by Richard Toye
Wavell’s sojourn in London was not a happy one. One caller found that he cut a rather sad figure in the ‘cheerless’ room granted him at the India Office and noted, ‘The girl messenger who was looking after his visitors did not know how to spell his name.’121 The Viceroy was not a natural politician – he was disconcertingly lacking in small-talk – and he had to contend with the fact that Churchill and many of his ministers were uninterested in discussing India. At his (somewhat belated) first meeting with the Prime Minister, Churchill said, ‘you must have mercy on us’, and suggested that, in view of the government’s many difficulties, constitutional progress in India ‘could be kept on ice’. Wavell stated firmly that the issue was urgent, which prompted ‘a long jeremiad’ from Churchill in which he indicated his support for partition. ‘He talked as if I was proposing to “Quit India”, change the Constitution, and hand over India right away,’ Wavell noted, ‘and I had to interrupt him a number of times.’122 Excluded from key meetings and denied the chance to see key documents, the Viceroy soon felt like ‘an Untouchable in the presence of Brahmins’.123 He did, however, have significant support from the unholy alliance of left-wing Cripps and right-wing Amery. Amery took care to ensure Churchill knew that if Wavell was forced to resign then he and Cripps would too.
For the time being, Churchill remained intransigent, haranguing the Cabinet, denouncing Wavell and attempting to disclaim the Cripps offer. (‘Winston frankly takes the view that we made the offer when in a hole and can disavow it because it was not accepted at the time’, observed Amery.)124 On 7 May the news came that Germany had surrendered unconditionally. This was followed by the withdrawal of Labour and Liberal ministers from the coalition, as they were determined to secure the political independence of their respective parties. Churchill then formed a new caretaker administration, pending a general election. In spite of some last-minute attempted backtracking by Churchill, the new government agreed action. As Wavell pointed out to Amery, the ‘P.M. could not expect me to return to India empty-handed, and [. . .] surely it would be unfortunate if from an electioneering point of view India came into party politics’. That would have been hard to avoid if Wavell’s plans had been turned down, as the Labour leaders knew the details of all the discussions that had taken place.125 The deal struck involved Wavell calling a conference of Indian political leaders with a view to creating an Indianized Viceroy’s Council comprising members drawn from their ranks. This would be an interim solution before full agreement on a new constitution was reached. However, the conference, held at Simla, broke down in mid-July. Congress was keen to prove that the Muslim League did not have a monopoly of Muslim support and therefore wanted a representative who was not a member of it to be appointed to the Council; Jinnah refused to allow this, triggering the talks’ failure. Amery wrote later that the ‘immediate wrecker was Jinnah’ but that perhaps the real wrecking factor was the long delay before Wavell had been allowed to make his effort; on this analysis, Amery made clear, the genuine culprit was Churchill.126
Just before Churchill embarked on his general election campaign he had to tackle another crisis, an episode which serves as a reminder that the British Empire was not the only one facing difficulties at this time. In 1941 British and Free French troops had entered the Levant, ousting the Vichy regime from control. (France held the area under the League of Nations mandate system.) But although Syrian and Lebanese independence was then declared in the name of General de Gaulle, this proved to be more nominal than real, in spite of British pressure. Much friction between the two Allied powers ensued. When the French arrested the Lebanese President and Prime Minister in 1943, Churchill was predictably outraged, complaining to Roosevelt, apparently without irony, that France’s actions were ‘entirely contrary to the Atlantic Charter’.127 Churchill’s friend Edward Spears, appointed British minister in Syria and Lebanon, was suspected by the French of agitating against them; the Prime Minister reluctantly sacked him at the end of 1944, believing that he was suffering from Francophobia.128 In spite of French fears, the British had no territorial ambitions in the region, as Churchill’s ‘liquidation’ speech made clear. London’s policy was to sit on the fence – to support a privileged position for the French in the Levant if the countries’ governments were prepared to concede this by treaty (which was very unlikely, given the depth of local anti-French feeling). In late May 1945 violence broke out in Syria and, when the French authorities failed to bring it under control, British troops moved in to restore order. Although Churchill had been far from keen to do this, de Gaulle interpreted it as a plot to present Britain as the protector of the Arabs and to impose public humiliation on France.129 It had been no such thing, although it is only fair to observe that Churchill regarded Arab aspirations in the Levant far more sympathetically than he did nationalist movements in British territories. He was not scheming for the liquidation of the French Empire but he could regard the prospect of its decline with a certain detached equanimity. During the crisis, ironically, de Gaulle echoed Churchill’s own language at Yalta: ‘he would not allow France to be put into the dock before the Anglo-Americans’.130
V
To many observers, Churchill’s victory in the forthcoming election looked like a foregone conclusion. In the view of the Washington Post, he hardly needed an issue to campaign on beyond his record of military victory and having ‘saved Britain and the British Empire from what seemed certain extinction’.131 On 4 June he opened his campaign with a broadcast that quickly became notorious. A socialist government, he said, ‘would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance’.132 In a brilliant riposte, Attlee suggested that this remark showed the difference ‘between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr Churchill, the party leader of the Conservatives’; Labour, he argued, was the true national party.133 Even Churchill’s own supporters were dismayed by his gaffe. ‘Winston jumped straight off his pedestal as a world statesman to deliver a fantastical exaggerated onslaught’, noted Amery. His younger son Julian, himself a Conservative candidate, started to wonder if he was on the right side!134 Critics were able to point out that Australia and New Zealand both had Labour governments and that no dire consequences had resulted.135 The speech may have contributed to the subsequent refusal of Ben Chifley (Australian Prime Minister after Curtin’s death in office) to permit an Opposition motion thanking Churchill for his services to the Empire during the war.136
