by Richard Toye
We can be rather more precise about his subsequent years at Harrow. In later life he felt, to say the least, ambivalent about the time he spent there, but it undoubtedly made a profound impression on him. During World War II he told his private secretary John Colville that those days had been the unhappiest of his life. Nonetheless, Colville noted that the Prime Minister could still repeat the school songs by heart, and that, when he returned for a visit in December 1940, ‘he made a brilliant impromptu speech to the school, saying how much Harrow Songs had meant to him, what an inspiration they had been at certain stages of his life, and pointing out that although Hitler claimed the Adolf Hitler Schools had shown their superiority to Eton, he had forgotten Harrow!’56 (One of the songs that Churchill requested on this occasion was ‘Giants’, which includes a line paying tribute to ‘the hero-race’.)57 He certainly believed that Harrow and the other major public schools played an important imperial role, helping ‘produce the type and habit of mind which have played so indispensable a part in our State and Empire’, and providing its ‘colonists and adventurers’.58
During Churchill’s time there, the headmaster, Revd J. E. C. Welldon, was determined to create the imperial habit of mind in his pupils. Born in 1854, Welldon had excelled at Cambridge University and seemed to be destined for high things. Appointed to the headmastership in 1885, he expressed the hope that ‘the liberal sentiments of Harrow people will make reform, so far as it is needed, comparatively easy.’59 ‘Liberal’ was a relative term; it did not mean that Welldon was soft on his pupils. (He once remarked of the ‘obstreperous, irresponsible’ Churchill that ‘he had birched him more frequently than any other boy, but with little effect.’)60 He was ‘an imposing figure’ whose ‘massive, towering form [. . .] expressed authority incarnate’.61 He was also a confirmed imperial ideologue, and this was reflected in his management of the school. In his memoirs he recalled how an Egyptian pupil had appeared one morning with two black eyes. Welldon made some inquiries, sent for the boy who had inflicted them and demanded to know why he had done it. The boy paused and then said apologetically, ‘Please, sir, he said something bad about the British race.’ According to Welldon, ‘The only possible reply which I could make was: “That is enough, my boy; you may go.” ’62
If this makes Welldon sound like the comic caricature of a Victorian headmaster, it was not the case that he simply despised non-whites. He advised one pupil who joined the Indian Civil Service on how to treat those over whom he exercised power: ‘you know how other Anglo-Indians treat them contemptuously; but you must remember that the West owes to the East nearly all the most precious part of its heritage, and then no native of India will seem to you to be unworthy of your tender consideration’.63 Such attitudes were undoubtedly deeply patronizing, and a much later letter demonstrates the assumptions underlying his imperialism. He argued, ‘it is clear to me that the British Government in India does not and cannot ultimately rest upon the good-will of the people; that the cry of equality among all citizens of the Empire is impracticable, because it would mean the subjection of the citizens of the West to the far more numerous citizens of the East’.64 The subjection of large numbers of Eastern citizens to small numbers of Western ones was, by contrast, something that he evidently found wholly unproblematic. To him, the British race was the best in the world, because it was the one that had ‘most succeeded in combining liberty with law, religion with freedom, [and] self-respect with respect for other races’.65 In other words, the British capacity for racial tolerance was a fundamental part of British racial superiority!
Welldon was an admirer of the Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley’s book The Expansion of England (1883), which he credited as both a cause and a symbol of Britain’s new-found imperial spirit. (It is not clear if Churchill read Seeley’s work himself, but he would certainly have encountered its central message, that Britain should consciously take charge of its imperial destiny.) Welldon believed that it was the duty of teachers to bring before their pupils ‘the magnitude and dignity of the British Empire’; the history and geography of Empire were to be made into ‘powerful educational instruments’.66 Other masters at the school took their cue from Welldon.67 The kind of imperial education that Welldon espoused had a significant impact on Churchill. He observed during his first parliamentary election campaign that the British people needed to be imperialistic ‘because we shall thereby learn geography’, a remark that may have been unconsciously revealing of this.68 The school rewarded expressions of national and imperial pride by the boys. When Churchill wrote an essay describing an imaginary future invasion of Russia by Britain – illustrating ‘the superiority of John Bull over the Russian Bear’ – his English teacher was so impressed that he kept it.69 After an outbreak of influenza swept across Europe in 1890, Churchill wrote a poem recounting the progress of the epidemic, and urging:
God shield our Empire from the might
Of war or famine, plague or blight
And all the powers of Hell,
And keep it ever in the hands
Of those who fought ’gainst other lands
Who fought & conquered well.70
For this he won a house prize.
