Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  There was another side to this, and it should be examined thoughtfully. As a boy at the Crystal Palace Winston had described the ruffian who accosted Count Kinsky as a “sort of Kaffir” and a “Mulatto.” In Cuba, fresh out of Sandhurst, he had distrusted “the negro element among the insurgents.” He never outgrew this prejudice. Late in life he was asked if he had seen the film Carmen Jones. He had walked out on it, he replied, because he didn’t like “blackamoors.” His physician was present, and Winston asked what happened when blacks got measles. Could the rash be spotted? The doctor replied that blacks suffered a high mortality rate from measles. Churchill said lightly, “Well, there are plenty left. They’ve got a high rate of production.”269 He could greet Louis Botha and Michael Collins as equals, but his relationship with any Indian, even an accomplished barrister like Gandhi or a fellow Harrovian like Nehru, could never be as between compeers. It followed, therefore, that their country must remain a vassal state. This was the underside of his position in the great debates over India’s future which began in 1929. Today it would be called an expression of racism, and he, as its exponent, a racist. But neither word had been coined then; they would not appear in the Oxford English dictionary or Webster’s for another generation. Until recently—beginning in the late 1940s—racial intolerance was not only acceptable in polite society; it was fashionable, even assumed.

  The popularity of prejudice when Parliament was pondering the India question is demonstrated by the extraordinary success of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, which went through forty printings in the 1920s. Churchill read it in 1927, as two notes by Chartwell visitors attest. On August 10 Victor Cazalet reported that his host “admires the book Mother India very much,” and on September 27 Lord Lloyd wrote: “I was staying a weekend recently with Winston who was immediately struck with Mother India—Miss Mayo’s book. It’s all true.” Viewed from the 1980s, her work seems almost comparable to the Protocols of Zion. Vile in its insinuations, wildly inaccurate, and above all hypocritical, this single volume by an elderly prig poisoned the minds of millions who might otherwise have reflected thoughtfully on Gandhi’s movement. Her case against the Hindu custom of child marriage is indisputable, but she did not stop there. Hindu mothers, she said, taught their sons and daughters to masturbate. Citing “highest medical authority,” she charged that every child practicing onanism “bears on its body the signs of this habit,” and that “when constantly practiced during mature life,” which she declared was the case in India, “its devastation of body and nerves will scarcely be questioned.” This chapter ends: “Given men who enter the world physical bankrupts out of bankrupt stock, rear them through childhood in influences and practices that devour their vitality; launch them at the dawn of maturity on an unrestrained outpouring of their whole provision of creative energy in one single direction; find them, at an age when the Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood, broken-nerved, low-spirited, petulant ancients; and need you, while this remains unchanged, seek for other reasons why they are poor and sick and dying and why their hands are too weak, too fluttering, to seize the reins of Government?” “Miss Mayo has dropped a brick,” Irwin wrote Neville Chamberlain. “It will make the Hindus of course see red.” Winston Churchill, being a larger figure than Katherine Mayo, dropped a bigger brick by sanctioning it. The same can be said of liberal men and women on both sides of the Atlantic who accepted her vicious fantasy without demur. The Spectator observed that “the evils which Miss Mayo attacks are widespread and deep-rooted,” and that until they had been expunged, “India can hardly take the place that she ought to occupy in the family of nations.” Survey’s reviewer called the book “challenging, prickly with facts and neglected angles of approach…. I confess I learned more from this book on the inner Indian and why the East is East than I ever knew before.” The leftist New Statesman described it as “the most important and truthful book that has been written about India for a good deal more than a generation.” Across the Atlantic, the New Republic welcomed it. Outlook found it “free from sentimentalism, artisanship, and preconceived notions. It is a straight-forward account.” Catholic World commented: “There is no gainsaying her statements.” To the New York Herald Tribune, Mother India was “calm, hard-headed—though not hard-hearted.” The New York Times reported: “Her detachment is obvious. If she quotes, she gives her authority. If she describes, it is an eyewitness. The facts that she states are not likely to be disputed.”270