Imperial issues did not generate a great deal of excitement during the election. Although the Simla conference started towards the end of the campaign, India did not seem to be of much interest to the voters. Instead, domestic questions tended to dominate.137 Churchill was keen to show that he was still a social reformer, and his rhetoric retained a slight trace of the National Efficiency theme that had preoccupied him before 1914. In his second broadcast he highlighted contemporary concerns about the falling birth-rate: ‘Our future as a nation, and future as the centre of a great Empire, alike depend upon our ability to change the present trend in our population statistics.’ It was essential to ‘encourage by every means the number of births’ and, through health policy, to ‘fight for a healthy and well-nourished race of citizens’.138 On the Empire itself, the Conservative manifesto offered some progressive-sounding generalities. It spoke of framing plans ‘for granting India a fuller opportunity to achieve Dominion Status’ and said that Britain’s responsibility to the colonies was ‘to lead them forward to self-governing institutions’. Not that Labour policy was any more specific; its manifesto talked of ‘the advancement of India to responsible self-government, and the planned progress of our Colonial Dependencies’. Only the Liberals mentioned ‘complete self-government for India’.139
The Tory manifesto was also vague on questions of international economic policy. During the campaign itself, Churchill’s public reticence on these was flagged up by the economist Roy Harrod, fighting as a Liberal in Huddersfield. Harro
d alleged that there was a serious danger in returning the Conservatives to power, as it was probable that those Tories (such as Amery and Beaverbrook) who opposed greater freedom of trade would get their way. The prospects for the British economy would thus be frustrated: ‘Churchill, whose own ideas on these topics might be perfectly sound, would be a prisoner in the Conservativep.’ At the behest of the incumbent Liberal National MP, who wanted support for his own declaration that the government stood by its previous commitments to international economic liberalization, Churchill was moved to describe Harrod’s accusations as ‘mischievous’.140 Talk of Churchill as a ‘prisoner’ of his party on international economic issues was an exaggeration, but, as peacetime was to show, Tory divisions over Empire trade and finance were not yet dead.
Votes were cast on 5 July but the results were not announced until the 26th, in order to allow time for the votes of servicemen abroad to be counted. The outcome was a landslide for Attlee’s Labour Party. Leo Amery was amongst those who lost their seats. (He had been faced in his constituency ‘with very serious Left wing opposition which has been worked up against me as the oppressor of India’, though it seems unlikely that this was decisive in his defeat.)141 Churchill’s defeat provoked widely differing reactions. Robert Menzies declared his departure from the international scene to be a tragedy.142 Mackenzie King – who had recently won yet another election himself – confessed to his diary his relief ‘that at Imperial Conferences and Peace Conferences I know I will not have to be bucking centralized Imperialism again’.143 Gandhi later gave the Labour victory as an instance of the kind of mass intellectual conversion that he believed non-violence could bring about: ‘To me it is a sufficient miracle that in spite of his oratory and brilliance, Churchill should cease to be the idol of the British people who till yesterday hung on his every word.’144 But, although many Indians welcomed Labour’s victory, some were sceptical. V. D. Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist later acquitted of involvement in Gandhi’s murder, feared that Attlee would ‘out-Churchill Churchill’.145 Churchill did have his Indian admirers. Nirad Chaudhuri recalled: ‘I was shocked, because I could never imagine that the British people would so unceremoniously reject the man who had led them to victory from an almost hopeless situation.’146
In America, ‘The news of Mr Churchill’s sweeping defeat was received with a shock of astonishment that was almost reminiscent of the reactions to the Pearl Harbor Bombing.’ Sensational changes in foreign policy were not anticipated, but there was the expectation of changes in the British attitude on some issues, including India, the colonies, and Palestine. According to the British Embassy, ‘The Zionists were quick to announce their pleasure at the turn of events and expressed confidence in the new Government.’147 Republicans were alarmed by the spread of socialism. Presumably, though, the Tory defeat held a silver lining for former isolationists such as Senator Bob La Follette, Jr, who had recently censured ‘Mr Churchill’s dogmatic and at times arrogant refusal to discuss any definite plans for freedom for the subject people of the British Empire’.148 However, it was not immediately clear how radical a shift could be expected from Labour. A few months after taking office, the senior minister Herbert Morrison was asked by American journalists if the new government intended to ‘preside over the liquidation of the Empire’. Morrison replied: ‘No fear. We are great friends of the jolly old Empire and are going to stick to it.’149
In contrast to the glory and heroics of 1940, the final years of World War II can appear as a forlorn tale, even though they culminated in comprehensive military victory. ‘Churchill stood for the British Empire, for British independence and for an “anti-Socialist” vision of Britain’, one historian has observed. ‘By July 1945 the first of these was on the skids, the second was dependent solely upon America and the third had just vanished in a Labour election victory.’150 Yet it is also important to remember that the war did evince genuine popular enthusiasm from within the Empire – and this was not restricted to the self-governing Dominions. Consider, for example, this poem on the war, written by Boishwerelo Yane, a teacher in the Bechuanaland protectorate:
When things were just about to begin,
At a time when the bells call worshippers to go and pray,
There was heard a whistle-call, that travelled
All the way from Mr Churchill, the head of the Government.
