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

by Richard Toye

  Yet even if so, his public rhetoric retained a strong imperial dimension. In a major speech in his Dundee constituency in June he said that the Allies were only a few miles from victory at the Dardanelles, ‘a victory such as the war had not yet seen’. He spoke boldly and optimistically of the Empire’s role in the war:

  The loyalty of our Dominions and Colonies vindicates our civilization, and the hate of our enemies proves the effectiveness of our warfare. (Cheers.) [. . .] See Australia and New Zealand smiting down in the last and finest crusade the combined barbarism of Prussia and Turkey. (Cheers.) General Louis Botha holding South Africa for the King. (Cheers.) See Canada defending to the death the last few miles of shattered Belgium. Look further, and, across the smoke and carnage of the immense battlefield, look forward to the vision of a united British Empire on the calm background of a liberated Europe.49

  If the speech was read by any of the soldiers at Gallipoli it may have rung rather hollow. The journalist H. W. Nevinson, who arrived there in July, found ‘depression and loss of heart, bitter criticism of G.H.Q. [General Headquarters], and savage rage against Mr Winston Churchill, who “ought to be publicly hanged” for having suggested the campaign’.50 In private, Churchill admitted some culpability. When Wilfrid Scawen Blunt visited him in August he found him painting – a new hobby which helped alleviate his gloom. ‘There is more blood than paint upon these hands’, Churchill said, at the same time making ‘a queer little tragic gesture pointing to his hands which he had smeared with his colours’.51 Two years later Blunt recorded that ‘Winston said I had been right when I told him Providence had punished him for his wickedness and performed a miracle by enabling the Turks to defeat the whole power of the British Empire by sea and land.’52

  In the autumn of 1915 the true state of affairs at Gallipoli started to filter back to the British and Empire publics. In September the London representative of the Sydney Sun wrote that Churchill, in his predictions of victory, had been ‘talking hot air. The ferment of his own imagination betrayed him into gross and inexcusable exaggeration.’53 In October, as the extent of the failure became clear, Hamilton was recalled from his command; he never again saw active service, although he lived on until 1947. In November Churchill discovered that he himself was to be excluded from the government’s new War Committee. As he would now have no part to play in the higher direction of the war, he determined to resign. Amongst the gleeful comments in the German press was the suggestion that the King reward his services by making him Earl of Gallipoli.54 A few days after his resignation statement the Cabinet decided to withdraw British forces there. There was a final irony: after all the disasters, the evacuation, completed in January 1916, was carried out brilliantly.

  What was Churchill to do next? At first he sought the command of the British forces battling the Germans in East Africa.55 When this idea came to nothing he joined the army in France, crossing the Channel on 18 November. He soon acclimatized himself to trench warfare, showing himself ‘very keen and very enthusiastic’ in spite of the cold, the dirt, the discomfort, and the unpalatable rations.56 Soon he was appointed to the command of a battalion which in January 1916 took up position at Ploegsteert (‘Plug Street’), in Belgium. He acquitted himself well, winning the respect of his men, but he was soon hankering to return to politics. After he visited London briefly on leave, Lloyd George noted: ‘He is anxious to come back. Sick of the trenches. He ought never to have gone there.’57 Churchill hoped that the Cabinet’s divisions over conscription would facilitate his emergence as a leading critic of the government, but Asquith, as so often, avoided a major split through adroit manoeuvring. Although the opportunity Churchill hoped for did not arise, he decided to go back to Westminster anyhow, leaving his battalion for the last time in May.

