Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made

by Richard Toye

  Yet, if anyone could complete the task, it was Cripps. From a wealthy background, he had succeeded brilliantly as a barrister, which provided his route into politics. Having abandoned his youthful Conservative leanings, he was appointed Solicitor-General under the second Labour government and stayed loyal to the party in the split of 1931. He then swung violently to the left and was expelled from Labour soon before the outbreak of war, serving as an independent MP before his return to the fold in 1945. There was little love lost between him and Churchill, but the latter nonetheless appointed him to the Moscow embassy, once observing that ‘he was a lunatic in a country of lunatics and it would be a pity to move him’.180 As a teetotaller and vegetarian, Cripps had a reputation for ‘quirkiness, extreme austerity and cold aloofness’, although he could also demonstrate a lively sense of humour.181 Hitler told his inner circle that he preferred ‘the undisciplined swine’ Churchill as an adversary to the ascetic, ‘drawing-room Bolshevist’ Cripps. ‘From Churchill one may finally expect that in a moment of lucidity – it’s not impossible – he’ll realise that the Empire’s going inescapably to ruin, if the war lasts another two or three years. Cripps, a man without roots, a demagogue and a liar, would pursue his sick fancies although the Empire were to crack at every corner.’182 Goebbels, for his part, thought that the Cripps mission was a cunning plan to pacify India via divide and rule: ‘It is quite clear that this mess has been cooked up in Churchill’s kitchen.’183

  Cripps spent three weeks in India cajoling the party leaders to accept the scheme that he had brought with him. At one point the agreement seemed tantalizingly close even though, early on, Gandhi referred to the offer of self-government after the war as ‘a post-dated cheque’. (Some wag of a journalist added ‘on a failing bank’.)184 After the mission broke down, Cripps commented that ‘Gandhi was anything but a saint and had determined to wreck the negotiations from the beginning. He had succeeded.’185 Others placed the blame elsewhere. Even before the final collapse in April, ‘high-placed Americans were angrily saying that Churchill had butted in to prevent a reasonable settlement!’186 The truth was more complex. Certainly, both Amery and (especially) Churchill lost confidence in Cripps, feared that he might be exceeding his brief, and began to communicate with Linlithgow behind his back. The involvement of Colonel Louis Johnson, Roosevelt’s personal representative in India, complicated things further. But there was no single decisive and wrecking Churchillian intervention. Perhaps the most crucial barrier to agreement was the suspicion that the Congress leaders felt towards Linlithgow (who for his part did not trust Cripps). They did not believe that, once they had been admitted to a new, more thoroughly Indianized Viceroy’s Council, the Viceroy himself would allow them meaningful power. Nehru recalled that: ‘During the Cripps-Congress negotiations, I accepted some impossible things but I and those who were with me, found out very soon that those in power in Britain still possessed the mind and mentality of the Victorian period and I came to a definite conclusion that it was impossible to arrive at any settlement with the British rulers.’187

  Political weakness had forced Churchill to accept the initiative of the Cripps mission and he had clearly been discomfited by being driven away from his diehard position. He thus bore the news of the breakdown, he recalled in his memoirs, ‘with philosophy’.188 The outcome for him was not without advantage. As Cripps’s official biographer remarks perceptively, ‘It is clear that, spared the necessity of going through with the Cripps offer, what was now uppermost in the Prime Minister’s mind was the effect upon American opinion of having made it.’189 In other words, there was a propaganda benefit in having made an apparently generous proposal and having had it turned down. Furthermore, a little of the shine had now been taken off Cripps’s halo. As Amery commented when the mission was first planned, ‘I am by no means sure [. . .] that Winston doesn’t think it a good thing to send off this dangerous young rival on the errand of squaring the circle in India.’190

