Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (56 page)

Although the tributes to him naturally focused on World War II, the Empire dimension of his life also received an airing. Harold Macmillan, for example, in a BBC broadcast, spoke of Churchill’s ‘love of Britain, of the Empire, his pride in its glorious past, his confidence in its future’.
³²
(However, in a radio talk prepared for the USA and Canada, he did not mention the word ‘Empire’, instead speaking of ‘his love of Britain and the Commonwealth, and his sincere belief in the common purpose of all English-Speaking Peoples’.)
³³
Likewise, Robert Menzies, in his widely praised broadcast, spoke of Churchill as ‘a great Commonwealth statesman’ and not as an Empire statesman.
³⁴
But if Macmillan and Menzies were a touch reticent about using the term Empire, two other commentators were less shy. Interestingly, they were both Americans. Eisenhower – who could easily have chosen to be more anodyne – said that Churchill was ‘the embodiment of all that was best in the British Empire’.
³⁵
And Joseph C. Harsh, the US journalist who provided commentary on ITV’s coverage of Churchill’s state funeral, was even more forthright: ‘Before the days of Winston Churchill, many an American saw Britain as a selfish imperial taskmaster . . . During the Churchill era that image has been transformed.’ Thanks to Churchill more than any other man, he said, ‘we Americans who once thought of Britain as rapacious, insolent and domineering now think of Britain as sturdy, brave and above all honourable’.
³⁶

The funeral itself, which took place on 30 January, could be seen as Britain’s last great imperial pageant. In Salisbury, the capital of (Southern) Rhodesia, there was a splendid memorial service, attended by the country’s political elite. This has been described as ‘perhaps the last great “establishment” occasion in Rhodesia when the great and the good could feel part of the British tradition of which they had been so proud’.
³⁷
A few months later the white minority regime in Rhodesia, desperate to avoid the imposition by London of majority rule, illegally and unilaterally declared independence. It was a moment that symbolized the British government’s inability to control the destinies of its former imperial subjects. The following year the country’s leader, Ian Smith, declared, ‘If Sir Winston Churchill were alive today, I believe he would probably emigrate to Rhodesia – because I believe that all those admirable qualities and characteristics of the British that we believed in, loved and preached to our children, no longer exist in Britain’s future as the centre of a great empire’.
³⁸

There were plenty of other interpretations of Churchill and his legacy. The day after Churchill’s death the journalist and historian John Grigg, a somewhat unconventional Conservative, argued that he had been the architect of a ‘delusive victory’. Grigg did not doubt that Churchill had saved Britain from defeat and dishonour, but believed he had failed to save it from its friends. ‘Though he claimed – and doubtless believed – that he had not become the King’s first Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, he had no choice but to acquiesce in a state of affairs that made that liquidation inevitable. He presided, in fact, over the inauguration of the American empire.’
³⁹
(No one seems to have taken exception to these comments at the time, but when the right-wing historian John Charmley made a similar argument nearly thirty years later he provoked a storm of controversy.)
⁴⁰
By contrast, the journal
Round Table
, which had been founded by Lord Milner and his followers in 1910, offered a subtle defence of Churchill. Commonwealth subjects, it suggested, had a simplified image of him, which was not closely related to the many controversies in which he had engaged. To them, it argued, he was simply a patriot: ‘He was the great fighter, and the cause for which he fought was their own. In the end, they saw him as the universal deliverer, the protector of the liberty of the Commonwealth to choose its own path; and none of them cared, few of them realized, that the path they actually chose to follow was transforming the Commonwealth in a sense directly opposed to the conception of it that prevailed in Churchill’s mind.’
⁴¹
Richard B. Moore, an American black rights activist born in Barbados, offered a very different but similarly thoughtful take in the journal
Liberator
. ‘The most able and voluble spokesman of the imperial mode of thought, Winston Churchill was nevertheless its prisoner’, he wrote. Moore condemned severely many aspects of Churchill’s record, including his willingness ‘to degrade and persecute the militant leaders of nationalist colonial movements’. Yet he also found much to praise, including Churchill’s ‘sage warnings’, his ‘eloquent and inspiring’ speeches in 1940, and his building of alliances with the USA and the USSR. How could these great contributions to human welfare be produced by such a narrow, hidebound imperialist? Moore explained that this was due to ‘a most rare and fortunate coincidence’, that is, ‘the agreement at that specific moment and in that particular conjuncture of events, of the vital interests of the British Empire with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind’.
⁴²
Here we see Moore struggling to reconcile his admiration for Churchill on the one hand and his opposition to Empire on the other. The acknowledgement that the interests of the British Empire and those of humanity in general
could
have coincided, even if only under very particular conditions, was surely a very significant concession for a radical anti-colonialist to make.

