Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made

by Richard Toye

  It was a new threat to the rights of Indians in the Transvaal that now brought Gandhi to London together with a Muslim colleague, H. O. Ally. This threat was the so-called ‘Black Ordinance’, proposed by the existing Crown Colony government, which would shut out new Indian immigration to the Transvaal and force Asians already living there to register themselves on pain of expulsion from the territory. These measures were a sop to Boer opinion; Smuts had spoken of eradicating the ‘Asiatic cancer’, and Louis Botha, the leader of his party, intended to ‘drive the coolies out of the country’.100 Gandhi and Ally arrived at pivotal moment, shortly before the new constitution came into effect; they hoped for London’s veto of the Ordinance. For his part, Churchill hoped that, if the Colonial Office could delay action sufficiently, responsibility for the controversial measure could be passed to the incoming elected Transvaal government. ‘The new parliament may shoulder the burden’, he minuted. ‘Why should we? Dawdle or disallow – preferably the former.’101

  On 8 November Gandhi and Ally met with Elgin, who was not completely unsympathetic but gave them no indication of his decision.102 The Secretary of State had recently received a petition signed by 437 Indians in South Africa denying that Gandhi had any authority to speak for them, and he gave the startled delegates a hint of this.103 (Churchill was clearly informed as he subsequently gave details of the petition in a House of Commons answer.)104 A few days later, having obtained more information, Gandhi and Ally responded with the claim – which Colonial Office officials seemed to accept – that the signatures had been obtained under false pretences. Gandhi also suggested that William Godfrey, one of the petition’s organizers, was ‘ “touched” in the head’.105 Gandhi and Ally were not granted their request for a further interview with Elgin in order to put things straight, but at the end of the month they did see Churchill, who was still inclined to ‘dawdle’ with regard to the Ordinance.106 This meeting was significant as the sole occasion on which Gandhi and Churchill met. The only record was made by Gandhi:

  We met Mr Winston Churchill at the time fixed by him. He spoke nicely. He asked both of us whether we were not afraid of responsible government in case the Ordinance were refused assent. What if a worse act were to be passed by the new Government? We replied that we could not imagine an act worse than the present Ordinance, and that we had asked for refusal of assent leaving the future to take care of itself.

  After Churchill promised to think about it, Ally emphasized his own loyalty to the British, telling him that he had been present at Durban Point to welcome him after his escape from Boer captivity. ‘And it was with the same Mr Churchill that he now pleaded for redress on behalf of the Indian community.’ At this, Churchill ‘smiled, patted Mr Ally on the back, and said that he would do all he could’. Gandhi noted: ‘This answer added to our hopes.’107

  Churchill seems to have made a generally good impression on Gandhi. In 1935 the latter remarked to a friend that he had ‘got a good recollection of Mr Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill’.108 This was a remarkably sunny comment, given the differences that the two had had in the meantime. Churchill, for his part, never made any reference to the meeting, and we cannot know for certain that it made any lasting impact on him. It may not have been insignificant for the future, though, that Gandhi had already been portrayed to him, via the apparently spurious petition, as a professional agitator who did not really speak for those he claimed to represent.

  In the short term Gandhi and Ally’s mission appeared successful. When their boat stopped at Madeira on the way back to Africa, they received cablegrams telling them that Elgin had refused assent to the Ordinance.109 But it was not much of a victory. Contrary to British expectations, at the Transvaal election of February 1907 the Het Volk party under Botha secured a majority. Hardly had it taken office than it passed a new law, practically identical to the rejected Ordinance. In May Churchill announced that the Colonial Office declined to intervene.110 His attitude seemed to be one of resignation.111 Gandhi now fought the Transvaal government with his new weapon of satyagraha, or non-violent resistance, which he would later use to such effect in India itself. In response to Churchill’s declaration that the people of South Africa had the freedom to make whatever laws they wished to in respect of Asiatic immigration and the treatment of non-whites, he observed that ‘the local governments in South Africa will be able to attack the Indian community with impunity’. He added: ‘The only weapon with which to ward off the attack is our resolution on gaol-going.’112 In January 1908, having refused to register with the authorities as the law required, he was sent to prison for the first time. It fell to Smuts, as the Transvaal’s Colonial Secretary, to negotiate with him to reach a compromise solution whereby Indians would register voluntarily. Gandhi came to believe that Smuts had reneged on a promise to repeal the law in exchange for this concession; the situation reached a kind of stalemate in the years before Gandhi’s return to India in 1914. As for Churchill, at the time of Gandhi’s jailing, he cabled High Commissioner Selborne: ‘Please tell Botha I am going to support his Government most strongly on the Indian question and that I thoroughly understand the views of white South Africa.’113

