by Richard Toye
He subsequently returned to the US, where, on 9 January 1901, at the University of Ann Arbor, he again received an unfriendly reception from anti-imperialists. That same evening he confided his thoughts on world politics to a student journalist, in an interview that was not published in full until after his death. The influence of Winwood Reade was still apparent: ‘I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. [. . .] The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.’112
On 2 February 1901, the day of Queen Victoria’s funeral, he boarded ship for England. The stage was now set for his House of Commons debut. He had warned Milner a few weeks before that ‘Everyone is sorely vexed and worried by the continuance of the war’, and that the forthcoming parliamentary debates would be ‘bitter’. He proposed a temporary armistice and negotiation.113 Public concern was growing about British tactics, which were soon to be labelled by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as ‘methods of barbarism’. In My Early Life Churchill acknowledged that the guerrilla phase of the war had led to ‘shocking evils’. He wrote that, in order to cope with surprise assaults by a non-uniformed enemy, the British army cleared entire districts and herded the population into concentration camps, but the Boers cut railway lines, causing supply problems. ‘Disease broke out and several thousands of women and children died. The policy of burning farms whose owners had broken their oath [of neutrality], far from quelling the fighting Boers, only rendered them desperate.’114 He gave no clue, though, that he himself had publicly justified farm burnings and concentration camps at the time. His maiden speech, on 18 February, made some efforts in this direction, in the context of a general defence of government policy in South Africa. He spoke immediately after the radical Liberal pro-Boer MP David Lloyd George, who made a speech condemning the ‘infamy which is perpetrated in the name of Great Britain in Africa’.115 Churchill did not answer Lloyd George’s arguments in detail, not least because, having learnt his own speech by heart, his ability to improvise was limited. He said, though, ‘that as compared with other wars, especially those in which a civil population took part, this war in South Africa has been on the whole carried on with unusual humanity and generosity’.116 A few months later he stated his belief that the concentration camps, if imperfect, involved ‘the minimum of suffering to the unfortunate people for whom we have made ourselves responsible’.117
As usual though, there were complex undercurrents. He had not lost his respect for the manly qualities of the Boers. In a famous passage in his maiden speech, he scorned the ‘verbal sympathy’ the enemy had received from Liberal MPs, unmatched by practical support. ‘If I were a Boer fighting in the field – and if I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field – I would not allow myself to be taken in by any message of sympathy, not even if it were signed by a hundred hon. Members.’118 The apparent admission that the Boers were motivated by a legitimate patriotism drew him some criticism. Chamberlain, sitting on the Treasury bench, muttered ‘That’s the way to throw away seats!’119 Even more telling was a letter Churchill sent to Milner in March. He wrote of ‘this miserable war, unfortunate and ill-omened in its beginning, inglorious in its course, cruel and hideous in its conclusion’. He had, he said, ‘hated these latter stages with their barbarous features – questionable even according to the bloody precedents of 1870, certainly most horrible’. (But he had cited the Franco-Prussian War himself in his maiden speech, pointing out that Paris had been shelled and reduced to starvation, and arguing that British forces should not be restrained from following such precedents!) He was still ‘absolutely determined’ to take away the Boers’ independence, but could not ‘face the idea of their being economically and socially ruined too’.120 Doubtless he would have justified the discrepancy between his public claim, that the conflict was conducted with ‘unusual humanity’, and his private one, that it had ‘barbarous features’, with the need to maintain public backing for what he still saw, fundamentally, as a just war. During its concluding phase (the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in May 1902), he combined newly outspoken criticism of the government’s handling of the military situation with the conviction that a supreme effort could bring about a victory that would ‘combine the peace of Africa with the honour of Britain’.121
As Churchill set out on his parliamentary career, then, his position was uncomfortable. Prior to the outbreak of war he had taken a conventional Conservative position and, in spite of his growing concerns in private, had largely sustained that in public through to his first months in the Commons. Nevertheless, his experiences of the war did make him sceptical of the way it was conducted in practice, and also greatly increased his respect for the Boers. Hence his (somewhat intermittent) criticisms of the War Office and also his calls for a magnanimous approach towards the enemy. He did at times appear opportunistic. After his embarrassment with the heckler at Plymouth he toned down his attacks on the War Office during his election campaign – when he ridiculed Liberal charges of muddle – only to revive his concerns later. In October 1901 Sir Edward Grey observed that ‘criticisms had ably been pressed home of late by Mr Winston Churchill, but what a satire his speeches were upon the last election at Oldham’.122 However, as his comments to Milner make clear, he felt a genuine dilemma about what he should say in public, given the need (in his view) to sustain patriotic sentiment at home as a precondition for victory. And although he may not have been the ruthless apostle of truth that legend favours, he did, to his credit, take the political risk of expressing his concerns when, in the dying months of the war, he felt that a dangerous public apathy was taking hold. Finally, we should not rush to conclude that his multiple twists and turns were the product of calculation, cynical or otherwise. To a fair degree they were the product of sheer inexperience and even of uncertainty. We can see a hint of his problems in his response to questions about the alleged inefficiency of the army after one of his Canadian lectures. His first response was to claim that its organization in South Africa was ‘perfect’, but he then paused before remarking that there were many reforms to be made and that he was pledged to his constituents to that effect.123 We can see here his instinctive ‘My country right or wrong’ attitude warring with his (in this case legitimate) intolerance of established methods and his (perhaps not always sufficiently developed) awareness of the hostages to fortune that he had already given. If he did not always achieve a perfect balance it is perhaps worth recalling that, at the time he entered Parliament, he was only twenty-six.
