by Richard Toye
‘Winston was his unique self – ’ wrote one Tory observer, ‘& that self was magnificent, restrained but imaginative’ and, ‘toward the end, deeply moving’.44 Another (himself an ardent supporter of British rule) thought it ‘a good speech’ and ‘less violent than one might have expected’.45 Churchill’s colleagues, indeed, lived in some trepidation, constantly anticipating that his next speech would bring his ‘antediluvian’ opinions to the surface.46 Words like ‘scuttle’ and ‘squalid’ were his stock in trade, together with predictions of civil war.47 He tried, unconvincingly, to back-pedal his original acceptance of the 1942 Cripps Offer. He encouraged his backbenchers to attack the ‘cowardly abandonment of our duties’ in India.48 Yet in truth his engagement with the Indian issue in 1946–7 was somewhat intermittent.49 Furthermore, although he let off steam with violent outbursts in private, senior Tories generally heaved a sigh of relief after he spoke in the Commons. ‘On the whole Winston might have been worse’ is a typical comment from Amery’s diary at this time.50 It should also be noted that some Indians showed appreciation for Churchill’s approach. B. R. Ambedkar, who visited him at Chartwell, thanked him for ‘the kindness and courtesy you have shown me’ and for ‘the sympathy you have evinced for the cause of the Untouchables’.51
Ultimately, it was restraint that won out. In May 1947 Mountbatten returned to Britain with the news that Congress, and most likely Jinnah, would accept partition and Dominion status in return for a much accelerated transfer of power. He and Attlee met Churchill, Eden and Lord Salisbury (formerly Cranborne) and requested a pledge that the Tories would not try to delay the legislation to implement this. Having consulted other colleagues, Churchill sent a letter to the Prime Minister stating that the Conservative Party would not oppose the bill. What accounted for this remarkable decision? There were plenty of senior Conservatives who, fundamentally, agreed with Churchill over India, whatever their doubts about his methods of controversy. He was not, therefore, pressured into capitulation by more moderate colleagues. Primarily, it was a question of political tactics. The leadership as a whole, including Churchill, did not see much electoral advantage in the issue, preferring to focus its energies on domestic questions. Indian leaders’ acceptance of Dominion status provided the Tories with a fig leaf to cover their retreat.52 Churchill was therefore angered when he learnt that the legislation was to be called the ‘Indian Independence Bill’, although in fact he swallowed even this.53
Independence on 15 August was followed by forced population transfers accompanied by a wave of mass killings. Partition was a deeply contentious process: although it was clear on the whole which provinces should go to India and which to Pakistan, two with mixed populations, Bengal and the Punjab, needed to be divided. Over the next months, 5.8 million Muslims found refuge in Pakistan and nearly as many Hindus and Sikh refugees headed for India. Up to a million people were killed.54 Churchill did not hesitate to blame Attlee’s government for the ‘hideous massacres, the like of which have never stained the British Empire in all its history’.55 (One Labour MP in turn reproached him with the Bengal famine.)56 Furthermore, when India’s constituent assembly described the country as a ‘sovereign independent republic’, Churchill was in two minds about whether it should be allowed to stay in the Commonwealth.57 The British government was ready to permit it to do so, and appeared willing to drop the word ‘British’ from the term ‘British Commonwealth’ in order to ease its path.58 Churchill decried this in the Commons: ‘At present there are not many Conservative Prime Ministers in the British Empire but it may be that this proportion will be reversed in the near future and that a more robust spirit will prevail.’59 Even George VI thought this speech ‘unwise and troublesome’, as did Mackenzie King, a Liberal of course, now at the very end of his premiership and in London for his final Commonwealth conference.60 Attlee told Churchill privately ‘that it would be a disastrous step to meet India’s desire for continued association with a blank negative’. In Attlee’s words, ‘Mr Churchill in response at once went off the deep end with his usual attitude on Indian matters, and suggested that India should now be a foreign power’.61 However, he calmed down and in due course agreed to the unwieldy but tactful formulation whereby India became an independent republic associated with the Commonwealth, recognizing the British monarch as its head. Churchill wrote to Smuts, who was now in Opposition himself, about the issue. ‘When I asked myself the question: “Would I rather have them in even on these terms or let them go altogether”, my heart gave the answer, “I want them in.” Nehru has certainly shown magnanimity after sixteen years imprisonment.’62
Churchill did come to recognize that a phase of history was over. Julian Amery recorded a lunch in 1952 at which Churchill engaged in his favourite game of historical ‘what if?’:
He went back to the war-time years and said what he had hoped to do in India. He argued that with very small forces the Congress rising of 1942 had been successfully suppressed without in any way interfering with the recruitment of volunteers for the Indian Army. He believed, therefore, that with a comparatively small force we could have maintained law and order in India after the war. We could then have held a Constituent Assembly with British troops holding the ring, in which the Princes, the Untouchables, the Moslems and others would have made their influence felt much more effectively than they did in the chaos that followed our withdrawal.
