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

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Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made Page 39

by Richard Toye


  The Americans were not keen on Nasser, but neither were they eager to see him deposed by force. Eisenhower, running for re-election, wanted to present himself as the man who had restored peace to the world. Eden therefore made a show of exhausting the diplomatic options, but in October he decided to act behind the backs of the Americans. A secret pact with France and Israel committed the latter to invade Egypt. Anglo-French forces would then move in, under the guise of ‘separating the combatants’. Coming just days before November’s presidential election, the invasion was met with hostility in Washington. One of Eisenhower’s first reactions was to wonder ‘if the hand of Churchill’ was behind the operation, ‘inasmuch as this action is in the mid-Victorian style’.8 In fact, Churchill would never have come up with a plan that involved deceiving the US government on such a scale. He was supportive of Eden in public, releasing a statement which spoke of his confidence that ‘our American friends will come to realize that, not for the first time, we have acted independently for the common good’.9 However, American opposition quickly combined with a weakening British financial position to bring the invasion to an abrupt halt. Eden’s resignation, on grounds of ill-health, followed in January 1957. In private, Churchill said he thought the whole Suez operation had been appallingly badly conceived and carried out. Asked whether, had he still been Prime Minister, he would have done what Eden had, he replied, ‘I never would have dared; and if I had dared, I would certainly never have dared stop.’10 His friend Violet Bonham Carter recorded: ‘I think he is very sad about everything poor darling – & though he began by being critical & fully realizing the Govt’s blunder, he now cannot endure or admit defeat for this country’.11

  ‘After Suez’, according to Clementine Churchill, her husband ‘specifically set out to mend fences with the United States’, through visits, public statements, and discussions with key American figures.12 His faith in Anglo-American unity was undimmed, and his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published between April 1956 and March 1958, formed a testament to it. He had originally conceived it in the 1930s and, as he explained then, ‘What is common to the history of the whole race will form the staple of a narrative comprising their origin, their rise, their quarrels and their comradeship, which I trust may long continue.’13 After it had been put on ice during the war, work began again in 1953. Much of it was written by ghost-writers.14 In 1963 President Kennedy awarded Churchill honorary citizenship of the United States. In his statement of thanks – probably drafted for him – the former prime minister rejected ‘the view that Britain and the Commonwealth should now be relegated to a tame and minor role in the world’. He added: ‘Mr President, your action illuminates the theme of unity of the English-speaking peoples, to which I have devoted a large part of my life.’15 It is worth comparing these comments with a remark he made in a letter to his brother over sixty years earlier, in which he spoke of ‘this great Empire of ours – to the maintenance of which I shall devote my life’.16 Naturally, he viewed maintenance of the Empire and the unity of the English-speaking peoples as wholly compatible, indeed mutually reinforcing. But it is interesting to note how, as the Empire declined, the theme of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ eclipsed it in his public rhetoric at the last.

  Eden was replaced as Prime Minister by Harold Macmillan, whose government’s approach to the Empire was unromantic: if the costs of holding a particular territory outweighed the benefits it should be dispensed with. After Macmillan secured a third term for the Tories in 1959, he appointed Iain Macleod as Colonial Secretary. The differences between the Macleod era and what had gone before can be overstated but, even if he was simply bringing earlier policies to their logical conclusion, he did so at a greatly accelerated rate. By the time Macmillan moved him in 1961, appointing him as Conservative Party Chairman and Leader of the House of Commons, the key decisions had already been taken. Nigeria gained independence in 1960; Tanganyika, Kenya, Nyasaland (as Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia) soon followed in its wake. Even the Prime Minister himself may have been alarmed at what he had unleashed. Nevertheless, Macmillan made his own contribution to the spirit of reform with his famous speech to the South African parliament in 1960, making clear the British government’s disapproval of apartheid. ‘The wind of change is blowing through the continent’, he said. ‘Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.’17 Churchill saw this as needless antagonism of the South African government. ‘Why go and pick a quarrel with these chaps’, he asked.18 Violet Bonham Carter noted that ‘he is alas very anti-black & didn’t like Harold’s Cape Town speech’.19 He was also sceptical about the government’s 1961 decision to apply for membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), a course of action seen by many as a betrayal of Britain’s Commonwealth links. Robert Menzies wrote to him expressing his fears regarding this, and also criticizing what he saw as the dictatorial tendencies of Kwame Nkrumah as President of Ghana. Churchill sent what was, at this stage in his life, an unusually long reply, agreeing completely with Menzies. He thought Ghana would leave the Commonwealth, although he was ‘not convinced that would be a great loss’.20 When Montgomery visited Churchill in hospital after a fall in 1962, he asked him if he favoured Britain joining the EEC. He received a straight ‘No’. However, when Monty told the press of this, Churchill’s secretary put out a statement reiterating Churchill’s formal position, which was supportive of the government, while emphasizing that Britain’s Commonwealth role should not be put in jeopardy. Britain should apply, because the negotiation process was the only way of finding out whether the conditions of membership were acceptable.21