  The problem of India remained. After the fall of Tobruk in North Africa in June, Churchill faced a vote of no confidence in Parliament (which was defeated overwhelmingly). In Nehru’s contention, the ‘real explanation’ for British military setbacks was ‘Empire’ and the remedy for them was ‘the complete liquidation of that Empire’.191 On 8 August 1942 the All-India Congress Committee passed a resolution calling on the British to ‘Quit India’ and launched a new wave of civil disobedience. Forewarned, the British acted swiftly, arresting Gandhi, Nehru and other Congress leaders the next day. Riots erupted all over the country, Europeans were attacked, and railways were sabotaged.192 At the end of the month, Linlithgow told Churchill, ‘I am engaged here in meeting by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857’.193 Subhas Chandra Bose, the extremist leader who had broken with Congress and established a Free India Centre in Berlin, congratulated the rebels in a propaganda broadcast, and mocked Churchill for visiting Stalin in Moscow. Britain, he said, would ‘debase herself to any extent and stoop to any humiliation, so long as she can retain her hold over India. That is why Mr Winston Churchill, the high priest of imperialism, the arch-enemy of Indian nationalism and the sworn opponent of all forms of Socialism, swallowed his imperialist pride and presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin.’194

  The swift and brutal British reaction ensured that peace was restored in India by the autumn. Thousands were killed or wounded and multitudes were imprisoned. On several occasions mobs were machine-gunned from the air.195 According to the Cabinet Secretary’s notebook Churchill observed:

  Indian show-down v. satisfactory. Recruiting v. favourable. Congress shown unable to move the masses – a great flop. They have come out as a revolutionary movement: influenced or working with Japanese: and have failed. Shows that Congress don’t represent India – only Congress caucus and Hindu priesthood.196

  According to Amery, ‘From this he rambled on to the suggestion that it would really pay us to take up the cause of the poor peasant and confiscate the rich Congressman’s lands and divide them up.’197 Labour ministers made remarks on similar lines. Churchill was surprised to learn that there was no inheritance tax in India and the Cabinet agreed that the Viceroy should be asked to put forward some proposals.198 Amery, aware that many of these questions were in fact now the responsibility of the Provinces, and eager ‘to get on with the real business’, sat silent.199 It was a telling moment. In the face of large-scale violence, the British government had taken note of India’s enormous social divisions and made a vague, not especially well-informed, resolution to do something about them. But after further discussion over the next weeks it was decided it would be too expensive. There could be no question of spending money on Indian social reform ‘any more than on Canadian social reform’, Amery wrote.200

  Equally telling was the minute Churchill wrote about Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar and the Maharaja Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, both of whom had earlier been invited to represent India at the War Cabinet as ‘a generous gesture to loyal Indians’ and who arrived in Britain in September. ‘Though I shall naturally invite them to attend our Monday meetings on general war affairs, it must not be assumed that I shall feel able to invite them to Meetings when Indian affairs are to be discussed’, Churchill warned his colleagues. ‘We have already had several such meetings, and may have more, at which the presence of Indian representatives would be highly embarrassing.’201 They, certainly, felt the difficulties of their own position. Churchill was due to make a statement in the Commons on the disturbances on 10 September. The day before, Mudaliar and the Jam Saheb were taken to be photographed with him in the Downing Street garden. While they were there, Amery asked Churchill if he had read the note he had sent him in preparation for the statement. The Prime Minister reacted angrily, saying he had read it but that he would speak on his own lines. ‘If we ever have to quit India we shall quit it in a blaze of glory, and the chapter that shall be ended then will be the most glorious chapter of that country, not merely in relation to the past but equ
ally in relation to the future, however distant that may be. That will be my statement on India tomorrow.’ No one else could get a word in edgeways, and when the Indians went back to their hotel they considered quitting and going home if the statement was as bad as they feared it would be.202 In the end, Amery’s influence prevailed to some extent; Churchill toned down his public statement. In private, though, the Prime Minister remained as intransigent as ever, ‘I hate Indians’, he suddenly burst out, ‘They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’203

