Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (17 page)

He subsequently returned to the US, where, on 9 January 1901, at the University of Ann Arbor, he again received an unfriendly reception from anti-imperialists. That same evening he confided his thoughts on world politics to a student journalist, in an interview that was not published in full until after his death. The influence of Winwood Reade was still apparent: ‘I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. [. . .] The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.’
¹¹²

On 2 February 1901, the day of Queen Victoria’s funeral, he boarded ship for England. The stage was now set for his House of Commons debut. He had warned Milner a few weeks before that ‘Everyone is sorely vexed and worried by the continuance of the war’, and that the forthcoming parliamentary debates would be ‘bitter’. He proposed a temporary armistice and negotiation.
¹¹³
Public concern was growing about British tactics, which were soon to be labelled by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as ‘methods of barbarism’. In
My Early Life
Churchill acknowledged that the guerrilla phase of the war had led to ‘shocking evils’. He wrote that, in order to cope with surprise assaults by a non-uniformed enemy, the British army cleared entire districts and herded the population into concentration camps, but the Boers cut railway lines, causing supply problems. ‘Disease broke out and several thousands of women and children died. The policy of burning farms whose owners had broken their oath [of neutrality], far from quelling the fighting Boers, only rendered them desperate.’
¹¹⁴
He gave no clue, though, that he himself had publicly justified farm burnings and concentration camps at the time. His maiden speech, on 18 February, made some efforts in this direction, in the context of a general defence of government policy in South Africa. He spoke immediately after the radical Liberal pro-Boer MP David Lloyd George, who made a speech condemning the ‘infamy which is perpetrated in the name of Great Britain in Africa’.
¹¹⁵
Churchill did not answer Lloyd George’s arguments in detail, not least because, having learnt his own speech by heart, his ability to improvise was limited. He said, though, ‘that as compared with other wars, especially those in which a civil population took part, this war in South Africa has been on the whole carried on with unusual humanity and generosity’.
¹¹⁶
A few months later he stated his belief that the concentration camps, if imperfect, involved ‘the
minimum
of suffering to the unfortunate people for whom we have made ourselves responsible’.
¹¹⁷

As usual though, there were complex undercurrents. He had not lost his respect for the manly qualities of the Boers. In a famous passage in his maiden speech, he scorned the ‘verbal sympathy’ the enemy had received from Liberal MPs, unmatched by practical support. ‘If I were a Boer fighting in the field – and if I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field – I would not allow myself to be taken in by any message of sympathy, not even if it were signed by a hundred hon. Members.’
¹¹⁸
The apparent admission that the Boers were motivated by a legitimate patriotism drew him some criticism. Chamberlain, sitting on the Treasury bench, muttered ‘That’s the way to throw away seats!’
¹¹⁹
Even more telling was a letter Churchill sent to Milner in March. He wrote of ‘this miserable war, unfortunate and ill-omened in its beginning, inglorious in its course, cruel and hideous in its conclusion’. He had, he said, ‘hated these latter stages with their barbarous features – questionable even according to the bloody precedents of 1870, certainly most horrible’. (But he had cited the Franco-Prussian War himself in his maiden speech, pointing out that Paris had been shelled and reduced to starvation, and arguing that British forces should not be restrained from following such precedents!) He was still ‘absolutely determined’ to take away the Boers’ independence, but could not ‘face the idea of their being economically and socially ruined too’.
¹²⁰
Doubtless he would have justified the discrepancy between his public claim, that the conflict was conducted with ‘unusual humanity’, and his private one, that it had ‘barbarous features’, with the need to maintain public backing for what he still saw, fundamentally, as a just war. During its concluding phase (the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in May 1902), he combined newly outspoken criticism of the government’s handling of the military situation with the conviction that a supreme effort could bring about a victory that would ‘combine the peace of Africa with the honour of Britain’.
¹²¹

As Churchill set out on his parliamentary career, then, his position was uncomfortable. Prior to the outbreak of war he had taken a conventional Conservative position and, in spite of his growing concerns in private, had largely sustained that in public through to his first months in the Commons. Nevertheless, his experiences of the war did make him sceptical of the way it was conducted in practice, and also greatly increased his respect for the Boers. Hence his (somewhat intermittent) criticisms of the War Office and also his calls for a magnanimous approach towards the enemy. He did at times appear opportunistic. After his embarrassment with the heckler at Plymouth he toned down his attacks on the War Office during his election campaign – when he ridiculed Liberal charges of muddle – only to revive his concerns later. In October 1901 Sir Edward Grey observed that ‘criticisms had ably been pressed home of late by Mr Winston Churchill, but what a satire his speeches were upon the last election at Oldham’.
¹²²
However, as his comments to Milner make clear, he felt a genuine dilemma about what he should say in public, given the need (in his view) to sustain patriotic sentiment at home as a precondition for victory. And although he may not have been the ruthless apostle of truth that legend favours, he did, to his credit, take the political risk of expressing his concerns when, in the dying months of the war, he felt that a dangerous public apathy was taking hold. Finally, we should not rush to conclude that his multiple twists and turns were the product of calculation, cynical or otherwise. To a fair degree they were the product of sheer inexperience and even of uncertainty. We can see a hint of his problems in his response to questions about the alleged inefficiency of the army after one of his Canadian lectures. His first response was to claim that its organization in South Africa was ‘perfect’, but he then paused before remarking that there were many reforms to be made and that he was pledged to his constituents to that effect.
¹²³
We can see here his instinctive ‘My country right or wrong’ attitude warring with his (in this case legitimate) intolerance of established methods and his (perhaps not always sufficiently developed) awareness of the hostages to fortune that he had already given. If he did not always achieve a perfect balance it is perhaps worth recalling that, at the time he entered Parliament, he was only twenty-six.

