Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (5 page)

The Boer farmer personifies useless idleness. [. . .] With the exception of the Bible, every word of which in its most literal interpretation he believes with fanatical credulity, he never opens a book, he never even reads a newspaper. His simple ignorance is unfathomable, and this in stolid composure he shares with his wife, his sons, his daughters, being proud that his children should grow up as ignorant, as uncultivated, as hopelessly unproductive as himself.
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Earlier, he had given a rather more positive impression of South Africa to Winston who, as a pupil at Harrow School, followed his progress avidly. A month into his tour Lord Randolph sent him an unusually affectionate letter. (He was by no means an attentive father, and when he wrote it was frequently to offer a reprimand.) ‘I have been having a most agreeable travel in this very remarkable country’, he wrote. ‘I expect that when you are my age you will see S Africa to be the most populous and wealthy of all our colonies.’
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Winston, for his part, informed Lord Randolph of the home press coverage, which he loyally denounced as ‘exceedingly spiteful & vicious’, and requested an antelope’s head for his room.
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‘I hear the horrid Boers are incensed with you’, he told his father before going on to request some rare African stamps. ‘It would have been much wiser, if you had waited till you came back before you “slanged the beggars”.’
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To Lord Randolph’s credit, his criticisms of the Boers included their treatment of black people. ‘The Boer does not recognize that the native is in any degree raised above the level of the lower animals’, he wrote, adding: ‘His undying hatred for the English arises mainly from the fact that the English persist in according at least in theory equal rights to the coloured population as are enjoyed by whites.’
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The ‘at least in theory’ was a very important reservation – and it should be noted that Lord Randolph did not hesitate to refer privately to ‘niggers’
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– but the willingness to pay lip service to equality shows that Victorian racial politics was rather more complex than is often assumed. Winston Churchill did not grow up in an atmosphere where straightforward and unqualified racism would invariably pass without challenge.

Lord Randolph’s personal behaviour was highly eccentric. The degree to which this was a product of mental instability caused by illness is a moot point. His discourtesy to many of those he met on his journey could not but attract comment, and, when he travelled into Mashonaland, the mind-boggling extravagance of his expedition provoked the hilarity of the locals. (He took with him 103 oxen, a cow, 13 riding horses, 18 mules and a mare to run with them, 14 donkeys, 11 dogs, and 20 tons of food, ammunition and equipment.)
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He seems to have been almost indifferent to the impression he was making, telling his mother that ‘the carping and abuse of the Press’ was due to jealousy of the amount he was being paid. Moreover, ‘one must write the truth, and the truth is that the country is a disappointment and a failure’.
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Lord Randolph’s return to England was followed by a tragic mental and physical decline; his halting speeches became a horrible embarrassment. His friend Lord Rosebery famously observed, that ‘He died by inches in public’ and was ‘the chief mourner at his own protracted funeral’.
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In 1894 he started a world tour, which was cut short by a further collapse in his health. He died in London the following January.

His influence on Winston Churchill’s world view in general, and on his imperialism in particular, is difficult to gauge. Lord Randolph never took his son, who so admired him, into his political confidence, so the latter’s contemporary knowledge of his father’s career was not much greater than any other observer’s. ‘When I became most closely acquainted with his thought and theme,’ Winston later acknowledged, ‘he was already dead.’
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But the recently bereaved son threw himself into the study of his father’s life, learning portions of his speeches by heart and even quoting them to acquaintances; one, made in patriotic opposition to the idea of a Channel tunnel, seemed to appeal to him specially.
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In 1906 he published a massive and well-documented biography of Lord Randolph. By the time he finished it he had left the Conservative Party and was on the threshold of his ministerial career as a Liberal; he had abandoned the Tories after they had dropped their commitment to free trade, a highly controversial move that he thought would be economically damaging. With a combination of literary skill and judicious editing, he did his best in his book to iron out the inconsistencies in Lord Randolph’s political journey and to play down facts that he himself found politically uncomfortable. For example, Winston, as a free trader, ignored evidence that Lord Randolph had done more than merely flirt with the protectionist ‘Fair Trade’ movement of the 1880s.
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And, as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt noted at the time, ‘there is nothing at all [in the book] about his father’s more Indian liberal views’.
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It might have been expected, then, that Churchill would also seek to reinvent Lord Randolph as an unabashed imperialist, but interestingly he did not do so. The biography showed that Lord Randolph had at times adopted a ‘Jingo’ tone out of electoral expediency, and acknowledged that his attacks on Gladstone over Egypt had made some ‘True Blue’ Tories feel uneasy.
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It even admitted that ‘Lord Randolph Churchill was never what is nowadays called an Imperialist and always looked at home rather than abroad’.
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Yet if Churchill recognized the limits to his father’s imperialism – and if his own more powerful kind must therefore have owed much to other sources – we cannot discount Lord Randolph’s influence entirely. Winston can hardly, for example, have overlooked an important lesson of the South African visit: that travelling to distant parts of the Empire and writing about them was an excellent way of gaining publicity and making money at the same time.

II

Not long before his death, Lord Randolph wrote to Winston of his certainty ‘that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless and unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel one of the hundreds of the public school failures’.
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Even allowing for Lord Randolph’s considerable exaggeration of his son’s idleness, the latter was certainly not a model pupil in most respects. This, taken together with the fact that he later felt the need to make good his educational deficit through self-instruction, might lead us to conclude that his formal schooling had little impact on him. The truth, however, was different. During his childhood, and during his time at Harrow School in particular, he was exposed to imperialist messages that would stay with him for decades.