  After his bruising first months in office, Churchill increasingly emphasized the continuity between his and Elgin’s policies and those implemented earlier by the Conservatives: ‘The rotation of the crops, he urged, was highly beneficial to the soil, and the Liberal party were but garnering the fruits of their predecessors.’114 We need not conclude, though, that Churchill’s period at the Colonial Office saw him shifting from Radicalism to reaction (which were at any rate not simple categories). His bullishness about the Empire’s long-term prospects never wavered. In 1906 he rebuked an official who had predicted it would not last another hundred years: ‘such pessimism is unworthy of the C.O.’.115 But in spite of the strength of his commitment, others continued to regard him as reckless. Towards the end of Churchill’s tenure Selborne was still fulminating at his ‘mad and wicked’ speeches in the Commons, ‘goading at the British’. In fury, he wrote: ‘I see Winston veering round to a position in which he will say the whole Boer war was iniquitous!’116 On the face of it, Churchill’s positions sometimes seemed contradictory. Almost simultaneously with his reassurance to Botha that he understood the concerns of white South Africans, Churchill wrote a Colonial Office minute condemning British punitive raids against the rebellious Kisii tribe in East Africa: ‘It looks like a butchery [. . .] Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale.’117 In Churchill’s mind, however, there was no inconsistency. He never questioned his belief in white racial superiority, but this did not mean that he felt that people of other races were undeserving of consideration, and if he discerned ill-treatment he could become genuinely angry (a feeling perhaps accentuated by the prospect of awkward questions in the House of Commons). In other words, he did not perceive that there was any necessary conflict between racial inequality and humanitarianism. The phrase ‘equal rights for all civilized men’ summed up his attitude effectively because – resting on a racially determined concept of ‘civilization’ – it squared his belief in equality before the law with an acceptance that in practice some racial groups were ‘more equal’ than others.

  V

  As the example of the Kisii revolt shows, Churchill’s activities at the Colonial Office extended far beyond South Africa. The diverse issues he dealt with included policy in West Africa, Newfoundland’s fishing dispute with the USA, and even such minutiae as petitions for reinstatement by dismissed employees of the Ceylon government railways. Disconcertingly for Elgin, he showed an obsessive interest in the latter, being much concerned with the rights of the underdog.118 With regard to Nigeria, he even demonstrated that he was prepared to consider scaling back the Empire, in order better to secure its overall future. In May 1906 Lady Lugard wrote to
her husband that his pioneering work in the country appeared to be under threat. She had had long talks with Churchill at Blenheim and he had, she said, been ‘talking rank little Englandism’. She lamented to Lugard that:

  He repeated all the foolish things you have ever heard about having gone too fast and added to them the extreme radical rubbish about holding innocent peoples tight in the grip of a military despotism. To abolish the Waff [the West African Frontier Force], to give up the greater part of Nigeria ‘which is much too big for us to hold’, put an end to the whole system of punitive expeditions and to be content with the peaceful administration of one small corner of the whole were the principal suggestions which he had to make.119

  Elgin, although he shared Churchill’s dislike of punitive raids, was not prepared to entertain his radical suggestion of a partial withdrawal.120 Churchill did not press the point, but it is clear that, at this stage of his career, he remained open-minded and flexible to a significant degree.

  From Churchill’s point of view, the main events of 1907 were the Colonial Conference in the spring and his tour of Africa in the autumn. He was well aware that the conference would be a mere ‘business meeting which cannot arrive at any positive decision’, as there was no chance that a Liberal government would grant trade preferences to the colonies, which was the chief demand of the visiting Empire politicians.121 Anticipating the hostility of Alfred Deakin, the pro-tariff reform Australian Prime Minister, he nagged Elgin to invite the premiers of the individual Australian States. For this he offered the rationale ‘Divide et impera!’ – the state premiers would counterbalance Deakin’s influence, he thought – but his arguments for divide and rule were to no avail.122 Churchill’s most notable contribution to the conference itself was ‘a rasping & injudicious speech full of highsounding phrases’, in which he developed his established theme that imperial preference would threaten the concord of the Empire.123 Asquith and Lloyd George were more soothing in their negatives, and in the end the visiting dignitaries were appeased with some small-scale concessions on inter-imperial transport and communications.

  Such occasions gave Churchill the chance to thrust himself into the limelight; his African journey was another opportunity to earn publicity and (by writing about his adventures) money. Naturally, this produced satirical comment. Punch published spoof despatches in which the running gag, based on a genuine Reuters telegram, was Churchill’s failure to bag any lions. He was said to have been interrogated by ‘Twysta, Chief of the Pozas, a very intelligent tribe’, who asked who ruled England in Churchill’s absence and when did he intend to give Lord Elgin an old-age pension.124 (A topical joke, this: state pensions were introduced in Britain the following year.) The Crown, a short-lived publication, printed a similar set of ‘Unofficial Despatches’ in cartoon form. In one frame, African tribesmen, in typical racist caricature, form a deputation demanding ‘free fetishes’ and ‘fatter missionaries’. In another, the radical Labour MP Keir Hardie is seen springing naked out of the bush, greeting Churchill, who is dressed in African tribal costume, as ‘My long lost black brother’.125

