Churchill

by Ashley Jackson

  But this is to anticipate. The 1930s were presented by Churchill, as he subsequently sought to design the historical architecture of his own life and of the twentieth century, as “wilderness years” in which he was forced from the citadel of power. In the wastelands beyond, he roamed alone, a soothsayer foretelling doom as the world sleepwalked toward the abyss. But Churchill barely had a moment to spare during this period, such were the calls of both his political duties and his manifold activities beyond. Contrary to the myth, his influence remained considerable, and he remained close to the center of British political life, his leadership sought and his voice listened to. He had still to perform his duties as a member of Parliament and a noteworthy commentator on national and international events. There were then the calls of his historical and journalistic pursuits, many of these aimed at restoring fortunes damaged by the Wall Street Crash, the continuing drain of Chartwell, and the need to secure the future of his children. On top of all this, there was his painting and the bucolic home pursuits that enriched his life and so burnish his historical image. If the decade was a wilderness, it was a surprisingly fertile one.

  Throughout the 1930s, Churchill kept up a steady assault on the policies of the government, voicing criticisms and sponsoring and leading pressure-group movements that indicated the health and vitality of a democratic state. All the time fostering networks of support, Churchill variously spoke out about political developments in Britain’s Indian empire, the threat posed to British security by the air forces of hostile powers, and the growing menace posed by Nazi Germany and the flawed nature of the government’s policy in attempting to meet it. Much of Churchill’s fire during the 1930s came from his belief that Britain was getting soft and failing to live up to the expectations placed upon it as the foremost international power. He had been deeply disturbed during his visit to America in 1929 by the common assumption that Britain was in decline. Though with hindsight, it might be said that the rot had set in and Britain was no longer powerful enough, unilaterally, to defend its far-flung interests or to act alone as the world’s policeman, Churchill set himself to defy such notions. This defiance was to take him to Number 10.

  Churchill’s vigor was also inspired by a desire to prevent the 1920s and 1930s being dominated by what he considered “lesser” politicians. Always prone to nostalgia, Churchill believed himself to be one of history’s great captains, though by the 1930s, it seemed as if the political giants had tamely yielded the ship of state to men like Baldwin, MacDonald, and the plebeians of the left. But Britain’s proud international position was not to be frittered away by such pygmies, one of the sentiments that determined him to take up the cudgels over Indian reform. While the age of nineteenth-century-style imperialism might have passed, and new political forces were afoot, Churchill hardly thought that an era in which fascism was triumphing in many parts of the world was a good time for Britain to be divesting itself of empire and its manifold responsibilities around the world. In short, Britain would be unwise, as well as negligent, if it were to lose India just as it was about to engage in a global struggle for national and imperial survival. Moreover, Churchill clung resolutely to a Whig conception of Britain’s role as the light of world progress.2

  The Tories After Electoral Defeat

  The Conservative Party was divided following its electoral defeat in 1929. Facing the fallout from depression and financial crisis, groping for a way forward, some argued forcefully for a serious program of tariff reform leading to widespread protection. Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere launched a “United Empire Party” to try to persuade Baldwin along this path. This naturally concerned Churchill, who had only been able to return to the Conservative Party after it had forsaken such an unequivocal position in the protection-versus-free-trade debate. But in October 1931, Baldwin finally accepted a policy of levying tariffs on all imported manufactures. Churchill wavered in his convictions. With unemployment spiraling, even significant sections of the Liberal Party (the great champion of free trade) moved behind the cause of protection. Eventually Churchill also succumbed. He pledged himself to support tariff reform, even to the point of accepting tariffs on food imports, a free-trade shibboleth. In Parliament he vigorously attacked Labour and maintained his reputation for repartee. As he said after a long speech by Labour MP William Graham, “He spoke without a note, and almost without a point.”3

  In the October 1931 election, Churchill doubled his majority, and the Conservatives won handsomely, though a national government under Ramsay MacDonald took office. Churchill was far too loathed by Labour to even be considered for office and his age-old opposition to the Labour movement was more important than his right-wing views on India in excluding him from power in the coalition governments that dominated the 1930s. It was not, as is widely held, his resignation from the Tories’ embryonic “business committee” (today’s shadow cabinet) following a speech on India in the Commons in January 1931 that estranged Churchill from the Tory leadership. To say that Churchill “resigned” from the business committee—a low-key affair established only in March 1930—is putting it rather strongly, and this minor event did not represent an irrevocable breach with the Tory front bench.

