THE WORLD AT HIS FEET
Flora Lugard, crusading journalist and former colonial editor of the Times, was prepared for a fight. On a morning early in February 1906 she was headed to Whitehall to talk some sense into Winston Churchill. As an ardent imperialist who had traveled widely in Africa, and whose husband was the high commissioner of Northern Nigeria, she had been dismayed to hear that the young adversary of the great imperial champion Joseph Chamberlain was now the number-two man at the Colonial Office. She had ambitious plans for herself and her husband, Sir Frederick Lugard—who was toiling faithfully at his post thousands of miles away. But she was afraid that Churchill might stand in their way.
She intended to show him that she wasn’t to be trifled with. Serious and uncompromising, she had enjoyed a career in journalism that was rare for a woman of her time. When she wanted something, she worked hard to get it, and had managed to become the first woman appointed to the permanent staff of the Times. The writer and African explorer Mary Kingsley described her as “a fine handsome, bright upstanding woman . . . [but] hard as nails.”1
When she arrived at the Colonial Office in Downing Street, she asked to see the new undersecretary and was taken through the long corridors to Churchill’s room. She didn’t have an appointment, but with her accustomed air of confidence she handed Marsh her card, requested a meeting, and sat down to wait for a response. She wasn’t expecting a warm welcome. The Conservative government had tentatively agreed to her husband’s request to administer Nigerian affairs from London for half the year. She had heard that Churchill was opposed to this arrangement. If her information proved correct, she intended to change his mind, arguing that the job didn’t really require Sir Frederick to be in Africa full-time, and that his imperial expertise was needed in the Colonial Office, where he could direct operations over the whole of West Africa.
To insist on such an arrangement was breathtakingly audacious. It would have allowed the Lugards—who were middle-aged newlyweds—to treat West Africa like their own kingdom from which they could come and go as they pleased. As they saw it, the idea wasn’t so unreasonable. It was simply a way to improve the system and provide a well-deserved reward for exemplary service.
But there was a problem. The high commissioner had a stained record that even his outspoken new wife couldn’t explain away. During his time in Africa he had shown a tendency to slaughter local tribes when they didn’t bend to his will. A heavily armed force under his command had recently killed twelve hundred men when shellfire and bullets blasted away a primitive fortress of mud walls and cowhide gates. Another expedition wiped out two thousand, including women and children.
The best solution for the people of West Africa would have been to keep him home all year long. But the Lugards believed that the empire was destined to improve the lives of everyone who embraced British rule, and they were prepared to see a lot of blood spilled in the service of that greater good.
Instead of being sent away, Flora Lugard was invited into Churchill’s office and received politely. She was shocked by Winston’s youthful appearance, later telling her husband it was “ridiculous that a boy of his age and experience should have the power and influence that he has.” He had been hard at work, and his desk was covered with documents and books. They stared at each other for a moment, and then she began with flattery, saying that she had heard some good reports of him. “But amongst the good things,” she said, “this bad thing has reached me.”
Was it true that he was opposed to Sir Frederick’s plan? Yes, he informed her, and that wasn’t all. There were going to be some major changes in the way Nigeria was governed.
“There are many things this new House of Commons won’t stand,” he told her bluntly, “and they will have to be reformed.”2
What she couldn’t have known—but might have guessed from all the paper on his desk—was that Churchill had so immersed himself in the work of the Colonial Office that he already knew not only the details of Lugard’s proposal, but also the brutal nature of his military expeditions. Only a week earlier Lord Elgin had ordered Lugard to refrain from launching any more raids against the tribes, and Churchill had agreed, noting sarcastically to his chief: “The chronic bloodshed which stains the West African seasons 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.”
As for Sir Frederick himself, Churchill soon concluded that, based on the evidence in the files, the high commissioner’s real ambition was to be another imperial czar, with Nigeria serving as his “sultry Russia.”3
The Lugards represented the dark underside of Chamberlain’s empire dreams. It was Joe who had authorized Sir Frederick to raise what amounted to a private army—the West African Frontier Force—and then to arm it with modern weapons to enforce British rule in the region. Flora Lugard didn’t know it yet, but Elgin and Churchill were hoping to put an end to her husband’s activities in Africa.
In the meantime, the “boy” listened patiently to her ideas and never once let on that he thought any privileged arrangement for her husband was absurd. He had already told Elgin, “We shall not simplify the labour of the Colonial Office by converting it into a pantheon of proconsuls on leave.” Flora Lugard left his office thinking she had impressed Churchill with her knowledge and reason, but when, a month later, Elgin officially rejected the proposal to give her husband equal periods of duty in London and Nigeria, she knew who to blame. In a letter to her husband, she tried to be upbeat, telling him to keep up his spirits and not to take the rejection too hard. It was only a spiteful blow delivered by an upstart.4
“Men like you . . . do their work, and the Empire is gradually well built,” she wrote. “And then an ignorant boy like Winston Churchill at the [Colonial Office] can at a critical moment dash in and seize your arm just when a sharp blow is essential.”5
It did not take long for the new masters of the Colonial Office to bring Lugard home from Nigeria and persuade him that returning wasn’t a good idea. The next year he would be shipped off to serve as governor of Hong Kong, where he did no harm. But after Churchill and Elgin had left the Colonial Office, he would manage to win another tour in Nigeria and shed more blood, ordering the public hanging of captured rebels as a warning to others and putting down disorders by sending in large numbers of troops to fire on protestors. In 1918, at Abeokuta, his men killed a thousand people.6
“All civilization rests on force as a background,” Flora told Winston. “I assure you that there is nobody in the world less military than my husband. His government is essentially a government of peace, but he has made it so by knowing how to repress disorder.”
