Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (29 page)

What does Mr Churchill mean by describing the Jallianwalla Bagh incident as a ‘monstrous event standing out in sinister isolation’ . . . The Jallianwalla Bagh incident stands on exactly the same footing as the shooting at most of the other places. Whom were the crowd attacking at the Upper Mall, for instance, or at the railway bridge at Amritsar itself until the crowd was fired upon? And is it not the case that in both these cases as well as almost all other places the crowd was unarmed? Lastly, if, as Mr Churchill said, frightfulness is not admissible in any form, can it be denied that the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre was not an isolated instance of frightfulness in the dark days of April and May, when frightfulness was more the rule than the exception.
¹⁴⁵

A recent commentator has written that the Amritsar speech was Churchill’s finest hour ‘from a moral point of view’.
¹⁴⁶
One could equally say it was one of his finest hours from the point of view of parliamentary politics. During the episode he showed a tactical skill which belied his bull-in-a-china-shop reputation. The moral heroics were Montagu’s – and they led directly to political failure.

Montagu did survive in office for the time being, although his position was much weakened. Nevertheless he stuck to his principles, as his position on the issue of Indians in East Africa demonstrates. This became a point of tension with Churchill once the latter had moved to the Colonial Office. The white settlers in Kenya were becoming increasingly militant in the face of Indian demands for an end to commercial and residential segregation, admission to the franchise on the same terms as whites and the right to buy land in the highlands.
¹⁴⁷
In the face of Montagu’s support for equitable treatment, Churchill – in his own eyes – did his best to be helpful. ‘At the present time I am inclined to think that I cannot meet you fully in regard to franchise and representation’, he wrote in May 1921. ‘I hope to be able to meet you in regard to segregation by substituting for invidious segregation on race lines, a very strict system of sanitary, social and building regulations which will in fact ensure that the only Indians who will live in the white quarters will be those who are really suited by their mode of living for residence amid a European community.’ Regarding the highlands, ‘I fear that a virtual pledge has already been given to the white settlers.’
¹⁴⁸
After an unsatisfactory meeting in June, Montagu disputed this final point in a long and heartfelt letter. He could not help it, he said, if Europeans refused to sell land to Indians; nor did he object to sanitary regulations so stringent ‘that no Indian who does not live completely in European fashion can live in the Uplands’. Yet he would continue to protest ‘so long as there is upon the statute book a regulation which differentiates between European and Indian subjects of the King’.
¹⁴⁹

Some weeks later, Churchill met with an Indian delegation. He told it that its demands, if granted, would lead eventually to ‘the leadership of the country in [
sic
] the Indians, with the white man underneath’. However, an exchange with one of the delegates, S. S. Varma, revealed certain shared assumptions:

MR CHURCHILL:
Broadly speaking, would you subscribe to Mr Rhodes’ formula – Equal Rights for Civilised Men?

MR VARMA:
I say exactly in those words, for civilised men, even including Indians.

MR CHURCHILL:
Certainly, if the individual becomes civilised and lives in a civilised way, in a civilised house, and observes civilised behaviour in his goings on, and in his family life, and he is also educated sufficiently – that principle seems to be a very valuable principle, and it is very practical too. It is absurd to go and give the naked savages of the Kikuyu and the Kavirondo equal electoral rights, although they are human beings – you cannot do that.

MR VARMA:
No.
¹⁵⁰

There was no overall meeting of minds, of course, and Churchill’s patience eventually wore thin. ‘The Indians in East Africa are mainly of a very low class of coolies, and the idea that they should be put on an equality with the Europeans is revolting to every white man throughout British Africa’, he told Montagu in October.
¹⁵¹
In his reply, Montagu spoke of his despair at Churchill’s attitude, whose remark about coolies might, he said, ‘have been written by an European settler of a most fanatical type’.
¹⁵²

For their part, the whites feared that Churchill would not safeguard their interests sufficiently, and sent a delegation to Britain to press their case.
¹⁵³
While they were in London, Churchill made his controversial speech at the Kenya Colony and Uganda dinner, in which he declared that the government looked forward to Kenya becoming ‘a characteristically and distinctively British colony’ and promised that the highlands would be reserved for the whites.
¹⁵⁴
Montagu was enraged at his failure to consult him or the Cabinet. (Churchill claimed to have been speaking in line with the advice of his officials.) In another long letter he said that he supported the principle of ‘equal rights for all civilised men’ that Churchill had invoked in the speech. However, ‘what distresses me is that you seem to think that the existing residents in the country can only mean the European residents. Under every rule of equal rights for all civilised men, the term must mean the residents in the country regardless of race.’
¹⁵⁵
Churchill was unbending, and told fellow ministers that the demands of Indians in East Africa were unreasonable and that the whites might rebel if there was any repudiation of his statement at the dinner.
¹⁵⁶
The settlers, indeed, took a slightly dim view of Churchill, and were underwhelmed by his promises.
¹⁵⁷
The
East African Standard
portrayed him as a beguiling post-prandial speaker who revelled in ‘the loftier regions of Imperialism’, but who failed afterwards to give substance to his eloquence. Although he was supposedly committed to full white self-government, his real masters, it claimed, were radical anti-imperialists such as the Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood. The settlers had somehow ‘to free Mr Churchill from the tyranny in which he is at present bound’.
¹⁵⁸

Just a few weeks later Montagu committed an extraordinary indiscretion by publishing a telegram revealing the Government of India’s critical views on Lloyd George’s anti-Turkish foreign policy. He was forced to resign for having breached the doctrine of collective Cabinet responsibility. In a speech to his constituents justifying his conduct, he pointed out that Churchill’s Kenya speech, which had had ‘a most terrible effect in India’, had been made without consulting the Cabinet at all. ‘Where was collective responsibility there?’
¹⁵⁹
The Times
’s correspondent in Delhi reported that ‘Indian politicians undoubtedly feel that if Mr Montagu goes, Mr Churchill must go; otherwise there is no justice in the Cabinet’.
¹⁶⁰
The difference, of course, was that Montagu had launched a direct political assault on the Prime Minister without having the allies he needed to back him up. He had in effect committed political suicide. He lost his seat at the general election of November that year; broken-hearted and embittered, he died just two years later, at the age of forty-five, from a combination of arteriosclerosis and septicaemia.