  Asquith, in spite of his short-term astuteness in political tactics, was facing growing concern about deficiencies in the conduct of the war. At the end of 1916 the long-suppressed tensions erupted into a first-rate crisis. This resulted in Lloyd George’s emergence as Prime Minister of a new coalition, at the cost of a fatal schism in the Liberal Party between his followers and Asquith’s. Churchill had hoped, even expected, to be in the new government; but his hopes were dashed owing to Tory opposition. Over the next months right-wing hostility to Churchill did not die away – the Sunday Times declared that his appointment to the Cabinet would be ‘a grave danger to the Administration and to the Empire as a whole’ – but Lloyd George’s political strength was growing.58 In March 1917 J. C. Smuts arrived in Britain to represent South Africa at the Imperial War Conference, having previously held the command in East Africa that had been denied to Churchill. Smuts’s transition from Boer rebel to British imperial statesman was now complete. He became such a trusted adviser to the government that, in June, he was elevated to the Imperial War Cabinet. Shortly before that he wrote to Lloyd George advising him to ignore the (highly vocal) critics and give Churchill a job as head of the Air Board: ‘In spite of the strong party opposition to this appointment, I think you will do the country a real service by appointing a man of his calibre to this department’. Smuts – who had clearly overcome the scepticism he had himself felt in 1906 – also met with Churchill and urged him to accept the post if it was offered to him.59 In July, Lloyd George did give Churchill a job, as Minister of Munitions, albeit without a seat in the War Cabinet. There were howls of Tory protest, but they died down without causing much damage. Smuts wrote to Churchill with some wise, tactfully phrased advice about the importance of not making enemies amongst his colleagues: ‘Now that you are well in the saddle [. . .] you must not ride too far ahead of your more slow-going friends.’60 Churchill’s aunt, Lady Cornelia Wimborne, was rather more direct: ‘My advice is stick to munitions & don’t try and run the Govt!’61

  Although Churchill was never exactly an easy colleague, it must be said that he largely took the point on board. When introduced to his new officials by his predecessor, Christopher Addison, he tackled their suspicions of him head on. He stood for a moment surveying their distrustful faces. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘Dr Addison has said that whatever the Minister of Munitions may do he can never be popular. In that respect at least I start from scratch.’62 This unexpected self-deprecation quickly won the civil servants over, and during the next year and a half he built on this, proving himself an effective minister. Because he was focused on the technical task of turning out supplies of weapons and ammunition, he had little opportunity to influence grand questions of national or imperial policy. His public speeches did, however, give him the opportunity to discourse on the issue of Britain’s future place in a world that had been thrown into upheaval by catastrophic war. The entry of the United States into the conflict in 1917 was a factor likely to have profound consequences for the British Empire. Before the war, in the kind of language that others had also used, Churchill had predicted the future ‘unity of the English-speaking races’.63 Now he stressed that the longer that Britain and America fought together in a common cause, the more closely would ‘these two branches of the Anglo-Saxon world’ be drawn together; this, he claimed, was the logical climax of all previous English history. The resulting ‘comradeship and reconciliation’ of the USA with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand was to form ‘the mainstay of the future world when the war is over’.64 This can be read both as an attempt to reconcile his audience to the realities of growing US power and as an implicit acknowledgement that the British Empire could not long survive in the absence of America’s blessing. In the years ahead – especially from the 1930s onwards – he often deployed the concept of ‘the unity of the English-speaking peoples’, to American audiences as well as British ones, in the hope of securing that survival by winning them over to this ambitious geopolitical project.

  III

  After the armistice in November 1918, Lloyd George called an immediate general election. The result was a massive victory for the coalition. Lloyd George now gave Churchill the job of Secretary of State
for War and Air. It was no easy posting. During the war Britain had conquered new territories, notably in the Middle East, that would have to be absorbed into the Empire. At the same time there was continuing nationalist ferment in Ireland, and in India there were the first mass protests against the Raj. In Egypt, too, there was a major revolt against British rule. Thus, Britain’s worldwide military capacity was stretched to the limit just when pressure was emerging at home to reduce spending and when conscripted troops were demanding rapid demobilization. The Bolshevik triumph in Russia fuelled fears of revolution at home in Britain, which, although exaggerated, were given credence by major outbreaks of industrial unrest. It was the Bolshevik threat, in particular, that obsessed Churchill, and the question of British involvement in the Russian civil war dominated much of his period at the War Office. In April 1919 Lloyd George described him privately as ‘a dangerous man’ who had ‘Bolshevism on the brain’.65 Lloyd George himself had no love for the Bolsheviks but, together with the majority of the Cabinet, was not prepared to make an unlimited commitment in support of the opposing, counter-revolutionary ‘White’ forces. Churchill did not share the essentially pragmatic viewpoint of his colleagues on this issue as, in his eyes, they failed to recognize the severity of the issues at stake. He claimed that Lenin, Sinn Féin (the Irish republican party) and the Indian and Egyptian extremists were all linked in a joint effort to overthrow the Empire. ‘It is becoming increasingly clear that all these factions are in touch with one another, and that they are acting in concert’, he declared in a speech in 1920. ‘In fact there is developing a world-wide conspiracy against our country, designed to deprive us of our place in the world and to rob us of the fruits of victory.’66