However, when Amery suggested the British would yet get the Indian Empire back, Churchill replied, ‘No, it is gone, gone for ever’.63 Post-independence, Churchill established a good relationship with Nehru who, even when in prison, had considered him ‘an honourable enemy’ with ‘fine qualities apart from the question of India or the East’.64 In 1961 he told the US ambassador to Delhi that his relations with Churchill had been influenced ‘by the old school tie. He thought Churchill had been generous in saying that he, Nehru, had forgotten both how to fear and how to hate.’65
This is not to say that Churchill was immediately overcome by a warm, autumnal magnanimity towards his former adversaries. In 1948 Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic. (Jinnah died of cancer later the same year.) In his memoirs of World War II – the writing of which preoccupied him for much of his time in Opposition – Churchill showed little inclination to let bygones be bygones. His advisers managed to get him to moderate his early drafts, but he still published the assertion that Gandhi had taken glucose during his 1943 fast. When the volume in question came out in 1951, Gandhi’s doctors disputed this, and the claim was removed from future editions.66 The comment of the Indian News Chronicle was typical of the rage the allegation provoked: ‘Mr Churchill has proved to be both a false prophet and a poor historian. He has tried to sub-edit history, over-dramatise events to glorify himself, and presented a perverted version of facts.’67 Amery’s view of the book’s Indian coverage was that ‘it might be worse and happily slurs over a great deal’.68 Later academic critiques of the whole memoirs, more cautiously expressed than this, have tended to substantiate the charge of ‘sub-editing history’.69
III
To Churchill, India was not the only case of ‘scuttle’ from responsibility by Attlee and Co. The issue of Burma was, of course, closely related. During the war, Churchill had reacted negatively to official planning for the post-reconquest future. In 1943 Amery wrote that ‘he has an instinctive hatred of self-government in any shape or form and dislikes any country or people who want such a thing or for whom such a thing is contemplated. So far from being pleased with the thought of continued direct rule for a period of years, all he sees in it is that we are to spend money in order to be, as he puts it, kicked out by the Burmese afterwards.’70 Churchill feared during this period that ‘we are being urged to take steps in miniature in Burma which will afterwards bring the destruction of our Indian Empire’.71 Nevertheless, in the spring of 1945, with India much more to the forefront of his mind, he let Amery’s Burma proposals pass through the Cabinet ‘with singularly little argument’.72 Th
e White Paper promised ‘complete self-government within the British Commonwealth’ but was vague as to timing.73 The new Labour government was forced to speed things up dramatically, faced with the threat of rebellion under the leadership of the charismatic young nationalist (and former Japanese collaborator) Aung San. Churchill, recalling his father’s role in the annexation of Upper Burma, lamented the ongoing ‘decline and fall of the British Empire’.74
In May 1947 Aung San demanded a date for withdrawal early in 1948 and revealed that the new Burma would be a republic.75 (Unlike India it never did join the Commonwealth.) The British could do little to arrest the rush to independence, but Aung San never got the chance to become a respected Nehru-type figure. On 19 July he and five of his ministers were gunned down together. Former premier U Saw was alleged to be behind the plot and was later hanged. Independence proceeded regardless, and this time the Conservatives opposed the bill when it was brought before the Commons in November. In his speech Churchill regretted that there was no provision for even a temporary stage of Dominion status. Referring to the ongoing dollar shortage, he observed, ‘The British Empire seems to be running off almost as fast as the American Loan.’ Given his former role as the head of a Japanese ‘Quisling army’, Aung San’s hands, he said, had been ‘dyed with British blood and loyal Burmese blood’.76 This was, perhaps, not exactly the ideal way to extend the hand of friendship to the Burmese people, who revered their murdered leader. Clement Davies reproached Churchill accordingly: ‘We all remember the tragedy of Ireland, but the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues shook hands with the man who was regarded up to that moment as a traitor and who died as a result of extending the hand of friendship, Michael Collins. So it does no good to indulge in these recriminations.’77 One civil servant involved in the Burmese negotiations described Churchill’s speech as ‘outrageous’, adding, ‘One’s only hope is that it will have been discounted on the spot as coming from Winston’.78 Churchill did not even have the full support of his own MPs. Three voted with the government and some, including Harold Macmillan and R. A. Butler, abstained. The bill passed its second reading by 288 to 114, and the Burmese selected 4 January 1948 as their independence day, believing it to be astrologically auspicious.79 Having granted independence to violent Burma, the government could hardly deny it to peaceable Ceylon, which got its freedom, within the Commonwealth, that same February. The Conservative Party actually supported this, although Churchill did not turn up for the debate.
The developments in India and Burma unfolded against the backdrop of crisis in Palestine and negotiations with Egypt over the future of British forces there. Churchill linked these questions repeatedly. His line on Palestine was not that withdrawal should be avoided at all costs. The Zionists’ high hopes of the Labour government had been disappointed: Bevin had incurred their wrath by resisting US-backed demands for high levels of new Jewish immigration. In July 1946 Jewish terrorists blew up the King David Hotel, the British HQ in Jerusalem, killing and wounding dozens. In the Commons, Churchill declared that he had not abandoned the Zionist cause, but that terrorism was putting British support for it at risk: ‘It is perfectly clear that Jewish warfare directed against the British in Palestine will, if protracted, automatically release us from all obligations to persevere, as well as destroy the inclination to make further efforts in British hearts.’ He noted that Britain was apparently ready to ‘scuttle’ from Egypt as well as India, ‘but now, apparently, the one place where we are at all costs and at all inconveniences to hold on and fight it out to the death is Palestine’. He concluded: ‘I think the Government should say that if the United States will not come and share the burden of the Zionist cause [. . .] we should now give notice that we will return our Mandate to U.N.O. and that we will evacuate Palestine within a specified period.’80 Amery lamented that he was no longer in the Commons and had no chance of ‘preventing Winston talking the nonsense he did about throwing up the mandate’.81 In February 1947 Britain did ask the UN to find a solution, British troops remaining in the country for the time being.
Churchill returned to the argument that March in reaction to the initial timetable laid down for withdrawal from India. He declared it incomprehensible that there was a time limit for India but not one for Palestine, which he viewed as much less strategically significant. ‘Two bottles of powerful medicine have been prepared,’ he said, ‘but they are sent to the wrong patients.’82 During the debate on the Burma Independence Bill he claimed that ‘Half, perhaps one-third, or one-quarter, of the British troops squandered in Palestine’ would have been enough ‘to enable the transfer of power to a Burmese Government, on the basis of Dominion status, to be carried out by regular and measured steps’.83 The logic of this argument – which he also deployed in relation to India – was doubtful. If it was impossible for these troops to maintain order in minute Palestine, how could they hope to do so in massive India or jungle-clad Burma?84
After the UN’s plan for partition was rejected by both Arabs and Jews, the British left in May 1948, triggering the war that resulted in the creation of the state of Israel. In January 1949 Churchill urged the formal British recognition of Israel, while at the same time suggesting that it would have been possible to agree a partition plan immediately after the war that would have resulted in a better deal for the Arabs.85 Amery told Chaim Weizmann – now elected President of the country he had done so much to create – that Churchill’s speech had been made in a helpful spirit. He wrote: ‘You must remember that, in an unfortunate moment, no doubt upset by the actions of the terrorists, he himself had suggested scuttling, and has therefore had to turn the particular corner with some circumspection.’86 The suggestion that Churchill’s doubts had merely been a temporary aberration was, of course, more than a little misleading.