  Churchill, however, always had second and third thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of his pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity. Given time, he could devise imaginative solutions. Russia had been more than he could handle—though it should be remembered that he would have been content to see a socialist regime there provided it renounced wholesale slaughter—but his record had been impressive in South Africa, the Middle East, and Ireland. He was prepared to accept provincial self-government in India provided Britain retained certain rights of “paramountcy,” including control of foreign affairs, communications, and defense. What he could not overlook was that India, Gandhian satyãgraha notwithstanding, was a land of violence. Even as Churchill was binding up his loins to confront Baldwin in the House, Indian terrorists tried to assassinate Irwin, of all people, as the viceregal train entered Delhi. (Churchill cabled Irwin congratulations on his escape; the viceroy, who himself was not untainted by racial condescension, replied that, luckily for him, Indians “seem to be less efficient in their execution than in their design.”) Bengalis then raided an arsenal in Chittagong, killing eight British guards. An uprising in Peshawar left thirty dead. After a terrorist had been executed in Cawnpore (now Kanpur), Hindus rioted and murdered over three hundred Moslems. Churchill said: “Wednesday’s massacres at Cawnpore, a name of evil import”—in June 1857 the British community there had been wiped out by mutineers who, legend has it, threw their corpses down a well—“are a portent. Because it is believed that we are about to leave the country, the struggle for power is now beginning between the Moslems and Hindus…. The British troops are now pacifying and calming the terrified and infuriated populace. But the feud is only at its beginning.” His dire warning outraged leaders of the congress, and was discounted by Wedgwood Benn and Baldwin. Today it is discredited; in 1967 Professor Arno J. Mayer of Princeton wrote that the freeing of India “never produced any of the dire consequences predicted by Churchill.” But it did. Eighteen years after his warning, when the Raj ended and the last British soldiers sailed from Bombay, over two million Hindus and Moslems were slain during six months of savagery. Like Turkey’s slaughter of the Armenians, the Russian civil war, and the destruction of the European Jews in the early 1940s, it was a great human disaster; in a word, a holocaust.271

  Back in England with Hearst and Wall Street behind him, Churchill took the boat train from Southampton, reaching Venetia Montagu’s house on the evening of Tuesday, November 5. Clementine had told him that a half-dozen worried Tories awaited him in the drawing room. They thought Baldwin wrong about India but were concerned about party reprisals. Not to worry, Winston told them cheerfully; he would stand alone, if necessary, and speak for all of them. As it happened, he had company. Lloyd George, though his powers were waning, was still effective and beyond Baldwin’s reach. The debate on the Irwin declaration opened on Friday. MacDonald spoke for it; Baldwin announced that the Conservatives supported him. George then rose to reply. Davidson wrote that Churchill had “sat through S.B.’s speech glowering and unhappy” but he leaned “forward during the ‘Goat’s’ speech cheering every mischievous passage in it.” Davidson estimated that at least a third of the Tory MPs would vote against the declaration. They had listened glumly to their leader; their applause for him had been perfunctory. Dawson wrote Irwin: “The naked truth is that his speech, to which I listened, was heard in almost icy silence by th
e House.” Hoare wrote: “It is certainly true that scarcely anyone in the party liked it. The diehards were much upset and… Austen, FE, Winston and Worthy [Sir Laming Worthington-Evans] were violently opposed to it.” Hoare thought he himself had been “the only supporter of Stanley’s attitude.” It was his impression that “Winston was almost demented with fury.” Lane-Fox observed that “there were several people such as Winston and Worthy whom I saw and heard crying ‘No.’ ” Had there been a vote, he thought, half the Tory MPs would have defected, but he felt confident that “since they have had time to think, the vast majority of the Conservatives have returned to their loyalty to SB.”272

