Fighting Retreat, page 15
For all the nervous energy that Churchill had injected into his opposition to the Bill, he took the outcome, which he had expected, with equanimity. He was never a man to hold grudges, and very speedily, indeed, he set about reconciling himself with the Conservative leadership. To an extent, he had already turned the focus of his attention to the European situation, and he thought that in any event, he had little to worry about from the final form of the Bill that had initially offended him. Lord Linlithgow, an old friend, although they had differed over the Government’s proposals, was appointed viceroy in August. When Churchill wrote to congratulate him, he said:
We apprehend increasing communal ill-will, and steady deterioration in all services . . . As long as the princes are not nagged and bullied to come into Federation, you need not expect anything but silence or help from us. We shall count more in the new Parliament than in this fat thing.9
Churchill was always capable of magnanimity. After the bill had been enacted, he invited G.D. Birla, one of Gandhi’s supporters, to have lunch with him at Chartwell. When he arrived, Birla found Churchill in the garden wearing a workman’s apron, which he had not changed for lunch. Afterwards, Churchill showed him the bricks he had laid and the building work that he had accomplished. He told Birla that Gandhi had risen in his esteem by standing up for the Dalits. He discussed Indian agriculture and spoke of his desire for an improvement in the lot of the masses. He didn’t care whether they were loyal or not to Great Britain. He didn’t mind about education, but he wanted the masses to have more butter. He wanted to go back to India for a six-month stay before he died. In Birla’s account, it was a slightly rambling and maudlin discourse, but it may have been sincere. Birla certainly thought it was.
Many years after the enactment of the India Bill, Hoare looked back on the opposition that Churchill led. This is what he said:
As I was one of the principal participants in the battle over India that raged from the day on which [Churchill] left the business committee [of the parliamentary Conservative Party, because they had accepted Hoare’s support of federation] in 1931 to the final passage of the India Act in 1935, I am not an impartial judge of his action. Nonetheless, I may perhaps make two comments. From the point of view of India, the consequences were altogether bad. His formidable opposition embittered a constitutional discussion that should have been kept free of recrimination. It delayed by many months and perhaps years the passing of the Act . . . if the Act had reached the statute book in 1933 instead of 1935, I am convinced that it would have been in effective operation before the war started. Even more serious than delay was the atmosphere created by years of parliamentary wrangle . . . with the inevitable result that Indians came to believe that instead of giving them the fullest possible opportunity for obtaining responsible government, we were intent upon tying them up in a straitjacket.10
The enactment of the India Bill marked the end of this section of Churchill’s involvement with the subcontinent. He turned to other issues. One was the support of Edward VIII in the abdication crisis of 1936. The entire British establishment and political opinion in the Commonwealth were entirely against the idea that the Prince of Wales should marry an American woman after her second divorce and remain on the throne. However, as ridiculous as it may seem almost a century later, it was at the time utterly unthinkable that the head of the Anglican Church could be married to a woman who was, in the view of the Church, already married to another man. Edward’s idea that the marriage could be morganatic was irrelevant and fanciful.* Churchill had never particularly admired the Prince of Wales: there was indeed little enough to admire. But his romantic soul and perhaps his archaic views on monarchy appear to have been captured, and he campaigned on behalf of Edward, even seeking to rally a ‘King’s Party’, with echoes of eighteenth-century politics.
This bizarre frolic consolidated the reputation he had acquired for perverse misjudgement, and the other occupation of his post-1935 years, opposition to Germany and concern over German rearmament, did just about as much damage. Hindsight changed everything, but at the time, he was thought to be continuing to tilt at windmills. Members who would listen spellbound to his great wartime speeches a few years later poured out of the chamber when he rose to his feet to talk about the dangers of Hitler.
He would return to India when he became Prime Minister in 1940. Indeed, back in the Cabinet in 1939 as First Lord of the Admiralty, he had already started to talk about the role of Britain in India. What he talked about was the three-legged stool on which Britain could sit indefinitely. The legs of this stool were the Hindus, the Muslims and the princes. The fashioning of these three independent components was the fruit of his time in opposition to the India Bill. The Government of India Act 1935 was the last serious and structured attempt by Britain to create a framework that might eventually provide a mechanism for delivering Indian self-government and ultimately dominion status to an undivided subcontinent. The Act, which in the event, was rushed through ahead of independence in 1947, was a compromise, cobbled together in the face of communal dissension and something approaching civil war. The flaws in the 1935 Act were not all of Churchill’s making, but he had been a damaging distraction. He did nothing to discourage the creation of potential conflict between Hindus and Muslims, and he certainly welcomed it if he did not actively foment the opposition by the princes. The great objective of British Indian policy was to keep the subcontinent united; indeed, if that had been achieved vast numbers of lives would have been saved and all the agony of inter-communal division would have been avoided. How far Churchill was responsible for making federation impossible cannot be assessed, but at the time of the passing of the 1935 legislation, he certainly congratulated himself, as we have seen, on having made it unworkable.
