by Richard Toye
Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled inefficiently by the Khedive, the Sultan’s representative, and was massively indebted to European bondholders. In 1882 Britain intervened to put down a nationalist revolt and thus protect her investments. After the rebels were defeated by her forces at the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir in September, real power in Egypt was exercised by the British, although the Khedive still owed nominal allegiance to the Sultan. To some it seemed a dirty business. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, poet, horse-breeder, womanizer and adventurer, was the anti-imperialist in chief. (He is best known for his later verse riposte to Rudyard Kipling: ‘The White Man’s Burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash’.)18 A supporter of the Egyptian nationalists, he had returned from Cairo to put their case to Gladstone, but had been unable to forestall the British action. He came to believe that the Khedive had deliberately inspired a deadly riot that took place at Alexandria (and was then blamed on the nationalists) in order to draw the British in. Seeking help in drawing attention to his allegations, Blunt approached Lord Randolph, whom he recalled as a ‘distinctly good-looking young man’ with a ‘certain distinction of manner’ and a curling moustache that ‘gave an aggressive tone to his countenance’.19 Lord Randolph was persuaded of Blunt’s case, and during 1883 publicly pressed the charge that the government was complicit in the actions of the Khedive, their ‘puppet and ally’.20 (He also described the execution of one nationalist officer, after a trial of doubtful fairness, as ‘the grossest and vilest judicial murder that ever stained the annals of Oriental justice’.)21 He may not have proven his accusations beyond all doubt, but he certainly made the government feel deeply uncomfortable. As Winston Churchill observed in his biography of his father, it was remarkable that, in officially rejecting the evidence he provided, ‘the Government took no steps, by rebutting it in detail, to discredit their pertinacious assailant’.22 Lord Randolph had undoubtedly demonstrated his unconventionality but he was no opponent of the Empire. He objected not to imperial rule per se, but to the halfway-house situation whereby the British propped up an unjust regime in Cairo. He declared that the government should either withdraw entirely or take total control: ‘Let them take Egypt altogether if they liked, but let the country be under persons responsible to the English Government who would rid the country of its burdens and raise up the fellaheen from their present low state.’23
His chief concern was to find sticks with which to beat the government. The following year he lacerated ministers for their failure to go to the rescue of General Charles Gordon, Governor-General of the Sudan, who was under siege in Khartoum. The government eventually sent a relief mission, but too late. It arrived, in January 1885, two days after the city had fallen to the forces of the Mahdi (‘The Expected One’), the charismatic Islamic leader who was determined to end Egyptian rule in his country. Gordon’s brutal death by spearing at the hands of the Mahdi’s warriors turned him into an imperial icon and helped seal the fate of Gladstone’s government, which fell in June. In spite of Lord Randolph’s tense relationship with his own party’s leadership, he had won national popularity, bolstered by speeches in which he urged ‘a policy of activity for the national welfare, combined with a zeal for Imperial security’.24 Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of the new minority Tory administration, could not fail to give him a Cabinet post, and appointed him Secretary of State for India.