Winston seemed to respect her tenacity and was always cordial, even acknowledging that Sir Frederick had done some good things and made personal sacrifices for the empire. But Churchill refused to endorse his repressive tactics. Flora mocked his scruples when they met one day at Blenheim, where she was Sunny’s guest. She told him that “the Manchester mob which governs your party vote” didn’t understand Africa. He told her the way forward was simple: “Give up the greater part of Nigeria, which is much too big for us to hold! Put an end to the whole system of punitive expeditions and be content with the peaceful administration of a small part of the whole.”
She stared at him in disbelief and asked, “How can you expect an Empire to prosper if these are to be your methods?”7
* * *
Churchill was looking for new ways to make the imperial system work without resorting to the crude methods of violence and coercion. It is true that he suffered from many of the prejudices of his time, and in a long life he would make many mistakes of his own. But by and large, his work at the Colonial Office was enlightened and farsighted.
It was also relatively free of humbug—except perhaps on the occasion in the House when he was trying to defend the government and called a dubious statement a “terminological
inexactitude.”8
With several years of experience behind him as an author, he delighted in bringing the tricks of one trade to another—spicing up the ordinarily dull pronouncements of government officials with language that was both playful and pertinent. Jonathan Swift couldn’t have improved on some of Churchill’s satiric criticisms of the bureaucratic mentality in departments like the Colonial Office.
The best of these is his long comment on a recommendation for getting rid of an African chief in Bechuanaland, a large but obscure protectorate. The tribe wanted their chief out of the way, so the Colonial Office was proposing to imprison Chief Sekgoma on a distant island. Half in righteous anger and half in jest, Churchill asked, “Why stop there?” If the government could justify deporting and imprisoning a man without trial, why not go ahead and kill him and get it over with.
“Why not poison Sekgoma by some painless drug?” he asked. “If we are to employ medieval processes, at least let us show medieval courage and thoroughness. Think of the expense that would be saved. A dose of laudanum, costing at the outside five shillings, is all that is required.”
Lord Elgin was not amused. He had spent much of his life solemnly dealing with the complex machinery of British bureaucracy, and didn’t see in Sekgoma’s case that a principle of law was at stake. In this instance, he believed that deportation and imprisonment were necessary administrative expedients. When Winston refused to agree, Elgin lost his temper—which was not common for him—and refused to admit that Sekgoma had any rights. “This man is a savage,” he insisted, “and is said to be contemplating proceedings in defiance of all law to disturb the peace.”9
When passions cooled, Elgin appeased his junior minister by throwing out the deportation and making the prison sentence a short one. Just as important, he admitted that these actions were being undertaken as extralegal precautions to preserve the peace. Elgin may not have realized it, but Churchill was using these disagreements not only to get his way, but also to wear the older man down and make him more accommodating the next time.
To his credit, Elgin put up a strong fight. One day Winston wrote of a certain proposal, “I cannot take responsibility for this.” Elgin responded simply, “I can.” On another occasion Winston ended a memo with the words, “These are my views,” to which Elgin responded, “But not mine.”
Back and forth it went, even to the point of Churchill rashly taking his pen and crossing out objectionable lines in certain documents, daring the Colonial Secretary to restore the change. Quietly, Elgin would solve the problem by using the proofreader’s symbol for “let it stand,” firmly writing in the margin “stet.”10
For all their disagreements, however, they did share a determination to put the brakes on the engine of imperialism. In Africa, for example, Churchill couldn’t see the point of continuing to claim authority over areas that were too remote to control. His advice to Elgin was consistent with what he had told Flora Lugard: “We should withdraw from a very large portion of the territory which we now occupy nominally, but really disturb without governing, and that we should concentrate our resources upon the railway and economic development of the more settled . . . regions.”
Elgin agreed and lamented the fact that, pushed on by Chamberlain and others, Britain had “engaged in the game of grab in the African continent” and now “cannot escape the consequences.”11
Churchill was a child of the imperial age and wanted the empire to prosper, but not if it meant neglecting or undermining what was best for Britain. It was a waste of resources and lives to fly the flag over lands that created more burdens than benefits, and that made life worse for the inhabitants than it was before. Instead of an empire held together by tariffs, Churchill wanted one governed by goodwill and a shared commitment to justice and security. Perhaps it was an unrealistic goal from the start, but in the days when the empire still had an air of romance attached to it, Winston believed in the goal wholeheartedly.