At the same time we may note that the war in South Africa had been ideologically disconcerting for him. The experience of fighting fellow white colonialists seems to have presented a greater challenge to his world view than battling the brave but alien-seeming tribesmen of the North-West Frontier or the warriors of the Sudan.
¹²⁴
The collapse of his contempt for the Boers under the pressure of reality did not imply any weakening of his faith in the Empire, but it did introduce new paradoxes. In particular, his increasing sympathy for their aspiration to freedom – provided that that freedom was exercised
within the Empire
– meant that the welfare of the black majority was put to one side. This did not mean that Churchill did not care about that issue, merely that he did not at this time care enough about it to prioritize it or indeed to say much of meaning about it at all. In this of course he was hardly unique, and his jibes at the inconsistencies of the pro-Boers were not without their point, but the absence was significant. In a speech made shortly after he became an MP he spoke of how the Boer War was ‘the people’s war’ and also ‘the Empire’s war’. He said he knew from his visit to Canada – and he believed it also true of Australia – that ‘the people, by their effective participation in this memorable struggle, had been able to feel, down to the poorest farmer in the most distant province, that they belonged to the Empire and that, in a certain sense, the British Empire belonged to them’.
¹²⁵
Yet it seems very unlikely either that many non-white colonial subjects of the Empire felt this profound sense of participation or ownership, or indeed that Churchill was even referring to them. If the implication of his words was that the British Empire required the moral sanction of its people, then he could only realistically claim it had that sanction on a highly restricted view of who ‘the people’ were. In other words, his narrow angle of vision regarding race helped him claim a democratic basis for his broader arguments for imperialism. For a young politician hoping to exploit his own imperial background in a new era of mass politics, this was, indeed, a convenient way of seeing the Empire.

PART TWO

Divide Et Impera!

4

THAT WILD WINSTON, 1901–1908

During the first months of 1906 Churchill made himself highly unpopular, not only with political opponents but also with important sections of opinion within the Empire. As a new minister in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal government, he was an obvious target for those on the Conservative side, from which he had ‘ratted’ two years earlier. The attacks of Joseph Chamberlain and other Unionists, who alleged that he was more concerned with party politics than with Empire, were therefore par for the course. Yet the criticisms of Churchill came from all sides. Ramsay MacDonald, secretary of the newly emergent Labour Party, accused him of tactlessness in his efforts to exert control over local colonial governments’ treatment of their non-white populations. ‘I do not think I am an over-cautious man, or that my sympathies with oppressed black and yellow men in South Africa are niggardly’, MacDonald wrote. ‘But I am bound to say that, unless the Cabinet muzzle Mr Winston Churchill, they will bring themselves into a disastrous conflict with the Colonies.’
¹
The right-wing
Morning Post
, Churchill’s former employer, applauded MacDonald’s remarks and claimed that the new minister had become ‘a national danger’.
²
And at a Colonial Institute dinner in London the very mention of Churchill’s name ‘evoked hisses and ironical exclamations’,
³
a reaction which
The Times
blamed on his apparent pursuit of ‘mere party purposes’ in place of efforts to secure ‘the confidence of those bearing the heat and burden in far-off lands for the benefit of the whole Empire’.
⁴
The central issue of controversy was South Africa; and when the
Times of Natal
denounced Churchill’s imperial policy as ‘rotten and vicious’ it was representative of the response of the British press there.
⁵
Lord Selborne, who had replaced Milner as High Commissioner, was driven almost to apoplexy by Churchill’s behaviour: ‘Winston keeps up a very friendly correspondence with me, but the only fixed purpose I can detect in his policy is that of keeping well with the extreme radicals. They are a crowd! of dangerous lunatics I say! the Empire cannot survive much of them.’
⁶
Although Churchill was still talked of, even in distant parts of the Empire, as a future Prime Minister, it was far from the happiest of starts to a ministerial career.
⁷

I

How, then, had Churchill made the switch from ardent Tory imperialist in 1900 to Liberal
enfant terrible
and alleged menace to British interests? Had he really changed his ideological spots, or was he a victim of misrepresentation? The answers to these questions take us back to the unhappy closing phases of the Boer War and its political aftermath. There were some signs, even before the war, that he did not regard the Conservative Party as his natural political home. In 1897 he told his mother that he was a Liberal at heart and that, were it not for the party’s commitment to Irish Home Rule, ‘to which I will never consent’, he would join it.
⁸
Yet, since he subsequently fought two vigorous Tory campaigns and then joined a Liberal Party which had
not
abandoned Home Rule – although in fairness it had put the issue on the back burner – we should perhaps not take these remarks too seriously. The indications are that, on election to Parliament, he intended to be ‘an independent Conservative’ who would not, rebel as he might, be drawn from his ‘true allegiance’ to the Tories ‘by any fulsome flattery or self-interested compliments which may come from the Radical side’.
⁹
This position, however, was to prove unsustainable.