by Richard Toye
When the agreement was announced in the Commons in July 1954, Churchill ‘sat glum and with bowed head’. Labour MPs taunted him with cries of ‘No scuttling!’ When Attlee pointedly asked him if the agreement had his consent, he rose slowly, looking hurt, and the House fell quiet. He opened his arms wide and said, ‘I am convinced that it is absolutely necessary.’133 In debate the next day he declared that the claim that he had encouraged the Suez Group ‘under the table’ was ‘an absolute untruth’. He rationalized his change of heart by claiming that the advent of the H-bomb had rendered the Suez Canal Base obsolescent.134 That was not a terribly convincing argument. However, his ultimate willingness to bite the bullet of withdrawal forms a reminder of the pragmatism that his wilder outbursts often obscured.
V
His relations with Commonwealth leaders similarly demonstrated his ability to adjust to new realities. He continued to develop the good relationship with Nehru that he had begun to establish in Opposition after 1947. ‘I get on very well with him’, he told Lord Moran. ‘I tell him he has a great role to play as the leader of Free Asia against Communism.’ Moran asked how Nehru reacted to this. After all, he was to be a key figure in the Non-Aligned Movement of countries that were determined not to take a side in the Cold War. ‘He has a feeling that the Communists are against him, and that’, Churchill explained with a smile, ‘is apt to change people’s opinions.’135 In fact Nehru’s appreciation of Churchill was based in part on his sense that, as a Cold Warrior, he was by no means completely hard-line.
Perhaps less surprisingly, now that the tensions of the war period were past, Churchill achieved an amicable bond with Robert Menzies. The thaw had set in with a 1948 visit to Chartwell at which the Australian had been granted a preview of the ‘three circles’ concept. Although Menzies thought that Churchill really ought to retire, he made sure to cultivate the link of friendship.136 He contributed an essay on ‘Churchill and the Commonwealth’ to a volume published to celebrate the great man’s eightieth birthday in 1954. Noting that the Prime Minister had not been identified with ‘great Empire economic policies’ – Churchill was ‘much too European for that’ – Menzies offered a slightly backhanded tribute to his wartime imperial rhetoric. ‘The great Imperialists in half a dozen countries had made millions think [of] the Empire’, he wrote; ‘it was left to Winston, the Englishman and European, to make scores of millions feel it with passion and will.’137 Churchill also retained his fondness for Canada, which he visited in 1952 and again in 1954. He was, however, deeply upset by the decision that the Canadian navy should abandon the playing of ‘Rule Britannia’. He told Lester Pearson, the country’s minister for external affairs, of his bitter disappointment and, to drive the point home, ‘recited all the verses of “Rule Britannia”, and, inspired by this, went on to recite several Harrow patriotic songs he had learned sixty years ago’.138 On his visits, the Canadian authorities tactfully ensured that the anthem was played for him on every possible occasion.