In the years since his death, Churchill has remained an iconic figure. US presidents have repeatedly invoked his name in support of their own goals. For George W. Bush, he was a man who ‘knew what he believed’ and ‘really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me’.
⁴³
However, when British and American politicians call upon Churchill’s memory, the imperial aspect of his career tends to be airbrushed out of a picture in which his battles against Nazism are heavily foregrounded. His early military heroics may be celebrated – as in the film
Young Winston
– but the attitudes that attended them are not. Nevertheless, Bush was vulnerable to reproaches such as ‘Even Churchill Couldn’t Figure Out Iraq’.
⁴⁴
By contrast, politicians outside the Western world are not reticent in addressing Churchill’s imperialism. In 2005, in a speech made in Sudan, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa launched into a stinging denunciation, quoting Churchill’s early remarks on the ‘fanatical frenzy’ of Muslims as evidence of the ‘terrible legacy’ of British colonialism. By depicting Africans as savages, he argued, Churchill and other imperialists had inflicted devastating divisions upon the Empire’s subject peoples. These ‘eminent representatives of British colonialism’ had done ‘terrible things wherever they went, justifying what they did by defining the native peoples of Africa as savages that had to be civilised, even against their will’.
⁴⁵
Yet, even if his criticisms had a measure of validity, just as Bush’s praise of Churchill did, Mbeki too was using historical memory for his own ends. While deploring the past evils of colonialism, he noticeably failed to draw attention to the contemporary horrors being perpetuated with Sudanese government connivance in Darfur. It should also be noted that there have been others willing to criticize Churchill’s imperial record from a very different perspective. In 1990 a BBC documentary team received an anonymous letter from a South African woman of English descent in response to a call for information. She wrote: ‘It was Churchill who, in his most “glorious” years, threw away the entire British Empire with the stroke of a pen and he should be held responsible for the rape of not only the entire African continent but also of India and Asia. Orderly British rule [was] handed over carte blanche to primitive savages.’
⁴⁶
This opinion may have been bizarre, but it was not necessarily unique in South Africa during the final collapse of apartheid.

How, then, should Churchill’s lifetime involvement with the Empire be assessed? His defenders amongst historians are certainly right to argue that the picture is more complicated than his diehard image would suggest. That reputation, acquired from the 1920s onwards, overlay an earlier picture of him as an imperial conciliator, based on his South African and Irish accomplishments. When at the Colonial Office before World War I he was even seen for a brief time as a ‘danger to the Empire’. Nevertheless, his detractors’ arguments also have merit. If Churchill became seen as a diehard, this was in part because of choices that he deliberately made, positioning himself unashamedly with reactionary elements in the Conservative Party. He used his own background selectively to reinforce the stance he now adopted. At the risk of sounding flippant, we might say that it was in the years between the wars that he decided to become a Victorian. This is not to play down the importance of his actual Victorian background but rather to emphasize that it cannot be used as a catch-all explanation, or excuse, for all the imperial attitudes he struck in later life.

It is true that his background provided him with some foundational beliefs from which he never departed. His 1953 statement, ‘Wherever it had grown, British imperialism had meant steady progress for the masses of the people and the establishment and enforcement of just laws’ could easily have come from the mouth of his headmaster, Mr Welldon, in the 1880s.
⁴⁷
Yet, far from instilling in him a uniform set of principles which he applied remorselessly throughout life, his upbringing and early career provided him with two different sets of assumptions which were hard to square with one another. The first was the confident, Whiggish assumption of inevitable human progress. The second was a dark, pessimistic view of life as a harsh, evolutionary process that pitted human beings against each other in atavistic conflict.