The imperial content of the curriculum should not be overstated. One of Churchill’s history notebooks, dealing with the eighteenth century, has survived. Aside from a brief reference to ‘Colonial Causes’ of the Seven Years War, the British Empire receives no mention.71 But formal teaching was not all. Welldon made much of ‘the festivals of the Empire’ and tried to bring the pupils into contact ‘with the leaders of imperial thought and action’.72 This meant bringing lecturers to the school, including, in Churchill’s time, Lord Wolesley, leader of the Canadian Red River expedition of 1870, and H. M. Stanley (of Dr Livingstone fame) who spoke on ‘African Exploration’.73 Churchill was particularly impressed by a talk given by G. R. Parkin, a well-known Canadian advocate of imperial federation – the idea that all parts of the Empire should be represented in the Parliament at Westminster. This was a notion that Lord Randolph considered ‘moonshine’.74 Although he did not become a profound enthusiast for it, Winston Churchill did argue as a young man that the colonies ‘must be federated’, and continued to make nods towards the idea into the 1920s.75 Parkin’s imagery made a vivid impression on him, and he could still remember it decades later. Parkin said that at the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson had signalled to his fleet ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’. He continued: ‘if you take the steps that are necessary to bind together and hold together the great Empire to the Crown, and if at some future time danger and peril strikes at the heart and life of that Empire, then the signal will run, not along a line of battle ships but a line of nations’. Churchill, as he told Parkin when he met him after World War I, believed that the Empire’s loyalty to Britain during that conflict was a vindication of this dream.76
There is a strong case to be made for Harrow’s influence not only on Churchill but on a whole generation of politicians. Welldon counted 1923 as the school’s annus mirabilis. Not only were the new Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and many of his ministers Old Harrovians, but so was the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘to say nothing of three Harrovians among members of Parliament in the Labour Party’.77 It is important to note, though, that the school did not produce a uniform stamp of mind, even amongst those of its students who became ardent imperialists and members of the same Tory cabinets. The point is proved by the example of Leo Amery, one of the ministers Welldon had in mind. A year older than Churchill, Amery was born in India, where his father was an official in the forestry commission. (His mother, incidentally, was Jewish – a point he concealed in his memoirs.)78 When he was three, his parents split up and he moved with his mother to Britain; he never went back to India again. Amery had a strong interest in the Empire even before arriving at the school. At the start of his first term, one master, Mr Stogdon, asked the boys what they thought was the most political event of the summer. There was general
silence, except from Amery who, to Stogdon’s delight, replied ‘the Nizam of Hyderabad’s offer to the Queen to supply money and troops in case of trouble with Russia’.79
His first encounter with Churchill came at Harrow when the latter deliberately pushed him into the swimming pool. On being told that his victim was in the sixth-form, Churchill determined to apologize, telling him, ‘I mistook you for a Fourth Form boy. You are so small.’ This did not go down very well, but Churchill then deftly placated Amery by telling him that Lord Randolph, who was a great man, was also small.80 Not only did Amery and Churchill share many of the same influences, but their early careers had much in common. Both had success as journalists before becoming Tory MPs. Nevertheless, Amery’s concept of imperialism was sharply divergent from Churchill’s. They were political antagonists during Churchill’s period in the Liberal Party after 1904; their differences over imperial trade were symbolic of the ideological contrast between them. They clashed repeatedly over policy, even when reunited as members of Baldwin’s Conservative Cabinet in 1924–9. In the 1930s they both found themselves in the political wilderness as opponents (in somewhat differing ways) of the policy of appeasement. After 1940, when Amery served as Churchill’s Secretary of State for India, they had serious disagreements once more, this time over the speed of Indian political reform. Harrow had certainly made its impression on both, but it did not turn out identikit imperialists.
