Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

  Churchill did his best to soothe any fears Meighen harboured about the depth of his commitment to the Dominions. Three days before the dinner, he told an audience including the Prince of Wales that he would bend all his energies to improving Canadian trade with the West Indies. ‘Canada,’ he said, ‘was not complete commercially or geographically unless she was associated with the tropical islands of the West Indies.’ But this was not the real reason he was so keen to court Canada’s prime minister.4

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  The major issue confronting the conference was the future of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Signed in 1902, it saw each of the two powers agree to remain neutral in any war fought by the other, and it was now up for renewal. But Washington was deeply suspicious of Japan’s Pacific ambitions and hostile to the treaty’s extension. Meighen was opposed to anything that could damage good relations with Canada’s giant southern neighbour. ‘Every possible effort,’ he told Lloyd George long before showing up in London, ‘should be made to find some alternative policy to renewal.’ Churchill’s view was similar, and in Meighen he found a powerful ally. The best way forward would be through a multilateral conference of all those involved, including Japan. This way, he believed, naval armaments could be limited and a dangerous crisis over the Pacific averted.

  His desire to keep in good standing with Washington was inspired by more than his benevolent feelings for the ‘English-Speaking World’. As graphically illustrated in the New Year sing-along with Lloyd George at Lympne, he was profoundly worried about the challenge posed by the United States Navy to Britannia’s traditional ruling of the waves. But nor did he wish to alienate the Japanese, who themselves possessed a powerful navy. In May, the twenty-year-old Crown Prince Hirohito had paid a lengthy visit to Britain as part of a charm offensive aimed at renewing the alliance. Shortly before hosting Meighen, Churchill received Baron Gonsuke Hayashi, Japan’s ambassador in London, who sounded him out about the future of the alliance. Churchill courteously told Hayashi that he hoped some ‘great international instrument’ could be drawn up that would ensure peace for all parties in the Pacific for the next twenty or thirty years, but explained that Britain’s most important object was to avoid a naval rivalry with the United States. Subject to that, he assured the ambassador, he was ‘a well-wisher of Japan’. He had studiously made no reference to renewing the alliance. The dinner at his home was a signal that he and Meighen were of one mind on the issue.5

  On Friday 1 July, Dominion Day, Curzon formally introduced the topic of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance to the assembled prime ministers in Downing Street and argued for its renewal following suitable consultations with China and the United States. Lloyd George, Australia’s William Hughes, and New Zealand’s William Massey all agreed. But Meighen bluntly rejected the idea because of its negative effects on relations between the United States and the Empire. If war ever broke out between them, he said, ‘Canada would be the Belgium of the conflict’. Instead, the best way forward would be through a conference with the United States and Japan to discuss the whole issue of naval rearmament in the Pacific. Churchill clearly had a reliable ally in Canada.

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  By the time the Canadian prime minister spoke, however, Churchill was overwhelmed by the business of planning his mother’s funeral. While Lloyd George and the Dominions debated whether or not to bury the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, he was laying his mother to rest in the churchyard at Bladon. Yet within hours of returning to London he was back at his desk furiously catching up with his files. He had already missed one crucial meeting of the conference. Determined to have his opinions heard, he dictated a lengthy memorandum for his Cabinet colleagues. It was Monday 4 July – American Independence Day – when they gathered round the table at 10 Downing Street to encounter his powerful verbal barrage aimed against renewal of the alliance. Its only value to Tokyo, he argued, could be as a support, open or veiled, against the United States. Pressure for a ‘Big Navy’ would grow irresistibly in America, sparking a naval race that would broaden into a larger antagonism. ‘We went through all this with Germany in the years before the war,’ he warned. ‘What a ghastly disaster it would be if such a process began between Great Britain and the United States.’

