Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (49 page)

The United States with its economic power would clearly win such a fight but it would indeed be a pyrrhic victory. [. . .] if the Loan were not granted, England would nevertheless come through somehow – belts would have to be tightened still further and austerity endured for much longer but England would come through and with her Empire remain as always one of the great forces in the world for stability, justice and freedom.

The Senators and Congressmen seemed ‘definitely impressed by all that Mr Churchill had to say’.
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It is notable that, with the exception of Arthur Capper, all those present subsequently supported the loan, some of them vociferously. No doubt some would have done so without Churchill’s intervention, but not, perhaps, the influential Republican Arthur Vandenberg, whose surprise announcement of his intention to vote in favour was crucial in shifting the debate.
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The loan eventually passed the Senate in May and the House of Representatives in July. The impact of Churchill’s efforts on this outcome is hard to quantify, but it was undoubtedly meaningful. One Congressman later told him, ‘It was realization that the best of all that is Britain is represented in you which prompted my tearing up and discarding a speech prepared in opposition to the loan, and my vote in favour of it.’
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Some US lawmakers, though, were never to shake off their conviction that Churchill was a ‘cunning foreign propagandist’ who wanted to ‘persuade Americans to underwrite the British Empire’.
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Their suspicions of him might have been confirmed had they heard his off-the-record speech to the University Club in New York during his 1946 visit. According to a British official who was present:

He defended the Empire and its principles with brilliance and vigour, and was warmly applauded for his presentation of its objectives. He deplored Britain’s being ‘talked out’ of her rich estate in India [. . .] but acknowledged the early need to advance India to nationhood. He expressed fears as to India’s future, however, which he considered obscure: her people might have cause to regret any hasty assumption of the responsibilities of nationhood.
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Churchill returned home towards the end of March. Throughout the rest of the year, internal Tory opposition to his economic views faded away. Amery published a book attacking the loan agreement, in which he declared, ‘No more than Mr Churchill am I prepared to acquiesce in the liquidation and break up of the British Empire’.
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The Empire Industries Association, of which he was president, launched an ‘Empire Unity Campaign’ but it made little impact on the Conservative policy. Amery noted in November: ‘[Robert] Boothby [MP] brought rather a depressing account of the Party’s Finance Committee which he said is drifting back hard to multilateralism and all the rest of it.’
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The critics were later able to claim a measure of vindication. One of the conditions of the loan was that sterling should be made convertible into other currencies, including the dollar, in order to help free up trade. But after convertibility was introduced in 1947 it was quickly abandoned after a run on the pound. Churchill (who had expressed his own doubts about this part of the deal during the Commons debate) had more justification for his position, though, because there was no realistic alternative to the loan and the economic agenda that went with it. Although the empire preference gang did not disband completely – Amery remained a fixture at Tory conferences to the end of his life – Churchill from now on kept moderate opinion on his side. He achieved this in part through his continued (albeit limited and conditional) public defence of the very imperial preference system in which he claimed not to believe. In this way, ironically, he put himself fairly close to the Labour government’s position. During post-war trade talks, ministers stubbornly held on to a scaled-down version of imperial preference, not through ideological commitment but because they felt that US tariff concessions were not enough to justify scrapping it.
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II

Churchill’s behind-the-scenes assistance to the Labour government over the loan showed his capacity to act in a non-partisan way on issues of national importance. However, his behaviour in the Commons at times appeared erratic, causing some observers to worry about his mental state. In May 1946 the Liberal Party leader, Clement Davies, wrote a letter to a colleague describing Churchill’s reaction to a government statement on the food situation. ‘Winston began a sort of tirade. His manner of uttering it was worse than the actual words he used. Knowing the terrible state in Europe and in India, the impression I got from Winston was that he was not prepared to make any further sacrifices for either of those two places’. Davies had then spoken, dissenting from Churchill’s point of view; afterwards Churchill ‘walked across to me swearing and abusing all and sundry’. Davies was, he said, ‘deeply concerned about Winston. He is a great man, a great figure and an outstanding personality, but something is going amiss. Sometimes he behaves like an ill-mannered gamin, making faces and putting out his tongue and so on.’
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The day after the episode Davies related, Churchill lost his temper during a debate on the government’s proposal to withdraw troops from Egypt, and stuck his tongue out at Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary.
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(The negotiations with Cairo later broke down, because of Egypt’s insistence that its sovereignty over the Sudan be recognized.)
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This was all probably less the result of mental deterioration than of the frustrations of Opposition. ‘I fear, once the immense responsibility of the Prime Ministership and the war are off Winston’s shoulders he will relapse into the bad judgement and recklessness of pre-war days’, wrote Amery.
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Those frustrations partly resulted from the fact that the Labour government had launched a policy of retreat from Empire of which he strongly disapproved yet could do nothing to arrest. For him, India remained the truly emotive issue. Wavell, in London once more in August 1945 for consultations, met with Churchill, who ‘gave forth the usual jeremiad’ and bade him farewell with the words ‘Keep a bit of India’.
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In private, Churchill could be fatalistic. ‘India must go’, he told one guest at the villa he took in Italy for his holiday that autumn. ‘It is lost. We have been consistently defeatist. We have lost sight of our purpose in India.’
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‘India breaks my heart’, he told Amery the following year.
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The government’s real problem now was to convince Indian politicians that they were serious about granting independence and to get them to agree amongst themselves about the shape that the future might take. From March to June 1946, Stafford Cripps headed a Cabinet Mission to India aimed at striking a deal. It seemed that the Muslim League could, on conditions, be persuaded to accept a United India, but the bargain was scuppered by Gandhi’s provocative insistence that a Congress Muslim be included in the interim government. After it was announced that such a government was to be formed anyway, protests by the League led to violence in which thousands were killed. Nehru became Prime Minister in September, and the following month Jinnah joined his government, but the coalition did not succeed. In January 1947, with progress on a new constitution deadlocked, Attlee summarily dismissed Wavell and appointed Mountbatten as Viceroy in his stead. In February, hoping to induce the Indians to agree a constitutional plan amongst themselves, the British government announced its intention to withdraw from India by 30 June 1948. Churchill denounced these developments in the Commons. Claiming that communism as well as corruption had grown apace under the interim administration, he declared that it had been ‘a cardinal mistake to entrust the government of India to the caste Hindu, Mr Nehru’. The new time limit did not give Mountbatten a fair chance, moreover. ‘What is the policy and purpose for which he is to be sent out, and how is he to employ these 14 months?’ Churchill demanded. ‘Is he to make a new effort to restore the situation, or is it merely Operation Scuttle on which he and other distinguished officers have been despatched?’ As an alternative to unilateral withdrawal, he suggested entrusting the problem to the United Nations. That, however, was to him a second-best expedient, as his striking peroration made clear:

It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire, with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind. [. . .] We must face the evils that are coming upon us, and that we are powerless to avert. We must do our best in all these circumstances, and not exclude any expedient that may help to mitigate the ruin and disaster that will follow the disappearance of Britain from the East. But, at least, let us not add – by shameful flight, by a premature, hurried scuttle – at least, let us not add, to the pangs of sorrow so many of us feel, the taint and smear of shame.
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‘Winston was his unique self – ’ wrote one Tory observer, ‘& that self was magnificent, restrained but imaginative’ and, ‘toward the end, deeply moving’.
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Another (himself an ardent supporter of British rule) thought it ‘a good speech’ and ‘less violent than one might have expected’.
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Churchill’s colleagues, indeed, lived in some trepidation, constantly anticipating that his next speech would bring his ‘antediluvian’ opinions to the surface.
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Words like ‘scuttle’ and ‘squalid’ were his stock in trade, together with predictions of civil war.
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He tried, unconvincingly, to back-pedal his original acceptance of the 1942 Cripps Offer. He encouraged his backbenchers to attack the ‘cowardly abandonment of our duties’ in India.
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Yet in truth his engagement with the Indian issue in 1946–7 was somewhat intermittent.
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Furthermore, although he let off steam with violent outbursts in private, senior Tories generally heaved a sigh of relief after he spoke in the Commons. ‘On the whole Winston might have been worse’ is a typical comment from Amery’s diary at this time.
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It should also be noted that some Indians showed appreciation for Churchill’s approach. B. R. Ambedkar, who visited him at Chartwell, thanked him for ‘the kindness and courtesy you have shown me’ and for ‘the sympathy you have evinced for the cause of the Untouchables’.
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Ultimately, it was restraint that won out. In May 1947 Mountbatten returned to Britain with the news that Congress, and most likely Jinnah, would accept partition and Dominion status in return for a much accelerated transfer of power. He and Attlee met Churchill, Eden and Lord Salisbury (formerly Cranborne) and requested a pledge that the Tories would not try to delay the legislation to implement this. Having consulted other colleagues, Churchill sent a letter to the Prime Minister stating that the Conservative Party would not oppose the bill. What accounted for this remarkable decision? There were plenty of senior Conservatives who, fundamentally, agreed with Churchill over India, whatever their doubts about his methods of controversy. He was not, therefore, pressured into capitulation by more moderate colleagues. Primarily, it was a question of political tactics. The leadership as a whole, including Churchill, did not see much electoral advantage in the issue, preferring to focus its energies on domestic questions. Indian leaders’ acceptance of Dominion status provided the Tories with a fig leaf to cover their retreat.
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Churchill was therefore angered when he learnt that the legislation was to be called the ‘Indian Independence Bill’, although in fact he swallowed even this.
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Independence on 15 August was followed by forced population transfers accompanied by a wave of mass killings. Partition was a deeply contentious process: although it was clear on the whole which provinces should go to India and which to Pakistan, two with mixed populations, Bengal and the Punjab, needed to be divided. Over the next months, 5.8 million Muslims found refuge in Pakistan and nearly as many Hindus and Sikh refugees headed for India. Up to a million people were killed.
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Churchill did not hesitate to blame Attlee’s government for the ‘hideous massacres, the like of which have never stained the British Empire in all its history’.
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(One Labour MP in turn reproached him with the Bengal famine.)
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Furthermore, when India’s constituent assembly described the country as a ‘sovereign independent republic’, Churchill was in two minds about whether it should be allowed to stay in the Commonwealth.
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The British government was ready to permit it to do so, and appeared willing to drop the word ‘British’ from the term ‘British Commonwealth’ in order to ease its path.
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Churchill decried this in the Commons: ‘At present there are not many Conservative Prime Ministers in the British Empire but it may be that this proportion will be reversed in the near future and that a more robust spirit will prevail.’
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Even George VI thought this speech ‘unwise and troublesome’, as did Mackenzie King, a Liberal of course, now at the very end of his premiership and in London for his final Commonwealth conference.
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Attlee told Churchill privately ‘that it would be a disastrous step to meet India’s desire for continued association with a blank negative’. In Attlee’s words, ‘Mr Churchill in response at once went off the deep end with his usual attitude on Indian matters, and suggested that India should now be a foreign power’.
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However, he calmed down and in due course agreed to the unwieldy but tactful formulation whereby India became an independent republic associated with the Commonwealth, recognizing the British monarch as its head. Churchill wrote to Smuts, who was now in Opposition himself, about the issue. ‘When I asked myself the question: “Would I rather have them in even on these terms or let them go altogether”, my heart gave the answer, “I want them in.” Nehru has certainly shown magnanimity after sixteen years imprisonment.’
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