  Churchill was himself capable of pragmatism, however, as his involvement with the Irish question was to demonstrate. Up until his entry into government in 1905, he had been an instinctive opponent of Home Rule. At the point that he became a minister it had been dormant as an issue for some time, but looked set to re-emerge; Churchill feared that if it did so it would put a great many people, himself included, ‘in an awful hole’.67 From 1910 onwards, when John Redmond’s moderate nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance of power in the House of Commons, the government was obliged to offer Home Rule as the price of its support. This provoked Unionist rage, but Churchill argued that the achievement of an Irish settlement would be ‘a boon and a blessing’ to the Empire and ‘a masterstroke of imperial policy’. He drew comparisons with the settlement that had been made with the Boers, and argued that a solution would increase trust between the self-governing Dominions and the motherland.68 Redmond reciprocated by saying that with the advent of Home Rule ‘every Irishman on the habitable globe will become a loyal citizen of and a loyal friend to the Empire’.69

  Ireland was, of course, an imperial question unlike any other, insofar as the country was represented directly at Westminster. This enhanced the intensity and bitterness of the debate. When Andrew Bonar Law, the new leader of the Conservative Party, spoke in support of the rebellious anti-Home Rule Protestants of Ulster, Churchill suggested Law’s arguments for non-compliance with the government’s will could be used to justify ‘every lawless or disruptive movement in any part of the Empire’.70 Churchill wrote to Redmond, ‘I do not believe there is any real feeling against Home Rule in the Tory Party apart from the Ulster question, but they hate the Government, are bitterly desirous of turning it out, and see in the resistance of Ulster an extra parliamentary force which they will not hesitate to use to the full.’71 Recognizing this, he and Lloyd George were amongst the first ministers to see that the Protestant-dominated northern counties might have to be excluded from the operation of the Home Rule Bill. Churchill’s notorious speech of March 1914 was widely seen by Unionists as an attempt to coerce Ulster into acceptance of Home Rule under threat of state violence. In fact, he was arguing that Ulster did deserve special treatment, in the form of the six-year exclusion from Home Rule that the government was now offering. In his view that offer removed all possible excuse for rebellion, which, he emphasized, would be met firmly. But, in the febrile atmosphere of the times, it is hardly surprising that his language was seen as provocative. He insisted that ‘there are things worse than bloodshed, even on extreme scale. An eclipse of the central Government of the British Empire would be worse.’72 He seemed to think that extremity of language would wake the populace up to the enormities of the situation and thus facilitate an accord between the two sides. Around this time he commented privately: ‘Public opinion had got to have a shock. [. . .] “A little red-blood had got to flow” & then public opinion would wake up & then—!’73

  Churchill’s tendency – whether he was dealing with nationalist or loyalist opinion – was to veer between the language of coercion and that of conciliation. This remained true over the following years. After the outbreak of war, Home Rule was put onto the statute book but with its operation suspended for the duration. The resulting nationalist frustration contributed to the Easter Rising of 1916, which was brutally suppressed by the British. (Churchill was out of office at the time and so was not implicated in the Cabinet’s misjudgements.) These events sounded the death knell of constitutionalist Redmondite nationalism and triggered the emergence of Sinn Féin as a major political force. In 1918 the party won 73 out of the 105 Irish seats, but its MPs declined to attend Westminster and established an alternative, illegal parliament (the Dáil Éireann) instead. In January 1919 the murder of two men of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) triggered the cut-throat and deadly Anglo-Irish War, or War of Independence. As War Secretary, Churchill put his faith in the RIC’s reserve force, the ‘Black and Tans’, which was responsible for indiscriminate shootings and burnings in reprisal for attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Churchill knew this – he may have been reminded of his experiences on the North-West Frontier of India – but he defended Black and Tan officers as ‘loyal and gallant’.74 He was confident of victory, asserting in a speech in October 1920 that the IRA’s terrorist tactics would not change the history of the British Empire: ‘We are going to break up this murder gang.’75

