Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (7 page)

Churchill’s regiment shipped out to India in September 1896. One book he read by way of preparation was
Twenty-One Days in India
by George Aberigh-Mackay. This ‘brilliant though little-known writer’, as Churchill later described him, had been Principal of Rajkumar College, Indore.
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Originally published in serial form in the
Bombay Gazette
in 1880, the year before the author’s death at thirty-three, the book was subtitled
The Tour of Sir Ali Baba K.C.B.
, and formed a satirical look at a range of Indian and Anglo-Indian ‘types’. These ranged from the ‘Great Ornamental’ Viceroy, ‘absolutely and necessarily withdrawn from all knowledge of India’, to the ‘Bengali Baboo’, ‘Full of inappropriate words and phrases’.
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Churchill was advised to read the book by a family friend in the Indian Civil Service. In 1942 he in turn sent a copy to William Phillips, who was about to go to Delhi as President Roosevelt’s personal representative. He acknowledged that the world Aberigh-Mackay described had long since passed; nevertheless, there were ‘serious things beneath the surface of this old book’ which gave ‘a sweeping glance at a vast, marvellous scene’.
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At some point during his time in India Churchill read Sir George Chesney’s
Indian Polity
, which argued that ‘the state of anarchy and universal strife throughout the land, which was replaced by the peace everywhere established under British rule, must have been attended with a degree of suffering which far outweighs the defects inseparable from a rule by foreigners’.
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Such arguments, which were to be echoed by Churchill in the 1930s, were the commonplaces of the time.

Churchill’s views of what to expect from India would already have been conditioned by his boyhood reading. At school he had read standard juvenile literature such as
Every Boy’s Annual
, which contained military adventure stories of the kind often credited with helping instil an imperial mentality in Victorian youth.
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Churchill’s own adventures would in turn be held up as a model for later generations. Hastings Ismay, his key military aide during World War II, recalled how, as a young soldier, he had aimed to emulate his future boss’s early career.
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In the 1950s, Churchill’s life was serialized in strip-cartoon form in the
Eagle
, a weekly publication intended as a wholesome alternative to the prevalent American ‘horror comics’.
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Churchill was also a fan of two of the most classic imperialist writers. As a teenager, he begged a meeting with H. Rider Haggard, who afterwards sent him a copy of his novel
Allan Quatermain
.
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He was a great admirer of Rudyard Kipling’s writing too (although, as with Haggard, he did not think all of his books were of equal quality), as were many of his fellow soldiers in India. He noted that, when fighting on the North-West Frontier in 1897, he often heard one of Kipling’s poems, ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’, quoted.
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In 1899, Kipling caught pneumonia, and it seemed he might die. Churchill thought this would be a ‘terrible loss to the English speaking world’.
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Kipling actually lived for almost another four decades, but, although they met on a number of occasions, he never reciprocated Churchill’s respect for him. During the latter’s period as a Liberal Kipling remarked of him that ‘it is impossible to cure a political prostitute from whoring’.
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After the 1922 general election he gloated over Churchill’s loss of his seat.
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Churchill was aware of this hostility, but claimed, in his public tribute after Kipling’s death in 1937, that their joint opposition to Indian self-government had ended their estrangement.
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This was at best only partially true. Kipling was actually not as hard line on India as Churchill was, and wrote in 1935, ‘The only point at which, I personally, would draw the line in present politics, would be in following Mr W. Churchill.’
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Churchill was a man who ‘very many praise but dam-few follow’.
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However, this is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Churchill’s own claims to have been influenced by Kipling. As he put it in his eulogy, ‘Although in my political actions I was often fiercely opposed to him, yet there was never a moment when I did not feel the surge of his appeal upon the great verities of our race and State.’ He also claimed on this occasion that, even if Britain’s Indian Empire should cease to exist, Kipling’s works would ‘remain to prove that while we were there we did our best for all’.
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Churchill’s own first impressions of the Indian scene were favourable. The regiment was stationed at Bangalore, where the climate was good, with cool nights, mornings and evenings providing relief from the heat of the day. The officers were not given quarters, but instead were provided with a lodging allowance, so Churchill and two friends shared an impressive white and pink bungalow set in an extensive garden. Each of them had the services of a ‘Butler’ (Churchill put the term in quotation marks), a First Dressing Boy, a Second Dressing Boy, and a groom for every horse or pony they owned. In addition, the household shared two gardeners, three water carriers, four washer-men and one watchman.
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This all had to be paid for, of course, and officers’ salaries and allowances were grossly inadequate in relation to the manner in which they were expected to live – a manner which served its own purpose of impressing the local population. Churchill was paid around
£
300 a year, including an allowance for keeping two horses, supplemented by
£
500 a year from his mother.
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The combined total was no negligible sum – it was roughly equivalent to
£
46,000 in 2009 prices. But Lord Randolph had not died rich, and neither Winston nor Lady Randolph was good at managing finance, so money was a constant bone of contention between them. Even a life of massive privilege can have its irritations.

