“What a monstrous speech Winston has just made,” Irwin wrote Geoffrey Dawson at The Times. Dawson, agreeing, ran an editorial declaring that Churchill was “no more representative of the Conservative Party” than “the assassins of Calcutta” were of the Indian Congress, and his speech would “have just as little influence.” Dawson and his fellow lords of the British media were doing something about this last. Churchill wanted to address the nation on the issue. He offered Sir John Reith £100 for ten minutes on the BBC. Reith, like any trapped civil servant, scurried to higher authority, in this case Wedgwood Benn, who replied that he felt “most apprehensive” at the prospect of Winston on the air; he was afraid the consequence would do “immense harm to India.” Reith thereupon rejected Churchill’s proposal, explaining that he opposed “American” broadcasting methods. This, Winston said, was an “oppressive decision.” He thought “the American plan would be better than the present British methods of debarring public men from access to a public who wish to hear”; when “an Imperial issue like the discharge of our mission in India is being debated, it seems to me that at least an equal solicitude for impartiality is required from you.” The Establishment was closing ranks against him. News accounts of his speeches in Parliament shrank and appeared deeper and deeper in newspapers’ inside pages. He protested to Rothermere of the Daily Mail that they were “the only weapon I have for fighting this battle.” If the Mail buried its accounts of them, “Baldwin with the Times at his back is master of the fate of India.” Gagged, he struggled on, addressing the Indian Empire Society twice more, always assailing Gandhi, whose cause and dedication were incomprehensible to him. In his view the Mahatma was “a malignant and subversive fanatic,” a cynical manipulator of “Brahmins who mouth and patter principles of Western Liberalism and pose as philosophic and democratic politicians.” And all the time he continued to attend meetings of the shadow cabinet. If his colleagues felt awkward, he was not in the least embarrassed. As he saw it he was true to the widow’s uniform he had once worn:279
Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year,
Our fathers’ title runs.
Make we likewise their sacrifice,
Defrauding not our sons.
As the rift grew between Baldwin and Churchill, Conservative MPs were faced with the nightmare of every workaday politician: the obligation to choose sides in an intramural quarrel. Some found it relatively easy. Lord Weir thought Britain needed “inspiration” and Winston could provide it. Lord Knutsford wrote him: “Some day you must lead the whole country. I look for this.” But others were more vulnerable. Neville Chamberlain privately wrote a young MP on November 29: “I, myself, would very much prefer to go more slowly in the matter of Indian reform, and try a series of cautious experiments, which might perhaps last for fifty years or more, before culminating in a complete system of Central and Provincial self-government.” Publicly, however, Chamberlain was among Baldwin’s most enthusiastic backers. Lane-Fox wrote Irwin that the party was “not very comfortable” with his declaration, and in another letter told him: “The average Conservative was of course rather shocked by the way in which Gandhi was originally allowed to break the law in the matter of his salt campaign and march to the sea.” A clear majority of the Tory MPs thought Churchill right, but most of them had too much to lose to say so. Despite their convictions, men like Chamberlain persuaded themselves that they were bound by a higher loyalty to oppose, in his words, those who were “either hostile” to their leaders “or disposed to join cliques led by men whose motives are much more complicated.” This last referred to the possibility that Winston was planning a revolt, deliberately dividing the party, as his father had, hoping to reach No. 10 through a coup. Davidson put it bluntly in a letter to Irwin: “Winston’s game, of course, has been obvious, as it always is. He is not the son of Randolph for nothing.” Beaverbrook thought Churchill’s stand revealed “a defect of character” and a willingness “to take up anything as long as it leads to power”; that he had changed “party, political friends and political dogmas so often” that his credibility was “nearly gone.” At present, said Beaverbrook, he was “trying to make a corner for himself in Indian affairs. He is now taking up the stand of a veritable die-hard. But,” he concluded, “he does not carry conviction…. His voice lacks that note of sincerity for which the country looks.” Irwin disagreed. To him, Churchill presented a real threat. Irwin noted that at least twenty times between March and December Winston had challenged the leadership’s position on India, and, on each occasion, Baldwin had barely mustered a majority of Tories.280
