Monday 20 June and lasted six weeks until early August. The word ‘conference’ is misleading. In reality it consisted of a series of closed meetings at 10 Downing Street between Lloyd George and British ministers and officials on the one hand, and the Dominion prime ministers on the other: William (‘Billy’) Hughes of Australia; Arthur Meighen of Canada; William Massey of New Zealand; Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa; and, representing India in a somewhat anomalous position, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, a member of the Council of State of India. Interspersed were several meetings of the Imperial Defence Committee for a discussion of major strategic issues.
As Colonial Secretary, Churchill might have been expected to act as major domo. But Lloyd George was determined to set the course for Britain’s place in the post-war world himself and chaired all the sessions. Churchill added this to his growing list of grievances against his old rival. Lloyd George, he complained to the Daily Mail’s editor Thomas Marlowe over lunch one day, was stealing the limelight. He was, so Marlowe told his newspaper’s owner Lord Northcliffe afterwards, ‘very sore’ about it.9 Once again, it was painfully evident which of the ‘terrible twins’ was the senior partner. To the man who had donated Chequers to the nation and was now First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Lee of Fareham had plenty of time to observe the two rivals duelling verbally at Cabinet meetings. ‘L.G.’s domination of the Cabinet is complete and wonderful,’ he told his wife. ‘Winston, who talks a great deal, and usually in a stimulating and interesting way, is the only Minister who even tries to measure swords with him.’ But, he added, ‘if it comes to a serious contest L. G. never has any difficulty downing him in argument’.10
Churchill’s feelings were understandable. The Colonial Office with its global reach sounded very grand. By drawing Mesopotamia and Palestine into its orbit he had put it firmly in the headlines. But the Dominions essentially now ran themselves, and looking after British colonies in Africa, the West Indies, South-East Asia and the Far East was mostly run-of-the-mill business and tediously mundane: currency problems in East Africa, postage rates in the Crown colonies, citrus fruit production in Jamaica, and so on. He happily delegated most of these issues to his subordinates.
One episode, however, brought him credit from an unexpected source, and has been curiously neglected by previous biographers. One of the first parliamentary questions he faced as Colonial Secretary was about child slavery in Hong Kong. Mui-tsai – the Cantonese for ‘little sister’ – were young Chinese girls sold by the poor, who could not afford to keep them, as bonded domestic servants to wealthier families. It was a long-established cultural practice also to be found in Malaya and Singapore. But it had been roundly denounced as child slavery by Western missionaries and organizations such as the Anti-Slavery Society, and frequently came accompanied by lurid allegations of sexual abuse and prostitution. As a result, the Mui-tsai system had come under hostile press and parliamentary scrutiny as ‘a disgrace and scandal under the British flag’.
Churchill’s predecessor Lord Milner had done little about it, thanks largely to resistance from the Governor of Hong Kong and Colonial Office officials who argued that it was an essentially philanthropic cultural tradition that helped the poor provide for their children. At first, Churchill was inclined not to cause trouble in the colony by pressing the issue. But when public criticism intensified and publicly defending child slavery became an embarrassment, he abruptly changed tack and told his officials that he was not prepared to go on defending it. When the Governor protested that abolishing the system would cause ructions in the island colony, he instantly snapped back. ‘I do not care a rap what the local consequences are,’ he wrote. ‘You had better make it clear that [freedom for the Mui-tsai] must be real.’ Later he followed this up with a telegram curtly instructing the Governor to issue a proclamation declaring that the system would no longer be recognized in the colony. His decision made him friends in unfamiliar places. The Manchester Guardian, a frequent critic, applauded his decisive action as ‘handsome and sensible’, and congratulated him for having ‘cut through all sophisticated official defences by which this piece of humanity has been resisted so long by the bureaucrats’. The issue had by now also become something of a feminist cause, and Lady Gladstone of the Anti-Slavery Society, the doyenne of humanitarian lobbyists with numerous friends in high places, declared that Churchill’s name ‘would go down to history for this in glory’.11
