It would seem to me a fantastic policy to endeavor to shut the British Empire up in a ringed fence. It is very large, and there are a good many things which can be produced in it, but the world is larger & produces some better things than can be found in the British Empire. Why should we deny ourselves the good and varied merchandise which the traffic of the world offers, more especially since the more we trade with others, the more they must trade with us. . . . Our planet is not a very big one compared with the other celestial bodies, and I see no particular reason why we should endeavor to make inside our planet a smaller planet called the British Empire, cut off by impassable space from everything else.17
The free-trade versus protection battle gave Churchill his first experience of taking campaigns to the country through the mechanism of a “league,” a common means of garnering support and publicity for a cause. He became a prime mover in the Free Food League, an organization created to rival the Tariff Reform League. The issue of tariff reform caused the final breach between Churchill and the Conservative Party, and he announced his resignation in a speech on March 29, 1904. Knowing what was coming, when Churchill rose to speak, the prime minister left the chamber, soon followed by his ministers. Tory backbenchers then began to leave, some remaining at the door to jeer Churchill (“the most marked discourtesy which I think I have ever seen,” in the words of the Tory MP Sir John Gorst). But Churchill joined a party in the ascendant. He cast aside all criticism and defended his actions. As he was to say in 1906, the year of the Liberals’ landslide victory at the polls, “I said a lot of stupid things when I was in the Conservative Party, and I left because I did not want to go on saying stupid things.”18 Churchill spoke on behalf of the Liberals at a special election and spoke out against the government’s position on tariff reform, actions that forced his Oldham constituency to disown him. He became the Opposition’s most knowledgeable and effective antiprotectionist speaker in the last days of the Tory administration.
Churchill crossed the floor of the House and took his seat on the Liberal benches in such a way as to emphasize his newfound relationship with Lloyd George. His desertion of the Tories was a defining moment in Churchill’s career, and while beneficial in many ways, it was personally damaging. Conservatives felt bitterly betrayed, and his reputation for opportunism, forged while a maverick soldier-cum–war correspondent, became an article of faith in some quarters. The Liberals, meanwhile, were naturally suspicious of a man who had ditched his party; he might (and he did) do it again. He acknowledged the reasons for hostility toward him in Conservative circles. As he wrote to Lord Salisbury in November 1904, “I readily admit that my conduct is open to criticism—not—thank heaven—on the score of sincerity, but from the point of view of taste. I had to choose between fighting & standing aside.”19 He had to quit the Carlton Club when he left the Tory party and was even blackballed from the Hurlingham Club, the home of British polo.
Churchill was a classic inside-outsider. Despite his noble birth, he looked different, sounded different, and acted differently from the lathe-turned aristocrat of his day. He eschewed idleness and leisure; he was publicity seeking among a class that pretended to shun publicity; he defied convention; he was seized with ambition and a desire for professional standards in an age when English gentlemen were supposed to cultivate an air of amateurism, languor, and laissez-faire. But Churchill found it impossible to “laissez-faire” anything.
Socially he remained privileged despite cutting a strikingly different figure from those around him. Even the Prince of Wales, so close in many ways to both Churchill’s parents, took an interest in his activities, and this continued when he became King Edward VII in 1901. In the autumn of 1902, he invited Churchill to stay at Balmoral, the kind of invitation few young backbenchers could display on their mantelpiece. Determined to wring every possible advantage from his contacts, he exhorted his mother, who would be seeing the king soon after: “Mind you gush to him about my having written to you saying how much etc. etc. I had enjoyed myself here.”20 Even when his politics turned against the Tories, his cousin Sunny, Duke of Marlborough, remained friendly, and Blenheim was always at his disposal as a haven. The duke even allowed him to have Lloyd George, author of the “People’s Budget,” to stay there (though relations between the Churchills and the duke soured for a couple of years when His Grace discovered Clementine writing to the Welshman on Blenheim stationery).
Churchill kept up his prodigious literary activity during this period. With five books already to his name, between 1903 and 1905 he embarked on a major biography of his father. He secured a lucrative deal with Macmillan, and the book was published to critical acclaim in 1906. In preparing it, he made extensive use of the Blenheim archives. Sunny gave him rooms, loaned him hunters when he was working there, and later gave him all Lord Randolph’s political papers bound in thirty-two blue morocco volumes.
