by Simon Schama
Back home, his disgust with the official left’s rhapsodies about the Soviet Union only deepened. When he tried to write the truth – that fascism and communism had more in common than most people realized, that in fact communism was ‘furthest of all to the Right’ – his work was inevitably rejected by pillars of the left like the New Statesman and Nation. Communist writers and critics like Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the Communist party, resorted to name-calling, describing Orwell as a ‘little middle-class boy’ who had day-tripped through socialism but came out the other side the imperialist reactionary he had always been. Homage to Catalonia, when it appeared in 1938, suffered from being seen as a shot in the internecine wars of the left. And it might have been for that reason that Orwell had already begun to brood on how he might preach the same warning message but in a form that was unmistakably popular. ‘On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone. … However, the actual details of the story did not come to me for some time until one day I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.’ The germ of Animal Farm (1945), then, was already there in Orwell’s mind, even as he settled down with his wife, Eileen, in a freezing cottage in the village of Wallington, near Baldock in Hertfordshire. A cough that he couldn’t shake off, the beginnings of tuberculosis, would rack him as he stalked around his small farm. Chain smoking probably didn’t help. But he was still capable of beginning letters like this: ‘Dear Geoffrey, Thanks so much for your letter. I am glad you are enjoying yourself in Denmark, though I must admit, it is one of the few countries I have never wanted to visit’, or, even better, in a review of some military memoirs in the New Statesman and Nation, August 1937, ‘General Crozier is a professional soldier and by his own showing spent the years between 1899 and 1921 in almost ceaseless slaughter of his fellow-creatures; hence as a pacifist he makes an impressive figure, like the reformed burglar at a Salvation Army meeting.’
While Orwell was tending his goats and chickens and trying to make people see the futility of war, Winston Churchill was stalking around his ruinously expensive country house in Kent, compensating – only somewhat – for political impotence by empire-building in the grounds. Chartwell, near Westerham, had been snapped up for what seemed a bargain at a time when Churchill had been relatively flush with the advance for The World Crisis. He had summoned an architect, Philip Tilden, to give the house more neo-Jacobean presence (which meant bigger) and to exploit its stunning site so that the big dining room looked south over the rolling Kent countryside. By the time he was finished with it, Chartwell was grand enough to be the alternative political court that Churchill meant it to be – 9 reception rooms, 18 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms; and then, in Winston’s dig-for-conquest phase, a heated outdoor swimming pool where he could merrily wallow; a fine pond stocked with ornamental carp, ritually fed each day to strange noises by the man in the homburg himself; and not least a little pavilion at the corner of the garden terrace, which he had painted with winning, slightly childlike scenes of Marlborough’s great battles.
That pavilion must have been an important place for Winston to sit and brood about the past and the future, and the difficult, important relationship between the two. The 30s he called his ‘wilderness years’, when he was ‘in exile’. Though in parliament, as MP for Epping, he was out of office for 10 years from 1929, when the Labour government came to power, until 3 September 1939, when, on the outbreak of war, he was summoned back to the admiralty by Neville Chamberlain. Throughout that admittedly long decade Churchill was neither idle nor especially solitary, although he was certainly isolated from power and direct influence in the Conservative party. Loyal friends and followers came to Chartwell all the time – Frederick Lindemann, the Oxford philosospher whom Churchill called ‘the Prof’ and on whom he relied for statistics about the terrible shape of things to come; his acolyte, the young journalist, lawyer and Tory MP Brendan Bracken; Lord Beaverbrook, the press baron; and Desmond Morton, the director of industrial intelligence for the department of defence, who very conveniently lived close by and who seems to have supplied Churchill with more ammunition for his rearmament campaign.
On these and many more Churchill lavished his hospitality – tanks of champagne; vats of claret; vast lunches; roaring conversations; semi-hilarious tantrums. If the Chartwell years were indeed exile, they were a phenomenally gregarious and expensive one, as the long-suffering Clemmie learned to her cost. Supporting the nine indoor servants, the three gardeners, the two nannies and the chauffeur, not to mention the private secretaries and research assistants who helped Churchill with his writing, cost a small fortune. Nor was it always a delight to be in the service of this particular Man of Destiny. He could be abrasively rude and petulant, by turns needy or insulting or both simultaneously. His hours were, for those unaccustomed to them, a nightmare: long mornings in bed swathed in his green and gold Chinese dressing gown, papers mixed up with the marmalade and melon; the first of the nine daily Havanas; dictating between what was left of the hours between breakfast and lunch (another cigar; the first of the many weak whiskies and water); lunch itself, heavily lubricated; then the mandatory one- or two-hour nap; after which Churchill rose, pink and cherubic, took a stroll around the grounds, talked animatedly like Dr Doolittle to his many pets – the pigs, the two poodles, the black swans, the fish; frogmarched visitors to see the latest improvements; or made for the Marlborough pavilion overlooking the beeches, the cows and the hazy horizon, and brooded. Then there would be the second of the two daily baths (98 degrees or else); dressing for dinner; dinner, including more champagne and claret; after which, in a manner staggering to most human flesh and blood, Churchill would take himself off into the night for some real work, finishing at two or three in the morning. It would be like this throughout the 30s and right through the war.