Meanwhile, he could at least try to keep the empire from extending the blessings of civilization at the point of a gun. As he soon discovered, Frederick Lugard was not the only administrator willing to crush any opposition with heavy force. When he learned that troops had killed 160 people in East Africa, he denounced the “butchery” and said with exasperation—and a touch of sarcasm—“Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale.”12
* * *
Much of Churchill’s job at the Colonial Office involved the typical bureaucratic drudgery, but he was always aware of his power to affect the lives of ordinary people in far-flung places that, in most cases, he knew only as bits of color on the map. He tried to keep in mind that each colony—however remote—was populated by individuals with real concerns worthy of London’s attention. It was said of an earlier head of the office that when he arrived his first words to the staff were “Let us come upstairs and look at the maps and see where these places are.”
Churchill didn’t have many people to help him. The regular staff of civil servants was surprisingly small. There were only thirty-five clerks of various grades, and twelve assistant, private, or permanent secretaries, all of whom were supported by a good number of office messengers and “lady type-writers.” They had enough work to keep them busy, but Winston often burdened them with matters that the old hands considered beneath their dignity. When a letter from a minor English figure in British Guiana went unanswered, Churchill reprimanded his staff, telling them not to be “too stiff and proud in answering this man’s loyal and civil letter. By snubbing a would-be supporter you can nearly always make a bitter enemy.”13
Between his work at the office and his duties in the House of Commons, he didn’t have much time for himself. In January he had left his rooms in Mount Street and moved into a house of his own at 12 Bolton Street, near Green Park and the Ritz Hotel. It was an easy walk from there to the office, and he could often be seen hurrying to Whitehall early in the morning and returning home late at night. The leasehold cost him £1,000, and he spent another £200 fixing it up. A narrow house built partly of red brick, it would have been cramped for a family but was spacious and comfortable for a bachelor.14
With his money from the biography and his new salary, he could afford to live well on his own, though not in any great luxury. He didn’t often entertain at home, because he was working so hard, but he wanted a convenient base that he could call his own and where he could unwind at the end of a long day.
Perhaps predictably, his most important work at the office involved South Africa. Campbell-Bannerman wanted to enhance the peace settlement with the Boers by granting self-government to their Transvaal stronghold. He saw it as their reward for ending the fighting and as a chance to win their allegiance by a conspicuous act of generosity after an ugly war. The Conservatives saw it as a national betrayal and an insult to all who had fought to subdue the Boers in defense of the empire. Churchill, who had encouraged his prime minister to undertake this bold action, was given the job of working out the details and neutralizing the opposition.
The Boers—his former enemies—proved easy to work with. The Tories—his former friends—attacked him ferociously. Anything he said or did in relation to South Africa drew the ire of his opponents. In March, when he was discussing in the House the career of Lord Milner—the former high commissioner in South Africa, an empire builder in the Chamberlain tradition, and a Tory hero—the opposition exploded with anger. They thought he was disparaging the recently retired official when he said, “Lord Milner has gone from South Africa, probably for ever. The public service knows him no more. Having exercised great authority he now exerts no authority. Having held high employment he now has no employment. Having disposed of events which have shaped the course of history, he is now unable to deflect in the smallest degree the policy of the day.”
This was one occasion when Churchill’s lofty rhetoric backfired. A motion had been introduced earlier to censure Milner for official misconduct during
his time in South Africa, and Churchill was trying—too slowly and too grandly—to say it was unnecessary in this case to censure someone who no longer exercised any authority. He had already conceded that Milner was guilty of misconduct, but he was now arguing that it would be a mistake “to pursue a private person” for old wrongs that were better left “wholly in the past.”15
But the wrongs in question were serious. Mine owners in South Africa had been mistreating their Chinese laborers, using them like slaves, and Milner’s administration had been accused of tolerating this abuse, allowing floggings and other unjust punishments. Milner, now in the House of Lords, was questioned about this and had confessed that he sanctioned the floggings in the interests of maintaining order, but that he regretted it, and acknowledged he was wrong.
Churchill and other Liberal leaders wanted to prevent further abuses and not be dragged into a long fight with the Tories over the past, especially when it involved a long-serving imperial leader who was also popular in the country as a whole. But in his eagerness to move on and bury the past, Churchill sounded as if he also wanted to bury Lord Milner. The Tories certainly jumped to that conclusion and began shouting him down, crying out, “Shame!” It didn’t matter to them that Milner was guilty of misconduct. They thought that Churchill—now on “the winning side”—was trying to humiliate both the former official and the defeated government, writing them off as relics who weren’t even worth the trouble of a slap on the wrist.
The more eloquent Churchill was on the subject, the more the opposition hated him. They heard arrogance and contempt in the rolling cadences; the sound hurt them more than the sense. In defeat, they didn’t want any show of generosity from him, so they seemed to revel in misconstruing his words, hearing what they wanted to hear, and believing that his message of reconciliation was actually a smug insult from a young turncoat.
Whether Churchill laid it on too thick or not, many of the Tories left the House that day boiling with anger. They had wanted his scalp badly enough before; now they couldn’t wait to get it and would be watching him closely for a good opportunity to take it. The first time that he stumbled badly, the first time he seemed vulnerable, they would remember this day and pounce on him.
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