  Churchill’s first attack on the declaration came, not on the floor of the House, but in the columns of the Daily Mail. It appeared on November 16, establishing a position on the issue from which he never wavered. Britain’s “rescue of India from ages of barbarism, internecine war, and tyranny,” he wrote, “and its slow but ceaseless forward march to civilisation” constituted “upon the whole the finest achievement of our history.” Now it was “the duty of public men and women to make it plain without delay that the extension of Dominion Status to India is not practicable at the present time and that any attempt to secure it will encounter the earnest resistance of the British nation.” Self-government was unthinkable for a community which “treats sixty millions of its members, toiling at their side, as ‘Untouchables,’ whose approach is an affront and whose very presence is a pollution,” and it was absurd to contemplate it “while India is a prey to fierce racial and religious dissensions and when the withdrawal of British protection would mean the immediate resumption of medieval ways.” If the viceregal proposal were adopted the British Raj would be replaced by a “Gandhi Raj” because “the political classes in India represent only an insignificant fraction of the three hundred and fifty millions for whose welfare we are responsible.” England could not, and indeed should not, “close the long avenues of the future.” But the idea that “Home Rule for India or Dominion Status or full responsible status for India can emerge from anything that is now being done is not only fantastic in itself but criminally mischievous in its effects.”273

  The struggle over Indian self-government mounted throughout 1930 and was fought against a background of tumultuous events. The Cawnpore riots resumed and the death toll passed one thousand, Afridi tribesmen emerged from the hills and attacked a strong British garrison in Peshawar, and Gandhi delivered his most brilliant political stroke, his Salt March to the Indian Ocean. He had been searching for some way to make his movement comprehensible to the masses. The Raj held a monopoly on the production and sale of salt. But salt should be free, said the Mahatma; the seas alone held enough to satisfy the world’s population a thousand times over. So he began his trek on March 12, scooping a spoonful of salt from brackish earth along the way. He never reached the seaside. While sleeping by a river, he was arrested by nervous British policemen; they had arrived stealthily in the middle of night to avoid a riot. But the Salt March continued without him. His original spoonful was sold for sixteen hundred rupees. Professors led their students to the shore. The Raj banned newspapers congratulating them. Indian youths raided a Raj salt depot. The British police responded with brutality and mass arrests; by the end of May, 100,000 Gandhi followers were behind bars, Nehru among them. He wrote his leader, who was cheerfully spinning cotton in another prison: “May I congratulate you on the new India you have created by your magic touch?”274

  Churchill’s response to all this was that the viceroy had asked for it. His declaration had displayed weakness; enemies of the Raj were exploiting it. The Afridis had stormed Peshawar because they had been encouraged to believe that “Lord Irwin’s Government was clearing out of India, and that rich spoils lay open to their raids.” During his service on the frontier, before the turn of the century, the fathers of these tribesmen had hidden in the hills. To hunt them had been “like going into the water to fight a shark.” Now they were witnessing “the shark coming out to the beach.” To Boothby he wrote that it would be “easy… to crush Gandhi and the Congress.” The party should be broken up and its leaders exiled to another British possession. The difficulty, as he saw it, was the indecisiveness of MacDonald’s government and the lack of leadership on either side of the House. “When eagles are silent,” he said, “the parrots begin to jabber.” On September 28 he distributed a brief statement to the press declaring that he would remain in public life until the India issue was settled. Lord Burnham, owner of the Daily Telegraph and a Tory ally, wrote him that “the scales are most unfairly weighted against such of us as believe that our betrayal of India would be a crime against civilisation…. The real tragedy is that India is crying out to be governed and we refuse to govern.” Burnham added: “F. E.’s illness is a great blow.”275