Churchill even got on well with Eamon De Valera on the one occasion that he met him. At the close of World War II, the two men had clashed over the airwaves. In his May 1945 victory broadcast Churchill had lambasted Ireland’s decision to stay out of the war, and spoke of how Britain, instead of seizing the ports, had restrainedly ‘left the De Valera government to frolic’ with German and Japanese representatives in Dublin.139 In response De Valera had offered a dignified vindication of Irish neutrality. Their September 1953 encounter, when the Taoiseach visited London, was surprisingly cordial, although they did not make any great diplomatic breakthrough. When De Valera raised the question of Irish unification, which in theory Churchill still favoured, the latter pointed out the obstacle posed by Ulster and Conservative Party opinion. To the request for the return of the bones of the Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement, hanged for treason by the British in 1916, Churchill implied that he favoured the idea, but afterwards did not act on it. (Casement was finally reburied in 1965.)140 One other point of interest came up. In 1949, when De Valera had been out of power, Ireland had left the Commonwealth for good. He now told Churchill that he would not have taken this step himself.141 Perhaps this contributed to Churchill’s beneficent reaction to his former adversary. ‘A very agreeable occasion’, he said afterwards, ‘I like the man.’142
On racial issues, though, he made no effort to adjust to modernity.143 When asked if he had seen the film Carmen Jones, a musical with a black cast, he replied that he had walked out early on as he didn’t like ‘blackamoors’.144 This was not just a private prejudice: it had implications for policy. Labour’s 1948 British Nationality Act had confirmed wide rights – which had previously been available to Empire subjects – for Commonwealth citizens to settle in Britain. It received little debate at the time, but immigration soon increased rapidly. Many of the new arrivals were from the West Indies. By the early 1950s the issue of ‘coloured’ immigration was rising up the political agenda and the Conservative Cabinet discussed it on several occasions. The Cabinet Secretary’s notebook records Churchill’s view in 1954. He spoke of the problems which ‘will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK?’ Immigrants, he said, were ‘attracted by the Welfare State’, and ‘Public opinion in U.K. won’t tolerate it [immigration] once it gets beyond certain limits.’ At this stage, however, he thought it would be ‘politically wise to allow public feeling to develop a little more’ before taking action.145 The following year Harold Macmillan noted a further discussion on Caribbean immigrants: ‘A bill is being drafted – but it is not an easy problem. P.M. thinks “Keep England White” a good slogan!’146 In fact, restrictive legislation was not passed until some years after Churchill left office. He complained to the editor of the Spectator that he thought immigration was ‘the most important subject facing this country, but I cannot get any of my ministers to take any notice’.147 In reality, many of them shared his (undoubtedly exaggerated) concerns. His inability to get anything done probably owed much to the fact that, by this stage, his diminishing energies were focused mainly on foreign policy. Arguably, it also owed something to the difficulties of drawing up a law that would have the effect of excluding black people while appearing to be non-discriminatory.148 (Race was clearly the issue: ministers showed no concern about continuing large-scale Irish migration, even though the Republic of Ireland was now outside the Commonwealth.) Churchill disliked the idea of a ‘magpie society’, as he called it, which he thought ‘would never do’.149 Ironically, lack of decisive action to halt black and Asian migration meant that he presided, however unwillingly, over the beginnings of Britain’s multicultural society.
At the international level, the advent of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1948 added an unpleasant new dimension to discussion of race. Smuts’s electoral defeat that year followed by his death two years later had deprived Churchill of a reliable friend. Once back in office himself, the Prime Minister he had to deal with (until 1954) was the National Party’s D. F. Malan. In addition to its well-known segregation laws, Malan’s government sought to weaken South Africa’s connection with Britain, for example by making it harder for British immigrants to be granted citizenship. Churchill’s government did not approve of apartheid but, at the same time, it did not want South Africa to leave the Commonwealth and was wary of alienating Malan’s regime. Officially, apartheid was a South African internal question.150 David Hunt, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, recalled the Prime Minister ‘sending a telegram to Dr Malan and asking me whether he should say sardonically, “My dear Mr President [sic], Alles sal reg kom (everything will be all right). Keep on skelping the kaffirs!” ’ The joke was clearly in poor taste, but it does hint at a slight sense of awkwardness on Churchill’s part. He may have been, in Hunt’s words, ‘on the whole rather anti-black’, but overt, institutionalized racism was a source of embarrassment and uneasiness.151 Yet it was not an issue that Churchill wanted to confront directly, or even one tha