Clearly a break between Churchill and him was imminent. Yet where could Winston go? In 1904 he had crossed to the Liberals; in 1924, back to the Conservatives. But Labour was now the Opposition, and he and they glared at one another from opposite ends of the parliamentary spectrum. Therefore his only choice was what political journalists call “the wilderness”—the cold, bleak, barren limbo of discredited or incompetent MPs whom no party wants. Nevertheless, no one can doubt that he was moved by a genuine conviction. That cannot be said of those with whom he was parting company. The Tory leaders were uninspired by Indian nationalism. One searches in vain for ringing affirmations of freedom or admiration for Gandhian saintliness in their speeches, letters, and diaries. What comes through, like the pounding on a wall of a man who wants the party in the next apartment to quiet down so he can sleep, is a determination to avoid discord, unpleasantness, or any rude interruption of long serene weekends in the country. England’s ruling class, or those of them in power, had lost their fathers’ inflexible determination. A. G. Gardiner had described the English patrician as “a personality that is entirely fearless,” belonging to “a caste that never doubts itself.” A. L. Rowse, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, quotes Gardiner and then adds: “Never till 1931, we may say; for in that year the caste lost confidence in itself and, undermined by fear, it lost not only confidence but conscience. Confused in mind about everything, except the main chance—its own preservation—it survived from year to year, from month to month, from day to day, by blurring the clarity of all issues, even the most dangerous—that of the nation’s safety; it maintained its enormous majority by electoral trickery, it spoke and perhaps thought in the language of humbug, it hoped to stave off conflict… by offering appeasement.”281
By January 8, 1931, Churchill had made his decision. He foresaw MacDonald’s fall and the formation of a new government, but, he wrote his son, “I have no desire to join such an administration and be saddled with all the burden of whole-hog Protection, plus unlimited doses of Irwinism for India. I shall be much more able to help the country from outside.” The “breaking-point in my relation with Mr Baldwin,” as he later called it, came less than three weeks later. Irwin wanted to lay the foundations for his “round-table” conference with the congress leaders, to be held in London. To clear the air he planned to release Gandhi from jail, and on January 23 he cabled Baldwin: “My immediate fear is lest, in the forthcoming debate in Parliament, Winston should make mischief. Do, if you can, get some helpful and cordial speeches made from our side to discount possible bad effect of what he may say. Best of all, speak yourself and send him to Epping for the day.”282
Gandhi was freed forty-eight hours later. Outraged Raj officials in India and Conservative associations throughout England were speechless. Churchill, of course, was not. On the evening of Monday, January 26, he rose in the House and—his other remarks on India having been delivered elsewhere, “out of doors,” in the parliamentary expression, and therefore being forgivable—took his first fateful step into the wilderness. “I must of course first of all make it clear,” he said at the outset, “that I do not speak for the official Opposition nor for my right hon[orable] friend the Leader of the Opposition.” He spoke, he said, “solely as a Member of Parliament, of some service in this House,” whose views ought not to go “unrepresented in this discussion.” He then laced into the viceroy’s declaration, deplored the t
abling of the Simon Report, and criticized the government’s decision to bar Simon and his fellow commissioners from the round table. “Our trusted friends and lawful, formal authoritative advisers are set aside,” he charged, “in order to placate those who are the bitterest opponents of British rule in India.” The promise of dominion status was to be laid before “the gleaming eyes of excitable millions” while sixty thousand Indian agitators were locked up, a situation virtually without precedent, at least since the Mutiny. To imagine that these resentful men would emerge docile was, he thought, absurd. Britons should not permit themselves “to be edged, pushed, talked and cozened out of India.” After two hundred years of fidelity and achievement, and thousands of British soldiers’ lives sacrificed “on a hundred fields,” Englishmen had earned “rights of our own in India.” Public opinion in the United Kingdom would not tolerate the spectacle of British women and children “in hourly peril amidst the Indian multitudes,” yet this was the future to which, “step by step and day by day, we are being remorselessly and fatuously conducted.”283