Life in Bangalore was comfortable, if boring. The regiment was on parade by six o’clock in the morning, but drills and other military duties were complete by half-past ten. After that it was too hot to do anything much until five, which was the hour for playing polo. Churchill was an enthusiast for the game, which was lucky for him as there were so few other ways of passing the time. Of ancient Indo-Persian origin, the sport had been adopted and standardized by the British, many of whom saw this process as evidence of the benefits of imperial rule. One sports writer suggested, for example, that ‘the order-loving and disciplined minds of the Westerns have organised a game which was a wild helter-skelter into a careful, scientific and military sport. These things are an allegory, and the polo of East and West may to the careful observer give a suggestion why in war and government the West ever prevails.’
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The game appealed to upper-class Indians for rather different reasons. Dangerous and highly expensive (a point not lost on the cash-strapped Churchill), it was a way for princes – in the absence of war – to demonstrate their personal courage and elite status.
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Polo competitions also provided a rare opportunity for Indians and Englishmen to meet on something like equal terms. In his first book,
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
, Churchill recognized this, arguing that the game had improved relations between British officers and the princes, and should therefore be counted as ‘an Imperial factor’. He did not think it likely that Indian army officers would ever serve on an equal footing with British ones, ‘but if it should ever come to pass, the way will have been prepared on the polo ground’.
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Churchill excelled as a member of the regimental team, which, within six weeks of the Fourth Hussars’ arrival in India, had won the prestigious Golconda Cup at Hyderabad. But polo could not be everything, and Churchill was understandably eager to broaden his horizons. Even before leaving England he had started to seek out the books that would give him the intellectual polish he felt he lacked as a consequence of his ‘purely technical’ education.
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Now, he launched into his reading programme with alacrity, starting with Gibbon. It was certainly not the case that everything he read had some explicit imperial theme. Undoubtedly, though, his thinking about empire was profoundly affected by much of what he absorbed in the long, hot afternoons between duty and polo.

It has been claimed that ‘Churchill supported the British Empire largely for Gibbonian reasons’. Whereas Gibbon, while despising ancient Rome’s political despotism, believed that its empire brought concrete benefits to the ruled, Churchill thought that Britain had achieved a double advantage by spreading such benefits in combination with liberty.
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Certainly, Churchill repeatedly referenced Gibbon throughout his career, and many similarities can be traced in terms of thinking as well as literary style. Yet this influence should not be blown out of proportion, and needs to be considered alongside that of other authors. After Gibbon, Churchill tackled Thomas Babington Macaulay’s
History of England
, and also his essays. As with Gibbon, the style had an effect on his own, and he was to quote him at some significant points in the future. Notably, he picked up on a remark in Macaulay’s essay on Warren Hastings describing the iniquities of eighteenth-century British rule in India. Macaulay referred to ‘the most frightful of all spectacles, the strength of civilisation without its mercy’.
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Churchill deployed this same imagery in
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
, although he used it to describe not British abuses but rather what happened when tribesmen got hold of modern weapons.
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During the Commons debate in 1920 on the notorious Amritsar massacre – when, at a time of nationalist disturbances, British forces shot into a crowd of unarmed Indians – he used it in the original sense, to deplore the killing of defenceless civilians.
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This did not mean that he, any more than Macaulay, entertained doubts about the fundamental virtues of British rule. Rather, he was making the claim that that rule did not depend exclusively on physical force, and that it was incumbent upon the rulers, given their vast military superiority over the indigenous population, to exercise restraint. The subject peoples of the Empire were to rely for their welfare, then, on the elevated moral qualities of their conquerors.