  His obsession with US naval power was neither new nor unfounded. American admirals made no secret of their traditional jealousies of the Royal Navy. Since the end of the war the United States had built more warships than the rest of the world put together. ‘Don’t let the British pull the wool over your eyes,’ the American Chief of Naval Operations had instructed Admiral Sims when sending him to London to co-ordinate wartime plans with the British Admiralty. ‘It’s none of our business pulling their chestnuts out of the fire. We would as soon fight the British as the Germans.’ In Washington such hostile attitudes still simmered below the surface. Churchill, with his close interest in American affairs, was more aware of them than many of his other colleagues, and it made him even more determined to strengthen the London–Washington axis. Significantly, the Cabinet colleague closest to him on this subject was Lord Lee of Fareham. ‘The political relations of Britain and America,’ the donor of Chequers told the Cabinet, ‘[are] of transcendent importance [and outweigh] in every way those with other powers or any combination of powers.’6

  Churchill’s heavy guns provoked angry counter-fire. Curzon was outraged. Relations between the two men were always rocky. Curzon had been a strong ally over Gallipoli and had recently welcomed Churchill and Clementine along with Ettie Desborough and Adele Essex to his grand Palladian home, Hackwood House in Hampshire, for the Whitsun holiday weekend. To Churchill the visit evoked vivid memories of happier pre-war times between the two of them, and he suggested that perhaps they could revert to their former habit of addressing each other in official correspondence as ‘Dear Winston’ and ‘Dear George’. When Churchill’s mother died, Curzon wrote him a deeply felt and genuine letter of sympathy. Yet their private cordiality was accompanied by deepening political animosity. Over Egypt, where Churchill was adamantly opposed to the slightest concession to nationalist feeling, they had repeatedly clashed in Cabinet and Curzon bitterly described him as ‘difficult and insolent’.7

  This time he furiously scribbled a note and pushed it in front of Lloyd George. ‘It seems to me entirely wrong that the Colonial Secretary should on an occasion like this air his Independent views on an F.O. question. I would not presume on a Colonial Office question, either to intervene at all or to take a line independent of the C.O. [Colonial Office].’ ‘I quite agree,’ wrote Lloyd George back, ‘I have done my best to stop his fizzing . . . It is intolerable.’ Austen Chamberlain pitched in with his own contribution to this bizarre game of pass-the-note. ‘I think you are right to show Winston that you profoundly resent his constant and persistent interference,’ he scrawled to Curzon. ‘It goes far beyond anything that I at least have ever known in Cabinet even from the most important member of a Government.’ Encouraged by this show of solidarity, Curzon pushed a missive of his own directly towards Churchill.’ ‘My dear Winston,’ he addressed him in the manner so recently agreed upon, ‘I wonder what you would say if on a Colonial Office [question] I felt myself at liberty to make a speech at this Conference – quite independent of the Colonial Office and critical of the attitude adopted by its chief.’ Unrepentant, Churchill fired back. ‘You may say anything you like about the Colonial Office that is sincerely meant,’ he replied. ‘But there is no comparison between these vital foreign matters [which] affect the whole future of the world and the mere departmental topics with [which] the Colonial Office is concerned. In these matters we must be allowed to have opinions!’ That nicely summed up his real opinion about his job as Colonial Secretary – distinctly inferior to Curzon’s and responsible for ‘merely departmental’ topics. It was typical, too, of Churchill’s habitual refusal to stay within the boundaries of his own ministerial tasks and of his determination to speak out on any issue that interested him, even if it ruffled his colleagues.

>   He tried Curzon’s patience again three days later when the conference turned its gaze on Europe. Newspapers were once more headlining France’s support for Poland in the crisis over Upper Silesia. Curzon opened the debate by dismissing any idea of giving a security guarantee to France, whose diplomacy he privately considered double-faced and untrustworthy. Dominion leaders followed suit. Prime Minister Smuts of South Africa in particular disliked and mistrusted France. Its policy, he declared, had for centuries been the curse of Europe and with Germany ‘down and out’ the French were using the reparations issue as the instrument of their dominion in Europe. ‘The British Commonwealth,’ he said, ‘must stand up to France.’8

