Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (30 page)

Mackenzie King did not voice his criticisms openly, but played for time by referring the matter to the Canadian Parliament, which was not in session. Press criticism, though, was vociferous. ‘Winston Churchill, being colonial secretary, is overlord of Mesopotamia’, observed the
Toronto Daily Star
. ‘He can’t divorce the idea that he is also overlord of Australia and Canada, South Africa and New Zealand – the one statesman to whom continents are bailiwicks.’
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In the event, war was averted: the commander of the Allied forces in Turkey held back from delivering to the Kemalists a provocative ultimatum which had been drawn up by the Cabinet. Kemal decided not to attack and agreed to negotiate. In public, Churchill claimed this as a victory for the stance that he and his colleagues had taken. ‘General Smuts, the great Liberal statesman of South Africa, has vindicated the action which we took’, he declared. ‘Australia and New Zealand have stood at our side.’
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Unsurprisingly, he made no mention of Hughes’s private anger; nor did he refer to Canada. The Chanak episode made Mackenzie King determined to resist what he saw as British attempts to centralize control of the Empire, and at the following year’s imperial conference he successfully pressed for recognition of Dominion autonomy in important spheres such as the making of treaties. Not for the last time, an attempt by Churchill to strengthen Empire ties had the unintended consequence of weakening them instead.

The prospect of war had caused alarm in Britain as well as in the Dominions. On 7 October
The Times
published a letter from Andrew Bonar Law in which he argued, ‘We cannot alone act as the policeman of the world’.
¹⁷⁹
This was a signal that Law – who had stood down as Conservative leader the previous year because of illness, but whose health was now improved – was prepared to give an independent lead to Conservatives in a way that Austen Chamberlain, the party’s official leader and a supporter of the coalition, would not. On 19 October Tory MPs, meeting at the Carlton Club, voted heavily to withdraw support from the coalition. As a result, Lloyd George resigned and Law became both leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. At the vital moment – not that he could have affected the result – Churchill was struck down by appendicitis. He had an operation, and later recalled that ‘in the morning when I recovered consciousness I learned that the Lloyd George Government had resigned, and that I had lost not only my appendix but my office as Secretary of State for the Dominions and Colonies’.
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(Lloyd George joked that, although ill in bed, Churchill was ‘busily drafting political programmes’.)
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The general election that followed was a landslide for the Tories. Churchill, fighting once more as a Lloyd George Liberal, lost his seat to an independent Prohibitionist candidate. The Tory victory was widely welcomed in South Africa and Australia.
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In Canada, Mackenzie King – himself a Liberal – had thought it would be ‘a good thing for England’ to get rid of Lloyd George, Churchill and their colleagues.
¹⁸³
The Times
reported that amongst Indians in Delhi the news of Edwin Montagu’s defeat was ‘more than compensated’ for by the return of Ramsay MacDonald as a Labour MP and by the defeat of Churchill.
¹⁸⁴

Churchill’s personal unpopularity within the Empire should not be exaggerated. If, for example, Australians and New Zealanders had borne him a terrible grudge about Gallipoli, it is doubtful that he would have been invited to speak at an ANZAC day lunch in London in 1921.
¹⁸⁵
Some influential figures such as Smuts were friendly towards him and were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt in a crisis. It is also clear that some of the criticisms made of him were excessive. The Chanak telegram and communiqué were undoubtedly misjudged, but Mackenzie King’s belief that ‘Lloyd George, Churchill and others were out to play an Imperialist game to help the Coalition politically’ was unfair.
¹⁸⁶
There had been no deliberate conspiracy. Furthermore, we may note that the reasons Churchill was distrusted varied considerably from country to country and group to group. If Indians disliked his speech on Kenya, then the white settlers disliked his failure, as they saw it, to deliver on its promises. In general, though, he was increasingly thought of as a diehard. Gandhi, for instance, said that he understood ‘only the gospel of force’.
¹⁸⁷
Churchill courted this reputation to some extent – with his interventions on Egypt, for example – but it did disguise the complexities of his attitudes.