  There were real enough differences nonetheless. Churchill had been bothered by Baldwin’s support of the Indian political advances proposed during the Labour government’s tenure of office. News of Viceroy Lord Irwin’s offer of Dominion status to India, received as he returned to Britain from New York in October 1929, had electrified Churchill. He was concerned about Britain’s status in the world, not just events in India, and was by no means alone in worrying about how to ensure Britain’s position and deal with rising nationalism in India and elsewhere.

  Consequently, the pattern for the 1930s was set. While Churchill continued to function as an MP and a political loose cannon, his time was occupied by private and nonpolitical pursuits. He researched the biography of the 1st Duke of Marlborough and seldom attended the Commons. In November 1931, the last volume of his war memoirs appeared (The Eastern Front); lecture tours were undertaken; and continental painting holidays and cruises were manfully endured. Chartwell, painting, writing, farming, building, holidaying—all of these things were as important to the Churchill of the 1930s as were politics, all important features of a many-layered and richly textured life. Though now an older dog, he could still learn new tricks and even attempted to change the way he delivered speeches (altered “largely under Randolph’s tuition” so that, as he told Clementine in April 1935, he could talk to the Commons “with garrulous unpremeditated flows. . . . There is apparently nothing in the literary effect I have sought for forty years!”).

  On December 5, 1931, Churchill, Clementine, and Diana embarked on the liner Europa for a tour of North America, during the course of which he intended to deliver forty lectures. The trip was designed to gross over £10,000 and recoup the losses sustained in the 1929 crash, as well as to provide a holiday. His main lecture theme during this trip was to become a familiar one, central to Churchill’s activities as an international statesman: he espoused the cause of Anglo-American unity and the mutual interests of the English-speaking peoples, meaning the British Commonwealth and empire and America. This American angle of vision, this advocacy of a “special relationship,” was to be a distinctive theme of his politics for the rest of his life. The trip was interrupted when Churchill was knocked down by a car on Fifth Avenue in New York, an accident that put him in hospital for eight days and prevented him from returning to England until March. After leaving the hospital, he continued with a reduced lecture tour and then sailed for the Bahamas aboard the liner Majestic to recuperate, staying at Government House. He returned home to find a £2,000 Daimler waiting for him alongside the platform at Victoria, a gift from American and British friends.

  India

  It was upon the relatively minor issue of political reform in India that Churchill risked impaling his political career. At first, his opposition to the government’s prop
osed India reforms looked as if it might provide a significant fillip to his political standing. On February 26, 1931, he wrote that there had been a great change in the political position in the last six weeks: “Every speech I’ve made and step I’ve taken has been well received beyond expectations.”4 This apparent change in fortunes was largely due to his first speech on the issue of political reform in India.

  As a reward for its support during the First World War, India had been promised Dominion status at some future date. So the course was already set for its political advancement along the road toward self-government as enjoyed by the “white” Dominions. Of course, from that point on, Indian nationalists pushed hard for the announcement of a firm timeline. In 1928, Sir John Simon was appointed to head a committee to plan constitutional advance and provincial self-government, the latter an important concession in any likely reform package devolving power at the level of the province to Indian legislatures, while Britain retained control of the all-important central government functions of finance, defense, and foreign policy. Simon’s commission was boycotted by the Indian National Congress, for whom the proposals did not go far enough.