His seven-month tenure at the India Office gave full play to the contradictions in his imperial attitudes. He had already made a long visit to India in advance of his appointment, and taken the trouble to meet a range of Indian intellectuals, politicians and journalists. Lala Baijnath, a lawyer, was ‘greatly astonished at his intimate knowledge of Indian subjects as well as those discussed by the native papers’.25 Nationalism was just beginning to flower in the country – the first Indian National Congress was held later in 1885 – and Lord Randolph appeared to be a polite and intelligent listener. He wrote to his mother: ‘The natives are much pleased when one goes to their houses, for the officials out here hold themselves much too high and never seek any intercourse with the natives out of official lines; they are very foolish.’26 He seemed genuinely to like the country (something that cannot be said of his son) and he won praise from papers such as the Indian Spectator, the Bengalee and the Hindoo Patriot.27
Back in England, and in office, Lord Randolph changed his tune. He had never doubted the benefits of British rule in India, even if – like many of its other supporters at the time – he admitted it to be ‘purely despotic’.28 (In a remark particularly admired by his son, he described the Raj as ‘a sheet of oil spread out over the surface of, and keeping calm and quiet and unruffled by storms, an immense and profound ocean of humanity’.)29 There was, however, the question of emphasis, and in language and policy he now showed himself a reactionary. The change was exemplified by his treatment of a delegation of Indians that came to Britain ‘to advocate advanced native views of a Home Rule kind’.30 At an interview arranged by Blunt, Churchill was charm itself, if politically noncommittal. ‘Nothing could have exceeded the grace and kindliness with which Lord Randolph shook hands with us’, recollected N. G. Chandavarkar. ‘I do not wonder that they make a hero of him on Tory platforms.’31 During that November’s general election, however, the delegates lent support to John Bright, Lord Randolph’s Liberal opponent in Central Birmingham, the constituency he was now fighting. He now mocked the ‘ignorance and credulity’ of the Indians, and added: ‘what must be the desperation of the radical party when, in order to secure the return of Mr Bright, they had to bring down on the platform of that great Town Hall three Bengalee baboos’.32 In the meantime Churchill had set in train the annexation of Upper Burma, which he clearly hoped would win him further Birmingham votes. The apparent liberality of the sentiments he had expressed in India had been replaced by military expansionism and cheap platform sneers.
Lord Randolph lost narrowly in Birmingham (although he easily found a new London seat) and the Tories lost the election as a whole. After Salisbury’s government fell in January 1886, Gladstone became Prime Minister again, but his determination to press ahead with Home Rule in Ireland led to his defeat and split his party in two. At a further election in July the Liberals met with disaster, and were thereafter to be denied effective power for nearly twenty years. Lord Randolph, though, was to gain little in career terms from the new Tory hegemony. At first his star continued to rise. Salisbury appointed him – when he was still only thirty-seven – Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. But his marriage was in difficulty (money worries may have contributed to this), he appeared ill, and he proved to be a mercurial, intemperate and ultimately impossible colleague. In December 1886, in an attempt to secure economy in naval spending, he offered his resignation. Greatly to his surprise, Salisbury accepted it. Lord Randolph never held office again. But his strangest imperial adventure was yet to come.
Within a few years, he was convinced that the Tory leaders meant to drive him out of the party: ‘I am not yet however clear that being driven out of the party is equivalent to being driven out of public life.’33 Indeed not. In February 1891 The Times reported that he had decided to visit South Africa; three months later the Daily Graphic announced that he had given its proprietors ‘the exclusive right to publish a Series of Letters signed by himself, giving a detailed account of his experiences’.34 He was to be paid the incredible sum of two thousand guineas for twenty letters. Owing to his and Jennie’s wild extravagance, he needed the money; he hoped to further boost his fortunes through the gold-prospecting syndicate he had formed. The Graphic was certainly to get its money’s worth, for once he arrived at Cape Town in May he began to generate spectacular and controversial copy. Almost everything he wrote – even his complaints about the catering onboard ship – generated heated debate at home. He attracted much criticism when he wrote that diamonds were mined in order to satisfy an ‘essentially barbaric’ feminine lust for personal adornment, and suggested that ‘w
hatever may be the origin of man, woman is descended from an ape’.35 His political pronouncements were startling too. He provocatively urged the British occupation of Portuguese territory on the Mozambique coast, following skirmishes between Portuguese soldiers and the forces of the British South Africa Company, at a time when the governments of Britain and Portugal were negotiating over the region. Perhaps most surprisingly, he endorsed the policy Gladstone had followed in South Africa in 1881. In that year, British defeat at the Battle of Majuba Hill had been followed by the restoration of the independent Boer republic of the Transvaal. (The Boers were Calvinists of mainly Dutch descent.) Many Conservatives had seen this as a pusillanimous imperial retreat, but Churchill now declared that the magnanimity of the peace settlement had allowed the British to escape ‘a wretched and discreditable muddle, not without harm and damage, but probably in the best possible manner’ given the circumstances.36 In the future, the value of conciliating the Boers was not to be lost on Winston Churchill, although many factors weighed on him quite apart from his late father’s opinions.