  Churchill took a radically different view. ‘May I say a word, Prime Minister?’ he began, this time giving at least a nod to Curzon’s sensitivities by stating that he agreed with the Foreign Secretary’s sentiments, but only wanted to ‘say a word from a slightly different angle’. Predictably, the word lengthened into a short but forceful speech. It essentially re-hashed what he had already told his audience of businessmen in Manchester the month before. ‘No one should doubt,’ he told the Dominion prime ministers, ‘the deep-rooted nature of the fear which this poor, mutilated, impoverished France has of this mighty Germany which is growing up on the other side of the Rhine.’ His own hope was to achieve an ‘appeasement of the fearful hatreds and antagonisms which exist in Europe’. This certainly involved reconciliation with Germany. But to allay French fears some sort of treaty had to be found that would bind the whole Empire to protect France against unprovoked aggression. If this were not done, the Franco-German struggle would be renewed. ‘It is from this point of view,’ he concluded, ‘that I have been an advocate of our giving such a guarantee to France, even if America would not come in, though I agree,’ he added, ‘this is not the moment to do it.’9

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  But it was the Pacific that remained the greatest of concerns to the Dominions. ‘Sea Power,’ declared Lloyd George in his opening comments to the conference, ‘is necessarily the basis of the whole Empire’s existence.’ One of its decisions was to have momentous consequences for the Empire – and, twenty years later, for Churchill personally.

  While he had been busily presiding over the conference in Cairo, the commanders-in-chief of the China, East Indies, and Australian naval stations of the Royal Navy had gathered on board the British heavy cruiser HMS Hawkins anchored off the island of Penang on the west coast of the Malayan peninsula and approved the construction of a permanent new naval base on Singapore. The small island off the southern tip of Malaya, acquired from the Sultan of Johore a hundred years before by Sir Stamford Raffles of the East India Company, had grown into one of the world’s greatest transport hubs with a population of half a million. Now it was destined as well to become the Royal Navy’s main base in the Pacific. The idea had first been floated by Admiral Lord Jellicoe, hero of the Battle of Jutland, who urged the need to project British power in the Far East both to counter a possible Japanese threat and to deter Australia and New Zealand from turning their backs on the Empire and looking instead for protection to the United States. A Britain impoverished by war could not afford to keep a battle fleet permanently in the Far East. But if war with Japan broke out, the Royal Navy would have time to send its fleet to Singapore, where it could dock and refuel its largest warships. At Penang, the assembled British admirals agreed that Singapore was the ‘key’ to British power in the Far East. As well as major docking and refuelling facilities, it would also have an advanced command headquarters and a Naval Communications and Intelligence Centre. Their proposal travelled up the chain of command to the Admiralty in London and then to the Cabinet, which approved it just as the Dominion prime ministers were assembling for the conference. It was vital to show them that Britain actually had a naval policy for the Pacific. ‘It would be disastrous to the prestige of Great Britain,’ pronounced Arthur Balfour, the former Conservative prime minister and Acting Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence, ‘if she were to abandon the Pacific by omitting to take the steps necessary to permit the British fleet operating there.’ The decision in principle was more important than the reality. Treasury objections meant that no construction could actually begin for at least two more years.10

  The Singapore base finally came before the conference on the same day as the game of notes played across the Cabinet table. Briefing it was Admiral David Beatty, the First Sea Lord and former Naval Secretary when Churchill was at the Admiralty. If war with Japan broke out, he told them, the object of the British battle fleet once it was readied at Singapore would be to destroy the Japanese Navy. So just holding Singapore would deter Japan in the first place from attacking either Australia or New Zealand. ‘So long as Singapore remains in British hands,’ he promised, ‘there is nothing to fear.’ Pointed questions followed and Prime Minister Hughes, for one, was not convinced. If it took six weeks for the British battle fleet based in home waters to reach Singapore, in the meantime what would happen? Could Australia rely on the United States for its defence? No, replied Beatty; the United States Navy would take far longer to get there – if at all. This brutally frank reply silenced Hughes and put a stop to further discussion. Construction of the base was duly approved. It would, Beatty promised, be ‘impregnable’.