  Another episode of Churchill’s retirement is worth noting, if only for its oddity.22 This was his contribution to the 1957 motion picture Something of Value. The movie was adapted from the Robert Ruark’s book of the same name, and told the story of a white settler (Rock Hudson) and his one-time boyhood friend (Sidney Poitier), a Kikuyu who becomes involved in Mau Mau. When the director, Richard Brooks, visited Kenya to scout for locations an African lawyer he met introduced him to the anthropologist Louis Leakey. Leakey in turn took him to meet the imprisoned Jomo Kenyatta, later independent Kenya’s first President. Between them they persuaded Brooks that Ruark’s novel, which was sympathetic to the white settler viewpoint, did not portray the situation in the country accurately, and that he should change his script. ‘Leakey and Kenyatta said that unless the Europeans could get along with the Africans, the Europeans would have to get out of Africa’, recollected Brooks. ‘Leakey told me that might be difficult to believe, so he gave me a book written by Winston Churchill which said the same thing.’ Although Brooks’s interpretation of it might seem hard to recognize, the book was My African Journey. Deeply impressed by what he read, the director spent months trying to get hold of Churchill on the telephone. When at last he did so, he overcame the former Prime Minister’s initial scepticism and persuaded him to provide a short, filmed prologue.23 ‘Forty-nine years ago I visited Africa’, Churchill said in this. ‘In my book My African Journey I wrote “the problems of East Africa are the problems of the world”. This was true in nineteen-hundred and seven. It is true today.’ However, this introductory monologue went down badly with test audiences. As Brooks recalled, a difficult meeting with MGM studio executives followed:

  One of them said, ‘Before we start talking about what we think is rotten about this movie, I want to tell you something right now. You have got to get rid of this fucking Englishman. . .’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? Who?’ He said, ‘The guy at the beginning of the movie! That’s who! Out! Out of the picture!’ I said, ‘Are you talking about Sir Winston Churchill?’ He said, ‘Whoever the fuck he is, I don’t care!’ I said, ‘He’s the greatest statesman in the world.’ He said, ‘I don’t care. Out of the movie!’24