Lord Randolph’s unexpected remarks about the Majuba episode did not prevent him being magnificently rude about the Boers themselves:
The Boer farmer personifies useless idleness. [. . .] With the exception of the Bible, every word of which in its most literal interpretation he believes with fanatical credulity, he never opens a book, he never even reads a newspaper. His simple ignorance is unfathomable, and this in stolid composure he shares with his wife, his sons, his daughters, being proud that his children should grow up as ignorant, as uncultivated, as hopelessly unproductive as himself.37
Earlier, he had given a rather more positive impression of South Africa to Winston who, as a pupil at Harrow School, followed his progress avidly. A month into his tour Lord Randolph sent him an unusually affectionate letter. (He was by no means an attentive father, and when he wrote it was frequently to offer a reprimand.) ‘I have been having a most agreeable travel in this very remarkable country’, he wrote. ‘I expect that when you are my age you will see S Africa to be the most populous and wealthy of all our colonies.’38 Winston, for his part, informed Lord Randolph of the home press coverage, which he loyally denounced as ‘exceedingly spiteful & vicious’, and requested an antelope’s head for his room.39 ‘I hear the horrid Boers are incensed with you’, he told his father before going on to request some rare African stamps. ‘It would have been much wiser, if you had waited till you came back before you “slanged the beggars”.’40
To Lord Randolph’s credit, his criticisms of the Boers included their treatment of black people. ‘The Boer does not recognize that the native is in any degree raised above the level of the lower animals’, he wrote, adding: ‘His undying hatred for the English arises mainly from the fact that the English persist in according at least in theory equal rights to the coloured population as are enjoyed by whites.’41 The ‘at least in theory’ was a very important reservation – and it should be noted that Lord Randolph did not hesitate to refer privately to ‘niggers’42 – but the willingness to pay lip service to equality shows that Victorian racial politics was rather more complex than is often assumed. Winston Churchill did not grow up in an atmosphere where straightforward and unqualified racism would invariably pass without challenge.
Lord Randolph’s personal behaviour was highly eccentric. The degree to which this was a product of mental instability caused by illness is a moot point. His discourtesy to many of those he met on his journey could not but attract comment, and, when he travelled into Mashonaland, the mind-boggling extravagance of his expedition provoked the hilarity of the locals. (He took with him 103 oxen, a cow, 13 riding horses, 18 mules and a mare to run with them, 14 donkeys, 11 dogs, and 20 tons of food, ammunition and equipment.)43 He seems to have been almost indifferent to the impression he was making, telling his mother that ‘the carping and abuse of the Press’ was due to jealousy of the amount he was being paid. Moreover, ‘one must write the truth, and the truth is that the country is a disappointment and a failure’.44 Lord Randolph’s return to England was followed by a tragic mental and physical decline; his halting speeches became a horrible embarrassment. His friend Lord Rosebery famously observed, that ‘He died by inches in public’ and was ‘the chief mourner at his own protracted funeral’.45 In 1894 he started a world tour, which was cut short by a further collapse in his health. He died in London the following January.
