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

by Richard Toye

  Lloyd George, promoted to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, had been Churchill’s predecessor as President of the Board of Trade. Following such a dynamic minister was a tough act, but Churchill pulled it off, although he alienated some colleagues who deplored his disruptive influence in Cabinet.9 His social reform achievements were impressive. He introduced legislation to enforce minimum wages in the ‘sweated’ trades and to create labour exchanges to help the workless find jobs. He also devised plans (in collaboration with Lloyd George) for state-sponsored National Insurance to protect workers against unemployment and sickness. Since the start of his public life his concern with social welfare had been entangled with fears that the effects of poverty could damage the Empire and its reputation. In My African Journey he quoted a settler as saying, ‘It would destroy the respect of the native for the white man, if he saw what miserable people we have got at home.’10 In 1909 Lloyd George introduced a radical budget which drastically increased the scope of taxation in order to help fund welfare commitments and to meet the cost of naval competition with Germany. This provoked an epic battle between the government and the Conservative-dominated House of Lords which – after two Liberal general election victories during 1910 – ended with the curtailment of the Lords’ rights to block legislation. In one of his speeches defending the budget, notable for its threat to ‘smash to pieces’ the Lords’ veto, Churchill spoke of his anxiety at the coexistence ‘of extreme wealth and of extreme want’. The greatest peril to the British Empire and the British people, he suggested, did not lie in Europe, India, or the colonies. Rather it lay in domestic social evils, including economic insecurity and the ‘physical degeneration’ consequent on poverty. The danger was ‘here in our midst, close at home, close at hand, in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay.’11 And when he spoke at a meeting in support of a well-known charity, Dr Barnardo’s Homes for children, he ‘said in the case of the young they should be moved not only by compassion, but by the instinct of national self-preservation’.12

  We might wonder if such phrases were mere rhetorical flourishes to help justify reforms that Churchill favoured for other, non-imperial reasons. We should not discount the possibility that he entertained genuine altruistic feelings towards the poor, aside from his fears about the impact that squalor and degradation might have on the Empire. (At the same time, it is well worth noting that social legislation was a potential way for the government to outflank the Conservatives and the nascent Labour Party, and for Churchill himself to win popularity in the dawning age of mass politics.) Churchill, however, would probably have rejected the very idea of a distinction between altruism and imperialism, which for him were two sides of the same coin. In his view the Empire itself was good for the British people, morally as well as materially. Strengthening its sinews via social reform was in this analysis entirely compatible with a compassionate response to the problems of those he called ‘the left-out millions’.13 There was, however, a sinister aspect to the problem. In 1910, the Prime Minister moved Churchill to the Home Office, where he took a strong interest, shared by many other contemporaries, in the pseudo-science of eugenics. He believed that the mentally and physically defective should be sterilized, in part for national-imperial reasons. He told Asquith: ‘I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a very terrible danger to the race.’14

  It was only when he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in the autumn of 1911 that the Empire again came close to the forefront of Churchill’s activities. The following year Wilfrid Scawen Blunt observed in his diary that Churchill’s new connection with the Navy had ‘turned his mind back into an ultra Imperialist groove’.15 Nevertheless, a number of contemporaries questioned Churchill’s commitment to imperial defence cooperation during his Admiralty years – one political opponent accused him of gambling with the fate of the Empire16 – and some naval historians have also criticized him for this. Central to the issues at stake was the so-called ‘fleet unit’ concept, developed in response to the scare of 1909 provoked by German naval expansion. The Dominions had not previously had their own navies, and were reliant on the British fleet for protection. The Admiralty’s new proposal was that the Dominions should fund fleet units, on a uniform pattern, which would be independent during peacetime but which would be subject to imperial control if war broke out. The Canadians were lukewarm about the plan and no help was forthcoming from South Africa, but Australia and New Zealand were cooperative. The key point about the new fleet was that it should stay in the Pacific permanently regardless of developments elsewhere. When still Home Secretary in 1910–11, however, Churchill resisted the idea that ships paid for by the Dominions should be despatched to the Pacific. He demanded that they be retained in the North Sea instead.17