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Nonetheless, he regarded such incursions into distant Imperial affairs as inferior to most Foreign Office business and continued to speak his mind on its activities whenever the mood took him. This was much to the annoyance of Curzon. Already this year, the Foreign Secretary had complained that Churchill seemed to be behaving like some sort of ‘Asiatic Secretary’. The sinner was happy to compound the offence. A week before the Imperial Conference opened, he travelled to Manchester, the heartland of Britain’s cotton manufacturing industry, where he had held his first seat as a Liberal in the Commons. Here, at a luncheon for the city’s Chamber of Commerce, he painted a vivid panorama of the post-war world coloured by the extremes of violence and peace, prosperity and poverty, despair and hope. Ireland was teetering on the brink. International trade held the key to prosperity but was stalled by mountains of debt and unrealistic demands on Germany for reparations that it couldn’t pay. As for Russia, under Lenin it was a case study in folly. ‘Probably seven or eight million have lost their lives, and many more have had their lives ruined in order to teach Monsieur Lenin the rudiments of political economy,’ he mocked. Things would only get worse for Russians. But at least other nations would be saved by her example. The lesson, he assured his audience, was written in glaring letters – ‘the utter failure of this Socialistic and Communistic theory, and the ruins which it brings to those subjected to its cruel yoke’.12
But it was potential failure closer to home a mere twenty miles across the English Channel that truly worried him most. ‘Where are we going in Europe?’ he demanded. ‘Has the Great War brought us the assurance of a lasting peace? Can we be quite sure that our children will not be exposed to a repetition of the horrors through which we have, with difficulty, lived?’ Talk of peace was all very well, he went on, but it was no good trusting in ‘a paper League of Nations’. Peace had to have the backing of the Great Powers. The only real way to prevent another terrible war was to establish a solid settlement between Britain, France, and Germany. His audience hardly needed to be reminded that since the Peace Conference there had been endless disputes about German reparation payments, and that in March Allied troops had marched into the Ruhr cities of Dusseldorf and Duisburg over defaults on payments.
Recent headlines had also shone an alarming spotlight on violence in Upper Silesia, a significant region of Germany awarded to Poland by the Paris peacemakers. Its loss was dire for the Germans as it produced a quarter of the country’s coal and was rich in iron and steel mills; at least a third of its population was German-speaking. After powerful protests, the Allied victors decided to hold a plebiscite allowing inhabitants to decide of which nation they wished to be citizens. In the months leading up to it violent Polish resistance broke out, especially after former German residents were granted the vote and began flooding back to the region in their tens of thousands. In March, four battalions of British troops had been rushed in to restore order amidst widespread intimidation, assaults, and raids from across the Polish border. In the ballot, the Germans obtained a large majority, but much of the coal-producing area opted for Poland. How precisely to divide the region in light of the results provoked yet more violence. By the time Churchill was speaking to his Manchester audience, the Upper Silesia question had flared into a broader argument pitting Germany on one side and Poland and France on the other. As well, fighting between German and Polish paramilitary forces had seriously escalated. The dispute