  And so the Greatest Living Englishman ended up on the cutting-room floor.25

  In 1964, not long before his ninetieth birthday, C
hurchill finally left the House of Commons. Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won the general election that took place that October and thereafter continued the decolonization agenda. On 10 January 1965 Churchill suffered a massive stroke, and lingered on for two weeks before passing away on the anniversary of Lord Randolph’s death. Around the world there was an outpouring of emotion. As on his retirement, there were dissenting voices. A few days before he died, the Iraqi newspaper Al-Thawra al-Arabiyya printed an unpleasant cartoon captioned ‘Churchill Struggles with Death’. It showed Churchill sitting with his ‘daughter’ Israel on his knee, demanding to take her with him. ‘Imperialism’, in the guise of Uncle Sam and John Bull, insists that he leave her behind ‘so that we may torment the Arabs with her’.26 Eamon De Valera, now holding the largely ceremonial post of President of Ireland, acknowledged that ‘Sir Winston Churchill was a great Englishman, one of the greatest of his time’. But he added that ‘we in Ireland had to regard Sir Winston over a long period as a dangerous adversary. The fact that he did not violate our neutrality during the war must always stand to his credit, though he indicated that, in certain circumstances, he was prepared to do so.’27 Neither he nor the Taoiseach, Seán Lemass, attended Churchill’s funeral, and the Minister of External Affairs was sent instead.28 The ambivalent Irish attitude was nicely captured by University College Dublin’s Literary and Historical Society, which resolved to send a telegram of sympathy to Clementine Churchill ‘by 59 votes to 23, with nine abstentions’.29 There was also a hint of such ambivalence to be found in India. President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan talked of the Indian people’s ‘profound sorrow’, but former minister Krishna Menon saw fit to recall Churchill’s ‘belligerent days against Indian nationalism’. (Nehru had died the previous year but had stated that he would attend Churchill’s funeral were he to outlive his old adversary and fellow Harrovian.) African reaction was somewhat less equivocal. Nkrumah of Ghana spoke of his ‘deep regret’.30 Michael Okpara was one of several leading Nigerian politicians who paid tribute: ‘He said Sir Winston’s qualities were admired by all African nationalists who could not agree with him on the question of their complete freedom.’31

  Although the tributes to him naturally focused on World War II, the Empire dimension of his life also received an airing. Harold Macmillan, for example, in a BBC broadcast, spoke of Churchill’s ‘love of Britain, of the Empire, his pride in its glorious past, his confidence in its future’.32 (However, in a radio talk prepared for the USA and Canada, he did not mention the word ‘Empire’, instead speaking of ‘his love of Britain and the Commonwealth, and his sincere belief in the common purpose of all English-Speaking Peoples’.)33 Likewise, Robert Menzies, in his widely praised broadcast, spoke of Churchill as ‘a great Commonwealth statesman’ and not as an Empire statesman.34 But if Macmillan and Menzies were a touch reticent about using the term Empire, two other commentators were less shy. Interestingly, they were both Americans. Eisenhower – who could easily have chosen to be more anodyne – said that Churchill was ‘the embodiment of all that was best in the British Empire’.35 And Joseph C. Harsh, the US journalist who provided commentary on ITV’s coverage of Churchill’s state funeral, was even more forthright: ‘Before the days of Winston Churchill, many an American saw Britain as a selfish imperial taskmaster . . . During the Churchill era that image has been transformed.’ Thanks to Churchill more than any other man, he said, ‘we Americans who once thought of Britain as rapacious, insolent and domineering now think of Britain as sturdy, brave and above all honourable’.36

  The funeral itself, which took place on 30 January, could be seen as Britain’s last great imperial pageant. In Salisbury, the capital of (Southern) Rhodesia, there was a splendid memorial service, attended by the country’s political elite. This has been described as ‘perhaps the last great “establishment” occasion in Rhodesia when the great and the good could feel part of the British tradition of which they had been so proud’.37 A few months later the white minority regime in Rhodesia, desperate to avoid the imposition by London of majority rule, illegally and unilaterally declared independence. It was a moment that symbolized the British government’s inability to control the destinies of its former imperial subjects. The following year the country’s leader, Ian Smith, declared, ‘If Sir Winston Churchill were alive today, I believe he would probably emigrate to Rhodesia – because I believe that all those admirable qualities and characteristics of the British that we believed in, loved and preached to our children, no longer exist in Britain’s future as the centre of a great empire’.38