Nevertheless, it is notable that, by the time of his fall from office, no one was criticizing his views on Empire as being too radical in the left-wing sense (even if East African settlers thought that he was too responsive to left-wing demands). This was in marked contrast to his first Colonial Office period. In the public mind, he had become increasingly associated with a domineering and allegedly old-fashioned form of imperialism. Ironically, even as he acquired this image, he was doing his best to break free from the constraints imposed by his ministerial remit. In 1921 Curzon complained about his interference in foreign affairs, and asked how Churchill would feel if he, Curzon, made public interventions on Colonial Office questions without consulting him. Churchill replied that ‘there is no comparison between these vital foreign matters wh[ich] affect the whole future of the world and the mere departmental topics with the Colonial Office is concerned’.
¹⁸⁸
The idea that Churchill was not really interested in imperial affairs would be absurd; yet, as the following years would show, the Empire was just one part of the canvas on which he wished to splash his paint.

6

DIEHARD, 1922–1939

At the end of 1923 Churchill published a swingeing attack on H. G. Wells’s views on imperialism in the pages of the
Empire Review
. This was in response to an article by Wells in the previous issue of the same journal, which argued that the British Empire should eventually be merged into a system of world federal government, acting in the meantime as a ‘trustee’ for this as-yet-unborn global organization.
¹
Churchill, although he praised the ‘imagination and foresight’ of Wells’s science-fiction writings, poured scorn upon this political vision. Wells, he suggested, was an unrealistic dreamer. ‘We see him airily discarding, or melting down, all those props and guard rails on which the population of this crowded and precariously conditioned island have been accustomed to rely’, Churchill declared. ‘We can almost hear him smacking his lips at every symptom or upheaval in India or in Africa.’ He ridiculed Wells’s world federation proposal: ‘In this sublime conception the British inheritance accumulated by the thrift and effort of so many centuries would be liquidated and generously shared with all nations.’
²
Wells replied in turn that Churchill’s talk of thrift, effort and ‘inheritance’ was cant. He, Wells, was merely pointing out the obvious, he said: the Empire in its current form was unstable and bound to undergo major changes in the future. He then put the boot in at the personal level. He described Churchill as his friend, but added: ‘There are times when the evil spirit comes upon him and when I can think of him only as a very intractable little boy, a mischievous, dangerous little boy, a knee-worthy little boy. Only by thinking of him in that way can one go on liking him.’
³

The spat should not, perhaps, be taken too seriously; indeed, it was somewhat prefabricated. Churchill and his friend Brendan Bracken had themselves prevailed upon Wells to write his initial article, which was on a topic he would probably not have chosen himself, in order to help revive the
Empire Review
.
⁴
Nevertheless, the episode was telling. To begin with, it showed how far Churchill had moved politically since his promotion to the Cabinet in 1908. At that point Wells, praising his ‘fair and statesmanlike utterances’, had urged socialists to vote for him, and Churchill had been happy to accept the endorsement.
⁵
Secondly, Churchill’s use of the word ‘liquidated’ saw him rehearsing for his famous comment during World War II that he had not become Prime Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. Finally, and most significantly, his article cast light on his imperial vision at a moment when, in the wake of the territorial expansion triggered by the Great War, the Empire sat on the cusp of irreversible decline. It cannot exactly be counted as philosophical reflection – much of it consisted of a sarcastic diatribe against Wells – but it did see Churchill discussing the Empire in general terms rather than in relation to a specific, current controversy. What, then, was his case in favour of the British Empire?

