Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (35 page)

In fact, the Act never came fully into force. Although elections for the provincial assemblies took place in due course (resulting in major Congress victories), federation remained a dead letter because of the opposition of the Princes. In the aftermath of his defeat, Churchill made some efforts to appear magnanimous. In August 1935 he was visited at Chartwell, his house in Kent, by the industrialist G. D. Birla, one of Gandhi’s big financial backers. (As someone once said, ‘it costs a great deal of money to keep Gandhiji living in poverty’.)
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Birla reported to Gandhi that he had found his host to be ‘no fire-eater’. Although ‘badly informed about India’, Churchill praised Gandhi’s work for the Untouchables and said that he hoped the reforms would work: ‘you have got the things now; make it a success and if you do I will advocate you getting much more’.
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Yet if on this occasion he demonstrated the sympathy which Amery accused him of lacking, he would in the next years revert to the bitter tone that had characterized his campaign as a whole.

IV

The later 1930s saw Churchill focus more intensively on foreign policy. When MacDonald retired in 1935, Baldwin became Prime Minister again. ‘Winston is rapidly transferring his interest from India to Air!’ he wrote – although in fact Churchill had been pressing the government over the problem of air defence for some time.
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In November Baldwin won another general election, but there was still no place for Churchill in the government; nor did this change when Neville Chamberlain succeeded to the premiership in 1937. In spite of these frustrations, Churchill was not as consistently oppositional as legend would suggest. Nevertheless, his overall stance against the appeasement of Germany and Italy was robust, and this was recognized in some apparently unlikely quarters. Nehru, after a visit to Britain, remarked: ‘Irrespective of his politics, Mr Churchill is the ablest politician in England today. [. . .] I am astonished at the foreign policy of His Majesty’s Government.’
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(A few months earlier, when Nehru visited China, Churchill had sent him a goodwill message via a mutual friend.)
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Churchill alienated some in the Dominions through his misguided support for Edward VIII at the time of the abdication crisis in 1936. The Governor General of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir, reported to Baldwin that ‘Winston has pretty well taken the place of Beaverbrook as Public Enemy No. 1’.
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By 1939, though, Churchill’s popularity at home had soared, as his warnings about the dangers of appeasement increasingly appeared vindicated. There are some signs that he was transcending his image as ‘the personification of Empire do-or-die’ in the USA as well. In July,
Time
magazine described him as ‘An imperialist of the Rudyard Kipling school’ and a ‘reactionary’ on domestic issues. ‘But on the one subject of German aggression, now uppermost in British minds, he has followed such a straight, consistent line that in an emergency Winston Churchill might well become Britain’s “Man of the Hour.” ’
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How central was the Empire to Churchill’s strategic vision at this time? As war approached, he told General Edmund Ironside ‘that sometimes he couldn’t sleep at night thinking of our dangers, how all this wonderful Empire which had been built up so slowly and so steadily might all be dissipated in a minute’.
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Irwin, after his Viceroyship ended, had returned to domestic politics and succeeded to the title of Lord Halifax. In 1937 he visited Hitler on behalf of the government and, as one junior minister noted, ‘Winston could well discover the same ignominy in seeing a British Cabinet Minister travel wearily to Berchtesgaden, as he saw in the Viceroy of India receiving a man “striding half-naked up the steps of Government House”.’
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Yet, with uncharacteristic restraint, Churchill avoided comparisons of this type; memories of the India campaign were left to fade away.

Churchill had never been a great enthusiast for the League of Nations. Now, however, he spoke often of the requirement to preserve collective security via the League. This should be seen in the context of his efforts to court progressive opinion within Britain and gain Liberal and Labour support for a tough line against the Nazis. In turn, he sounded a moderate note when talking about imperial issues. When asked to broadcast in a series on ‘Responsibilities of Empire’ he stressed that the Empire power would never be used for any purpose inconsistent with the League’s covenant.
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In a further speech he denied that the Empire was held together by ‘outworn Jingoism or grasping Imperialism’. Rather, ‘If in these hours of anxiety [. . .] we feel the surge of unity and of duty thrilling the pulses of the British race, it is because we are bound together by principles, themes and conceptions which make their appeal not only to the British Empire, but to the conscience and to the genius of humanity.’
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Churchill spoke too of the need for the unity of ‘the English-Speaking Peoples’. His emphasis on this could be seen as part of an effort to woo US opinion. Churchill’s first public reference to ‘the unity of the English-speaking races’ came in 1911 – when such ideas were already quite common – but it was only in the 1930s that it became one of his most dominant themes, other prominent politicians having used similar language in the meantime.
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It was a seemingly racialized vision in which the Britons of the ‘White Dominions’ and America were linked as part of a broader global community with a common interest in defending freedom.
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Churchill did not exactly downplay the Empire in his rhetoric at this time, but he could, perhaps, have emphasized it more. A comparison with Amery is instructive here. Amery was a strong opponent of the National Government’s foreign policy. Like Churchill, he was opposed to disarmament. Like Churchill, he rejected the idea that Germany’s lost colonies should be returned to her without the consent of the inhabitants. Unlike him, though, he wanted Britain to keep her distance from European diplomacy and was scathing about the League of Nations. He wanted to strengthen the power of the Empire by integrating it as an economic bloc, while leaving Germany the power to build up her own bloc in central Europe.
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Churchill, for his part, ridiculed such views, observing in a 1934 broadcast on ‘The Causes of War’:

There are those who say, ‘Let us ignore the continent of Europe. Let us leave it with its hatreds and its armaments to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels, and cause its own doom. Let us turn our backs upon this melancholy and alarming scene. Let us fix our gaze across the oceans and lead our own life in the midst of our peace-loving dominions and Empire.’