By custom, either MacDonald or Wedgwood Benn should have replied to him. Baldwin did it instead. His decision was unwise; he answered Winston’s rolling, cadenced rhetoric with a meandering, legalistic defense of the round table. Lane-Fox reported to Irwin that “while S.B. was vigorously cheered by the Socialists, there was an ominous silence on our benches. And I am afraid this represents the position in our party on many things.” Nevertheless, it was Churchill who had sinned, and now he must pay the forfeit for flagrant disobedience of his party’s leader. Tuesday morning Lord Hailes approached him, like a summons server, with the formal request for his resignation from the shadow cabinet. Afterward Hailes set down Winston’s reaction. “Face reddened then went white. Pouted furiously. Walked to a corner of the room, picked up his silver knobbed cane, came back and brought the cane down full force on the table. As he looked at me, I imagined that I might be the next victim. Then his face suddenly puckered into a smile. ‘So the Conservative P. wants to get rid of me, does it? All right, I’ll go quietly now.’ ” He scrawled a paragraph to Baldwin: “Now that our divergences of view upon India policy have become public”—persisting in the quaint conceit that nothing in British politics becomes public until uttered in the House—“I feel that I ought not any longer to attend the meetings of your ‘Business Committee’ to which you have hitherto so kindly invited me.” Baldwin replied on Wednesday: “I am grateful to you for your kind letter of yesterday and much as I regret your decision not to attend the meetings of your old colleagues, I am convinced that your decision is correct in the circumstances.”284
Churchill’s departure left the shadow chancellorship vacant. To fill the void, Baldwin appointed Neville Chamberlain.
Churchill’s parliamentary career had come to resemble the Greek legend of Sisyphus, who was condemned to toil up a steep hill pushing a huge stone which, just before he reached the top, always rolled back to the bottom. Twice he had been regarded as England’s next prime minister, first as a Liberal, then as a Conservative. Now he was once more cut off from all inner political councils. But during those first months in the wilderness he felt unfettered, exhilarated, free to loose verbal thunderbolts whenever so moved. Young MPs who thought they had heard Churchillian philippics at their most venomous now learned otherwise. When Gandhi arrived in Delhi to meet Irwin, Winston thundered: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.” And even as die-hard back-benchers howled with appreciative laughter, they were shocked at the cruel attack on MacDonald, the titular prime minister, who was permitting Baldwin to run his government. Winston told the House: “I spoke the other day, after he had been defeated in an important division, about his wonderful skill in falling without hurting himself. He falls, but he comes up again smiling, a little dishevelled but still smiling.” Then, staring at MacDonald across the well, he continued: “I remember when I was a child being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder.’ My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”285
Epping staunchly supported its member. His constituents, he wrote Clementine, were “loving, ardent, and unanimous.” Indeed, he believed there was “no doubt that the whole spirit of the Conservative party is with me, and that much of their dissatisfaction with S.B. turns itself into favour with me.” This was no illusion; that same week the party’s principal agent wrote Neville Chamberlain: “Many of our supporters are worried about the question of India. They lean much more towards the views of Mr Churchill than to those expressed by Mr Baldwin in the House of Commons.” Nevertheless, when a Gandhi-Irwin pact was signed in early March—the Mahatma agreed to call off all satyãgraha and attend the round-table conference in London to discuss India’s future—Baldwin endorsed it. He opened the House debate on March 12 and was followed by Wedgwood Benn, who accused Winston of advocating a policy of “the lathi, the bayonet, the machine-gun and artillery.” Churchill reminded the House of his speech in the Dyer debate and his repeated opposition to “brutal force in India,” and pointed out that most of the Indians who had died over the past year had been killed, not by British troops, but in “religious fights” between Moslems and Hindus. It was all true. Yet the feeling persisted that he was scheming for power. Leo Amery wrote in his diary that upon leaving Parliament he had “heard Winston haranguing a press correspondent in the Lobby to the effect that he was not going to let India be betrayed without telling England all about it. I am afraid we are in for some difficulties over the India business. Winston has chosen his moment and his excuse for separating with the Party very adroitly.”286