  Churchill began his modified Commons statement by saying that the declaration of principles that formed the basis of the Cripps mission ‘must be taken as representing the settled policy of the British Crown and Parliament’. In other words, the government stood by its offer. But, Churchill pointed out, Cripps’s ‘good offices’ had been ‘rejected by the Indian Congress Party’, which was at any rate unrepresentative even of the Hindu masses. Furthermore:

  The Congress Party has now abandoned in many respects the policy of nonviolence which Mr Gandhi has so long inculcated in theory, and has come into the open as a revolutionary movement designed to paralyse the communications by rail and telegraph and generally to promote disorder, the looting of shops and sporadic attacks upon the Indian police, accompanied from time to time by revolting atrocities – the whole having the intention or at any rate the effect of hampering the defence of India against the Japanese invader who stands on the frontiers of Assam and also upon the eastern side of the Bay of Bengal. It may well be that these activities by the Congress Party have been aided by Japanese fifth-column work on a widely extended scale and with special direction to strategic points.

  Towards the end of his statement, he referred to the continued high levels of recruitment to the Indian army: ‘It is fortunate, indeed, that the Congress Party has no influence whatever with the martial races, on whom the defence of India apart from British Forces largely depends.’ And in his concluding remarks, he noted that large numbers of reinforcements had reached India and that ‘the numbers of white soldiers now in that country, though very small compared with its size and population, are larger than at any time in the British connection’. Therefore, ‘the situation in India at this moment gives no occasion for undue despondency or alarm’.204

  According to Amery, Churchill’s statement ‘evoked ringing cheers’ from Conservatives but ‘greatly upset many of the Labour people, including a good many moderates’.205 The reaction of the Indian nationalist press was predictably angry. It pointed out that, having negotiated with Congress for so long, not least during the Cripps mission, it was a bit rich for the British government to start denouncing it as unrepresentative. The Hindu claimed that Churchill had packed more half-truths and venom into a few hundred words than he had given to the Commons during the passage of the India Bill.206 The Calcutta Sunday Statesman’s ‘Indian Observer’ – a columnist billed as holding ‘a representative Indian central point of view’ – remarked more thoughtfully that ‘such anger, such fury, such desperation have many times preluded the sullen but inevitable reversal of an unworkable policy’.207 For its part, the Congress-supporting India League, based in London, produced a pamphlet designed as a point-by-point answer to what Churchill had said.208 Jinnah criticized the speech too. He, of course, agreed with Churchill that Congress was unrepresentative but argued that the British government attached insufficient value to Muslim cooperation. Churchill had referred to the 90 million Muslims opposed to Congress and had said that they had a right of self-expression. But, Jinnah asked rhetorically, ‘Is this the only value you attach to the Mussalmans and the Muslim League, that they are opposed to the Congress, which is a fact, and they have the right to self-expression, which is a self-evident truth? Is that all he has to say?’209

  The impact in America was also negative. ‘Winston’s statement on India will not have done us much good here’, Halifax complained to Eden. ‘Why must he talk about white troops, when “the British army in India” would have served his purpose just as well?’210 Cripps, who felt that he was being sidelined from the running of the war, was at this time pondering resignation. He realized, though, that he could not resign over India. ‘Churchill’s speech harmful and foolish; but it contains the specific pledge in words that the Cripps offer holds.’211 This, perhaps, is the correct way to read Churchill’s statement. Although he used it as opportunity to encourage his Tory supporters and to vent some of his longstanding prejudices, he also ensured that he protected his political flank. Indeed, his reiteration of the Cripps offer was highly significant, not because there was any chance that it would now be accepted, but because he now associated himself personally with the promise of independence after the war. It was evidence that his political weakness during 1942 had dragged him from his entrenched position, although he drew attention away from this with his verbal pot-shots at Congress.

