Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (27 page)

De Valera was able to portray the Irish government’s acceptance of this as a sell-out, and by 1932 he had mounted a remarkable political comeback, as Prime Minister at the head of a new party, Fianna Fáil. The following year his government passed the Constitution (Removal of Oath) Act. This, ironically, proved Collins’s point that the treaty had created the conditions for increasing Irish freedom in the long run. It also seemed to falsify Churchill’s hopes of reconciling ‘the spirit of the Irish nation to the British Empire’.
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In spite of Churchill’s contempt for De Valera, which Ireland’s neutrality in World War II only increased, he sometimes talked about the possibility of Irish reunification.
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As he put it in June 1940, weeks after becoming Prime Minister, ‘I could never be a party to the coercion of Ulster to join the Southern counties: but I am much in favour of their being persuaded. The key to this is de Valera showing some loyalty to Crown & Empire.’
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This shows that Churchill was not very serious about the possibility of a United Ireland because, as he well knew, ‘Dev’ was about as likely to show enthusiasm for the Empire as he was to grow wings and fly.

IV

Churchill’s involvement with Ireland had, of course, straddled his War Office and Colonial Office periods; but why had the Prime Minister moved him to the colonies at all? It was not because of any positive enthusiasm on Churchill’s part. Lloyd George proposed the move to him on 1 January 1921 but it was a few days before he accepted. ‘I am afraid this venture is going to break me’, he said despondently.
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Sir Henry Wilson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, noted: ‘Winston told me he took the Colonies because he would not have lasted much longer in the WO owing to differences with LG.’
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It may well be that Lloyd George also felt that a switch would help reduce the tension that had arisen between them over Russia. He was almost certainly influenced too by the interest that Churchill had lately been taking in Middle Eastern affairs, with a view to reducing military expenditure there. Clementine Churchill tried to reassure her husband that she thought his new post ‘the best office just now’. With a hint of wry humour she added: ‘if you are able to “feature” the Empire once more it will make all English people happy, at peace with each other (more or less) & able to resume our lofty but unconscious contempt of the Foreigner’.
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Yet Churchill felt he deserved higher things. When, shortly after his appointment, the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer became free, he was furious not to be given the job. Leo Amery, who himself served as a junior minister at the Colonial Office in 1919–21, believed that ‘except for Ireland and Iraq’ Churchill ‘largely neglected the work’ of his department.
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There were, however, other exceptions too. Churchill took considerable interest, for example, in the introduction of responsible government in Southern Rhodesia. When this was under discussion, the white settlers were granted a referendum on the possibility of joining the territory to South Africa. Smuts blamed his friend for the fact that they rejected this option, although in reality Churchill would probably have been pleased to see them accept and thus to operate as a counterweight to Afrikaner influence within the Union.
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Churchill insisted, as a condition of accepting Lloyd George’s offer, on being allowed to create a new Middle East Department within the Colonial Office. Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, thought Churchill was trying to usurp his prerogatives. ‘He wants to grab everything into his new Dept, and to be a sort of Asiatic Foreign Secretary’, Curzon told his wife.
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One of Churchill’s first recruits was T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. Born in 1888, Lawrence took a First in Modern History at Oxford before taking part in archaeological digs in Syria in the years before the war. ‘I don’t think anyone who tasted the East as I have would give it up half-way, for a seat at high table and a chair in the Bodleian’, he wrote.
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In 1914 he took on a military intelligence role for the British in Cairo, paving the way for his involvement in the Arab Revolt that broke out two years later. He led contingents of tribesmen in daring attacks against Turkish forces, and immortalized his experiences in
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, first published privately in 1926. Crucially, Lawrence believed that Arab national aspirations and the defeat of Ottoman power could be harmonized with British interests and the outfoxing of the rival French. When Churchill first met him in 1919 he was unimpressed, but his opinion changed when he saw him again at the Paris Peace Conference a few weeks later. Lawrence was wearing Arab dress. ‘From amid the flowing draperies his noble features, his perfectly-chiselled lips and flashing eyes loaded with fire and comprehension shone forth’, Churchill recalled in typically romantic style. ‘He looked what he was, one of Nature’s greatest princes.’