At the same time we may note that the war in South Africa had been ideologically disconcerting for him. The experience of fighting fellow white colonialists seems to have presented a greater challenge to his world view than battling the brave but alien-seeming tribesmen of the North-West Frontier or the warriors of the Sudan.124 The collapse of his contempt for the Boers under the pressure of reality did not imply any weakening of his faith in the Empire, but it did introduce new paradoxes. In particular, his increasing sympathy for their aspiration to freedom – provided that that freedom was exercised within the Empire – meant that the welfare of the black majority was put to one side. This did not mean that Churchill did not care about that issue, merely that he did not at this time care enough about it to prioritize it or indeed to say much of meaning about it at all. In this of course he was hardly unique, and his jibes at the inconsistencies of the pro-Boers were not without their point, but the absence was significant. In a speech made shortly after he became an MP he spoke of how the Boer War was ‘the people’s war’ and also ‘the Empire’s war’. He said he knew from his visit to Canada – and he believed it also true of Australia – that ‘the people, by their effective participation in this memorable struggle, had been able to feel, down to the poorest farmer in the most distant province, that they belonged to the Empire and that, in a certain sense, the British Empire be
longed to them’.125 Yet it seems very unlikely either that many non-white colonial subjects of the Empire felt this profound sense of participation or ownership, or indeed that Churchill was even referring to them. If the implication of his words was that the British Empire required the moral sanction of its people, then he could only realistically claim it had that sanction on a highly restricted view of who ‘the people’ were. In other words, his narrow angle of vision regarding race helped him claim a democratic basis for his broader arguments for imperialism. For a young politician hoping to exploit his own imperial background in a new era of mass politics, this was, indeed, a convenient way of seeing the Empire.
PART TWO
Divide Et Impera!
4
THAT WILD WINSTON, 1901–1908
During the first months of 1906 Churchill made himself highly unpopular, not only with political opponents but also with important sections of opinion within the Empire. As a new minister in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal government, he was an obvious target for those on the Conservative side, from which he had ‘ratted’ two years earlier. The attacks of Joseph Chamberlain and other Unionists, who alleged that he was more concerned with party politics than with Empire, were therefore par for the course. Yet the criticisms of Churchill came from all sides. Ramsay MacDonald, secretary of the newly emergent Labour Party, accused him of tactlessness in his efforts to exert control over local colonial governments’ treatment of their non-white populations. ‘I do not think I am an over-cautious man, or that my sympathies with oppressed black and yellow men in South Africa are niggardly’, MacDonald wrote. ‘But I am bound to say that, unless the Cabinet muzzle Mr Winston Churchill, they will bring themselves into a disastrous conflict with the Colonies.’1 The right-wing Morning Post, Churchill’s former employer, applauded MacDonald’s remarks and claimed that the new minister had become ‘a national danger’.2 And at a Colonial Institute dinner in London the very mention of Churchill’s name ‘evoked hisses and ironical exclamations’,3 a reaction which The Times blamed on his apparent pursuit of ‘mere party purposes’ in place of efforts to secure ‘the confidence of those bearing the heat and burden in far-off lands for the benefit of the whole Empire’.4 The central issue of controversy was South Africa; and when the Times of Natal denounced Churchill’s imperial policy as ‘rotten and vicious’ it was representative of the response of the British press there.5 Lord Selborne, who had replaced Milner as High Commissioner, was driven almost to apoplexy by Churchill’s behaviour: ‘Winston keeps up a very friendly correspondence with me, but the only fixed purpose I can detect in his policy is that of keeping well with the extreme radicals. They are a crowd! of dangerous lunatics I say! the Empire cannot survive much of them.’6 Although Churchill was still talked of, even in distant parts of the Empire, as a future Prime Minister, it was far from the happiest of starts to a ministerial career.7
I
How, then, had Churchill made the switch from ardent Tory imperialist in 1900 to Liberal enfant terrible and alleged menace to British interests? Had he really changed his ideological spots, or was he a victim of misrepresentation? The answers to these questions take us back to the unhappy closing phases of the Boer War and its political aftermath. There were some signs, even before the war, that he did not regard the Conservative Party as his natural political home. In 1897 he told his mother that he was a Liberal at heart and that, were it not for the party’s commitment to Irish Home Rule, ‘to which I will never consent’, he would join it.8 Yet, since he subsequently fought two vigorous Tory campaigns and then joined a Liberal Party which had not abandoned Home Rule – although in fairness it had put the issue on the back burner – we should perhaps not take these remarks too seriously. The indications are that, on election to Parliament, he intended to be ‘an independent Conservative’ who would not, rebel as he might, be drawn from his ‘true allegiance’ to the Tories ‘by any fulsome flattery or self-interested compliments which may come from the Radical side’.9 This position, however, was to prove unsustainable.