  F.E.’s death, which swiftly followed, was a far greater blow. He was relatively young—still in his fifties—and to Churchill he had almost been a member of the family. On October 1 Clementine wrote Margaret Smith, Lady Birkenhead: “Last night Winston wept for his friend. He said several times ‘I feel so lonely.’ ” F.E., secure in the House of Lords, had confidently led the defenders of the Raj; now they turned to Winston. Churchill’s position in the Commons, very different from his lost friend’s, was growing more difficult every week. Yet he could see no alternative. He wrote: “When I think of the way in which we poured out blood and money to take Contalmaison or to hold Ypres, I cannot understand why it is that we should now throw away our conquests and our inheritance with both hands, through helplessness and pusillanimity.” On September 24 he had written Baldwin: “What times we live in! The most serious of all our problems is India. I am now receiving, in consequence of my speeches, streams of letters from our people in India and the feeling of anxiety that we are being let down…. I do earnestly hope that you will not allow your friendship with Irwin to affect your judgement or the action of your party upon what, since the War, is probably the greatest question Englishmen have had to settle. Very strong currents of feeling and even passion are moving under the stagnant surface of our affairs, and I must confess myself to care more about this business than anything else in public life.”276

  Baldwin was unmoved. He had already confided to a friend that if he formed another government, Churchill would not be part of it. Winston’s incapacity for teamwork, he said, far outweighed his talents. Clementine saw what was coming. Politics, she wrote their son, “have taken an orientation not favourable to Papa.” India was the main issue, but Baldwin, strongly supported by the shadow cabinet in this instance, endorsed high tariffs. Churchill protested. On October 14 the two men held a long private talk and agreed that there was a definite breach between them. That evening Baldwin wrote Churchill of his “profound regret that there is a real parting of the ways and a friendship towards you which has grown up through six years of loyal and strenuous work together.” He insisted that he continued to “cherish the hope that you may yet see your way to stay with us,” but by his actions he was sabotaging that hope, if indeed it existed. The Tory tariff policy remained unchanged, and Winston contemplated resignation from the shadow cabinet. He was nudged again when Lord Lloyd, the strong British high commissioner in Cairo, was recalled with Baldwin’s approval as the first step in the evacuation of all British troops, except those in the canal zone, from Egypt. “During the last forty years,” a furious Churchill told the House, “everything has turned upon the British garrison in Cairo. With its departure the once glorious episode of England in Egypt comes to an end. It is not without a bitter pang that I contemplate this.” He observed that “there is a sombre philosophy nowadays which I hear in some quarters about Egypt and India. It is said: ‘Give them all they ask for! Clear out and let things go to smash, and then there will be a case for us to come back again!’ ” Such a doctrine, he said, “is no foundation for the continuance of British fame and power. Once we lose our confidence in our mission in the East… it will be a presence whic
h cannot long endure.”277

  Baldwin wrote a friend that Churchill wanted “to go back to pre-war and govern with a strong hand. He has become once more the subaltern of hussars of ’96.” But Winston was far from alone. The very die-hard members of the party to whom he had once been anathema founded the Indian Empire Society and invited him to address their first meeting. It was held in London’s Cannon Street Hotel, hard by St. Paul’s, on December 12, 1930. They wanted powerful political medicine, and he believed he knew the prescription. In Lahore, Kipling’s beloved citadel in the Punjab, members of the congress had burned the Union Jack. Their meeting, said Winston, should have been “broken up and its leaders deported.” Gandhi had been treated far too leniently in the beginning; he should have been arrested and tried “as soon as he broke the law.” Even now, firm measures, demonstrating Parliament’s resolve “to govern and guide the destinies of the Indian people in faithful loyalty to Indian interest,” could, perhaps within a few months, “bring this period of tantalized turmoil to an end.” Each Indian province should be given “more real, more intimate, more representative organs of self-government,” leaving the central authority in the hands of the Raj. But there could be no compromise with “the forces of sedition and outrage,” because “the truth is that Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him with cat’s meat. The sooner this is realised, the less trouble and misfortune will there be for all concerned.”278