Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (47 page)

For the time being, Churchill remained intransigent, haranguing the Cabinet, denouncing Wavell and attempting to disclaim the Cripps offer. (‘Winston frankly takes the view that we made the offer when in a hole and can disavow it because it was not accepted at the time’, observed Amery.)
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On 7 May the news came that Germany had surrendered unconditionally. This was followed by the withdrawal of Labour and Liberal ministers from the coalition, as they were determined to secure the political independence of their respective parties. Churchill then formed a new caretaker administration, pending a general election. In spite of some last-minute attempted backtracking by Churchill, the new government agreed action. As Wavell pointed out to Amery, the ‘P.M. could not expect me to return to India empty-handed, and [. . .] surely it would be unfortunate if from an electioneering point of view India came into party politics’. That would have been hard to avoid if Wavell’s plans had been turned down, as the Labour leaders knew the details of all the discussions that had taken place.
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The deal struck involved Wavell calling a conference of Indian political leaders with a view to creating an Indianized Viceroy’s Council comprising members drawn from their ranks. This would be an interim solution before full agreement on a new constitution was reached. However, the conference, held at Simla, broke down in mid-July. Congress was keen to prove that the Muslim League did not have a monopoly of Muslim support and therefore wanted a representative who was not a member of it to be appointed to the Council; Jinnah refused to allow this, triggering the talks’ failure. Amery wrote later that the ‘immediate wrecker was Jinnah’ but that perhaps the real wrecking factor was the long delay before Wavell had been allowed to make his effort; on this analysis, Amery made clear, the genuine culprit was Churchill.
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Just before Churchill embarked on his general election campaign he had to tackle another crisis, an episode which serves as a reminder that the British Empire was not the only one facing difficulties at this time. In 1941 British and Free French troops had entered the Levant, ousting the Vichy regime from control. (France held the area under the League of Nations mandate system.) But although Syrian and Lebanese independence was then declared in the name of General de Gaulle, this proved to be more nominal than real, in spite of British pressure. Much friction between the two Allied powers ensued. When the French arrested the Lebanese President and Prime Minister in 1943, Churchill was predictably outraged, complaining to Roosevelt, apparently without irony, that France’s actions were ‘entirely contrary to the Atlantic Charter’.
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Churchill’s friend Edward Spears, appointed British minister in Syria and Lebanon, was suspected by the French of agitating against them; the Prime Minister reluctantly sacked him at the end of 1944, believing that he was suffering from Francophobia.
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In spite of French fears, the British had no territorial ambitions in the region, as Churchill’s ‘liquidation’ speech made clear. London’s policy was to sit on the fence – to support a privileged position for the French in the Levant
if
the countries’ governments were prepared to concede this by treaty (which was very unlikely, given the depth of local anti-French feeling). In late May 1945 violence broke out in Syria and, when the French authorities failed to bring it under control, British troops moved in to restore order. Although Churchill had been far from keen to do this, de Gaulle interpreted it as a plot to present Britain as the protector of the Arabs and to impose public humiliation on France.
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It had been no such thing, although it is only fair to observe that Churchill regarded Arab aspirations in the Levant far more sympathetically than he did nationalist movements in British territories. He was not scheming for the liquidation of the French Empire but he could regard the prospect of its decline with a certain detached equanimity. During the crisis, ironically, de Gaulle echoed Churchill’s own language at Yalta: ‘he would not allow France to be put into the dock before the Anglo-Americans’.
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V

To many observers, Churchill’s victory in the forthcoming election looked like a foregone conclusion. In the view of the
Washington Post
, he hardly needed an issue to campaign on beyond his record of military victory and having ‘saved Britain and the British Empire from what seemed certain extinction’.
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On 4 June he opened his campaign with a broadcast that quickly became notorious. A socialist government, he said, ‘would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance’.
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In a brilliant riposte, Attlee suggested that this remark showed the difference ‘between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr Churchill, the party leader of the Conservatives’; Labour, he argued, was the true national party.
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Even Churchill’s own supporters were dismayed by his gaffe. ‘Winston jumped straight off his pedestal as a world statesman to deliver a fantastical exaggerated onslaught’, noted Amery. His younger son Julian, himself a Conservative candidate, started to wonder if he was on the right side!
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Critics were able to point out that Australia and New Zealand both had Labour governments and that no dire consequences had resulted.
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The speech may have contributed to the subsequent refusal of Ben Chifley (Australian Prime Minister after Curtin’s death in office) to permit an Opposition motion thanking Churchill for his services to the Empire during the war.
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Imperial issues did not generate a great deal of excitement during the election. Although the Simla conference started towards the end of the campaign, India did not seem to be of much interest to the voters. Instead, domestic questions tended to dominate.
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Churchill was keen to show that he was still a social reformer, and his rhetoric retained a slight trace of the National Efficiency theme that had preoccupied him before 1914. In his second broadcast he highlighted contemporary concerns about the falling birth-rate: ‘Our future as a nation, and future as the centre of a great Empire, alike depend upon our ability to change the present trend in our population statistics.’ It was essential to ‘encourage by every means the number of births’ and, through health policy, to ‘fight for a healthy and well-nourished race of citizens’.
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On the Empire itself, the Conservative manifesto offered some progressive-sounding generalities. It spoke of framing plans ‘for granting India a fuller opportunity to achieve Dominion Status’ and said that Britain’s responsibility to the colonies was ‘to lead them forward to self-governing institutions’. Not that Labour policy was any more specific; its manifesto talked of ‘the advancement of India to responsible self-government, and the planned progress of our Colonial Dependencies’. Only the Liberals mentioned ‘complete self-government for India’.
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The Tory manifesto was also vague on questions of international economic policy. During the campaign itself, Churchill’s public reticence on these was flagged up by the economist Roy Harrod, fighting as a Liberal in Huddersfield. Harrod alleged that there was a serious danger in returning the Conservatives to power, as it was probable that those Tories (such as Amery and Beaverbrook) who opposed greater freedom of trade would get their way. The prospects for the British economy would thus be frustrated: ‘Churchill, whose own ideas on these topics might be perfectly sound, would be a prisoner in the Conservativep.’ At the behest of the incumbent Liberal National MP, who wanted support for his own declaration that the government stood by its previous commitments to international economic liberalization, Churchill was moved to describe Harrod’s accusations as ‘mischievous’.
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Talk of Churchill as a ‘prisoner’ of his party on international economic issues was an exaggeration, but, as peacetime was to show, Tory divisions over Empire trade and finance were not yet dead.