Churchill seemed to aspire to recreate the ‘Fourth Party’, the group of parliamentary guerrillas that had formed a springboard for his father’s career. He banded together with a few other like-minded young Tories, including Lord Hugh Cecil, a son of Lord Salisbury; the group became known as the Hooligans or ‘Hughligans’. Churchill explicitly took up Lord Randolph’s mantle – the cause of economy – in his first big act of rebellion, his attack on the army reform scheme introduced by the Secretary of State for War, St John Brodrick. Brodrick wanted to expand the army to comprise six corps. Three of these would form a potential expeditionary force (presaging a greater commitment to involvement in European warfare) and three were to be kept for home defence.10 Churchill was pledged to reform of the army but not to its growth, and in May 1901 he attacked Brodrick in the Commons, quoting Lord Randolph’s 1886 resignation letter which warned of the dangers of excess military spending. One army corps, the younger Churchill argued, was ‘quite enough to fight savages’ whereas three were not enough ‘even to begin to fight Europeans’. In case of war in Europe, he put his faith in the navy’s capacity to defend Britain until such time as land forces could be made ready; the Admiralty was the only department ‘strong enough to insure the British Empire’.11 Clearly riled, Brodrick hit back, offering up the hope that Churchill would in time ‘look back with regret to the day when he came down to the House to preach Imperialism, without being willing to bear the burdens of Imperialism, and when the hereditary qualities he possesses of eloquence and courage may be tempered also by discarding the hereditary desire to run Imperialism on the cheap’.12 Churchill was by no means the only Conservative to oppose Brodrick. Leo Amery, with whom Churchill was in touch over the question, was another notable critic, and in 1903 he published influential Times articles which were broadly in line with Churchill’s arguments.13 Such criticism contributed to the overall failure of Brodrick’s plans. But although Churchill was not a lone voice amongst Tories, his calls for retrenchment brought him closer to mainstream Liberal opinion. At the same time they raised suspicions on his own side that, having used ‘his graphic pen to excite a spirit of militarism’, he was making a U-turn in order to ride the changing tide of public opinion. His opportunism, it was thought, made him a true son of his father.14
By 1902 he had ceased to regard the Conservative Party as his long-term political home. He briefly put his hopes in the Liberal Imperialist Lord Rosebery, who had been a failure as Prime Minister in 1894–5, but who continued to hold an almost mystical sway over his supporters. When Rosebery appeared to hold out the prospect that he might emerge from retirement, Churchill commented that the ‘muddy waters of the Opposition’ were getting clearer, and ‘The slime, the sewage, and other Radical impurities are sinking slowly to the bottom, the clearer waters of Liberalism [are] rising steadily to the top’.15 He tried to persuade Rosebery that he should head ‘a central coalition’, together with Sir Michael Hicks Beach, the former Tory Chancellor. He noted: ‘The one real difficulty I have to encounter is the suspicion that I am moved by mere restless ambition: & if some definite issue – such as Tariff – were to arise – that difficulty would disappear.’16 Rosebery was to prove as elusive as ever and did not commit himself. However, Churchill’s desire that trade policy should emerge as an issue was to be fulfilled, and it was to provide him with his opportunity, even if not in exactly the form that he had sought. The idea of a centre party was to prove a mirage, but the grand upheavals of the next few years enabled him to find a new home with the Liberals.
It was the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, who was to shake the political kaleidoscope. In 1902 Arthur Balfour had succeeded Salisbury as Conservative Prime Minister. At sixty-six, Chamberlain must have known that he himself was unlikely ever to lead a government, not least because he was not universally trusted within the Tory Party, of which, as a Liberal Unionist, he was an ally rather than a member. Nevertheless, he was determined t
o leave his mark on the Empire. In May 1903 he gave a speech in Birmingham, his great power base, in which he argued for a system of imperial tariff preference; that is to say Empire countries would treat each other’s products more favourably than they did foreign goods. In his view, this was an essential means to consolidate the Empire ‘which can only be maintained by relations of interest as well as sentiment’, and which should, indeed, be ‘self-sustaining and self-sufficient, able to maintain itself against the competition of all its rivals’.17 The speech blew apart the broad free-trade consensus that had dominated British politics for decades. Tariff reform raised the unpopular prospect of tariffs on staple imports, which the Liberals quickly labelled ‘food taxes’. The controversy was bitter. As Chamberlain’s comments show, the argument was not just about economics. It was a debate about international power, and about the fundamental nature, even the very soul, of the British Empire.