His influence on Winston Churchill’s world view in general, and on his imperialism in particular, is difficult to gauge. Lord Randolph never took his son, who so admired him, into his political confidence, so the latter’s contemporary knowledge of his father’s career was not much greater than any other observer’s. ‘When I became most closely acquainted with his thought and theme,’ Winston later acknowledged, ‘he was already dead.’46 But the recently bereaved son threw himself into the study of his father’s life, learning portions of his speeches by heart and even quoting them to acquaintances; one, made in patriotic opposition to the idea of a Channel tunnel, seemed to appeal to him specially.47 In 1906 he published a massive and well-documented biography of Lord Randolph. By the time he finished it he had left the Conservative Party and was on the threshold of his ministerial career as a Liberal; he had abandoned the Tories after they had dropped their commitment to free trade, a highly controversial move that he thought would be economically damaging. With a combination of literary skill and judicious editing, he did his best in his book to iron out the inconsistencies in Lord Randolph’s political journey and to play down facts that he himself found politically uncomfortable. For example, Winston, as a free trader, ignored evidence that Lord Randolph had done more than merely flirt with the protectionist ‘Fair Trade’ movement of the 1880s.48 And, as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt noted at the time, ‘there is nothing at all [in the book] about his father’s more Indian liberal views’.49
It might have been expected, then, that Churchill would also seek to reinvent Lord Randolph as an unabashed imperialist, but interestingly he did not do so. The biography showed that Lord Randolph had at times adopted a ‘Jingo’ tone out of electoral expediency, and acknowledged that his attacks on Gladstone over Egypt had made some ‘True Blue’ Tories feel uneasy.50 It even admitted that ‘Lord Randolph Churchill was never what is nowadays called an Imperialist and always looked at home rather than abroad’.51 Yet if Churchill recognized the limits to his father’s imperialism – and if his own more powerful kind must therefore have owed much to other sources – we cannot discount Lord Randolph’s influence entirely. Winston can hardly, for example, have overlooked an important lesson of the South African visit: that travelling to distant parts of the Empire and writing about them was an excellent way of gaining publicity and making money at the same time.
II
Not long before his death, Lord Randolph wrote to Winston of his certainty ‘that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless and unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel one of the hundreds of the public school failures’.52 Even allowing for Lord Randolph’s considerable exaggeration of his son’s idleness, the latter was certainly not a model pupil in most respects. This, taken together with the fact that he later felt the need to make good his educational deficit through self-instruction, might lead us to conclude that his formal schooling had little impact on him. The truth, however, was different. During his childhood, and during his time at Harrow School in particular, he was exposed to imperialist messages that would stay with him for decades.
This exposure began early, but it was not simply a question of formal indoctrination. As his parents were distant, even neglectful, they delegated his care to Mrs Everest, who became his childhood confidante. In My Early Life (1930) he recalled a visit made to her sister and her husband, a prison warder, on the Isle of Wight, when he was four. It was at the time of the Zulu War, and as he recollected, not without irony:
There w
ere pictures in the papers of the Zulus. They were black and naked, with spears called ‘assegais’ which they threw very cleverly. They killed a great many of our soldiers, but judging from the pictures, not nearly so many as our soldiers killed of them. I was very angry with the Zulus, and glad to hear they were being killed; and so was my friend, the old prison warder. After a while it seemed that they were all killed, because this particular war came to an end and there were no more pictures of Zulus in the papers and nobody worried any more about them.53
Historians of Empire rightly place much emphasis on the role such media images (and popular culture in general) played in inculcating the British people with the spirit of Empire, and also on that of schooling. How much effect this had on the masses is a matter of controversy. For many years scholars tended to argue that the populace was suffused with Empire sentiment, via sweeping propaganda ranging from children’s literature to the music hall to imperial exhibitions.54 More recently it has been argued that even when this propaganda reached the working classes they were often indifferent to it, and that popular feeling for the Empire erupted only rarely, for example during the Boer War.55 There is little doubt, however, of the impact on the social elite. In Churchill’s case, that impact can be traced with some certainty. There are, it is true, some gaps in our knowledge. We do not have detailed evidence of the curricula he followed at the preparatory schools he attended between the ages of seven and thirteen. Nevertheless, it seems probable that he was exposed, even if only obliquely, to some form of imperial education while he was there. (He would surely have become familiar with the world map – with the extensive ‘pink bits’ indicating British territory – that was an almost proverbial feature of the Victorian schoolroom.) The fact that he joined the Primrose League in 1887, and his eagerness to attend Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in the same year, suggests that he felt some degree of emotional attachment to Crown and Empire by the time he reached his teens.