  Churchill was away from Britain between September 1907 and January 1908. This prolonged absence was possible because there was no autumn session of Parliament that year – a testament to the comparatively relaxed (albeit even then steadily increasing) pace of government in those days. Before reaching Africa he visited the British dependencies of Malta and Cyprus, where he engaged in detailed discussion of local affairs. This was a sign of things to come. Elgin later complained that the tour had originally been intended as ‘a purely sporting and private expedition – & I really don’t know how it drifted into so essentially an official progress’. Churchill began to spew forth missives making proposals which Elgin thought hopelessly impractical.126 An early example was a letter from Cyprus to Sir Francis Hopwood, Permanent Secretary at the Colonial Office. Churchill argued that the island’s majority population’s aspirations to unity with Greece – ‘Enosis’ – might be countered through ambitious schemes of economic development. Churchill expressed concern for the island’s minority Muslim population, ‘who have always behaved so well to us & to whom we have given so many pledges’, but also looked forward to a time ‘when the Moslem minority has been more or less painlessly submerged or extinguished’, presumably through intermarriage and cultural assimilation.127 From Cyprus he travelled to Aden and then Somaliland, where he spent several days, before sailing to Mombasa in the East African Protectorate (later the Crown Colony of Kenya). He journeyed onwards to Uganda and thence to Cairo via Sudan. In Uganda, in the absence of train or steamboat, he went on safari; his party of ten was accompanied by between three and four hundred African porters. Edward Marsh, who was himself writing about the trip for the Manchester Guardian, reported these arrangements to a friend, observing that ‘one can’t help feeling that it is a great personal convenience to belong to a dominant race’.128 A subsequent American visitor claimed that it was possible to trace Churchill’s route by the empty champagne and beer bottles he had left by the side of the trail.129

  In addition to letters and memoranda, he also produced articles for Strand magazine (later published in book form as My African Journey) for which he was paid handsomely. H. Hesketh Bell, the Governor of Uganda, recorded that Churchill kept him awake one night by dictating to a clerk while he was in the bath.130 The time spent on politics and journalism did not mean that sport was neglected altogether. Churchill reported to his mother that in one day’s hunting he killed ‘1 zebra, 1 wildebeeste, 2 hartebeeste, 1 gazelle, [and] 1 bustard (a giant bird)’. A couple of days later he helped kill two rhinos; and a lion was bagged, although not by him.131 He addressed gatherings of African leaders who were clad in traditional attire. According to the Governor of Kenya’s official report:

  To all these assemblies of chiefs short suitable speeches were delivered, thanking them for the welcome he had accorded him, impressing upon them the advantage of working and developing their lands, and the benefits they would receive by contact with white men from whom they would learn many arts of which they were ignorant, and assuring them of the pleasure with which he had heard that they had settled down quietly under the aegis of the Government, and of the fact that the lands which had been allotted to them would be theirs for ever, to be enjoyed by them and their children’s children so long as they lived at amity with the Government.132

  These promises about security of land tenure were doubtless well meant but they were, as time would show, completely worthless. Over the years, and with the collusion of the authorities, the settlers were to use unfair means to dispossess Africans wherever they could. The resultant land hunger would be a major cause of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s.

  The evidence permits us to catch only the barest glimpses of the impression that Churchill made on ordinary Africans, mediated through the eyes of the whites. According to a woman settler in Uganda, writing in the Daily Graphic, ‘One of my “boys” wanted to know if this white man is the King’s brother. I explained by saying that he was a big chief. He replied: “He must be a Saza chief,” which means the chief of a whole county.’133 Hesketh Bell, introducing Churchill to a gathering of chiefs at Kampala, tried to give a simple explanation of the position of the Colonial Under-Secretary in relation to the King and the Empire. The young Bagandan who translated simplified things further, saying that Churchill was the ‘toto’ of one of the King’s servants. According to Bell, ‘The amusing part of this matter is that, in Uganda, a toto is the small black urchin which a cook or other servant pays to help him in his job and who is usually remunerated by pickings from the master’s table.’134

  The views of the settlers themselves can be traced much more easily. For these people, oppressed by the heat and perhaps bored and frustrated with colonial life, Churchill’s visit was a big event. According to the Star of East Africa, ‘Practically all European Nairobi’ turned out to meet him at the station, ‘from the lordly official strutting it proud
ly in his uniform’ to the humble worker. They felt that his arrival might signify ‘the beginning of a new epoch’, presumably hoping that the London government would now take a greater interest in their doings and welfare.135 He met deputations tirelessly even though he thought many of their complaints trivial; he blamed their vexatiousness partly on the recent influx of ‘a vy low class of S. African’.136 But although he seems to have won the settlers over at the personal level, many of them were deeply suspicious of the Liberal government, with its element ‘which always sticks up for the “poor native” ’, and wondered if he could have real influence over its doings.137 The Star of East Africa declared that ‘Mr Churchill has to be considered – and with sympathetic insight it may be divined that he considers himself – as an able, energetic statesman struggling with a fate too strong for him.’138 He had clearly succeeded, without saying very much that was concrete, in conveying a sense that he understood the settlers’ aspirations. This was a notable contrast with his reputation in South Africa.