An interesting clue to the way in which Churchill tried to reconcile these assumptions in his own mind can be found in speech notes he prepared for a debate on India in March 1943. These remarks – aimed at ‘a particular class of simpleton by no means all resident in the British Isles’ – included the expected sideswipes at Gandhi and at the Indian capitalists who supported him. Yet there was also a more subtle passage in which he examined the idea of Indian independence. One might as well say ‘Give Europe her independence’, he said. Europe had in fact been given such independence with the final collapse of the Roman Empire, he argued, and she had used it to embark on a nearly ‘unending succession of bloody and devastating wars, of which we are at present passing through the latest’. He hoped, however, that after the war there would emerge a new regional organization, ‘some sort of central residing power’ which would put a check on such miseries. This had to be a force ‘external to Europe itself’; that was why ‘we seek so earnestly to bring the detached vast steadying power of the United States into the new Council of Europe’. He then turned more explicitly to the question of Empire. He acknowledged that in the past there had occurred the ‘exploitation of the weaker races by the white man’ and ‘the wicked and brazen exploitation of colonies and conquests’. However, ‘the broad, shining, liberating and liberalizing tides of the Victorian era’ had put an end to this. ‘For the last 80 years – four generations – the British have had no idea whatever of exploitation in India, but only service. In fact British rule has rendered to India exactly that function of central control, including an external element, which is what we seek to create in Europe.’
⁴⁸

The speech was never completed or delivered, in part due to pressure of work and in part due to Churchill’s realization that it ‘might be contentious’.
⁴⁹
It raised as many questions as it answered. After all, he himself proved deeply hostile to the idea of making British colonial rule accountable to an external force, in the form of the United Nations. But the speech notes did provide at least a partial account of how a despairing view of human nature could be harmonized with a belief in the feasibility of progress. Progress was possible, but it needed to be imposed by a benign, disinterested outside force. Even in the face of clear abuses, some of which he denounced as such himself, he never lost faith that rule of others by the British fitted the bill in this respect. In that sense, he was a true imperialist, however much critics such as Leo Amery might cast doubt on his credentials. For him, moreover, running the Empire was not just about the careful weighing of policy options. It was an emotive issue. Charles de Gaulle put his finger on it during a discussion towards the end of World War II in which Churchill sought to damp down French ambitions in the Levant:

CHURCHILL:
Colonies today are no longer a pledge of happiness, or a sign of power. India is a very heavy burden to us. Modern squadrons are worth more than overseas territories.

DE GAULLE:
You are right. And yet you wouldn’t exchange Singapore for squadrons.
⁵⁰

But what of Churchill’s concrete successes and failures? As a young officer and journalist he was not as much of a maverick as is usually suggested, but nor were his writings those of a mindless imperialist lackey. Unlike many other correspondents of the same stripe, he provided more than a chronicle of inspiring events. In the words of one contemporary, he went on his own lines: ‘Churchill reviews the past, and attempts to look into the future. He is original and instructive, as well as interesting.’
⁵¹
As a young Tory MP he proved unable to conform successfully. His decision to plump for free trade and the Liberals may have involved an element of opportunism but – even though he did not stick to them with complete tenacity later – his beliefs on the issue were sincere. His efforts as a junior minister to conciliate South Africa after the Boer War were in some ways far-sighted, yet the failure to do more for the rights of the non-white population appears to modern eyes as a blot on the record. His grand visions for East Africa in the same period were well meaning but rather superficial and paternalistic. By the time that he returned to the Colonial Office after the Great War his attitudes had hardened and, although he was not a straightforward pushover for the Kenyan settlers, his decision over the land issue contributed to the country’s later problems. He has, however, been criticized too harshly over the creation of Iraq; he did not draw up the new Middle East map out of his own head but rather put his imprimatur on a problematic solution that had been placed before him by apparent experts. Likewise, his Palestine White Paper may have been an unsatisfactory response to an intractable problem but something quite similar would most probably have emerged under a different minister. His actions over Ireland at this time are more obviously praiseworthy. If the Anglo-Irish war was unnecessarily cruel and bloody, he and Lloyd George did at last grasp the need for negotiation and implemented a settlement in the face of much Tory hostility. It was, of course, an imperfect answer, but it was about the best that could have been achieved in the circumstances.