Welldon’s own career never lived up fully to its early promise. In 1898 he was appointed Bishop of Calcutta, a post in which, Churchill believed, he was not happy: ‘The East without wife, woman, sport, war, authority or friends seems to me a vy bad bargain’.81 For Welldon, the shortage of women was perhaps not a great problem; he was unmarried, and his lifetime relationship with his manservant was one of ‘complete devotion’.82 In India, however, his determination to convert the population to Christianity led to conflict with Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, who was more pragmatically inclined, and Welldon resigned in 1902 on grounds of ill health.83 (Churchill also rejected Welldon’s view, arguing that ‘the Asiatic derives more real benefit from the perfect knowledge and practice of his own religion – albeit inferior – than from the imperfect and partial comprehension of Christianity.’)84 After his return to England he served as Dean of Manchester and then of Durham, and, before his death in 1937, he kept an eye on Churchill’s career. In 1923 Welldon observed that Churchill had ‘shown more of the public school spirit’ than some other leading politicians, but he disapproved of his decision to publish confidential wartime documents in his book The World Crisis, noting, ‘It is now taken as an axiom that everything must be told [. . .] without much or any regard to the danger of creating a false impression or of conveying information in a rather unpatriotic spirit.’85 And when Churchill campaigned against greater self-government for India, Welldon came down firmly on the other side. In 1935 he wrote to the wife of Sir Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State for India (who was also an Harrovian), praising his Government of India Bill, which Churchill so vigorously opposed. ‘If he [Hoare] can effect, as I hope he may, what will be a practically pacific revolution in the constitutional history of India, he will live in history as one of the principal benefactors, not of India only, but of the British Empire.’86 In other words, although Churchill’s imperial attitudes are often explained with reference to his Victorian background, other Victorians who contributed to and shared that background were frequently able to take different (and sometimes more liberal) approaches. Jawaharlal Nehru, who attended Harrow in the Edwardian period, testified that the school’s atmosphere was in fact far from stifling. In 1950 he and Churchill attended a dinner for Old Harrovians at Westminster. One of the organizers recalled:
Winston had once during the troubles in India put Nehru under arrest for a time, but we felt sure that this would not be allowed to rankle, nor did it. The toast to Nehru was proposed by Winston in the felicitous manner of which only he was capable. Nehru replied and referred to his time at Harrow. He said he left Harrow with a feeling of regret. He could not say why he had this feeling. He had thought about it since and had come to the conclusion that he had learnt something at Harrow that served him well in later life: that, before you make a decision, always bear in mind that there are two sides to every question.87
Churchill, then, was not merely a sponge, absorbing the propaganda of his schoolmasters without question. His imperialism, already strong by the time he entered Sandhurst, was to receive a further unique imprint from his own direct experience, and from the books that, sensing the gaps in his education, he anxiously sought out.