seemed to be threatening peace in Europe itself. ‘If the Treaty [of Versailles] can be reduced to waste in one quarter,’ thundered The Times, ‘it will soon become pulp in others.’ Anglo-French relations in particular seemed threatened. Just days before Churchill spoke, British troops had once again been in action. A sergeant from the Black Watch who was shot ‘by unknown outlaws’ was buried with full military honours. ‘Allies Floundering in Silesia’ warned The Times.13
Combined with Anglo-French disputes over Syria and the Middle East, traditional anti-French feeling was mounting in Britain. But this was dangerous, argued Churchill. People had to be fair to France, and understand the anxieties its people felt about the ex-enemy nation of some 70 million just across its border compared to their own more modest 40 million. ‘We must,’ he declared, ‘understand their point of view.’ In pursuing post-war reconstruction, it was for Britain to help navigate the rancour between these two European nations. ‘Let that be the part of Britain,’ he exhorted, ‘to mitigate the dangerous poisons still rife in Europe, and to consolidate the world upon the basis of the victory which our lads have won.’14
He may well have concluded on his customary upbeat and patriotic note – this, after all, was a speech delivered to natural-born Liberal businessmen in a county that had sent tens of thousands of ‘lads’ off to war. But his reference to ‘dangerous poisons still rife in Europe’ offered a necessary and timely caution about radical nationalist trends across the English Channel. His words proved remarkably prescient. ‘You may be sure,’ he warned his listeners, ‘that deep in the heart of Germany, certainly in their universities and in those powerful forces dethroned by the war, there must be lurking ideas dangerous to the peace of Europe.’ Criticisms that Churchill lacked judgement were then, as they remain today, commonplace. Yet he also possessed a much rarer and more valuable quality: that of insight. As history was to show, German universities did indeed nurture strongly nationalist sentiments, and some of them capitulated easily to the Nazis and their ideology. Meanwhile, ‘dethroned’ by the war, elements within the German armed forces and elsewhere were busily doing their best to destroy the Weimar Republic. Only weeks after Churchill’s Manchester speech, an embittered ex-corporal from Austria named Adolf Hitler, who had also fought on the Western Front, was elected as sole leader – ‘Fuhrer’ – of the radically nationalist and anti-Semitic party in Munich known as the National Socialist German Workers Party, or NSDAP – the Nazis.15
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Lloyd George formally opened the Imperial Conference in 10 Downing Street at noon on Monday 20 June. Evoking the unity that the Empire had displayed during the Peace Conference, he stressed the need to uphold the treaties they had all signed and pronounced friendship with the United States ‘a cardinal principle’ for the future – especially if agreement could be reached on naval armaments. ‘We cannot forget,’ he said, evoking his most bullish patriotic sentiments, ‘that the very life of the United Kingdom, as also of Australia and New Zealand, indeed the whole Empire, has been built up on sea power – and that sea power is necessarily the basis for the whole Empire’s existence.’ His final remarks acknowledged changes in the nature of the Empire created by the war. Four blood-soaked years had fuelled growing demands for independence from what was still frequently described in the white Dominions as ‘the Mother Country’. If Australian and New Zealand boys could die in their thousands at Gallipoli, and Canadians at Vimy Ridge, then it was clear that any future commitments to fight should be the result of decisions made in Canberra, Wellington, or Ottawa, not in London. At Paris, each Dominion had been granted its own delegation. Lloyd George acknowledged the new reality. ‘There was a time when Downing Street controlled the Empire,’ he declared. ‘Today the Empire is in charge of Downing Street.’ This was inflated rhetoric. Forging a new constitutional relationship between the Dominions and London that would balance their growing sense of autonomy while maintaining the integrity of the British Empire proved too complex and controversial to deal with, and the issue was shelved until a later conference.