In response came out Mongwaketse, Mokwena, Mokgatla and Mongwato,
And the chiefs of smaller tribes in the Protectorate.
Their answer was, ‘Do not wait to be asked!’
Hitler of Germany stood up in anger, the dog raised his tail.
He has put his paws on the little ones, like Poland,
Raise your voices and say, ‘You dog! You have comrades,
But so too does Mr Churchill,
He has comrades who will come to oppose you.’
This was one of thirty-nine entries in a verse competition to mark the launch of the first Setswana-language newspaper in 1944; twenty-eight of them took the war as their subject matter. Those who wrote them were clearly highly literate and surely had a much firmer grasp of the causes and personalities of the war than most of their less well-educated fellow countryfolk.151 Equally obviously, the half-million Africans who joined the British army had strong economic motives to do so, yet we cannot discount the idea that principle or indeed Empire loyalty may also have played a part in the thinking of at least some of them.152 Furthermore, it must not be forgotten that support for the war and burgeoning support for colonial liberation were not necessarily incompatible. As the Gold Coast nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote in later years, ‘All the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.’153 The final decade of Churchill’s career was to see him battling demands and changes in part unleashed by his own inspiring rhetoric.
9
ONCE MAGNIFICENT AND STILL CONSIDERABLE, 1945–1955
On 8 October 1948 Winston and Clementine Churchill arrived at the Grand Hotel, Llandudno, North Wales, accompanied by their poodle, Rufus. They were there for the Conservative Party’s annual conference. Loss of power had not dimmed Churchill’s celebrity status. The entire staff lined up to welcome him, and they spared no effort to ensure his comfort even at this time of harsh post-war austerity. Reportedly, one Tory worthy ‘stood by the elevator gate and watched the car go up eight times, carrying only a waitress with heavy trays. Finally, the elevator boy shouted through the gate: “Sorry, sir, but it’s Mr Churchill’s dinner.” ’1 Churchill’s keynote speech the next day provided the assembled delegates with a satisfying meal of their own. He gave a bravura performance, combining strong words on the Soviet threat coupled with an attack on the ‘guilty men’ of the Labour government, who, he claimed, had neglected Britain’s defences. He also looked forward with hope. In a well-known passage, he described ‘the existence of three great circles among the free nations and democracies’:
The first circle for us is naturally the British Commonwealth and Empire, with all that comprises. Then there is also the English-speaking world in which we, Canada, and the other British Dominions and the United States play so important a part. And finally there is United Europe. These three majestic circles are co-existent and if they are linked together there is no force or combination which could overthrow them or even challenge them.
The fact that Great Britain stood at the point where the three circles overlapped created an opportunity for it to exercise global leadership. ‘If we rise to the occasion in the years that are to come it may be found that once again we hold the key to opening a safe and happy future to humanity, and will gain for ourselves gratitude and fame.’2
Anthony Eden had already spoken to the conference of the ‘three unities’: ‘unity within the British Commonwealth and Empire, unity with western Europe, and unity across the Atlantic’.3 Churchill’s achievement was to rearticulate this in a more colourful fashion. His
rhetoric served two important functions. First, for his national audience, it offered reassurance amid the post-war gloom. The speech seemed to show how (under Conservative leadership, it went without saying) Britain could play a pivotal world role in spite of the decline of her imperial power. Second, it helped smooth over divisions within the Conservative Party itself. There was significant anti-Americanism amongst Tories at this time, which manifested itself partly in hostility to US efforts to prod Britain into engaging in European integration.4 Churchill had himself declared in favour of a ‘United States of Europe’ two years earlier. He now made clear, though, that ‘I cannot think [. . .] that the policy of a United Europe as we Conservatives conceive it can be the slightest injury to our British Empire and Commonwealth or to the principle of Imperial Preference which I so carefully safe-guarded in all my discussions with President Roosevelt during the war.’5 His insistence that there was no incompatibility between a strong Empire, a united Europe and Anglo-American unity was a way of reconciling the competing ideological instincts of different groups of Tories.