Having switched parties, Churchill needed a new seat and agreed to run as Liberal candidate for Manchester North West, where free trade was strongly supported. Many of his supporters in this campaign came from the Jewish community, as he was a significant critic of the Aliens Bill, establishing his reputation as a leading opponent of discrimination against minorities and a Zionist sympathizer. Churchill’s mother campaigned with her son in Manchester, as she had done with Lord Randolph many years before. As Ann Leslie wrote, “Jennie never ceased to work for her elder son. Jack, whom she loved equally, worked away in the City under Cassell’s guidance, but it was the demanding, the tyrannical, fascinating Winston who kept her on the go.”21 Churchill won his poll on January 13, after leading the Liberals’ fight in the whole area.
Junior Minister
The Liberal Party won a landslide victory in the general election of January–February 1906. Churchill attained office in the new government. Offered the most senior of the junior ministerial posts—financial secretary to the Treasury, where he would have worked under Herbert Asquith, the party’s coming leader—Churchill asked for the lowlier office of undersecretary of state for the colonies. This was a shrewd move because it meant working for a secretary of state who was twenty-five years his senior and not known for his dynamism and who, as a member of the House of Lords, could not represent the department in the House of Commons. Enter Churchill, who would lead on all matters related to the colonies in that chamber and, because of this, be to the fore in a way that was uncommon for a junior minister. In doing so, he was to exhibit a real talent for conducting government business effectively in Parliament.
His boss, Lord Elgin, relished the quiet life on his Scottish estate. While certainly no pushover, and indeed rather adept at curbing Churchill’s excesses, this was just the kind of boss for a young thruster, though throughout their relationship Churchill behaved with a becoming sense of loyalty and propriety. Elgin was not subdued by Churchill’s obvious talent or bamboozled by his exuberance and energy. As he put it, “When I accepted Churchill as my Under-Secy I knew I had no easy task. I resolved to give him access to all business—but to keep control (& my temper).”22 But Elgin did require a measure of protection; his staff devised an early-warning system that gave them notice when Churchill left his office to make for Elgin’s upstairs, allowing them to head Churchill off and oblige him to approach Elgin via his secretary.
What followed was a period in which Churchill’s dash and energy, and his habitual pronouncement upon all issues under the sun regardless of whether they were within his purview or not, contrasted and complemented the more leisurely pace at which Elgin conducted his department’s affairs. Randolph Churchill neatly summarized his father’s approach: “While he was a backbencher, Churchill had spoken as if he were an Under-Secretary, now, as an Under-Secretary, as if a member of the Cabinet; and when he reached the Cabinet he was apt to speak as if he were Prime Minister.”23 His tenure at the Colonial Office was to see Churchill concoct a stream of minutes and reports of extreme audacity. They often irritated his superiors but demonstrated Churchill’s
insistence on fundamental principles of British life, such as the rule of law, being applied in the colonies. He argued for the need to understand the perspective of indigenous peoples subjected to alien rule.
Churchill chose as his private secretary Edward (“Eddie”) Marsh, two years his senior, who was to follow him through eight departments of state. He joined a band of “behind the scenes” people, such as nannies, secretaries, researchers, and valets, who kept Winston Churchill on track during his lengthy career. Without these important people, Churchill would have found it difficult to acquire crucial political and literary information, to manage masses of data and juggle large projects and offices of state, or even to feed himself and get dressed.
Like all incoming governments, which until recently have subjected the incumbent administration to withering criticism from the relative safety of the Opposition benches, the Liberal government that took office in 1906 was expected to deliver on a raft of pledges. For the Colonial Office, nowhere was this more important than with regard to Britain’s relations with South Africa, so recently the scene of bitter fighting and with a peace still to be lost or won. The new government had to show that, unlike the Tories, it could reconcile the defeated Boers and offer them status equal to that of South Africans of British descent. Churchill was heavily engaged in determining the future of the newly united South Africa, a country in which he had so recently fought and that now required political reconstruction. This was one of the most important imperial issues of the time, ranking alongside political reform in India and Ireland. The puzzle was how to transform the two recently conquered states from Crown colonies under the authoritarian rule of Sir Alfred Milner and his successor, to a political status that at least reconciled the vanquished Boers to British overlordship by providing them with a large measure of autonomy. Attempting to square the circle of nationalism and imperialism was to become a familiar theme of twentieth-century imperial politics. As we have seen, Churchill sympathized with Boer demands for independence; the question was, could he devise an acceptable form of “independence” that kept them and South Africa within the British Empire?