A far more obscure yet nonetheless important influence was Winwood Reade’s book
The Martyrdom of Man
, which was recommended to Churchill by his commanding officer, Colonel John Brabazon. This has been described as ‘a classic of Victorian atheism’ which left Churchill with a ‘sombre vision of a godless universe’.
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In fact, Reade was not an atheist (although his arguments were sufficiently shocking that contemporaries understood him to be one) but merely an anti-Christian. He argued that ‘God is so great that he does not deign to have personal relations with us human atoms that are called men’.
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Furthermore, his world view could actually be described as one of wild, unabashed optimism about the possibilities of human progress. Reade, an explorer and failed novelist, published his epic work in 1872, three years before his death at the age of thirty-six, his health having broken down after a third and final visit to Africa. Although the book met much hostility, it continued to sell in significant numbers. (Amongst those it influenced was H. G. Wells, another author Churchill admired greatly.)
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Churchill, in his memoirs, focused on the blow Reade dealt to his religious beliefs; although initially shocked by what he read, he found Reade’s message confirmed by Gibbon’s secular viewpoint and by the works of W. E. H. Lecky, who believed that old superstitions would die away as the spirit of rationalism grew.
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(He also emphasized that his resulting anti-religious phase was short-lived, although in reality his belief in conventional Christianity never recovered.)
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Equally important, arguably, was Reade’s impact on his thinking about Empire and human development.
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The book’s message needs to be understood in the context of an intellectual atmosphere much influenced by Charles Darwin (with whom Reade had corresponded). It was common to apply Darwinian insights not only to the social competition between individuals but also to that between nations. It was widely believed that – as Joseph Chamberlain was to put it later – the day of the small nations had passed, and that of empires had arrived. In order to survive in a predatory world, states needed to expand in order to maximize their populations and natural resources.
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The first part of
The Martyrdom of Man
consisted of a reckless romp through thousands of years of world history, leading to the conclusion that war had acted as ‘the chief agent of civilisation’ in the ancient world.
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The book went on to suggest that the world’s major religions (including Islam) had, at certain times and places, served a useful social function, stamping out the more primitive beliefs of barbarous peoples. They would, however, die away as man became more perfect and acquired a true religion that would harmonize with his intellect. This progress would be driven by suffering, mental as well as physical, which was what Reade meant by ‘the martyrdom of man’. Such suffering was inherently undesirable and yet was also, paradoxically, the motor of beneficent change. He even argued that the slave trade, ‘though cruel and atrocious in itself’ had ‘like most wars, been of service to mankind’.
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Not only had it created for slave-owners the leisure essential to the cultural achievements of the ancient world but also, more recently, awareness of its cruelties had stimulated the moral improvement of the Anglo-Saxon peoples as they strove towards its abolition. Reade’s attitude to race was equally complex (or convoluted). He criticized ‘pride of colour and prejudice of race’ while remaining agnostic on the question of whether ‘negroes are equal in average capacity to the white man’.
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Africans could, in his view, be induced to want things that they did not positively need, and, thus equipped with the same incentives to work as whites had, be brought within the ambit of civilization. But if need be European governments should compel them to labour both for their own good and for the sake of progress: ‘Children are ruled and schooled by force, and it is not an empty metaphor to say that savages are children.’
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We may see an echo of this in Churchill’s later (much more mildly stated) conviction that Africans, even with their basic needs satisfied, had no right to remain idle. They would benefit from having their wants multiplied and, like everyone else, were ‘bound to go forward and take an honest share in the general work of the world’. He too saw Africans (or at least the Kikuyu) as educable, if brutish, children, albeit he could certainly have absorbed this point of view from many other sources in addition to Reade.
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We might even locate in
The Martyrdom of Man
the origin of a famous Churchillian trope. Reade cited an eighteenth-century MP’s condemnation of a slave-ship: ‘never was so much suffering condensed into so small a space’.
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