  His order of priorities remained the same when he took over the Admiralty himself. Prior to his move he had championed the cause of naval economy, but early in 1912 Germany promulgated a new naval law that compelled him to abandon any such thoughts. Even before he learnt the full extent of the German plans, though, he was insisting on the return of all possible ships from Australian waters and the retention of New Zealand’s sole Dreadnought-class ship in the vicinity of Britain.18 In a letter to Lewis Harcourt, the Colonial Secretary, he attacked the fleet unit scheme and declared that the ‘whole principle of local Navies is, of course, thoroughly vicious’.19 However, in public he expressed quite opposite views. In May 1912 he predicted that, given the increasing need for the British fleet in home waters, the main naval development of the next ten years would be ‘the growth of effective naval forces in the great Dominions overseas’. These were to be under full Dominion control in peacetime. This would allow ‘the true division of labour between the Mother Country and her daughter States, which is that we should maintain sea supremacy against all comers at the decisive point, and that they should guard and patrol all the rest of the British Empire’.20 G. R. Parkin, the imperial educationalist who had inspired Churchill in his youth, stated his approval, and the response from the Dominions was generally favourable.21 Soon afterwards the Sydney Morning Herald declared, ‘One of the most hopeful signs of the times is the success with which Mr Churchill has grouped the whole nation, indeed, the whole Empire behind his naval policy.’22

  Yet that apparent unity was on the basis of a policy with which Churchill did not actually agree. He was, of course, genuinely eager for the Dominions to make a financial contribution, but he wanted Britain to retain of control any ships they might contribute. In the summer Robert Borden, the recently elected Conservative Prime Minister of Canada, arrived in London for consultations. A convinced imperialist, he was committed to a Canadian ‘emergency contribution’ to Empire naval defence, provided that a crisis really did exist.23 This was excellent news for Churchill, who had to contend both with Liberal supporters of economy and with Tories who alleged that the government was neglecting Britain’s defences. However, the idea of Canada giving ships to the British rather than creating its own section of an imperial navy concept was disconcerting to the Australians, because it seemed to be at odds with the fleet unit idea, which they were already trying to put into effect.24 Churchill gave Borden the required assurance that the situation was severe enough to require ‘special measures’ by Canada in the immediate future; the precise nature of these was not made public until after Borden had returned to his own country and consulted his colleagues.25

  At the end of the year Borden announced plans to pay for three dreadnoughts, the future maintenance costs of which would fall on the British Treasury. This thrust him into a political storm, as Canadian opinion was deeply divided. Quebecois nationalists wanted to contribute nothing to imperial defence. The opposition Liberals were sceptica
l that an emergency really existed while preferring, if money was to be spent, that it should be used to develop a Canadian navy. Borden’s scheme was denounced as ‘a policy of tribute’.26 Churchill’s name was also dragged into the debate. The Ottawa Free Press, observing the shift from his earlier endorsement of local naval units, described him as ‘a really clever political acrobat’ and suggested he was trying to ‘drag the Dominions into the maelstrom of barbaric jingoism with which Europe is afflicted’.27 W. L. Mackenzie King, who had lost his parliamentary seat in the Liberal defeat the year before, made a speech casting doubt on the idea that an emergency existed. He quoted Churchill himself as saying that there was no need for panic or alarm.28 Building the ships themselves in Canada would have helped appease opinion there, but Churchill presented Borden with arguments that this was impractical, given the ill-developed state of the Canadian shipbuilding industry.29 When the correspondence was made public, it was claimed that Churchill was branding Canadians as incapable of manufacturing. ‘He thinks we are all lumbermen or Red Indians’, declared one MP.30 Another said that whereas Lord North (Prime Minister of England at the time of the US War of Independence) had lost Britain her American colonies, ‘conceivably Mr Winston Churchill’s latest naval memorandum might lose to the Empire Canada and Australia. The people of Canada were disinclined to bow down before an Admiralty Lord.’31