Votes were cast on 5 July but the results were not announced until the 26th, in order to allow time for the votes of servicemen abroad to be counted. The outcome was a landslide for Attlee’s Labour Party. Leo Amery was amongst those who lost their seats. (He had been faced in his constituency ‘with very serious Left wing opposition which has been worked up against me as the oppressor of India’, though it seems unlikely that this was decisive in his defeat.)
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Churchill’s defeat provoked widely differing reactions. Robert Menzies declared his departure from the international scene to be a tragedy.
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Mackenzie King – who had recently won yet another election himself – confessed to his diary his relief ‘that at Imperial Conferences and Peace Conferences I know I will not have to be bucking centralized Imperialism again’.
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Gandhi later gave the Labour victory as an instance of the kind of mass intellectual conversion that he believed non-violence could bring about: ‘To me it is a sufficient miracle that in spite of his oratory and brilliance, Churchill should cease to be the idol of the British people who till yesterday hung on his every word.’
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But, although many Indians welcomed Labour’s victory, some were sceptical. V. D. Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist later acquitted of involvement in Gandhi’s murder, feared that Attlee would ‘out-Churchill Churchill’.
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Churchill did have his Indian admirers. Nirad Chaudhuri recalled: ‘I was shocked, because I could never imagine that the British people would so unceremoniously reject the man who had led them to victory from an almost hopeless situation.’
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In America, ‘The news of Mr Churchill’s sweeping defeat was received with a shock of astonishment that was almost reminiscent of the reactions to the Pearl Harbor Bombing.’ Sensational changes in foreign policy were not anticipated, but there was the expectation of changes in the British attitude on some issues, including India, the colonies, and Palestine. According to the British Embassy, ‘The Zionists were quick to announce their pleasure at the turn of events and expressed confidence in the new Government.’
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Republicans were alarmed by the spread of socialism. Presumably, though, the Tory defeat held a silver lining for former isolationists such as Senator Bob La Follette, Jr, who had recently censured ‘Mr Churchill’s dogmatic and at times arrogant refusal to discuss any definite plans for freedom for the subject people of the British Empire’.
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However, it was not immediately clear how radical a shift could be expected from Labour. A few months after taking office, the senior minister Herbert Morrison was asked by American journalists if the new government intended to ‘preside over the liquidation of the Empire’. Morrison replied: ‘No fear. We are great friends of the jolly old Empire and are going to stick to it.’
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In contrast to the glory and heroics of 1940, the final years of World War II can appear as a forlorn tale, even though they culminated in comprehensive military victory. ‘Churchill stood for the British Empire, for British independence and for an “anti-Socialist” vision of Britain’, one historian has observed. ‘By July 1945 the first of these was on the skids, the second was dependent solely upon America and the third had just vanished in a Labour election victory.’
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Yet it is also important to remember that the war did evince genuine popular enthusiasm from within the Empire – and this was not restricted to the self-governing Dominions. Consider, for example, this poem on the war, written by Boishwerelo Yane, a teacher in the Bechuanaland protectorate:

When things were just about to begin,

At a time when the bells call worshippers to go and pray,

There was heard a whistle-call, that travelled

All the way from Mr Churchill, the head of the Government.

In response came out Mongwaketse, Mokwena, Mokgatla and Mongwato,

And the chiefs of smaller tribes in the Protectorate.

Their answer was, ‘Do not wait to be asked!’

Hitler of Germany stood up in anger, the dog raised his tail.

He has put his paws on the little ones, like Poland,

Raise your voices and say, ‘You dog! You have comrades,

But so too does Mr Churchill,

He has comrades who will come to oppose you.’

This was one of thirty-nine entries in a verse competition to mark the launch of the first Setswana-language newspaper in 1944; twenty-eight of them took the war as their subject matter. Those who wrote them were clearly highly literate and surely had a much firmer grasp of the causes and personalities of the war than most of their less well-educated fellow countryfolk.
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Equally obviously, the half-million Africans who joined the British army had strong economic motives to do so, yet we cannot discount the idea that principle or indeed Empire loyalty may also have played a part in the thinking of at least some of them.
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Furthermore, it must not be forgotten that support for the war and burgeoning support for colonial liberation were not necessarily incompatible. As the Gold Coast nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote in later years, ‘All the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.’
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The final decade of Churchill’s career was to see him battling demands and changes in part unleashed by his own inspiring rhetoric.