  There were plenty of other interpretations of Churchill and his legacy. The day after Churchill’s death the journalist and historian John Grigg, a somewhat unconventional Conservative, argued that he had been the architect of a ‘delusive victory’. Grigg did not doubt that Churchill had saved Britain from defeat and dishonour, but believed he had failed to save it from its friends. ‘Though he claimed – and doubtless believed – that he had not become the King’s first Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, he had no choice but to acquiesce in a state of affairs that made that liquidation inevitable. He presided, in fact, over the inauguration of the American empire.’39 (No one seems to have taken exception to these comments at the time, but when the right-wing historian John Charmley made a similar argument nearly thirty years later he provoked a storm of controversy.)40 By contrast, the journal Round Table, which had been founded by Lord Milner and his followers in 1910, offered a subtle defence of Churchill. Commonwealth subjects, it suggested, had a simplified image of him, which was not closely related to the many controversies in which he had engaged. To them, it argued, he was simply a patriot: ‘He was the great fighter, and the cause for which he fought was their own. In the end, they saw him as the universal deliverer, the protector of the liberty of the Commonwealth to choose its own path; and none of them cared, few of them realized, that the path they actually chose to follow was transforming the Commonwealth in a sense directly opposed to the conception of it that prevailed in Churchill’s mind.’41 Richard B. Moore, an American black rights activist born in Barbados, offered a very different but similarly thoughtful take in the journal Liberator. ‘The most able and voluble spokesman of the imperial mode of thought, Winston Churchill was nevertheless its prisoner’, he wrote. Moore condemned severely many aspects of Churchill’s record, including his willingness ‘to degrade and persecute the militant leaders of nationalist colonial movements’. Yet he also found much to praise, including Churchill’s ‘sage warnings’, his ‘eloquent and inspiring’ speeches in 1940, and his building of alliances with the USA and the USSR. How could these great contributions to human welfare be produced by such a narrow, hidebound imperialist? Moore explained that this was due to ‘a most rare and fortunate coincidence’, that is, ‘the agreement at that specific moment and in that particular conjuncture of events, of the vital interests of the British Empire with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind’.42 Here we see Moore struggling to reconcile his admiration for Churchill on the one hand and his opposition to Empire on the other. The acknowledgement that the interests of the British Empire and those of humanity in general could have coincided, even if only under very particular conditions, was surely a very significant concession for a radical anti-colonialist to make.

  In the years since his death, Churchill has remained an iconic figure. US presidents have repeatedly invoked his name in support of their own goals. For George W. Bush, he was a man who ‘knew what he believed’ and ‘really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me’.43 However, when British and American politicians call upon Churchill’s memory, the imperial aspect of his career tends to be airbrushed out of a picture in which his battles against Nazism are heavily foregrounded. His early military heroics may be celebrated – as in the film Young Winston – but the attitudes that attended them are not. Nevertheless, Bush was vulnerable to reproaches such as ‘Even Churchill Couldn’t Figure Out Iraq�
��.44 By contrast, politicians outside the Western world are not reticent in addressing Churchill’s imperialism. In 2005, in a speech made in Sudan, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa launched into a stinging denunciation, quoting Churchill’s early remarks on the ‘fanatical frenzy’ of Muslims as evidence of the ‘terrible legacy’ of British colonialism. By depicting Africans as savages, he argued, Churchill and other imperialists had inflicted devastating divisions upon the Empire’s subject peoples. These ‘eminent representatives of British colonialism’ had done ‘terrible things wherever they went, justifying what they did by defining the native peoples of Africa as savages that had to be civilised, even against their will’.45 Yet, even if his criticisms had a measure of validity, just as Bush’s praise of Churchill did, Mbeki too was using historical memory for his own ends. While deploring the past evils of colonialism, he noticeably failed to draw attention to the contemporary horrors being perpetuated with Sudanese government connivance in Darfur. It should also be noted that there have been others willing to criticize Churchill’s imperial record from a very different perspective. In 1990 a BBC documentary team received an anonymous letter from a South African woman of English descent in response to a call for information. She wrote: ‘It was Churchill who, in his most “glorious” years, threw away the entire British Empire with the stroke of a pen and he should be held responsible for the rape of not only the entire African continent but also of India and Asia. Orderly British rule [was] handed over carte blanche to primitive savages.’46 This opinion may have been bizarre, but it was not necessarily unique in South Africa during the final collapse of apartheid.

 

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