by Richard Toye
In October there was a further general election, which the Conservatives won by a landslide. Churchill won a seat at Epping, standing nominally as a ‘Constitutionalist’ but with the support of Tory Central Office. To everyone’s surprise, Baldwin, back in Downing Street, made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Baldwin certainly recognized Churchill’s ability, but there may have been deeper calculations. Not only would the appointment cement Churchill’s separation from the still-dangerous figure of Lloyd George, it could be seen as a public token of the Conservatives’ broad acceptance of the free-trade status quo. Baldwin also appointed Churchill’s friend Lord Birkenhead (formerly F. E. Smith), another former Coalitionist, as Secretary of State for India. W. L. Mackenzie King noted that Baldwin had earlier described Lloyd George, Birkenhead and Churchill privately as ‘the three most dangerous men in the Empire’, but that now he had taken two of them to his breast.15
Churchill had contrasted Labour ministers’ desire for good relations with Soviet Russia with the ‘frigid repulsion’ they supposedly offered to Britain’s Dominions.16 Yet as Chancellor he himself was to meet strong criticism from within his own party for his alleged neglect of the Empire. His chief detractor was Leo Amery, who had strongly opposed his Abbey candidacy and was now Colonial Secretary. (‘Though I like him infinitely better than Winston Churchill, for instance, I haven’t the same sense of swift power’, Gertrude Bell wrote of Amery when he visited Baghdad in 1925. ‘On the other hand, I have a sense of great sympathy and consideration and of an earnest desire to do the best thing possible, if only he knew what it was.’)17 A year into the life of the government, Amery recorded in his diary a talk with Baldwin, ‘my chief object being to make him understand that we shall get no progress on any Imperial development question unless he can make Winston definitely understand that it is his duty not simply to defend the Treasury point of view in these matters which is congenitally Little England but to override them’.18
Baldwin must have come to dread Amery’s long letters of protest about Churchill, not to mention the two men’s arguments in Cabinet. The issues were often relatively trivial ones, such as the budget of the Empire Marketing Board, spending to encourage emigration, or the question of who would pay for Imperial War Graves.19 But the basic complaint was always the same. To Amery, Churchill was ‘a brilliant talker and military strategist who is frankly incapable of understanding finance or the meaning of Empire development, and is anyhow steeped in free-trade prejudice’.20 The Chancellor, he believed, was in thrall to his cheese-paring officials, whereas to Churchill Amery was excessively open-handed when it came to disposing of government money. ‘I cannot understand why the idea of keeping Palestine in a dole-fed condition at the expense of our taxpayers attracts you’, he told him on one occasion.21 The Prime Minister never lent Amery the support he wanted. ‘Whether on the side of Empire development or of domestic protection Baldwin allowed Churchill to paralyse all our actions’, Amery told J. C. Smuts after the fall of the government. ‘For me it has been a very trying five years’.22
Was there any real foundation for Amery’s relentless moaning? It was certainly true that Churchill formed a barrier to any substantive departure from free-trade principles – and Amery was not the only Conservative who thought him doctrinaire – but any such move would at any rate have been very difficult without a further general election to validate it.23 It was also true that he was no great enthusiast for schemes such as state-subsidized emigration from Britain to her overseas territories, which appealed to some imperialists. ‘All experience shows that if people are asked by the Government to emigrate they make a favour of everything and grouse at all the inevitable hardships of life’, he observed. ‘Having been favoured far above the rest of the population in public money they become almost invariably discontented and beseech the Government for further aid.’24 Nevertheless, he was not an absolute slave to Treasury orthodoxy. In 1925 Amery proposed a £10-million government-guaranteed loan to support the development of transport in East Africa – exactly the sort of thing that had appealed to Churchill in pre-war days. Churchill did agree to the principle, to the discomfort of his own officials. Yet he also backed his civil servants in their insistence on tight controls on how the money was spent, as against the free hand demanded by Amery, whose big vision was not matched by a firm grasp of financial details.25 This was the kind of Whitehall battle the Treasury was bound to win, and Amery would almost certainly have been denouncing its supposed short-sightedness no matter who occupied 11 Downing Street.
There was an imperial dimension to one of Churchill’s most controversial decisions as Chancellor: the return of the pound to the gold standard in 1925, arguably at the cost of increasing unemployment. (Tying sterling to the dollar at the high fixed rate of of 4.86 to the pound made it harder for Britain to export.) When he made the announcement he pointed out that Canada was already on gold, and that the other Dominions would now join with Britain in the new arrangements. The establishment of a uniform standard of exchange across such a wide area would help revive international and inter-imperial trade, he argued.26 However, homeland concerns were Churchill’s primary focus during this period. Unlike Amery, he did not see Empire development (and the stimulus that it might give to British exports) as a major solution to the problem of the dole queues. Rather, he put most of his faith in balanced budgets and ‘sound money’, coupled with the reform of taxation and local government finance. He had not abandoned social reform; by extending the system of old-age pensions he made a conscious effort to grasp for the Tories the legacy of the pre-1914 ‘New Liberalism’.27 There was little if any talk now, though, of using social policy to strengthen ‘the British race’. The provision of social services, it seemed, no longer had to be justified as an imperial benefit. It is equally notable that, during the General Strike of 1926, Churchill saw no need to colour his denunciations of the unions with explicit warnings about the danger posed to the Empire. These absences may have been in line with the concerns of the British people – if we assume, that is, that after the upheavals of the Great War, they were increasingly preoccupied with the domestic over the foreign and imperial.28 Yet in the 1930s Churchill reverted to the Empire as an issue and stuck with it well beyond the point of political profitability. So we cannot say that his interest in imperial questions simply ebbed and flowed with the spirit of the times.