  In order to try to establish better relations with the powerful nationalist party, Lord Irwin believed it necessary to demonstrate London’s continuing commitment to the goal of Dominion status. Soon after the release of Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian National Congress (INC) leaders from prison, Gandhi met the viceroy at Government House, and civil disobedience was suspended in return for government concessions. This appalled Churchill, who found it “nauseating” to see “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace.”5 During Gandhi’s visit to London for the Round Table conference, Lloyd George spent hours curled up on a sofa with him and rated him the most brilliant man he had ever met, whereas Churchill fulminated. At the conference, the Indian delegates demanded an all-India federation as opposed to immediate Dominion status. Churchill’s view was that a weak viceroy had been bounced by Gandhi into believing that a few half-baked, well-educated urban agitators represented the views of 365 million Indians. His opposition to India’s political advance was stentorian. One of the main pegs upon which it hung was Churchill’s concern for the “untouchables.” As he said in the Royal Albert Hall on March 18, 1931:

  To abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence. It would be a shame for ever for those who bore this guilt. These Brahmins who mouth and patter the principles of Western Liberalism, and pose as philosophic and democratic politicians, are the same Brahmins who deny the primary rights of existence to nearly sixty million of their own fellow-countrymen whom they call “untouchable,” and whom they have by thousands of years of oppression actually taught to accept this sad position. . . . They consider themselves contaminated even by their approach. And then in a moment they turn round and begin chopping logic with John Stuart Mill, or pleading the rights of man with Jean-Jacques Rousseau.6

  This was one of the central planks of Churchill’s opposition to India’s advance to Dominion status: that it should not be granted to a country that branded sixty million people “untouchable.” Churchill was opposed to moves toward Dominion status under present conditions in India, believing that the political elite was completely unrepresentative of the subcontinent’s enormous population, and that only British rule could prevent its racial and religious divisions spilling into open violence. What mattered most to Indians, he believed, was good government rather than self-government. As he famously described it: “India is not a country or a nation: it is rather a continent inhabited by many nations. . . . It is a geographical abstraction. . . . Such unity of sentiment as exists in India arises entirely through the centralized British Government.”7 He summed up his beliefs regarding India in a letter to Clementine on New Year’s Day 1935: “Imagine what will happen to India when sagacious, scientific, incorruptible direction is withdrawn!” Later that month he told her about the start of his India campaign in Parliament. “I am about to begin my very hard fight in the House about India. The odds are very heavy against us. But I feel a strong sense that I am doing my duty, & expressing my sincere convictions.”8 Clementine was off on a komodo-dragon-hunting cruise to the Sunda Islands aboard Lord Moyne’s yacht. During her absence, Churchill missed her immensely and sent her regular “Chartwell Bulletins” in which animals, India, the “increasingly sombre” German situation, and children were reported upon—Randolph’s “scrubby” beard, Mary’s whooping cough—causing him to liken children to “live bombs” liable to go off at any moment.

  Churchill had long been disturbed by the signs of imperial dissolution signified by a succession of independence treaties, even if the independence granted had been impaired by continuing British military presence (Egypt, Iraq) or the veneer of imperial unity preserved by membership of an emerging “Commonwealth” (Ireland). Thus, despite his own role in negotiating it, he thought that the Irish Treaty of 1921 was at the extreme margins of acceptability in its concessions to nationalism. He had been determined to retain base rights for the Royal Navy in Ireland and was outraged by the government’s decision in 1938 to give them up (with reason, as the difficulties in defending the Western Approaches without Irish bases during the war were to show). He had also opposed the granting of a form of independence to Egypt in 1922, a concession calculated to head off nationalist opposition to the British occupation while securing Britain its cherished base rights in Alexandria and the Suez Canal Zone. Speaking in the debate on Egyptian constitutional reform in December 1929, Churchill had told the Commons:

  Once we lose confidence in our mission in the East, once we repudiate our responsibilities to foreigners and minorities, once we feel ourselves unable calmly and fearlessly to discharge our duties to vast helpless populations, then our presence in those countries will be stripped of every moral sanction, and resting upon selfish or military requirements, it will be a presence which cannot endure long.9