It was natural for the Attlee government to present the steps it took towards dismantling the Empire as part of a planned process aimed at securing a smooth transfer of power. ‘If Churchill were in power he would lose the Empire,’ opined the junior minister Patrick Gordon Walker in 1947, ‘just as George III lost the thirteen colonies. The aim of the Labour government is to save the empire; this will be achieved by giving the colonies self-government.’87 The reality was considerably messier than this implied. Labour’s immediate ambitions for reform had been relatively modest. In the face of military overstretch, economic crisis and nationalist pressures from within the Empire, the government was driven to concede much more, much more quickly, than it had ever intended. To this extent, Churchill’s charge of ‘scuttle’ had some truth in it, but Attlee’s ministers do deserve an enormous amount of credit for recognizing the inevitable and bowing to it when it came. It is hard to avoid wondering what Churchill himself would have done had he won the 1945 election. He liked to suggest that, had he been in charge, progress towards self-government would have been more orderly and slower – exactly how much slower was left rather vague. But he no longer disputed the principle of self-government as a long-term goal; it would have been hard to do so, given the various pledges in this direction that his own government had made. It seems probable, then, that – just as he had been forced, kicking and screaming, to accept constitutional initiatives for India during the war – he would have been unable to overcome the momentum of post-war events. He would have been made to preside over the liquidation of a substantial part of the Empire, albeit without the Attlee government’s good grace. Another possibility is that he might have drawn the line at conceding Indian independence and staged a dramatic resignation when his colleagues attempted to compel him to see sense. This seems unlikely, though, given what we know of his tenacious hold on the post of Leader of the Opposition, despite the hopes of many of his colleagues that he would bow out into a graceful retirement.
Churchill, of course, still had many admirers amongst the public, although in the early post-war period his popularity seemed to fade. A 1947 survey by Mass-Observation – whose methods were admittedly not terribly scientific – foun
d a steep decline in approval from the peak reached in 1943. ‘I have always regretted that Winston Churchill whom it is impossible not to like, did not retire on the crest of the wave’, commented one young woman. ‘I find it impossible to agree with his politics, and his grief at the break up of the British Empire leaves me cold.’88 (Approval of the Empire itself, however, was generally high; wartime doubts about it, such as they were, had seemingly evaporated.)89 In August 1949, at the age of seventy-four, Churchill suffered a stroke, although he staged a decent recovery and the news was hidden from the public. The following February the government called a general election, in the face of continued domestic austerity and the ongoing Cold War, and in the aftermath of the shock devaluation of the pound. Churchill insisted that all his youthful daydreams had been accomplished and that he had ‘no personal advantage to gain by undertaking once more the hard and grim duty of leading Britain and her Empire through and out of her new and formidable crisis.’ But it was, he said, his duty to try.90
The campaign mainly focused on the economy and on Churchill’s suggestion of a summit conference with the Soviet Union. The Conservatives made little effort to attack Labour’s decolonization record. The party manifesto spoke of developing Empire trade and pledged to maintain ‘whatever preferences or other special arrangements may be necessary’.91 Nothing was said about the political future of Britain’s colonies. Churchill did, however, make some play with the failure of the government’s scheme to grow groundnuts in Tanganyika, a piece of attempted Empire development gone expensively wrong.92 He also criticized the practice of sending so-called ‘unrequited exports’ – goods for which no payment was received – to Egypt and India by way of paying off wartime debts. He appeared to hint that some of these sterling balances should be written off in consideration for the expense to which Britain had been put in shielding the countries concerned from invasion.93 The election resulted in a narrow Labour majority, sufficient to allow the government to limp on for some time.