When, as Prime Minister, he came to direct policy in his last period of involvement in Indian affairs, from 1940 to 1945, he made full use of the separation of the communities. He continued to profess concern for the Dalits, claiming that they were ill-served by the political classes. Equally, he asserted that nothing must be done that would be to the disadvantage of the Muslim minority. He played this card repeatedly in the last five years. The more the interests of the minorities were emphasized, the less chance there was of a union based on compromise.
* ‘Let justice be done, even if the heavens fall.’
* A morganatic marriage is the device used, most famously, by the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was murdered at Sarajevo in 1914, to marry Sophie Chotek, which allowed a person of royal or aristocratic birth to marry a commoner, by providing that the titles and belongings of the privileged partner would not pass to his wife or offspring. The marriage itself is just as real as any other marriage and would have been subject to the same rules of the Church. Its specialty is merely related to the rights of succession.
16
Inside Churchill’s Language
Churchill was in the wilderness until 1939. He came back to office in that year as First Lord of the Admiralty and, in the following year, became Prime Minister. He would therefore again have responsibilities for and a practical interest in India. His responsibilities in relation to the complicated situation in India when Britain was at a vulnerable point in her fight for survival tested him in new ways.
In the meantime, however, India was forgotten; his preoccupation was with the threat from Nazi Germany. Events that proved he was very much in the right during these years should not lead us to think that that was how he was seen by his party at the time. On the contrary, he seemed wrong-headed and almost eccentric.
Before we turn again to his engagement with the subcontinent, it is appropriate to consider his mindset and his attitude towards races other than his own. We can only judge whether the charge of racism is valid by judging him against the standards of his time. We then need to consider the values that formed a man of his age and background.
I might as well face up at once to what may be a minor part of the charge against him but which still does enormous damage to his reputation, and that is his language. He said some appalling things, which it pains me to record. Some of them read as racism fired off by a scattergun: ‘I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails.’ ‘Hottentots’ were likely to throw white people into the sea. In 1920, he told Duff Cooper that ‘Gandhi ought to be lain, bound hand and foot, at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back.’1*
This abusive language was certainly linked to the idea of the superiority of white peoples. On 16 December 1900, in the course of the South African War, he became aware of a report that there had been fighting in the northern Cape between a commander of Boer Raiders and ‘Cape Boys’, men of mixed blood. He wrote to Joe Chamberlain, saying that he was disturbed:
We have done without the whole of the magnificent Indian Army for the sake of a ‘White man’s War’; surely it is unnecessary to employ Cape Boys . . . Personally I’m conscious of a feeling of irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men, and I am sure that those who live in S.A. will feel this much more strongly.2
But alongside a general distaste for other races, there was a particular dislike of Indians. Particularly Hindus. He could talk of ‘Baboos’, Indians, that is, describing them as gross, dirty and corrupt. In 1942, he said to Leo Amery, then Secretary of State for India: ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ This remark needs qualification. When the Cripps Mission, discussed below, failed and Congress unleashed the Quit India Movement, declaring that it would only offer passive resistance to a Japanese invasion, Churchill was furious. He thought that Gandhi and the Hindus, as opposed to the Muslim League, which had supported the war, were stabbing Britain in the back when help was most needed.3 Many of Amery’s comments about Churchill’s racial views have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Amery’s Cabinet contributions were long-winded and boring and Churchill mischievously liked to interrupt them with unacceptable racist jokes that would stop him in his tracks.
In February 1922, he told a conference of ministers that he was strongly opposed to the idea that India would gradually be handed over to the Indians. ‘He believed that opinion would change soon as to the expediency of granting democratic institutions to backward races that had no capacity for self-government.’4 When Irwin was viceroy, he recognized that the problem was partly due to the influence of Churchill’s youth. He suggested that Churchill’s views on India were like those of ‘a subaltern a generation ago’, and that he might like to bring himself up to date by meeting some Indian activists who were in London at the time. ‘I am quite satisfied with my views on India. I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indian.’5
In his second administration, from 1951 to 1955, he had to face increasing concern on both sides of the House about Commonwealth immigration. It was very small, at 3000 arrivals in 1953 and 11,000 in 1954, but that was enough to cause concern, particularly as his Home Secretary, David Maxwell–Fyfe, discovered that a substantial proportion of the immigrants lived on welfare. There were many people, of course, who took a liberal view on the matter, and others took a legalistic view that came to the same conclusion: in late 1948, the British Nationality Act had given British Citizenship to all subjects within the Empire. But there were racists too. And Churchill, for all his capacity for magnanimity, had sympathy with their views. He learned that a fund was being set up by public subscription on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. He said he didn’t want the sum raised for charity ‘just to bring home some coloured gentleman from Jamaica to complete his education’.6 He said the continued immigration would create ‘a magpie society’ which ‘would never do’.7 In January 1955, he told the Cabinet that ‘Keep Britain White’ would be a good slogan.8 But these views were far from being particularly his; they were shared, alas, by a large element of the supporters of both political parties and by people of all ages and classes. Even Violet Attlee, the wife of the Leader of the Labour Party, admitted after a reception at which black people were present that she found it very difficult to like them, even though she knew she should. In 1968, scores of thousands of dockers in mass protest went on strike and marched in support of Enoch Powell, the Tory MP and former Cabinet member who had just made his notorious racist ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Shamefully, these views have far from disappeared today, even if they are less openly articulated.