Now there would be much to be said for this plan, if only we could unfasten the British islands from their rock foundations and could tow them three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean, and anchor them safely upon the smiling coasts of Canada.
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This was not Little Englandism. Churchill did not believe the Empire was unimportant; rather he believed that the chief threat to it came from Europe, not from more distant enemies.

Admittedly, Churchill did underrate other threats. ‘But why should there be a war with Japan?’ he wrote in 1924 when battling to keep naval spending down. ‘I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime.’ (In the same memorandum he pointed out, rather more far-sightedly, that the Japanese would find it very hard to invade Australia.)
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‘The Japanese war bogey leaves me completely cold’, he told a Cabinet committee in 1928.
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In the 1930s he showed himself to be overly sanguine about the strength of Britain’s naval base at Singapore, which was seen as an important symbol of Britain’s commitment to the defence of Australia and New Zealand.
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Arguably, though, his broad sense of priorities was correct. In the event of a world war, Britain would need to win first in Europe before turning her attention to the Far East. For him, the British Isles were indeed the starting point of policy, but it was not the case, as Amery liked to allege, that they were the sole end point too.

In July 1939 Mackenzie King – who had returned to office as Prime Minister in Ottawa four years earlier – heard a rumour that Chamberlain had brought Churchill into the government in London. He was terribly worried, because he believed that this would make war inevitable. It seemed possible at this time that the Soviet Union might in that event become an ally of Britain; what should Canada do? ‘We would not like to stand behind Churchill – or Russia – it is all a terrible muddle.’
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The rumour on this occasion proved false; it was only at the outbreak of war in September that Chamberlain appointed Churchill to his old post of First Lord of the Admiralty. But even after Germany invaded Poland, Mackenzie King held Churchill partly responsible for the war.
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Robert Menzies, the new Prime Minister of Australia, was no unqualified admirer either. A supporter of appeasement, he had met Churchill at Chartwell in 1935 and found him ‘an arresting person’, but after seeing him in action in the Commons judged that the idol had feet of clay. He wrote in his diary: ‘his theme is a constant repetition of “I told you so”, and a first class man usually doesn’t indulge in this luxury. If a first-rater has once said an important thing, he doesn’t need to remind people that he’s said it.’
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Churchill could count on hostility from J. B. M. Hertzog, the South African Prime Minister, but sympathy from Smuts, now Hertzog’s deputy. Hertzog’s government split when war broke out, and he himself, who supported neutrality, was narrowly defeated in Parliament and replaced by Smuts. With South Africa at war, and Churchill back at the Admiralty, the latter sent a telegram to Smuts: ‘I rejoice to feel that we are once again on commando together.’
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Churchill was not yet, of course, Prime Minister, and attitudes to him were not necessarily a proxy for attitudes to Britain and to the Empire. Mackenzie King felt confidence in Chamberlain and Halifax (now Foreign Secretary).
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His policy was that Canada would support Britain if she went to war, and when hostilities broke out he secured his Parliament’s approval for this course; the Canadian declaration of war came a week after those of Britain and France. In Canberra there were no such formalities: for Menzies it was axiomatic that if Britain was at war then Australia was too. New Zealand’s anti-appeasing Labour government under Michael Savage also joined the war immediately. But, if Churchill did emerge as Britain’s new leader, there was no guarantee that he could count on unqualified support from all parts of the Empire for an uncompromising prosecution of the war. The next years would unleash conflicting forces promoting, on the one hand, imperial military cohesion in the short term and, on the other, the nationalist spirit and economic strain that would seal the Empire’s eventual dissolution. It was Churchill’s longstanding conviction that ‘The British Empire will last so long and only so long as the British race is determined to maintain it.’
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This revealing assertion, which seemed to assume that British willpower (or the lack of it) was the only factor in world politics, was now to be put to the test.

PART THREE

Liquidation

7

UNDISMAYED AGAINST DISASTER, 1939–1942

A few days after the outbreak of war Churchill found the time, in the midst of his new tasks at the Admiralty, to inquire after the health of his old commander, General Sir Bindon Blood, who was now ninety-six. Blood’s wife wrote afterwards to thank him for his call. She reported that ‘my Bindon’ was ‘
very
feeble & his brain [is] in a shocking muddle, but he knew you had phoned & how pleased he was he looked up and said “Winston is a grand man” ’.
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Blood lived on until the following year and died just six days after Churchill became Prime Minister. His longevity reminds us of the contrast in the scale of the threats the British Empire faced at the start of Churchill’s career and at its high-water mark. Churchill himself joked to journalists that ‘one may look back with envy to the past, and to the Victorian Age when great controversies were fought about what now seem to us vy minor matters’. At that time great states ‘fought little wars’ and ‘the pugnacious instincts of our people were satisfied with such comparatively harmless objects as Cetewayo, the Mahdi, President Kruger and the Mad Mullah’. The social, economic and military problems of ‘this shattering 20th Century’ posed an entirely new challenge.
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In his public rhetoric, Churchill emphasized the ‘vast latent power of the British and French Empires’ that equipped them to deal with the German threat. ‘We have the freely-given ardent support of the twenty millions of British citizens in the self-governing Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa’, he said in a broadcast after the first month of war. He added, rather less convincingly, ‘We have, I believe, the heart and moral conviction of India on our side.’
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