III
After Harrow, Churchill went to Sandhurst, his father having decided he was not bright enough for the Bar. Here too imperial messages were in evidence: the inside of the Royal Memorial Chapel was decorated with plaques commemorating graduates killed fighting in Empire and other campaigns.88 Churchill worked hard although, as he later recalled, he and his fellow cadets believed there was little chance of them ever making practical use of their training. It seemed a shame that – as they believed – the era of war between ‘civilized’ countries had ended. Fortunately, though, there were still ‘savages and barbarous peoples’ such as the Afghans, the Zulus and the Sudanese Dervishes. ‘Some of these might, if they were well-disposed, “put up a show” some day.’89 Although he sometimes used racist epithets,90 Churchill was prepared to deal with individuals on equal terms if they were ‘civilized’, which in practice meant rich and well educated or, in the case of one Afghan officer with whom he and some friends dined, good at billiards. (‘Everyone likes him,’ he told his mother.91) Meanwhile, Churchill continued to absorb the imperial culture of the day. His love of the music hall, as shown by his Empire Theatre escapade, might not appear important at first sight, but patriotism and imperialism were staples of this form of entertainment. Dance pageants such as ‘Our Empire’ and songs like ‘It’s the English-Speaking Race against the World’ were typical.92 Although he was later dismissive of the slogans of the ‘pothouse Music Hall’ and of the ‘cheap Imperialist productions’ of the popular press (though he thought the latter did some good amongst the ‘vulgar’ classes),93 he clearly enjoyed the music hall atmosphere enough to defend it against the puritans, and it is hard to believe that he was altogether indifferent to the ideological messages that it conveyed.
Having completed his training, Churchill joined the Fourth Hussars, a cavalry regiment, in February 1895, less than a month after Lord Randolph’s death. He determined to make the most of his generous leave entitlement before the regiment shipped to India and so, the following winter, he and a friend travelled to Cuba via New York. They had chosen this destination because they wanted to get a taste of war at first-hand: the island was in the throes of rebellion against Spanish rule. It was also a chance for Churchill to earn a little bit of money and fame, by contracting to provide articles on the conflict to the Daily Graphic. He accompanied the Spanish forces as they tried to hunt down the insurgents and, on his twenty-first birthday, heard shots fired in anger for the first time. His initial sympathy for the rebels dwindled as he began to see how pained the Spanish were at the prospect of losing their treasured colonial possession; his discovery that they had similar feelings to the British in this respect came as a rather uncomfortable surprise.94 He told the Graphic’s readers that Spanish administration was corrupt to the point that made rebellion inevitable and justifiable, but the rebels themselves were mere brigands, and Cuban autonomy was not a practical possibility.95 He made no suggestion that imperial rule per se – rather than the specifically Spanish version of it – was at fault. Indeed, he wrote to Bourke Cockran, a prominent Democrat politician whom he had met in New York, that he hoped the US would not force Spain to disgorge Cuba – unless America itself was prepared to take on the responsibility of governing her. Cockran’s reply has not survived, but apparently he found that idea unpalatable, preferring that the Cubans should rule themselves.96 This was an early hint of the diff
erence in British and American attitudes to Empire and national independence movements that would take on such importance during the most crucial phase of Churchill’s career.
Churchill’s regiment shipped out to India in September 1896. One book he read by way of preparation was Twenty-One Days in India by George Aberigh-Mackay. This ‘brilliant though little-known writer’, as Churchill later described him, had been Principal of Rajkumar College, Indore.97 Originally published in serial form in the Bombay Gazette in 1880, the year before the author’s death at thirty-three, the book was subtitled The Tour of Sir Ali Baba K.C.B., and formed a satirical look at a range of Indian and Anglo-Indian ‘types’. These ranged from the ‘Great Ornamental’ Viceroy, ‘absolutely and necessarily withdrawn from all knowledge of India’, to the ‘Bengali Baboo’, ‘Full of inappropriate words and phrases’.98 Churchill was advised to read the book by a family friend in the Indian Civil Service. In 1942 he in turn sent a copy to William Phillips, who was about to go to Delhi as President Roosevelt’s personal representative. He acknowledged that the world Aberigh-Mackay described had long since passed; nevertheless, there were ‘serious things beneath the surface of this old book’ which gave ‘a sweeping glance at a vast, marvellous scene’.99 At some point during his time in India Churchill read Sir George Chesney’s Indian Polity, which argued that ‘the state of anarchy and universal strife throughout the land, which was replaced by the peace everywhere established under British rule, must have been attended with a degree of suffering which far outweighs the defects inseparable from a rule by foreigners’.100 Such arguments, which were to be echoed by Churchill in the 1930s, were the commonplaces of the time.