  The decision was momentous in its implications. Actual use of the base would only be contemplated in the event of a war with Japan. Yet the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was still in force and would remain so until the Washington Conference. This frightened Lloyd George. If news about Singapore leaked out, he remarked, it ‘would blow up the whole East’. Churchill agreed, and with no one dissenting he moved that to guard the secret only one copy of the minutes should be kept.11

  He was profoundly impressed by Beatty’s defence of the Singapore base. Three months later, as pressure mounted on government finances and threatened yet more political trouble for the Coalition, Lloyd George appointed a Committee of National Expenditure to recommend cutbacks on a whole range of government spending and Churchill was appointed to chair the Cabinet Committee examining the proposals for the armed forces. One of them was to abandon the Singapore base. To this, he firmly put his foot down. It was vital, he argued, ‘to continue the discreet building up of the fuelling stations and of the base in Singapore which alone can enable our fleet to offer some protection to all our interests in the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand’. In the end construction went ahead, although to appease the Treasury only with much reduced urgency spread out over time. Twenty years later Singapore was to surrender to the Japanese in what Churchill, then prime minister, was to deplore as the largest capitulation in British military history.

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  Churchill is frequently described as an imperialist, and he was – at least in his head, where dreams of the Empire’s glory imprinted in his Victorian childhood inspired his writing and rhetoric until the day he died; on becoming Colonial Secretary, he had even suggested that his title might be changed to Secretary of State for Imperial Affairs. Yet his imperialism was largely rhetorical. In the real world of action, he rejected ideas of imperial federation, trade preference, and tariffs; most of these were politically ‘dead ducks’ anyway. Thanks to the peace settlement, the world’s map was coloured in large daubs of red. But what did he actually know of it? He left India – ‘the Jewel of the Empire’ – in 1898, never to return, and the same went for South Africa after 1900, the last full year of Queen Victoria’s reign. At age thirty-three he had made his trip to East Africa, but he never visited West Africa, or Australia, or New Zealand, or indeed any of Britain’s Far East possessions about which he so frequently waxed eloquent. He visited Canada on several occasions, but invariably as an adjunct to longer and weightier visits to the United States. As for the newly acquired territories such as Mesopotamia and Palestine, events in 1921 demonstrated that far from rejoicing in their ‘possession’ by Britain, Churchill frequently lamented their acquisition and did his best to ens
ure that they cost as little as possible.12

  Insofar as he cared deeply about the Empire, it was largely in relation to the security of Britain itself – and this crucially hinged on events just twenty miles away across the English Channel. Keeping the balance of power in Europe was historically a central plank of Britain’s foreign policy, and Churchill’s urgency about post-war Franco-German relations was heartfelt. Yet even here, things were changing. Heated disagreements about the Anglo-Japanese Alliance between the Dominion prime ministers rapidly cooled down after back-channel talks prompted an invitation from President Warren G. Harding to Washington later in the year to discuss arms and security in the Pacific. Meeting at Chequers on Sunday 10 July, the Dominion prime ministers immediately and unanimously accepted the offer with relief. It was good news for Lloyd George, too, coming as it did just twenty-four hours before the Irish truce came into effect.13

  Churchill embraced the idea of the Washington Conference with enthusiasm. ‘Properly and wisely handled,’ he told his Cabinet colleagues in late July, ‘[it] might well lead to a lasting peace in the Pacific.’ Brusquely, he torpedoed the idea floated by some of his colleagues of holding a preliminary conference in London as a waste of time, on the grounds that all decisions would in the end have to be referred to Washington anyway. Rather, he preferred talks in the American capital to start as soon as possible. In the event, they opened in November and lasted until early the next year. As a bargaining tool with the Americans, he also vigorously supported the construction of four new heavy cruisers and four new battleships.14

  The Imperial Conference marked a turning point for Britain. No longer could it maintain the balance of power in Europe without the help of American muscle. The ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States is frequently credited to (or blamed on) Churchill’s Second World War relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt. In reality, however, its seeds were planted here, in 1921. Churchill’s recognition of the reality that Washington now held the keys to Britain’s security was an insight uncomfortable to many of his contemporaries. But it was to give him credibility and authority as a statesman when the burden of leadership was thrust on his shoulders some twenty years later.15