He enjoyed frequent successes. At his urging Lord Lloyd agreed to challenge Baldwin in the party’s India Committee, and at one point Lloyd mustered a majority of diehards against the round table. “Winston has done a good deal to corrupt them,” Dawson wrote Irwin. Churchill’s eloquent plea for the Untouchables was particularly effective. (“A multitude as big as a nation, men, women and children deprived of hope and of the status of humanity. Their plight is worse than that of slaves, because they have been taught to consent not only to a physical but to a psychic servitude and prostration.”) The Daily Mail and the Daily Express provided him with such full coverage that Baldwin, like virtually all leaders stung by a free press, protested. “What the proprietorship of the papers is aiming at,” he charged, “is power and power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot.” At the Albert Hall, Tory back-benchers heard Churchill describe how dissent was being suppressed by the alliance of political chieftains now sharing the same nest. Baldwin had “decided that we are to work with the Socialists, and that we must make our action conform with theirs. We therefore have against us at the present time the official machinery of all the three great parties in the State. We meet under a ban. Every Member of Parliament or Peer who comes here must face the displeasure of the party Whips.” In the House, despite jeers, hostile interruptions, and outbursts, he roared until he was heard: “By your actions you have produced misery such as India has not seen for half a century. You have poisoned relations between the Mohammedans and the Hindus.” Then he flourished photographs of Indian corpses mutilated in the communal killings, pictures taken on the spot which were, he cried, “so revolting that no paper would be able to publish them.” All spring and throughout the summer he kept up his drumfire, and in the Daily Mail of September 7, when Gandhi was on his way to London—no other Indian politician accompanied him; he alone wou
ld speak for India’s 350 million—Churchill warned that the round table would lead to “nothing but further surrenders of British authority.” Without the “guidance and control” of the Raj, he wrote, such “pure savagery” as the Cawnpore killings would be repeated all over the sub-continent, an inevitable consequence of unchecked Hinduism and its “whole apparatus,” as represented at Benares on the Ganges, “with its palaces and temples, its shrines and its burning ghats, its priests and ascetics, its mysterious practices and multiform ritual… unchanged through the centuries, untouched by the West.”287
This was Churchill at his most effective. His prose soared. His commitment was total. At that time, on that issue, he was speaking for most Englishmen. And yet…
It was all as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The public was distracted by the growing financial crisis. The House had wearied of India. Lloyd George had to enter the hospital for a major operation; Churchill, ostracized, left for Chartwell. Britain therefore was deprived of the two authentic geniuses in its public life; “as we have said several times in the last few days,” Hoare wrote Neville Chamberlain on August 31, “we have had some great good luck in the absence of Winston and L.G.” Thus Baldwin and MacDonald were free to pursue their separate grails: business as usual for Baldwin; disarmament for MacDonald. Winston returned and spent six months trying to pry them apart, but Baldwin ignored him, attending the round-table talks and accepting Labour’s lead in the conferences with Gandhi, while MacDonald—who never forgave him for the Boneless Wonder gibe—lost his poise but once. Baited by Brendan Bracken, who was quoting Churchill, the prime minister glared at Bracken and shouted, “You swine!”—an indiscretion which, Dawson being away for the time, appeared in The Times, to Winston’s delight. Some senior Tories worried about their restless back-benchers. Sir Malcolm Hailey wrote of the round-table discussion that he was “beginning to feel” that Baldwin “may not have been quite correct in believing that he could carry the whole of the Conservative Party in any decision at which he might arrive.” He concluded, however, that “the general block” of Tory MPs were likelier to follow the leader than be “swayed by the very extreme views of Winston Churchill.” Seeing Winston isolated, others were reluctant to join him in Coventry. Churchill, their elders told them, was a rogue elephant, an opportunist; his pleas for Indian minorities, his support of Indian self-government on the local level, and his prediction of a bloodbath should the Raj leave were dismissed as wily diversions or hyperbole. He wrote Boothby: “Politics are very interesting. My late colleagues are more interested in doing me in than in any trifling questions connected with India or tariffs.”288
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