Instead, we may suggest simply that, during the later 1920s, Churchill found no great imperial question to seize upon and make his own. The power of the Empire may have been strained but, while the Conservative government lasted, it faced no single, dominating threat. Indeed, it seemed to some that it was moving towards a new, happy era. The Imperial Conference of 1926 accepted the so-called ‘Balfour Definition’, which recognized the Dominions as ‘autonomous Communities within the British Empire’ while noting that for the time being much responsibility for their defence and foreign policy would continue to rest with Britain.29 (The definition passed formally into law with the 1931 Statute of Westminster.) This was a mere acknowledgement of reality, and although Churchill may not have liked it much he accepted it with good grace in public at the time. ‘The Age of Control is gone, the Age of Comprehension has begun’, he declared. ‘The Constitution of the British Empire depends now and henceforward solely upon good sense, good will, and loyalty to the Imperial Crown.’30
II
The era of control remained in place, of course, in India, the colonies and other dependent territories. But, by the end of the decade, India too seemed to be at a crossroads, as nationalist militancy there increased and British control weakened. In December 1928, against a backdrop of unrest, and in the face of pressure from radicals, Gandhi moved a compromise resolution at the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress. It said that, if Britain did not grant independence within a year, a new campaign of non-violent resistance should be launched. Remarkably, Baldwin seemed to think that Churchill might be the man to deal with the problem. The Prime Minist
er was planning an election in mid-1929, expected to win it, and thought that afterwards he might move Churchill to the India Office. He told the Viceroy, Lord Irwin (the former Edward Wood), that Churchill ‘was very good all through the Irish trouble: he has imagination, courage: he is an imperialist; he is a liberal. BUT – we all know the risk. Should it be taken?’31 Irwin wrote back saying rather delicately that he thought not. Citing Churchill’s attitude to Indians in Kenya as an unhappy precedent, he told the Prime Minister that, ‘if I thought that Winston would really be interested, & would really be Liberal minded, about India, I might be different: but I can’t bring myself to believe that this is constitutionally likely’.32 At some stage the Prime Minister personally mentioned the idea to Churchill, who years afterwards recalled: ‘Mr Baldwin seemed to feel that as I had carried the Transvaal Constitution through the House in 1906, and the Irish Free State Constitution in 1920, it would be in general harmony with my sentiments and my record to preside over a third great measure of self-government for another part of the Empire.’ He added laconically, ‘I was not attracted by this plan.’33
In the event, the Conservatives lost the election and Baldwin’s resolve was never put to the test. (Labour formed another minority administration.) The discussion illustrates, though, that even at this comparatively late date Churchill’s reputation on imperial issues was by no means set in stone. Irwin thought him too vigorous an imperialist, Baldwin thought him a liberal, and Amery (who was intriguing to get him moved from the Treasury) thought that he was ‘definitely hostile to the Empire’.34 These three prominent Conservatives could all cite different parts of his record in support of their opinions. Given Churchill’s own comments, we can guess that he would have recognized Irwin’s portrait of him as closest to the truth, and would have made no apology for it. Nonetheless, it was not until the Conservatives went once more into opposition that he nailed his trousers firmly to the diehard mast.35
Shortly after the election the Labour government recalled Lord Lloyd, Britain’s High Commissioner in Cairo, and forced him to resign. Lloyd, like Churchill, felt that the granting of self-government to Egypt had been a mistake, and over the previous years his efforts to preserve British influence by browbeating its rulers had annoyed Conservative Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain. Churchill thought Lloyd was being punished for his failure to accept Labour’s policy of ‘sloppy surrender and retreat’.36 However, Baldwin did not think this was a good issue on which to attack the government, as to do so might drive the Liberals into its arms. Churchill insisted on defending Lloyd but recalled that when he did so ‘it was evident I was almost alone in the House. [. . .] So far as I could see, Mr Baldwin felt that the times were too far gone for any robust assertion of British Imperial greatness’.37 It was the start of a wider breach between the two men.