t he was happy to see others confront. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Geoffrey Fisher, denounced apartheid as ‘a sort of slavery’, Malan protested vigorously. Lord Swinton (Ismay’s replacement at the Commonwealth Relations Office) brought the matter to Cabinet, warning that Malan might object to sitting with the Archbishop at the forthcoming coronation. Churchill said that Fisher should be reproved, and that he would be ‘well advised to stick to spiritual matters’.152
However, the government did hold firm against the South African desire to take control of Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland (known collectively as the High Commission Territories). The threat that they would be swallowed up was longstanding. In 1941, Churchill had written that if this occurred they would be run ‘in accordance with very old-fashioned ideas’.153 When the South Africans brought the issue of the territories up again in 1954, he told the Cabinet, ‘We will not hand these over to Malan.’ He believed that if South Africa renounced its allegiance to the Crown, Natal, a strongpoint of British loyalism, might secede from the Union, but he correctly predicted that Malan would not react violently to a refusal.154 He then made it clear in the Commons that the demands would not be met: ‘I therefore sincerely hope that Dr Malan and his Government, with whom we have hitherto happily co-operated on so many problems we share in common, will not needlessly press an issue on which we could not fall in with their views without failing in our trust.’155 Churchill also took a firm line in negotiations over the Simon’s Town naval base near Cape Town. ‘No weakening of our rights over Simonstown should be tolerated’, he urged, and argued there should be no NATO involvement there. ‘The Americans are getting a footing in many parts of what was once our Empire but I do not think our weakness has yet become so pronounced as to require American protection to preserve our rights in Simonstown in any period which we need to consider at this moment.’156 Agreement was finally reached in 1955, shortly after Churchill’s retirement, on terms more advantageous to the British than might have been expected. Although the South Africans gained control of the base, the Royal Navy kept the right to use its facilities in peacetime and was guaranteed their availability in time of war, even a war in which South Africa was not involved.157
There has been much debate over the 1951 government’s African policy as a whole. Did it represent a continuation of the Attlee administration’s decolonization agenda, or did it seek to turn back the clock? There is a strong argument for continuity, albeit in the sense that Labour had in reality been reactive rather than radical and that this dynamic did not change much under the Tories. Certain decisions, such as the creation of the doomed Central African Federation (of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland) were a continuation from the previous regime.158 The case of the Gold Coast is also instructive. There, Kwame Nkrumah had founded the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in 1949. Pointing out that the Labour government was relatively sympathetic to African demands, and desiring immediate self-government, he urged striking while the iron was hot. Citing Churchill’s ‘liquidation’ speech, he warned that if the Conservatives were returned to power ‘our struggle for independence might be suppressed’.159 He was imprisoned for supporting an illegal strike, but was released when his party won the country’s first general election in 1951. The following year, Nkrumah became Prime Minister, and in 1957 he led his country to independence. Now known as Ghana, it was the first African country to win its freedom from Britain. Much of the progress was owed to the colony’s far-sighted Governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke. He knew that Conservative ministers were doubtful about the pace of change but he got his way anyway, in the absence of a workable alternative policy.160 Naturally, his efforts helped stoke up demands elsewhere in British Africa. If the Gold Coast had its own Prime Minister, why shouldn’t, say, Nigeria have one too? Churchill thought that it was ‘Crazy’ to give universal suffrage to ‘these naked savages’. Lyttelton hoped to ‘retard’ constitutional development in Nigeria and cited the principle of ‘divide et impera’.161 There was no big new wave of decolonization for the time being. However, the real question by this stage was when the various colonies would get independence, not if. The government’s strategy was to apply the brakes whenever practicable, not to engineer a major change of course.