  That confidence, which was shared by most of Churchill’s colleagues, including Lloyd George, was soon eroded. The enemy’s guerrilla tactics could not be overcome, even by theoretically overwhelming force, and reprisals simply increased the local population’s resentment of the British. In July 1921, a few months after moving to the Colonial Office, Churchill privately ‘acknowledged the failure of the policy of force’.76 However, the Irish rebel leaders were also tiring of the war, and they now agreed a truce. In due course they agreed to negotiate on ‘how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire can best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations’.77 This was a euphemistic way of addressing the ultimate point of division between the two sides. Although the British were prepared to offer Ireland de facto independence they were insistent that this would be on the basis of Dominion status within the Empire. For Sinn Féin only full, formal independence would do.78

  Churchill was assigned to the ministerial team of the negotiators on the British side, although his centrality to the talks should not be overstated. One of the leading figures on the Irish side was Michael Collins, a young, dashing impresario of terror who had played a key role in Bloody Sunday – the murder of twelve British officers on 21 November 1920. Collins’s impressions of Churchill were not positive, as his contemporary notes reveal: ‘Outlook: political gain, nothing else. [. . .] Inclined to be bombastic. Full of ex-officer jingo or similar outlook. Don’t actually trust him.’79 Subsequently, relations between the two warmed up, albeit not perhaps to the extent depicted in the more romantic interpretations, but it is at any rate important not to focus on the personalities of the ‘great men’ involved to the exclusion of the issues at stake. The eight weeks of the negotiations were to lead to the creation of an Irish Free State, but there were major stumbling blocks on the way. The first o
f these was the right of the six counties comprising ‘Northern Ireland’ to opt out of Home Rule – a right that was exercised immediately – and the British demand that MPs in the new Southern parliament swear allegiance to the Crown. The former problem, the question of partition, may have been the more substantive, but the oath of loyalty was an emotive issue that struck at the heart of national identity. Churchill was present on 5 December 1921 when Lloyd George presented the Irish delegates with an ultimatum: either sign the treaty as it stood, partition and the oath of allegiance included, or face a renewal of the war. One of the Irish delegates, Erskine Childers, wrote that his ‘chief recollection of these inexpressibly miserable hours’ was of Churchill in evening dress walking up and down ‘with his loping stoop and long strides and a huge cigar like a bowsprit’.80 After some hours of hesitation, the Irish signed, with heavy hearts. Collins remarked that in doing so he was signing his own death warrant.81

  In his Commons defence of the treaty, Churchill maintained his imperial theme: ‘Every Colonial statesman will feel that if this succeeds, his task in his Dominion of bringing people closer and closer into the confederation of the British Empire will be eased and facilitated.’82 This kind of rhetoric was useful in the difficult task of selling the agreement to the government’s Conservative supporters. Yet the more Churchill and Lloyd George emphasized that a free Ireland would be tightly bound into the Empire, the more doubts were raised in Irish minds about whether such an Ireland would be free at all. This was seen during the debates about the treaty in the Dáil. Eamon De Valera, the Dáil’s President, had agreed to the negotiations but had stayed away from them himself; he now repudiated the outcome. He demanded, ‘does this assembly think the Irish people have changed so much within the past year or two that they now want to get into the British Empire after seven centuries of fighting?’83 Constance Markievicz, aristocrat and veteran of the Easter Rising, declared that she ‘would sooner die than give a declaration of fidelity to King George or the British Empire’. (Given that she had been sentenced to death for her part in the Rising – and then reprieved because she was a woman – these words carried some conviction.) She argued that ‘if we pledge ourselves to this oath we pledge our allegiance to this thing, whether you call it Empire or Commonwealth of Nations, that is treading down the people of Egypt and of India. [. . .] And mind you, England wants peace in Ireland to bring her troops over to India and Egypt.’84 Collins, by contrast, argued that the treaty gave Ireland scope to increase its freedom in the future. He pointed out that it defined Ireland as having the same constitutional status of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, which had real solid independence. ‘Judged by that touchstone, the relations between Ireland and Britain will have a certainty of freedom and equality which cannot be interfered with.’ As for those who quoted Lloyd George and Churchill’s interpretations of the document, ‘I say the quotation of those people is what marks the slave mind.’85