But for now, the warm glow of victory and wartime comradeship smoothed the path of co-operation, helped by the common British heritage shared by those sitting around the Downing Street table. Billy Hughes, the Australian prime minister, a dozen years older than Churchill, had been born in Pimlico, less than a mile away from Downing Street; New Zealand’s William Massey came from Londonderry; and while Arthur Meighen of Canada had been born in Ontario, his paternal grandfather had come from the same Ulster city as Massey; while his mother, who had travelled with him from Canada, was visiting her family relatives in Scotland and Ireland. Meighen was the youngest of the Dominion prime ministers at the conference, a ‘debutante among a tribe of dowagers’.16
Churchill was one of the only four British Cabinet members sitting round the Downing Street table to hear Lloyd George’s opening remarks. The next day he formally delivered his own tour d’horizon by reporting on the Crown Colonies and other territories administered by the Colonial Office. It was a subject he had already covered the week before in a speech that pre-empted much of what Lloyd George had just said. At a dinner in the House of Commons given by the Empire Development Parliamentary Committee to welcome the delegates, he promised they could look forward to the British Empire’s future as ‘a super-unit’, one that would deal with ‘our cousins and brothers in the United States on terms of amity and equal friendship’. That was the dream, he suggested, one that would secure the peace and safety of ‘all who spoke the English tongue’. The route was through increasing inter-Imperial trade and improving and extending communications by air and sea. Not least, he told them, ‘we must spread our valiant manhood over the British Empire, we must spread our soldiers and citizens as numerously as possible in the great Dominions of the Crown and in that way facilitate the steady growth of inter-Imperial sentiment and common interest’. His comments on India came almost as an after-thought. ‘Not yet a Dominion,’ he acknowledged, it was heading in that direction thanks to the reforms being introduced by the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu; eventually, Churchill promised, it would join the others as a powerful partner.17
TWELVE
IMPERIAL DREAMS
A week after presenting his survey of Colonial Office affairs to the Dominion prime ministers, Churchill hosted a dinner at his home. In addition to some family and close friends – Clementine, brother Jack, Eddie Marsh, John and Hazel Lavery – it embodied the Imperial Conference in miniature: Lloyd George with his wife Margaret; Sir Thomas Smartt, the South African Minister of Agriculture, and his daughter; Sir James Allen, wartime acting prime minister of New Zealand who had once tangled with Churchill over developing a national naval force separate from the Royal Navy; sitting beside his wife, he was now his country’s High Commissioner in London. Also at the table with his wife was Lord Byng of Vimy, the British general who had overseen the withdrawal of Allied troops from Gallipoli and as Commander of the Canadian Corps led Canadian forces to their famous victory at Vimy Ridge in April 1917; he was now awaiting his final confirmation as the new Governor-General of Canada. Two single women also graced the table. Lady Sybil Grey was the second daughter of Earl Grey and had turned her home at Howick Hall in Northumberland into a wartime hospital before establishing an Anglo-Russian hospital in St Petersburg’s Dmitri Palace; she still carried the scar of a shrapnel wound from standing too close to a grenade practice at Minsk. Representing Australia was Lady Coghlan, daughter of the New South Wales agent-general in London, who had thrown her wartime energies into providing humanitarian relief to Serbia.1
The principal guests of honour, however, were the Canadian prime minister Arthur Meighen and his wife, Isabel. The product of small-town rural Ontario, Meighen disliked social events, and his wife was there to help with the exhausting round of pomp and ceremony surrounding the conference: a state dinner and ball at Buckingham Palace; luncheons with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Connaught; and his own swearing in as an Imperi
al Privy Counsellor at Buckingham Palace. He was awarded the Freedom of the City of London, and he and Isabel journeyed north to Scotland where he was granted the Freedom of Edinburgh, both of them elaborate civic affairs involving numerous speeches and formal meals. One evening he also attended a party at Cliveden House, the mansion on the Thames occupied by Lady Astor, the first female Member of Parliament to take her seat in the House of Commons. The Virginian-born Astor had assembled a glittering array of guests to meet him. One of them was the sculptress Lady Kennet, widow of the polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott – ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ – who boasted how she had enjoyed his company. ‘Ridiculously young and so alive,’ she enthused. ‘I danced with him with a crowd looking on and I didn’t care a blow . . . He is an adorable one.’2
Meighen was just five months older than Churchill and had celebrated his forty-seventh birthday the week before. His transatlantic exchanges with the Colonial Secretary over who should become the new governor-general had produced some testy moments as he tried to pin him down on candidates during his lengthy absence in the Middle East. Byng had only emerged as a contender at the very last moment. In addition, Meighen shared the general suspicion of Churchill allegedly widespread in the Dominions – or so The Times had recently claimed – as ‘autocratic, restless, [and] immensely ambitious’. Some of this wariness sprang from the Gallipoli legacy. It was difficult for Churchill to shake this off. John, the son of Sir James and Lady Allen, had died fighting there, and privately the New Zealand High Commissioner considered the expedition still being vigorously defended by his dinner host as ‘ill-conceived and mad’.3
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