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Of the many African issues the government had to confront, the worst was the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. It was probably also the one that involved Churchill most emotionally, as the memory of his 1907 visit gave him a sense of connection to the country. The image he had gained then of its inhabitants as happy, childlike people conformed with the prevailing stereotype. In the face of horrific Mau Mau violence, this was suddenly replaced with a stereotype of Africans as primordial savages, in the grip of some form of collective psychosis. The blood-curdling nature of Mau Mau oaths (often taken unwillingly) helped justify the use of ‘primitive barbarity’ as a simplistic, catch-all explanation. In fact, Mau Mau’s origins owed much to land hunger, exacerbated partly by the reservation of the highlands to the settlers, as approved by Churchill years earlier. However, the rebellion should not be understood exclusively as an anti-imperial revolt but rather as a civil war within the Kikuyu, the ethnic group chiefly affected. Many Africans stayed loyal to the British regime, including, for example, Harry Thuku, the nationalist whose deportation Churchill had sanctioned in the 1920s. Only thirty-two European civilians were killed in Mau Mau attacks, in comparison with at least 1,819 African deaths. The British response to the crisis was brutal. Communities were subjected to collective punishments. Members of the security forces – black as well as white – committed terrible brutalities. The death penalty was extended to a wide range of offences, including administering Mau Mau oaths, carrying weapons, or ‘consorting’ with the group’s members. A total of 1,090 Kikuyu were executed for such crimes during the course of the emergency, many of them after trials that were patently unfair. At least 150,000 people passed through the detention camps, almost always being held without trial.162 Unsurprisingly, such measures were counterproductive, forcing thousands of Kikuyu to take to the forests and transforming sporadic Mau Mau violence into a full-scale guerrilla campaign.163
How much responsibility did Churchill and his ministers bear for the major abuses that took place? One Nairobi journalist has written recently, ‘Churchill’s role in the atrocities against the Kenyans is too obvious.’ This is because ‘He was the man who appointed and gave moral and institutional support to a number of war criminals’, including Sir Evelyn Baring, the Governor of Kenya from 1952. Furthermore, ‘Churchill was the head of an unrelenting Conservative Government that believed in its arrogant “civilising mission” to Africans, even as it reduced them to sub-humans.’164 To those who are inclined to see the decolonization process as essentially benign, such anger comes as a salutary reminder of the deep resentment that some people still feel about the British role. It is, moreover, undoubtedly true that Churchill bore some general moral responsibility for the things done in his government’s name. Beyond this broad responsibility, there is the question of his detailed involvement, how extensive it was, and whether or not his attitude was truly ‘unrelenting’. There was certainly an element of diehardism in his views, but close examination of his role in the crisis shows that at times he showed a surprising level of sympathy towards the rebels.
Churchill had no direct part in instigating the state of emergency. This was asked for by the newly arrived Baring in October 1952, after the murder of Paramount Chief Waruhiu wa Kungu, the latest in a rash of Mau Mau killings. Baring was under pressure from the settlers, who, he feared, might take the law into their own hands in the absence of strong official action. Lyttelton agreed to his request.165 Churchill’s own early interventions prove, on the one hand, that he was concerned about Kenyan affairs and that, on the other, his efforts had little effect. In a typical move, he suggested that an exercise for parachutists should be held in Kenya, feeling that a display of air power would make an impression on the population and imp
rove confidence in the British regime. The Chiefs of Staff rejected this as unnecessary.166 He continued to worry away at the idea, although it was never implemented: ‘What I propose is that small parties of 20 or so should be dropped in selected places and that two or three cross-country vehicles should come and pick them up after they had interviewed the local natives.’167 Far better judged, but equally ineffectual, was the minute he sent to Lyttelton about cattle taken from the Kikuyu as a form of collective punishment. He asked if it was true that they were dying from lack of attention: ‘they must be fed, watered and milked; who is doing this? Remember they belong to the innocent as well as the guilty.’168 Such sentiments were worthy, but he did not succeed in getting the people on the ground to take much notice of them.
In March 1953 a large group of loyal Kikuyu was massacred at Lari.169 ‘Today’s Mau Mau atrocities in Kenya show the urgency for getting troops there’, Churchill wrote. ‘At the same time there are advantages in staging a battalion en route for a few days at Khartoum and thus imprinting upon the minds of the Egyptian dictators the fact that we can quite easily cut them off entirely from the Sudan out of which they hope to talk, bribe and swindle us.’170 As always, he resented criticisms of the British and there was a chill in his relations with Nehru when, on the anniversary of the Amritsar massacre, the latter spoke up in support of Mau Mau.171 ‘I never expected anything better from a Congress governed India’, Churchill wrote.172 But he was not willing to allow the settlers carte blanche. In mid-1953 General Sir George Erskine was appointed as Kenya’s Commander-in-Chief. Erskine took a very dim view of the settlers: ‘I hate the guts of them all, they all are middle-class sluts.’173 Churchill equipped him with a letter giving him the power to impose martial law. Erskine never used it, but he made sure its existence was known. He kept it in his glasses case, and when he wanted to bring settlers or members of Baring’s government into line, he would do so by pointedly snapping the case open and shut.174