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Lawrence was one of Churchill’s major advisers at the seminal Cairo conference of March 1921, the series of discussions amongst British officials held to determine the future map of the Middle East. Another was the archaeologist and traveller Gertrude Bell, also a believer in Arab self-rule – under British guidance. She was one of the key subordinates of Sir Percy Cox, High Commissioner of Mesopotamia (soon to be renamed Iraq), who played a leading role at the Cairo talks. Although some other officials complained that Churchill did not take the time needed to brief himself, she was impressed with Churchill’s conduct of the conference, writing that he ‘was admirable, most ready to meet everyone half way and masterly alike in guiding a big meeting and in conducting the small political committees into which we broke up’.
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Lawrence too praised his ‘imagination and courage’ and thought him ‘so considerate as sometimes to seem more like a senior partner than a master’.
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A factor making for this harmony was the fact that Churchill’s policy position was closely in line with that of the officials on the spot. As Bell put it, ‘Not the least favourable circumstance was that Sir Percy and I, coming out with a definite programme, found when we came to open our packets that it coincided exactly with that which the S.[ecretary] of S.[tate] had brought with him.’
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This is worth remembering, given that Churchill’s ‘crucial role [. . .] in giving birth to the Middle East we live with today’ has been subject to so much criticism.
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The typical indictment is that ‘By lumping together [in Iraq] populations that had nothing in common under an alien ruler, Churchill guaranteed eight decades of instability’.
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Yet Churchill did not just wade in and impose his own opinions. Doubtless aware of his lack of specialist knowledge, he deferred to the expertise available, even when this involved overriding his own instincts. For example, both he and Lawrence were sympathetic to the idea of an independent Kurdish state, and majority opinion at Cairo was actually in favour of this. Over the following months, however, Cox used his position as ‘the man on the spot’ to negate this decision, and Churchill acquiesced.
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With the benefit of hindsight, the decisions taken at Cairo certainly appear flawed in important respects, but the failures were collective (as Churchill’s critics in fact tend to acknowledge). Nonetheless, Churchill’s conspicuous desire to act as impresario, indulging his ‘roving propensities’ by going out to the Middle East himself, may have helped attract the retrospective blame onto his own head.
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The purpose of the conference was to sort out the aftermath of Britain’s conquests in the region during the war. Its occupation of Mesopotamia had led to it being granted the League of Nations mandate (a form of protectorate) for the country at the 1919 Peace Conference. Early in 1920 General Aylmer Haldane, Churchill’s ex-prison mate from Boer War days, was appointed to command the British troops there. A few days before he departed he reported to the War Office, ‘where Mr Churchill harangued me for twenty minutes on the necessity for making drastic reductions in the garrison of Mesopotamia, the cost of which, he said, was becoming intolerable to British taxpayers’.
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In May, hopes of economy were sandbagged by a major anti-British rebellion that persisted for several months. In an unsent letter to Lloyd George in August, Churchill wrote of his frustration that ‘we should be compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts’.
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He hoped to reduce spending by using air power rather than ground troops. As part of this scheme – for which he eventually won acceptance – he suggested ‘experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them’.
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These remarks have gained notoriety, even though Churchill was clearly talking about non-lethal gas. Just as horrifying, if not more so, were the casualties inflicted by machine guns and bombing. After a particularly appalling episode the following year, Churchill wrote, ‘To fire wilfully on women and children taking refuge in a lake is a disgraceful act’, but, beyond complaining, he took no action.
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Not long before his move from the War Office, and with the rebellion suppressed, Churchill circulated to the Cabinet a memorandum by the Director of Military Operations. This suggested withdrawal from the provinces of Baghdad and Mosul in the spring and the retention thereafter of the southern part of the country only.