  VII

  In October 1942 Smuts arrived in London for consultations, at Churchill’s pressing invitation. Invited to address both Houses of Parliament, he was introduced by the doddering Lloyd George who, if not actually on his last legs, was certainly on his penultimate ones. Afterwards, Chips Channon saw all three men sitting together in the Smoking Room. ‘Winston and Smuts, who had once fought each other in the Boer War, were having a drink together, and there were glasses before them. Of the three only the bronzed South African looked fit.’212 According to taste, Smuts’s speech was either a) full of ‘every commonplace that we have all been trying to avoid for years’ (Harold Nicolson), or b) ‘finely phrased and inspired by a lofty conception of what the British Commonwealth means today’ (Leo Amery).213 It did contain at least some substance, in the form of a clear hint that an offensive against Hitler was coming.214 Two days later, on 23 October, the British Eighth Army under General Montgomery attacked Axis forces at El Alamein. (Over half of Monty’s 195,000 men were British, and most of the rest came from India, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.) Eleven days of fierce fighting followed, at the end of which Rommel began to retreat – and carried on for 1,500 miles. On 7 November British and US troops landed in Morocco and Algeria.215 ‘Now this is not the end’, Churchill said in a speech at the Mansion House in London on 10 November. ‘It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’216

  A later passage in the same speech is equally famous:

  We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. For that task, if ever it were prescribed, someone else would have to be found and, under democracy, I suppose the nation would have to be consulted.217

  According to The Times, his comments were greeted with loud cheers.218 The context for the remarks deserves some consideration. In general, they can be seen as a rejection of the contemporary (and particularly American) demand that in future colonies should be subjected to some form of international control or ‘trusteeship’.219 More specifically, they may well have been intended as a rebuttal of Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate defeated by Roosevelt in 1940, who had called for the ‘orderly but scheduled abolition of the colonial system’.220 It is also worth noting that they came immediately after a passage in which Churchill emphasized that Britain would not exploit its military triumphs to gain territory at the expense of France – she had no ‘acquisitive appetites or ambitions’ in North Africa or anywhere else, he said.221 Thus his insistence that Britain retain existing possessions was modulated by the assurance that she was not engaged upon a war of conquest. On the other hand, his observations about democracy were not merely benign musings about the workings of the system.222 Churchill was well aware of the prestige he could now command and was implicitly threatening colleagues that, if they opposed him on imperial issues, he would be prepared to force a general election, even during wartime. In any such election, he may well have thought, they, not he, would be swept away.

  With his position strengthened immeasurably by t
he first clear signs of victory, Churchill was able to demote Cripps, who had argued with him over military strategy, from the War Cabinet to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. His challenges as Prime Minister were still enormous. At home, the publication of William Beveridge’s famous report, calling for a major post-war expansion of social services, helped trigger a groundswell of radical opinion that would in due course sweep the Conservatives from office; Churchill himself saw such planning for peacetime as a distraction from the current war effort. At the same time, his ‘liquidation’ remarks drew inevitable criticism. ‘The Indians will come to dislike Allied successes if they merely increase British arrogance, as evidenced by Mr Churchill’s speech’, said Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, a prominent Indian politician known for his support for the war.223 Nehru wrote in his prison diary that he was pleased with Churchill’s plain speaking as it at least made the situation obvious: ‘How can any decent Indian submit to this or agree to cooperate with Churchill and his underlings passes my comprehension.’224 Wendell Willkie slammed Churchill’s defence of ‘the old imperialistic order’, and there were other signs of a revival in the USA of the picture of Britain ‘as a stronghold of reactionary imperialism’.225 Nevertheless, the criticism was not all one way. There was, of course, support from some fairly predictable quarters, such as the National Review and the British Empire Union in Australia.226 The Liberal MP Jimmy de Rothschild emphasized his friend Churchill’s belief that the Empire must march hand in hand with freedom: ‘Such is the Empire which he does not wish to liquidate.’227 Perhaps more surprisingly, the Washington Post said Willkie was talking nonsense, as Churchill had not been defending the old order but only ‘the right of the British Empire to exist as an entity’. In many countries the Empire had demonstrated its liberality over the years, and as regards India, ‘about which so much emotional confusion exists in this country’, Churchill and his government were pledged to give it freedom after the war. The Post believed Britain would live up to this promise.228