Yet Montagu’s downfall was not the end of the India Office concern with the welfare of the Kenyan Indians, nor did Churchill’s speech mark the final triumph of the settler attitude. Churchill allowed his under-secretary of state, Edward Wood, to hammer out an agreement with Earl Winterton, a junior minister at the India Office. The Wood–Winterton agreement conceded the settlers’ demands on the highlands, but not on voting, immigration or segregation.
¹⁶¹
When the terms were revealed to the settlers later in 1922 they were widely seen as a breach of the promises made by Churchill at the start of the year. There was anger too at his recall of the pro-settler Governor of Kenya, Sir Edward Northey.
¹⁶²
‘The old Bostonian spirit is abroad and must be taken very seriously’, wrote one observer of the mood in Nairobi. ‘The terms laid down by Mr Churchill in September will have to be very greatly modified or there will be civil war.’
¹⁶³
The settlers began planning an insurrection. However, the Lloyd George coalition fell before it could come to fruition, and the new Conservative government succeeded in patching together a compromise the following year.
¹⁶⁴

The settlers were, of course, very difficult people to satisfy. Churchill had already alienated them in 1921 by acting to restrict (although not abolish) the existing system of forced labour in Kenya.
¹⁶⁵
This issue demonstrated both his good intentions and their limits. On the one hand, it seemed to belie his growing public image as an imperialist reactionary. British officials had been battling the settlers over the question, and one of them hailed Churchill’s decision as the ‘Emancipation act for which the administration fought long and persistently’.
¹⁶⁶
But it was not always implemented on the ground. In the spring of 1922, Harry Thuku, a young Kikuyu activist, came across a group of young girls and women being made to cut reeds. ‘Well,’ he told one of the African policemen in charge, ‘whoever told you to force these women to do this forced labour is acting illegally. Don’t you know that forced labour of this sort has been stopped by the order of Winston Churchill in the Colonial Office?’ The police agreed to let the women go, but the authorities were displeased and ordered Thuku’s arrest.
¹⁶⁷
When an angry crowd surrounded the police station in which he was held the police opened fire and around twenty people were killed.
¹⁶⁸
In Churchill’s view, no blame attached to the police or officials for this outcome, and he approved Thuku’s exile to the city of Kismayu, where he remained until 1930.
¹⁶⁹
There was no trial, and the official account made no mention of the immediate cause of the arrest, which was justified on the basis of Thuku’s other allegedly seditious activities.
¹⁷⁰
It was more than a little ironic that Thuku’s attempt to secure the implementation of Churchill’s own policy should lead to a situation where Churchill himself considered him a danger to the peace of the colony.

VI

Throughout 1922 the troubles of the coalition deepened. Many Conservative MPs disliked their own leaders’ acquiescence in the Irish settlement, and public revelations about Lloyd George’s practice of selling political honours did the government’s reputation no good. It was the perceived recklessness of its foreign policy, however, that was the immediate cause of its downfall. In September Turkish nationalist troops under Mustafa Kemal routed Greek troops and occupied the port of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, which had been allocated to Greece under the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. Kemal’s advance seemed to pose a direct threat to British troops at Chanak, on the Asian side of the Dardanelles. On 15 September the Cabinet took a clear decision to defend, by force if need be, the neutral ‘Zone of the Straits’. Churchill was deputed to draw up a telegram to be sent to each of the Dominions informing them of this and seeking their support. Lloyd George approved his draft, and the messages were sent out late the same evening. On the 16th the two men worked together on a press communiqué, declaring it to be the duty of the wartime Allies to defend ‘the deep-water line between Europe and Asia against a violent and hostile Turkish aggression’.
¹⁷¹
This was a tactless error, because the story became public before the Dominions had been able to digest what was being asked of them. Australia and New Zealand quickly indicated their readiness to act if required, although Australian Prime Minister W. M. Hughes was privately furious at the turn of events, believing that the behaviour of the British ‘savoured of sharp practice’.
¹⁷²
The response from South Africa was equivocal. Smuts, Prime Minister of the Union since 1919, was up-country when the cable arrived. By the time he got back the crisis had receded somewhat, and the government could therefore claim that there was no longer a need for active South African intervention.
¹⁷³
(Smuts later sent a supportive message direct to Churchill.)
¹⁷⁴
In Canada, there was major controversy. Mackenzie King, who had become Prime Minister at the previous year’s general election, saw the telegram – which he heard about first from a journalist – as an attempt to bounce the Dominions into war. ‘I confess it annoyed me’, he wrote in his diary. ‘It is drafted designedly to play the imperial game, to test out centralization vs. autonomy as regards [E]uropean wars.’
¹⁷⁵
Following another ‘very startling message’ from Churchill a few weeks later, Mackenzie King wrote: ‘It is a serious business having matters in [the] hand of a man like Churchill – the fate of an Empire!’
¹⁷⁶