Churchill argued strongly that a complete break with the previous government’s constitutional plans was required, and that they should stop at nothing short of “one man one vote.” He therefore pressed hard for full responsible government, even though the then high commissioner, Lord Selborne, thought the end result would be Boer majority governments (which it was). But it was a progressive and liberal solution, despite the fact that it meant selling the nonwhites down the river in pursuit of the politically attainable and contributed to the Union of South Africa remaining a part of the British Empire. Churchill managed to convince his colleagues of the rightness of his plan for early responsible government, elevating South Africa to the same status of autonomy within the empire as was enjoyed by Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Jan Smuts, the former Boer general who was for many decades to be Britain’s main ally in negotiating the tightrope between Boer and Briton, instantly saw this as a significant olive branch proffered to his people. Thus in February 1906, the Cabinet agreed self-government would be granted sooner rather than later. Churchill told the king in mid-August 1906 that he had conducted all the South African business in Parliament, answering around five hundred questions.
Also relating to South Africa, Churchill had to wrestle with the thorny problem of Chinese indentured laborers, who had been imported to work in the mines on the Rand. This was an issue ruthlessly exploited by the Liberal Party when in opposition, so when they inherited the problem, they risked accusations of hypocrisy if they failed to swiftly resolve it. It was at this time that Churchill blundered badly in the Commons by launching a vehement attack on Sir Alfred Milner, showing a customary lack of awareness of the feelings of others or the likely results of his actions. Some Liberals had tabled a motion of censure against Milner when it was learned that he had sanctioned the flogging of some Chinese laborers. The subsequent spectacle of the bombastic and belligerent young Churchill tearing strips off a senior imperial proconsul, even taunting him, confirmed the worse suspicions about Lord Randolph’s impetuous offspring. The king told a distant kinsman of Churchill that his behavior was “simply scandalous.” The episode earned him the lasting enmity of many Tories, and Churchill had, not for the first or the last time, provided grist for the mill of those who wished to hate him. Sir William Anson, warden of All Souls and MP for Oxford, wrote that Churchill “seems to have been both pompous and impertinent. . . . It is terrible to think what harm that young jackanapes may do with a big majority behind him and an incompetent prime minister to look after him.”24 But in belittling Milner, Churchill had been attempting to shield him from parliamentary censure. Another scrape for what the Pall Mall Gazette called “The Blenheim Pup” occurred when Churchill claimed that Westminster could overrule the new self-governing South African colonies on matters relating to the treatment of the African population. Churchill was, of course, correct, but saying so affronted settler sensibilities regarding their precious autonomy.
The affair blew over, however, and the headline fact was that Churchill, in a year, had dealt with two of the most pressing problems facing the British government in colonial affairs—the Transvaal and Chinese labor—showing commendable skill and audacious confidence. He also continued to evince a liberal outlook regarding the treatment of indigenous people. He condemned punitive raids and suppressions that took place in Natal and East and West Africa and questioned the actions of settlers and administrators. Lady Lugard (the wife of a famous colonial official), staying at Blenheim in 1906, was appalled by his “rank Little Englandism,” in this instance an unintended compliment to Churchill’s liberal proclivities.25 After proposing reprisals when the Munshi people had burned a Niger company station, Lugard was met by this Churchillian riposte: “The chronic bloodshed which stains the West African season is odious and disquieting. Moreover, the whole enterprise is liable to be misrepresented by persons unacquainted with Imperial terminology as the murdering of natives and stealing of their lands.”26
In 1908, Churchill decided to make a tour of British colonial possessions in Africa. Elgin thought this might provide relief from his eager subordinate’s constant initiatives, but he was wrong: Churchill sustained his bombardment by sending missives on all manner of subjects back to London. Potentially more worrying, rather than just being the private “sporting” (i.e., big-game shooting) holiday that had been planned, Churchill’s character, his important political position, and his fame transformed it into a semiofficial state progress from Britain to East Africa by way of the empire’s stepping stones in the Mediterranean and Red Sea. His tour took on the characteristics of an official enquiry into colonial affairs, from native administration to sleeping sickness and railway construction. Churchill visited Malta, where he met the cruiser HMS Venus, put at his disposal by the Admiralty. The journey eastward continued, punctuated by various stops—Cyprus, and then Port Said, where “I bought a Japanese kimono for a dressing gown in passing through,”27 possibly the first appearance of the brightly colored evening wear he was to sport throughout his life.