The striking thing, in fact, is that Churchill had so few concrete things to say for the current state of affairs. He was very good at suggesting that Wells’s system of world government would be worse: ‘British credit and currency would, for instance, be dissolved in world-federal credits and currency to which German insolvency, French extravagance, Russian rapacity, and Chinese indolence would have loyally made their contributions.’ It was only in relation to the role of the King-Emperor (disdained by Wells) that he laid out a positive argument. The Empire, he wrote, was ‘a house of many mansions, where there is room for all, and in which the legitimate diversities of national, racial, geographical sentiments and interests may dwell and unfold peacefully and tolerantly side by side’. But formal political arrangements such as a Parliament of the Empire would not command the approval of these different communities. ‘There is only one link which is accepted by all. The democratic communities of Australia, the surging progressiveness of Canada, the builders of the Irish Free State, the burghers of the Transvaal, the princes and populations of Hindustan, the inhabitants of fifty tropical dependencies and a thousand ocean-nursed islands, willingly, naturally, gratefully include themselves within the golden circle of an ancient Crown.’
⁶
In fact, as Wells pointed out, ‘One of the chief troubles in the Irish settlement has been the excessive distaste of many Irishmen for the forms of royalty’, and one might well ask too how profound the reverence for the monarchy went amongst some of the other groups Churchill mentioned.
⁷
Churchill was undoubtedly romanticizing the Empire, and here lay the deeper significance of his article. During his subsequent career he would often react with violent hostility to progressive proposals for reform of the Empire, even those more modest than Wells’s. His denunciations were brilliant, and his descriptions of the advantages of Empire were colourful if unspecific, but his prescriptions showed little grasp of detail. His belief that ‘the future of the British Empire may best be secured by advancing along the old road’ was not accompanied by any constructive vision.
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The bold ideas about economic development sparked by his pre-war African trip had more or less died away. It was this absence of a positive agenda, rather than his continued belief in Empire as such, that increasingly marked him out as a reactionary during the remainder of the interwar years.

I

Churchill’s Indian campaign, in opposition to reforms supported by the Tory leadership, was to be one of the chief hallmarks of the period; but before he could destabilize the Conservative Party from the right, he had first to rejoin it from the left. This was not a straightforward process. He himself claimed that he had been on the point of rejoining in 1922 but had been prevented from doing so by the collapse of the Coalition.
⁹
In 1923 Bonar Law resigned through ill health and was replaced as Prime Minister by Stanley Baldwin. But, later that same year, Baldwin overplayed his hand by calling a general election, asking for support for a policy of tariffs in order to combat the growing problem of unemployment. The threat to free trade reunited the divided Liberals, and led Churchill to fight a final campaign as a candidate for the party, in Leicester. He pointed out the falsity of Joseph Chamberlain’s gloomy predictions about what would happen to the Empire if tariff reform was not adopted. When war had broken out in 1914 ‘the Empire was found united, heart and hand, after 70 years of Free Trade, in a manner far beyond the brightest and most sanguine dreams of any Imperialist’.
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He also argued that ‘the consolidation and development of the Empire’ were not the monopoly of ‘Tory Diehards’.
¹¹

The Tories lost their majority (although they won the largest number of seats), paving the way for a minority Labour government. Churchill was defeated at Leicester, but the overall result removed one obstacle from his path. Baldwin was now forced to drop his tariff policy, making it easier for Churchill to associate himself with the Tories, an alliance made urgent, he could now claim, by the threat the socialist government posed to Britain. In the spring of 1924 Churchill contested a by-election in the Abbey division of Westminster, as an ‘Independent and Anti-Socialist’ candidate, in conflict with the official Conservative candidate, Otho Nicholson. He tried to solicit Baldwin’s help, telling him, ‘Mr Nicholson’s withdrawal or even the non-interference of the [Conservative] Central office in the fight, wd result in a resounding victory for Conservative & imperial interests & for anti-Socialism.’
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The appeal was fruitless and Nicholson won the seat, but Churchill did well enough to make it clear that he could be a significant asset to the Tories. During the contest he laid into the Labour government, suggesting that, desirous of appeasing nationalist sentiment within the Empire, it was ‘ready to lay down our burden in any one of the great Oriental countries if a stick be shaken at us by any irresponsible chatterbox’.
¹³
Labour, for its part, claimed that ‘Churchill’s militarist mind is as dangerous to the workers at home as it is to peace abroad’.
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