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When the Cabinet rejected this idea, he defended the status quo in the House of Commons, portraying the idea of withdrawal as a policy of ‘scuttle’.
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It is clear, therefore, that Churchill did not believe in holding on to territory for the sake of it and at any price. His actions at Cairo were the product of pragmatism not diehardism. One of the key decisions taken there was to install Lawrence’s friend the Emir Feisal as ruler of the new Kingdom of Iraq. In a blow to Zionists, Feisal’s brother Abdullah was put in charge of neighbouring Transjordan, which was now divided from the rest of Palestine. All of this was high-handed, certainly, and there was an element of black comedy in the efforts taken to make it look as though Feisal was the Iraqi people’s choice. The government claimed to be neutral yet arrested and deported a rival candidate.
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The aim of the whole strategy was to minimize the British commitment through indirect rule by a government amenable to British guidance. Lawrence, for one, saw this as a ‘liberal’ policy based on national self-determination rather than domination. Noble as this might sound in theory, the policy caused problems for the British – Feisal soon started showing dangerous signs of mental independence. In September 1922, as Churchill’s frustration increased, he wrote to Lloyd George: ‘At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.’
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During that year’s general election he downplayed his role in forming policy for Palestine and Mesopotamia.
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The British position in the Middle East was much complicated by the competing promises to Arabs and Jews made by the Allies during the war. The most famous of these was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which stated the British government’s support for the creation of a Jewish ‘national home’ in Palestine. It was there that Churchill travelled at the conclusion of the Cairo conference, in the company of Sir Herbert Samuel, who as High Commissioner in Jerusalem was responsible for administering the British mandate. His train journey was chronicled by Maxwell Henry Coote of the RAF, who was acting as Churchill’s aide-de-camp for the duration of his trip. ‘After lunch we stopped at Gaza where Winston had a most tremendous reception of a howling mob all shouting in unison “Cheers for the Minister” and also for Great Britain but their chief cry over which they waxed quite frenzied was “Down with the Jew”, “cut their throats” and such like “anti-Zionist” cries’, Coote noted. ‘Winston and Herbert Samuel also were quite delighted with their reception not the least understanding what was being said.’
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A few days later Churchill visited the site of the planned new Hebrew University in Jerusalem. According to Coote, ‘He made a tremendously pro-Zionist speech which rather surprised me although I suppose he had to [be seen as] as upholding the Government (Balfour) policy. It seems curious though when one knows he is really not in sympathy with the Zionist cause.’
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Churchill’s attitude was indeed ambivalent. In 1919 he had mused that Britain could return both Palestine and Mesopotamia to Turkish control, and spoke scathingly of ‘the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine and who take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience’.
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It would not be correct, though, to describe him as an anti-Zionist. In a notorious newspaper article of 1920 he distinguished between praiseworthy ‘National Jews’, loyal to the countries in which they lived, and the ‘sinister confederacy’ of ‘International Jews’ whom he claimed were largely responsible for the Bolshevik revolution. In this analysis Zionism offered a ‘third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race’, and Churchill predicted that, ‘if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown [. . .] an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire’.
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His belief that Zionism would help combat the Bolshevik conspiracy was not greatly dissimilar to the views of Lloyd George and Balfour, both of whom believed that international Jewry was highly influential and its support worth cultivating.
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Meeting with a Palestinian Arab delegation in Jerusalem, Churchill rejected its concerns, which were couched in anti-Semitic language. He airily assured them that Zionism would be ‘good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine’. He emphasized that the existing form of British rule would continue for many years: ‘Step by step we shall develop representative institutions leading to full selfgovernment, but our children’s children will have passed away before that is completed.’
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Lloyd George, in private, was more explicit. During a meeting with the prominent Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in July 1921 he said to Churchill: ‘You mustn’t give representative government to Palestine.’
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Given the relative sizes of the Arab and Jewish populations, to have done so before much greater Jewish immigration took place would have been a catastrophe for Zionist hopes.