Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (8 page)

From Reade’s perspective, Empire and progress went hand in hand. The uneducated populations of the world would never begin to advance until their property was secure and they enjoyed the rights of man, ‘and these they will never obtain except by means of European conquest’. Such security, he argued, had been brought by the British to the population of India. He criticized the ‘sickly school of politicians who declare that all countries belong to their inhabitants, and that to take them is a crime’. But in Asia, the masses of the people were in fact slaves to their rulers, he claimed. ‘The conquest of Asia by European Powers is therefore in reality emancipation [. . .] Thus war will, for long years yet to come, be required to prepare the way for freedom and progress in the East’.
¹³⁶
It seems that Churchill’s cheerful vision of war as the engine of social improvement – which he maintained into the 1940s
¹³⁷
– was heavily influenced by Reade. On the eve of his first election campaign he told the Midland Conservative Club of his lack of enthusiasm for the then ongoing Hague peace conference. ‘It was only one more instance of the reaction against the spirit of competition’, he said. ‘Destroy the rivalry of men and nations, and all that made for the betterment and progress of the world would be destroyed’. Decay and degeneration would follow, he argued; the ‘clear blue ocean of national passion’ was preferable to the ‘stagnant pool of international agreement’. This speech, however, revealed him to be much more of a British (or at least white) chauvinist than Reade was. ‘He [Churchill] cared little for the improvement of the human race’, reported the
Birmingham Daily Post
. ‘The supremacy of our own race was good enough for him’.
¹³⁸

In India, Churchill continued his feats of reading. He sought out Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
, Plato’s
Republic
, and the memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon, amongst others.
¹³⁹
He secured copies of the
Annual Register
from the 1870s and wrote his own comments on the debates they recorded. He gave his views, for example, on the Indian famine of 1873–4, claiming that the Viceroy had been right to refuse demands that he prohibit grain exports. In Churchill’s opinion, a food shortage did not justify interfering with the free market in such a way. He also expressed approval of the contentious Royal Titles Act that had made Queen Victoria Empress of India. The ‘natives of India’, he argued, would be ‘impressed by the Imperial’. The whole question, he suggested, was trivial, ‘except from an Indian aspect. In India these things count.’
¹⁴⁰
Throughout his career, Churchill argued that the Crown was fundamental to the Empire, serving as the mystical link which held it together, in spite of the weakness of its formal constitutional apparatus. This was, perhaps, a way of reconciling his strong emotional attachment to the monarchy with his recognition that it had little formal power. (Such that it had withered further during the course of his lifetime.) These early comments, however, should alert us to the fact that there was an instrumental, even cynical, aspect to his championship of titles and ceremony. If the pomp associated with the Crown could be used to impress ‘the natives’, then so too, as the years went on, could it be used as a rhetorical fig-leaf to disguise the increasingly naked decline of British power.

This was also the time when Churchill began to write. He later recalled that one of his first, unpublished efforts was an attack upon an article by George Bernard Shaw ‘which he had written disparaging and deriding the British Army in some minor war’.
¹⁴¹
By April 1897 Churchill had decided that, although he was ‘a Liberal in all but name’, his opposition to Home Rule precluded him standing for the party at an election. He would therefore adopt Lord Randolph’s slogan of ‘Tory Democracy’, campaigning for reform at home and imperialism abroad. Britain should remain aloof from European politics, he believed, and the colonies should contribute more to the motherland’s defence. ‘East of Suez Democratic reins are impossible’, he wrote. ‘India must be governed on old principles.’
¹⁴²

Were these old principles really so satisfactory? Almost as soon as he arrived, Churchill was writing home about the bubonic plague that threatened Bombay, and the shortage of rain that threatened drought, famine and accompanying riots.
¹⁴³
The blame for these disasters should not perhaps have been laid exclusively at the door of the British administration – Britain did in fact make an effort to help by sending large quantities of vegetable seed.
¹⁴⁴
Nevertheless, they should surely have stimulated more concern than they did. Churchill’s attitude to the local population was probably typical of Anglo-Indian opinion – his indifference, verging on callousness, alternated with occasional twinges of concern. In March 1898 he observed in a letter to his younger brother Jack that the plague was ‘going on merrily’ with four hundred people a day dying in Bombay alone. ‘The population however is superabundant.’
¹⁴⁵
At the end of the year the plague came to Bangalore and so rather closer to home. Two of Churchill’s grooms were carried off, as were the wife and mother of the bearer who had accompanied him to the North-West Frontier. Sixty people were dying a day but, as Churchill wrote with a hint of disgust, ‘nobody cares a rap & you never hear a word about it’.
¹⁴⁶
Soon, the epidemic began to subside, and he said little more about the subject himself. Earlier, he had visited Hyderabad with Pamela Plowden, his first love, to whom he had recently been introduced during a polo tournament. They had to travel into the city on an elephant, because Europeans would be spat at if they walked in the streets, ‘which provokes retaliation leading to riots’.
¹⁴⁷
Such signs of Indian discontent did not disturb his initial sense that England was fulfilling her ‘high mission’ to rule over the ‘primitive but agreeable’ local population in an entirely benevolent way.
¹⁴⁸
The prevailing racial attitudes of the British in India certainly rubbed off on him. ‘When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking’, he acknowledged in the 1950s; ‘when I was a subaltern the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man’.
¹⁴⁹