This exposure began early, but it was not simply a question of formal indoctrination. As his parents were distant, even neglectful, they delegated his care to Mrs Everest, who became his childhood confidante. In
My Early Life
(1930) he recalled a visit made to her sister and her husband, a prison warder, on the Isle of Wight, when he was four. It was at the time of the Zulu War, and as he recollected, not without irony:

There were pictures in the papers of the Zulus. They were black and naked, with spears called ‘assegais’ which they threw very cleverly. They killed a great many of our soldiers, but judging from the pictures, not nearly so many as our soldiers killed of them. I was very angry with the Zulus, and glad to hear they were being killed; and so was my friend, the old prison warder. After a while it seemed that they were all killed, because this particular war came to an end and there were no more pictures of Zulus in the papers and nobody worried any more about them.
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Historians of Empire rightly place much emphasis on the role such media images (and popular culture in general) played in inculcating the British people with the spirit of Empire, and also on that of schooling. How much effect this had on the masses is a matter of controversy. For many years scholars tended to argue that the populace was suffused with Empire sentiment, via sweeping propaganda ranging from children’s literature to the music hall to imperial exhibitions.
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More recently it has been argued that even when this propaganda reached the working classes they were often indifferent to it, and that popular feeling for the Empire erupted only rarely, for example during the Boer War.
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There is little doubt, however, of the impact on the social elite. In Churchill’s case, that impact can be traced with some certainty. There are, it is true, some gaps in our knowledge. We do not have detailed evidence of the curricula he followed at the preparatory schools he attended between the ages of seven and thirteen. Nevertheless, it seems probable that he was exposed, even if only obliquely, to some form of imperial education while he was there. (He would surely have become familiar with the world map – with the extensive ‘pink bits’ indicating British territory – that was an almost proverbial feature of the Victorian schoolroom.) The fact that he joined the Primrose League in 1887, and his eagerness to attend Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in the same year, suggests that he felt some degree of emotional attachment to Crown and Empire by the time he reached his teens.

We can be rather more precise about his subsequent years at Harrow. In later life he felt, to say the least, ambivalent about the time he spent there, but it undoubtedly made a profound impression on him. During World War II he told his private secretary John Colville that those days had been the unhappiest of his life. Nonetheless, Colville noted that the Prime Minister could still repeat the school songs by heart, and that, when he returned for a visit in December 1940, ‘he made a brilliant impromptu speech to the school, saying how much Harrow Songs had meant to him, what an inspiration they had been at certain stages of his life, and pointing out that although Hitler claimed the Adolf Hitler Schools had shown their superiority to Eton, he had forgotten Harrow!’
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(One of the songs that Churchill requested on this occasion was ‘Giants’, which includes a line paying tribute to ‘the hero-race’.)
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He certainly believed that Harrow and the other major public schools played an important imperial role, helping ‘produce the type and habit of mind which have played so indispensable a part in our State and Empire’, and providing its ‘colonists and adventurers’.
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During Churchill’s time there, the headmaster, Revd J. E. C. Welldon, was determined to create the imperial habit of mind in his pupils. Born in 1854, Welldon had excelled at Cambridge University and seemed to be destined for high things. Appointed to the headmastership in 1885, he expressed the hope that ‘the liberal sentiments of Harrow people will make reform, so far as it is needed, comparatively easy.’
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‘Liberal’ was a relative term; it did not mean that Welldon was soft on his pupils. (He once remarked of the ‘obstreperous, irresponsible’ Churchill that ‘he had birched him more frequently than any other boy, but with little effect.’)
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He was ‘an imposing figure’ whose ‘massive, towering form [. . .] expressed authority incarnate’.
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He was also a confirmed imperial ideologue, and this was reflected in his management of the school. In his memoirs he recalled how an Egyptian pupil had appeared one morning with two black eyes. Welldon made some inquiries, sent for the boy who had inflicted them and demanded to know why he had done it. The boy paused and then said apologetically, ‘Please, sir, he said something bad about the British race.’ According to Welldon, ‘The only possible reply which I could make was: “That is enough, my boy; you may go.” ’
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If this makes Welldon sound like the comic caricature of a Victorian headmaster, it was not the case that he simply despised non-whites. He advised one pupil who joined the Indian Civil Service on how to treat those over whom he exercised power: ‘you know how other Anglo-Indians treat them contemptuously; but you must remember that the West owes to the East nearly all the most precious part of its heritage, and then no native of India will seem to you to be unworthy of your tender consideration’.
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Such attitudes were undoubtedly deeply patronizing, and a much later letter demonstrates the assumptions underlying his imperialism. He argued, ‘it is clear to me that the British Government in India does not and cannot ultimately rest upon the good-will of the people; that the cry of equality among all citizens of the Empire is impracticable, because it would mean the subjection of the citizens of the West to the far more numerous citizens of the East’.
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The subjection of large numbers of Eastern citizens to small numbers of Western ones was, by contrast, something that he evidently found wholly unproblematic. To him, the British race was the best in the world, because it was the one that had ‘most succeeded in combining liberty with law, religion with freedom, [and] self-respect with respect for other races’.
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In other words, the British capacity for racial tolerance was a fundamental part of British racial superiority!