In Churchill’s youth, and indeed throughout most of his life, people did use language that would be regarded now as quite unconscionable. The inhabitants of the different nations in the United Kingdom, or indeed of the provinces at a distance from London, were referred to in terms which were on the face of it, extraordinarily offensive but which were accepted as the currency of chaff. In Parliament, Churchill and his contemporaries would stretch the rules of the House to refer to members of opposing parties in the most savage of terms. After exchanges that might have been expected to separate the combatants’ families for generations, they would go off for a drink in the bar. When Churchill and others thought that opponents were beginning to get a little out of touch with each other during the intense controversy over the Parliament Act in 1911, he and F.E. Smith formed the Other Club in order to avoid division caused by vitriol. But Rule 12 provided that: ‘Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics.’
Churchill could make offensive remarks and jokes about Jews, as was common at the time. All the same, a disproportionately high number of his friends were Jewish. His admiration for the Jewish people went beyond these personal links. He believed in ‘the genius’ of the Jews, whom he described as ‘the most formidable and remarkable race that ever appeared in the world’.9 He had worked closely with Jewish groups in Manchester in his time as a Liberal MP, and there he became a friend of Chaim Weizmann, the future Zionist leader and President of Israel. He supported the Zionist cause and was genuinely moved by what he learned about Nazi genocide. He is listed as one of the Righteous Among the Nations on the Wall of Honour in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. That said, his pro-Zionism is not so much an indication of a lack of racism as an acknowledgement of a belief in racial hierarchy.
Churchill was human. I’ve said elsewhere that the scale and range of his abilities were matched by a profound sense of humanity and magnanimity. But he was not perfect. He unalterably believed that the British race was superior to the races in the black colonies, that Britain had a civilizing duty, and that it was neither in the interests of Britain nor of the subject races that it should be assumed that power should automatically and always be transferred from the former to the latter. I said earlier that Churchill chose his language with great precision, and so he did when he was writing or speaking for the record; on other occasions, however, he could also use it carelessly. That was because he was capable of being downright silly and often peevish and petulant. In the course of one of their long and exhausting battles, Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff for most of the war, was failing to get Churchill to adopt a coherent strategic view, a planned succession of moves. In frustration, he pointed out that if Churchill was going to the barber’s, he would decide on his route before he left his front door. Churchill infuriatingly said, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ That was of a piece of saying that he hated Indians and that they were a beastly people.
He was a product of his times, as we all are, and his views were formed in days that were, by the 1930s, fairly distant and permeated by assumptions that were by then discredited. He was to an extent conscious of this. We have seen that in My Early Life, he described himself as ‘a child of the Victorian era’. Much later in life, in 1952, he reflected to his doctor, Charles Wilson, ‘When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking; when I was a subaltern in India the Indians did not seem to me equal to the white man.’10 Lord Moran wrote of Churchill’s attitude towards the Chinese: ‘Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin; it is when he talks of India or China that you remember that he is a Victorian.’11 But ‘Victorian’ is sloppy shorthand. Many Victorians, including Churchill’s headmaster, were liberal in their views of the Empire.
When he was in India as a young man, it was not uncommon for the British to find themselves better disposed towards the Muslims than the Hindus. To that, Churchill added an admiration for the warrior qualities that he perceived among the Muslims. The martial races were seen as loyal and dependable, and the non-martial races were seen as corrupt and lazy, ‘baboos’ and ‘boxwallahs’, spineless shopkeepers. It may be no coincidence that it was on the much-caricatured baboos that Churchill depended for the loans that kept him going as a young officer. He certainly appreciated the qualities of the martial races and celebrated them in My Early Life. In 1899, in The River War, there are critical references to Islam, expunged from the second edition. The First World War reinforced his views: ‘During the Great War, the Moslems of India confounded the hopes of their disloyalty entertained by the Germans and their Turkish ally and readily went to the colours. The Punjab alone furnished 180,000 Moslem recruits.’12 We shall look more closely at this categorization of the different communities in the next chapter.
* Churchill was almost always very rude, indeed, about Gandhi and regarded him as evil. Gandhi was backed at times by Indian mill-owners, who could see that with Independence, India could close her markets, to their advantage and at the cost of Lancashire. Was Churchill’s view of Gandhi informed by his connections with the Lancashire cotton interest? Probably not.