  In March 1913, when Churchill presented the Admiralty’s annual spending plans, he proposed a new ‘imperial squadron’ to include any ships that Canada might provide. This would be based at Gibraltar, from which it would ‘cruise freely about the British Empire, visiting the various Dominions and showing itself ready to operate at any threatened point at Home or abroad’.32 This appeared to be a strong commitment to imperial defence, and Borden considered it an ‘inspiring proposal’.33 But to many in Australia and New Zealand, Churchill’s assurance that the squadron could beat any equivalent European force to any point in the Empire seemed to be beside the point. They were not afraid of any European force; rather, in spite of the Anglo-Japanese treaty of 1902, they were afraid of Japan. (There was often an unpleasant element to these fears: the following year Churchill’s friend Ian Hamilton spoke in Auckland of the dangers posed by the ‘hardworking, rice-eating, parsimonious “yellow” races’.)34 The Wellington Evening Post suggested that Churchill had drifted into ‘forgetfulness of the Pacific’.35 Furthermore, the imperial squadron idea marked a clear if unstated rejection of the fleet unit concept. However, the new plan died in turn when Borden’s naval programme, which got through the Canadian House of Commons on the basis of a reduced majority, was emphatically rejected by the Liberal-dominated Senate. Borden did not risk a general election on the issue.36

  ‘Unfortunately’, declared The Times not long before the outbreak of World War I, ‘the disposition of our naval authorities, from Mr Churchill downwards, has been rather to dismiss with an impatient wave of the hand the fears of Australia and New Zealand than to reassure them by making more than adequate provision for their safety.’37 One historian has commented, ‘Churchill, who during much of his career gloried in the strength and gifts of the British Empire, was as first lord so bent on the defense of the British Isles that he was indifferent to the obligations of imperial co-operation, one of the abiding sources of the empire’s strength.’38 It is certainly true that he was high-handed, failing to fulfil the pledges made by his predecessor in 1909: the Australians acquired the ships for their fleet unit only to find that the British did not live up to the spirit of the bargain. (Churchill blithely dismissed Australian concerns, but there was outrage in Canberra.)39 It is also true that Churchill’s primary focus was on the defence of Britain. It is by no means clear, though, that this judgement was strategically unsound. In 1914–18 the main fleet operations were largely restricted to the North Sea, and the abandonment of the fleet unit plan led to no great cataclysm. (Even had it been implemented the Admiralty could still have disposed of the ships as it wished during wartime.) Nevertheless, these pre-war developments do lend some weight to the argument that for Churchill it was England, and not the wider Empire, that was ‘the starting point and the ultimate object of policy’.40 They also had a wider significance. To quote the Wellington Evening Post again: ‘It becomes increasingly clear that if we do not ourselves attend to what is primarily our own business, we cannot expect our friends on the other side of the world to do it for us.’41 This was a lesson that the Australasians would have to learn again, rather painfully, during World War II.

  The rejection of the Borden plan increased the pressure on Churchill at a time when he was casting around for ways to alleviate Britain’s financial burden. At the very end of 1913 Borden informed him that he would not try again to push the proposals through the Senate, claiming that ‘Imperial interests will be materially prejudiced by renewed rejection’.42 This came at a bad moment for Churchill, who was by now battling with Lloyd George over his large-scale spending plans for 1914. The Chancellor’s demands for economy were backed by a number of other ministers as well as by the Liberal press. C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, was one who believed that the ‘great change for the better in our relations with Germany’ had rendered the expenditure unnecessary.43 For a time, it looked as though either Churchill or Lloyd George might have to resign, but in the end the former got the bulk of what he wanted in return for some symbolic concessions. Churchill emerged from the fight politically strengthened, and it might have been thought, given his known enthusiasm for all things military, that the outbreak of war in August would have bolstered his position further. Yet in fact his career was to plunge into free fall within the space of months.