  Thus it was no surprise that Churchill opposed similar moves in India. He realized, unpalatable truth though it may have been, that the nature of imperial power was the rule of one group over another. It was all very well managing imperial decline by co-opting indigenous elites and effectively power-sharing. But it was a doomed strategy, nonetheless, and could lead only to dissolution. Churchill sensed keenly Britain’s loosening grip on its empire. He believed that Britain had a right to be in India because it had conquered it—a position that became more and more difficult to sustain as the twentieth century progressed—and that self-respecting powers did not give up what they held if they wanted to remain great.

  Churchill claimed to have special knowledge of India, though he was subsequently condemned for holding completely outdated views and therefore espousing unrealistic policies. He had “studied” the caste system and lived in India for four years and knew something of the ethnic makeup of the subcontinent and the role of the princes. His firsthand experience, however, had been confined to the rarefied atmosphere of the late Victorian junior officer: the mess, servants, polo, and exclusive European society. Ramsay MacDonald remarked upon Churchill’s antiquated understanding of the relationship between the imperial center and the colonial peoples over which it ruled. Baldwin accused him of backwardness and insensitivity toward India’s legitimate aspirations, aspirations the British had directly encouraged. Though it might be claimed with hindsight that he had a sound grasp of the likelihood of Hindu-Muslim violence should the British leave, he had no real understanding of the strength of Indian nationalism by the 1930s and was wrong to perpetuate the justificatory myth that the leaders of the INC were nothing more than self-serving lawyers and doctors with no popular support behind them, denying the forces of nationalism that were beginning to engulf European colonial empires throughout Asia.

  Beyond the Tory right, his position attracted little support in the Commons and renewed all the ol
d suspicions about his lack of judgment and reliability. Even those who agreed in principle with his point of view thought his actions played into the hands of Indian nationalists. But this was just one more example of Churchill’s doing what he thought was necessary with scant regard for the political consequences. Though keen to find an issue that could serve as a platform for political revival, he was not, as some suspected, attempting to rival Baldwin for the Tory leadership (though he continued to josh him; in the Commons in May 1935, he said that “in those days Mr. Baldwin was wiser than he is now; he used frequently to take my advice.”)10 Baldwin was a regular butt of Churchillian humor—as Churchill said of him the following year, “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”11 Rather, Churchill was convinced that the situation in India thoroughly justified raising the alarm. Churchill’s departure from the business committee freed him to rally support among like-minded people beyond Westminster and Whitehall. He thus became a leading figure in the “Indian Empire Society,” formed to resist precipitate constitutional advance. Churchill’s position meant he was widely identified as the leader of a group of about sixty MPs on the Tory right who were also opposed to the government’s India policy. These were the very Tory diehards who had previously most loathed him. Now, indicating the unpopularity of his position among mainstream politicians, Churchill was the only senior figure prepared to champion their cause. But his stand on this issue alienated such supporters as Duff Cooper, Eden, and Macmillan, as well as a great deal of public opinion.

  Despite being out of government and off the Conservative front bench, Churchill was not a lonely figure bereft of support or sympathy. His stance on India turned him into a national crusader, and the respect accorded to his continuing political vitality, plus his longevity as a senior statesman and powerful orator, meant that even those who held high office did not wish to spurn him. A Joint Select Committee of both houses of Parliament was formed to report on the white paper proposals for Indian reform in 1933. A Commons debate on the committee’s report resulted in an overwhelming endorsement. Churchill attacked it, and the civil service, but was embarrassed by his failure to have mastered the detail contained in the report, leaving him “painfully exposed” before the Select Committee. In the debate, he claimed that promotion in the Indian Civil Service was dependent on a man’s supporting the reform program. When challenged on this point, he was unable to substantiate his claim. While the committee had been deliberating, Churchill had been to the fore in marshaling opposition in the country, though converting it into effective parliamentary opposition proved very difficult.