In August, Churchill departed for a lengthy tour of North America. During the Canadian leg he met Mackenzie King, who noted that he ‘made a very good speech [. . .] closing with a very fine & very true peroration re “united we stand, divided we fall” re British Empire’.38 At the end of October, a few days before Churchill’s return to Britain, Baldwin urged the Shadow Cabinet to accept a bipartisan policy on India. The Tories should back Labour’s plan to offer eventual Dominion status, he urged, at the same time arguing that this would not involve going beyond previous British pledges. A few days later Irwin formally announced that the government saw Dominion status as ‘the natural issue [i.e. result] of India’s constitutional progress’.39 Baldwin then backed this line in the Commons, but many of his own MPs looked on in silent contempt. One former minister, Samuel Hoare, told Irwin, ‘Throughout the debate Winston was almost demented with fury and since the debate has scarcely spoken to anyone.’40
In mid-November Churchill broke cover with an article in the staunchly imperialist Daily Mail. He did not criticize Baldwin or Irwin directly. Rather, he warned that nationalists were interpreting the Irwin declaration as a promise of Dominion status in the near future. This, he wrote, was not practical: it might be desirable as an ultimate object but the journey towards it would have to be ‘immense’. Hinduism was a particular object of his criticism:
Dominion status can certainly not be attained by a community which brands and treats sixty millions of its members, fellow human beings, toiling at their side, as ‘Untouchables’, whose approach is an affront and whose very presence is pollution. Dominion status cannot be attained while India is a prey to fierce racial and religious dissensions and when the withdrawal of British protection would mean the immediate resumption of mediaeval wars. It cannot be attained while the political classes in India represent only an insignificant fraction of the three hundred and fifty millions for whose welfare we are responsible.41
Over the following years he would add to these arguments, but his fundamental message remained consistent: India was not a nation but a ‘geographical abstraction’,42 home to multitudes of competing races and religions. Only the rule of disinterested white officials, ‘quite impartial between race and race’, could hold the ring between them.43 (He claimed that the deadly Hindu–Muslim riots of 1931 were the result of the belief that the British were about to leave the country.) Britain had brought enormous material and social benefits to the toiling Indian masses; these would be horribly jeopardized were she to depart, as would the economic welfare of Britain as a self-governing India closed its markets. Gandhi’s financial backers, the wealthy Indian mill-owners, were hoping to benefit from this at the expense of both the British and the Indian masses. Britain, for its part, had no desire to exploit India, he claimed; the existing relationship was one of mutual benefit, although the British extracted ‘only a fraction of the blessings’ that the Indians got.44
He also came to argue – and this was one of the most compelling parts of his case – that the British government’s proposed reforms were excessively complicated and would not in fact satisfy nationalist opinion. Once they were granted, the demand for full independence would inevitably follow. The obvious counter-argument to this was that the very little reform he himself was prepared to grant would satisfy the nationalists even less. Churchill believed, though, that the British should ignore demands for political change and concentrate instead on improving the well-being of the population. The ‘plain assertion of the resolve of Parliament to govern and to guide the destinies of the Indian people in faithful loyalty to Indian interests’ could bring the existing turmoil to an end.45 His overarching belief was that British ‘abdication’ in India would be fatal to the moral authority and the concrete power of the Empire as whole. This was linked to events in Europe and elsewhere and his growing sense that a global crisis of apocalyptic proportions was approaching. ‘In my view England is now beginning a new period of struggle and fighting for its life, and the crux of it will be not only the retention of India but a much stronger assertion of commercial rights’, he wrote in 1933. ‘As long as we are sure that we press no claim on India which is not in their real interest we are justified in using our undoubted power for their welfare and for our own.’46
To what extent were such views consistent with those that Churchill had expressed prior to 1929? Critics liked to cite his 1920 Amritsar speech – his most substantive previous post-war comment on India – in order to imply that his views had changed.47 Churchill responded that he stuck by what he had then said: he abhorred the shooting of unarmed people, ‘and nothing is less necessary for the re-establishment of British authority in India’.48 Opponents also pointed out that he had been a member of the government in 1919 when Edwin Montagu’s Government of India Act was passed. (The Act foresaw ‘the progressive realisation of responsible government in British India’.) Churchill’s response to this was that he had had little direct responsibility for the legislation and that Montagu had at any rate represented it ‘as a mere experiment which could be arrested or reversed at any time’.49 It is worth noting that Churchill did tell Montagu, in October 1921, that ‘you are getting i
nto rather deep water with the Dominion of India idea’;50 and he provoked him by saying that Gandhi ‘ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back’.51 In private he attributed the stiffening of his attitude to the failure of Montagu’s reforms to assuage the nationalists. He told a conference of ministers in 1922 that he believed that ‘opinion would change soon as to the expediency of granting democratic institutions to backward races which had no capacity for self-government’.52
Yet, at the 1921 Imperial Conference, Churchill himself gave a significant hostage to fortune. He said, at a dinner to honour the Dominion premiers and the Indian representatives, that the British ‘looked forward confidently to the days when the Indian government and people would have assumed fully and completely their Dominion status’. Irwin later took relish in drawing attention to this speech, and Churchill had great difficulty explaining it away.53 The true explanation for it is to be found in a letter from Neville Chamberlain describing Churchill’s behaviour at the dinner and the reaction to it of one of the Indian delegates, Srinivasi Sastri. According to Chamberlain, Churchill in his speech