In the spring of 1897 Churchill returned home on leave. It was while he was there that he made his speech to the Bath Primrose League on the ‘splendour’ of the Empire. (Naturally, he did not share with his audience the fact that he found the particular part of the Empire to which he had been sent tedious rather than splendid.) His early imperial education was not yet finished. Not only was the formative experience of his military campaigning across the Empire still to come, but he was keenly aware that his knowledge even of India was woefully incomplete. As he complained to his mother, he had no access, as a mere subaltern, to people of influence and expertise; and he had no time for the ‘despicable’ Indian press (from which he could perhaps have learnt more than he chose to).
¹⁵⁰
Nevertheless, it is clear that he had learnt to think imperially – not merely in the sense of having a sentimental attachment to the Empire, but in having developed his own rationale for it. His world view, as articulated to the Tories of Bath, was pretty orthodox; Winwood Reade had convinced him that Christianity might be false, but not that it was ‘wise or expedient to say so’.
¹⁵¹
One might say, then, that he had reached an apparently conventional viewpoint by a somewhat unconventional route. Primed by his Harrow education and the imperial culture of the time, his encounter with heterodoxy led him to view international relations as an evolutionary battle, but never to question the idea that Britain, because of its inherent superiority, would be able to win that struggle. Ultimately, he thought, such a victory would be for the good of the world as a whole, but in practical (and electioneering) terms the welfare of the rest of the world was low on his list of priorities. The notion that thinking imperially meant thinking always of ‘something higher and more vast than one’s own national interests’ was one that at this stage remained alien to him.

IV

Churchill freely conceded that he was a ‘child of the Victorian era’.
¹⁵²
In the interwar period and beyond, though, the term ‘Victorian’ had become practically a term of abuse, the equivalent, when the Empire was discussed, of ‘reactionary’. The surprising thing is that his Victorian background was used against him not just by political progressives, but by imperialists within the Conservative Party who were themselves of a similar vintage to Churchill. In 1929, when Baldwin (b. 1867) pondered making Churchill Secretary of State for India, the Viceroy, Lord Irwin (b. 1881), advised him not. Irwin suggested that Churchill held antediluvian opinions, writing that he ‘has always been a much more vigorous Imperialist in the 1890–1900 sense of the word than you and me’.
¹⁵³
A later Viceroy, Lord Wavell (b. 1883), remarked that Churchill ‘has still at heart his cavalry subaltern’s idea of India; just as his military tactics are inclined to date from the Boer War’.
¹⁵⁴
Leo Amery (b. 1873) believed, for his part, that ‘the key to Winston is to realise that he is a Mid Victorian, steeped in the politics of his father’s period, and unable ever to get the modern point of view’.
¹⁵⁵
Even Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran (b. 1882), had a view. He wrote of Churchill’s attitude to the Chinese: ‘Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin; it is when he talks of India or China that you remember he is a Victorian.’
¹⁵⁶

Describing Churchill’s attitudes as ‘Victorian’ may in part have been a convenient way for those who opposed him to stress the contrasting ‘modernity’ of their own imperial views. Or perhaps Churchill did to some extent suffer a genuine case of arrested development. Either way, we can see the limitations of the suggestion that Churchill’s later opinions were the inevitable product of a Victorian upbringing per se. And, whether or not it is right to criticize his views on issues such as race, it can scarcely be considered
anachronistic
to do so, when his own contemporaries did not hold back themselves. By the time he had reached the threshold of his public career, he had absorbed a particular version of imperialism, but not one that was universally held. No homogeneous view of Empire existed in late-Victorian Britain; there was in fact vibrant debate, not about the Empire’s inherent validity, but about how its interests could best be pursued. Churchill’s first real military excursion, on the Indian frontier in 1897, led to his wholehearted launch into this field of controversy.

2

JOLLY LITTLE WARS AGAINST BARBAROUS PEOPLES, 1897–1899

In 1929 Churchill took up the honorific position of Chancellor of Bristol University. In a speech to the students he reflected on his own lack of a university education and remembered how his military training had led him instead to a period of adventure. He recalled how at that time Britain had fought ‘a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples’ and how he himself had gone ‘scurrying about the world from one exciting scene to another’.
¹
If this sounds like a parody of Victorian imperial adventurism, it is more than possible that Churchill was intentionally sending himself up. He was certainly capable of humour at his own expense; the persistently ironical tone of
My Early Life
, for example, is part of what gives the book its charm. But if it would be unfair to dismiss that book as merely a sequence of thrilling scenes – a charge more easily levelled against treatments such the 1972 film
Young Winston
– it is nonetheless true that the picture it paints of the Empire is romantic and depoliticized. Churchill’s failure to give his readers a full sense of his role in fin-de-siècle imperial debates may have been a wise commercial decision in the gloomy circumstances of 1930; yet without an understanding of that context, his ‘scurrying’ phase is reduced to not much more than the ‘jolly little wars’ of his own caricature. Churchill may have been courageous as a soldier, but when he combined that role with that of journalist, he was by no means always the candid scourge of authority that legend depicts.

I

On the very day in 1897 that Churchill made his first political speech at Bath, there was a rising of Pathan tribesmen in the Swat Valley on the North-West Frontier of India. The news was reported in Britain two days later. After two years of quiet, the garrison at Malakand had suddenly been attacked at the behest of a local religious leader called Sadullah, dubbed the ‘Mad Mullah’ by the British, who was intent on raising jihad. The attack was repulsed, but it quickly transpired that the whole valley was up in arms. In the view of
The Times
the episode was simply an example of what was to be expected in the early years of occupation of new territories. ‘It is absolutely necessary to show the tribesmen without delay that we can bring an overwhelming force to act against them even in the fastnesses of their own mountains, and to teach them that treachery and insurrection will be sharply and swiftly punished’, the paper claimed. ‘That is a lesson which we have been obliged to teach savage peoples very often in many parts of the world’. If this was done then in due course the ‘wild and fanatic’ tribesmen would ‘subside into loyal soldiers, peaceful husbandmen, and industrious traders’.
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