Churchill recorded his tour for the Strand Magazine, which had commissioned him to write a series of articles at £150 apiece, a now familiar Churchill ploy when traveling overseas, as was his keenness to turn the articles into a book posthaste upon returning home (he did so even though this conflicted with his honeymoon in August 1908; the book appeared as My African Journey). His letters were “written in the long hot Uganda afternoons,” as he put it, “after the day’s march was done.” His customary panache was evident from the book’s first sentence: “The aspect of Mombasa as she rises from the sea and clothes herself with form and color at the swift approach of the ship is alluring and even delicious.”28 He was welcomed with a fanfare when he arrived at Mombasa after stops at Berbera and Aden.
As well as flooding the Colonial Office with memoranda, he became deeply involved in the
business of the places he visited (“I shall spend I think two days looking into the affairs of the Somaliland Protectorate—upon which we spend £76,000 a year with uncommonly little return,” he wrote to his mother).29 Churchill traveled from Nairobi to Lake Victoria along the railway line whose development he had championed. At Kisumu, he boarded a steamer to Entebbe. In between official dinners and receptions, the energetic undersecretary did manage to get in some trophy shooting as he moved from Kenya to Uganda, though even this was not without a businesslike purpose; moving with four hundred porters, the Churchill safari had as its practical aim the reconnoitering of a possible railway extension linking Lakes Albert and Victoria. Running up and down the railway line on a trolley, Churchill took potshots at the wildlife. “The plains are crowded with wild animals,” he wrote. “From the window the whole zoological garden can be seen disporting itself.”30 He sympathized with the “noble” beasts slaughtered in the name of sport though still found himself able to shoot them.
Churchill evinced ideas about subject races as well as wildlife that were common and uncontroversial at the time, but would now be considered deeply flawed on both racial and conservational grounds. Africans were viewed as “childlike” and “dignified” when they conformed to British stereotypes of “traditional” African society, while colonial officers were viewed as guardians protecting the Africans from those who would exploit them—by which Churchill meant the white settlers. The Kikuyu, he wrote, were “light-hearted, tractable, if brutish children” for whom it would be “an ill day” if “their fortunes are removed from the impartial and august administration of the Crown and abandoned to the fierce self-interest of a small white population.” In Churchill’s view, colonial rule was bringing to Africa the manifold benefits of civilization and protecting docile Africans from the predations of slave raiders and unscrupulous traders and from their own violence, a classic justification for the Pax Britannica. This did not prevent him from striking a cautionary note about the dangers of unchecked white settlement, for both the native African and the Indian population. He also saw in these recently acquired British domains rich fields of opportunity, not least because of the potential of their untapped natural resources. In Churchill’s mind, resources such as water were placed on God’s clean earth to be developed in the name of “progress,” just as game was there to be shot with gay abandon in the name of sport. He viewed the presence of the white man as an unsolicited boon for the indigenous people, uplifting them from a state of backwardness by his very presence. Nevertheless, Churchill did display some more enlightened thinking about these matters, akin to his liberal and reformist attitudes toward social issues in Britain. Though a staunch paternalist, he was considerate and empathetic toward subject peoples, questioning the belief that colonial officials were always right when Africans complained about their rulers. He deplored, here as in India, the employment of punitive expeditions to discipline alleged recalcitrants.
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