  II

  The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 triggered an ultimatum from Austria-Hungary to Serbia that soon resulted in world war. From his position at the Admiralty, Churchill, enthusiastic for the conflict, seemed poised to profit from it politically by enhancing his reputation as a man of action. This was not to be: the implosion of his political hopes was forever to be associated with the fiasco of Gallipoli.

  The origins of the disaster were complex. On the Western Front, the rival armies quickly fought each other to a stalemate. By the start of 1915, British politicians and officials, Churchill included, had begun to look for ways to break the deadlock. The plan that emerged was for an attempt to drive a naval force through the Dardanelles – the narrow stretch of water that separates Asia from Europe – and thus, it was hoped, knock Turkey out of the war. It was not originally Churchill’s idea, nor, by any means, did he bear sole responsibility for the decision to put it into action. But he could not, in the end, evade the blame. In spite of his misgivings about the idea of a purely naval assault – and the initial failure to deploy the army on land in support was indeed a catastrophic error – he gave it the go-ahead. In March the naval action met severe setbacks and was suspended; it was decided, after all, to deploy troops on the Gallipoli peninsula (on the eastern side of the straits). They were to be commanded by Ian Hamilton, still in fine form at the age of sixty-two, but perhaps overconfident in the face of tough odds. When the landings did at last take place, on 25 April, they were botched. The French and British forces failed to displace the outnumbered Turks, and by the end of the first day they had barely established themselves on the fringes of the peninsula. Nor was there any major breakthrough over the next weeks, although Churchill heaped praise on ‘the brilliant and memorable achievement of the Australian and New Zealand troops at the Dardanelles’.44 The soldiers of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps – the ANZACs – were brave but poorly trained. Throughout the course of the campaign, the combined British forces suffered 36,000 dead or missing and the French around 11,000.45 Although it is the appalling ANZAC losses that dominate the popular memory, the sufferings of the rest, including Indian and Gurkha troops and men from the French Empire, should not be forgotten either.

  The failure at Gallipoli – which was not y
et apparent to the public – was not the immediate cause of Churchill’s downfall. In mid-May, Admiral Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord, suddenly resigned after falling out with Churchill over the question of naval reinforcements for the Dardanelles. It was the aged and highly eccentric Fisher who was unreasonable, but the crisis destroyed confidence in Churchill’s administration of the Admiralty. Indeed, Churchill himself had insisted on recalling Fisher from retirement in 1914. Asquith was simultaneously faced with press revelations about the shortage of shells faced by the army on the Western Front. The combination of pressures forced him to act to defuse Opposition criticism by forming a coalition government. For the Conservatives, an essential condition of joining was that Churchill be moved. When Asquith made clear to Churchill that he was to leave the Admiralty, he asked if he would prefer to stay in the government in a different post or to take a military command in France. At this point, Lloyd George came into the room and said, ‘Why do you not send him to the Colonial Office? There is great work to be done there.’ Churchill demurred, and we may deduce that he saw the job, in wartime, as a political backwater, and that he thought he could hold out for something better.46 Within days, though, he was reduced to pleading with the Prime Minister for ‘any office – the lowest if you like – that you care to offer me’.47 In the end he was given a junior Cabinet role as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a position lacking defined departmental responsibilities. He vented his anger by denouncing Lloyd George, whom he felt had not done enough to protect his position, but the latter denied this. He swore that he had ‘done all he possibly could – has proposed & supported Winston for Colonies, India [Office], & Viceroyalty of India all in turn and has loyally stood by him’.48 In terms of perceptions of Churchill at this time, it is telling that, even some years after he had moved on from the Colonial Office, Lloyd George’s proposed roles for him were all related to the Empire. Churchill’s own failure to show any interest in these suggestions may indicate that he was reluctant to be pigeonholed in this way.