And he was, almost all of the time, writing history: the dazzling and funny My Early Life (1930), books of essays on political leaders of the past; the four-volume biography of the Duke of Marlborough; then, by 1939, helped by research assistants from Oxford like Bill Deakin, half a million words of The History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1951–6). And although he certainly needed the money to stave off ruin, to support the flamboyant life he refused to retrench and the entourage with which he travelled, history in the 30s meant something more to Churchill than just income. It was what gave him his moorings, his unshakeable sense of navigation. Both friends and enemies marvelled at Churchill’s self-steering at a time when every day’s news seemed to herald unwelcome surprises, rugs pulled out from under the feet. Anyone in their right mind, politically, ought to have trod very cautiously over this unstable ground and calculated very carefully the pros and cons of any given position before making a move. Now Churchill was just as prone as other politicians to weighing advantage and disadvantage, and was certainly not happy to be out of the centre of power. Time was not his friend. At his age there were only so many more ponds he could dig at Chartwell.
But his history-writing, sometimes misinterpreted as a panacea for political impotence, was something like the opposite: the humming engine of his ambition and his certainty. Looking back on the long history of the ‘island nation’ and the empire did not muddy Churchill’s mind in romantic fantasies. On the contrary, it gave him the grip and clarity to see what needed to be done. What he wrote about Rosebery could more plausibly be applied to himself: ‘The Past stood ever at his elbow and was the counsellor upon whom he most relied. He seemed to be attended by Learning and History and to carry into current events an air of ancient majesty.’
Passages of Marlborough, ‘bronzed by African sunshine’, were the purest autobiography: ‘Marlborough regarded the raising of his family to
the first rank second only to the importance of raising England to the first place in Europe, and he saw no reason why these two processes should not be combined. His tireless industry and exertion, his profound sagacity and calculation, his constant readiness to stake, not only his life but all he had gathered in reputation and wealth, upon the hazards of war and of a well-chosen battle were faithfully offered to his country’s service.’
However, standing back and looking at the great arc of Britain’s history, especially in the age of Queen Anne when the history of the Union and of the empire had both begun in earnest, presented Churchill with a difficult paradox. The fate of the island empire and its involvement in Europe had often been presented, especially in the Victorian century into which he had been born, as mutually exclusive. But Churchill’s history told him that this had virtually never been the case; just the opposite, in fact. It had been when England, and then Britain, had been most engaged in Europe that its empire had best prospered: in Marlborough’s wars; in the Elder Pitt’s global struggle with France; with his son’s determination to resist the expansionism of the French Republic; even during Disraeli’s plunge into treacherous eastern diplomacy in the 1870s. Little Englandism meant imperial self-effacement; shorn of the empire, Churchill staunchly believed, the ‘Great’ might as well be subtracted from Britain, and the united island kingdom itself would, in the end, perhaps be doomed to disintegrate.
It was this historically derived conviction that led Churchill to take positions in the 1930s that, on the face of it, were incompatible or at least impractical: both rearmament and imperial assertiveness in India. His reactionary truculence on the empire undermined his credibility as an authority on the future of Europe. But in Churchill’s mind in the early 1930s, and then again during the Second World War itself, the two were inseparable. Whether he had been marinading his imagination rather too long in Macaulay’s essays on Clive and Hastings, or dwelling on his own memories of Sir Bindon Blood and the Malakand War, Churchill’s response to the rise of Congress nationalism was as anachronistic as it was intemperate. The Labour government’s efforts to take the sting out of the Indian Congress militancy by hinting at eventual dominion status (meaning self-government within the empire) were attacked by Churchill as abject capitulation to sedition. A true commonwealth confederation of free nations, their allegiance commonly pledged to the monarch, he obviously believed could only work when there was a real bond of common ethnic ancestry and language as in Australia and for Canada – in other words, for the white sons of the empire.
The notion that British power (for which read ‘force’) could somehow evolve into affinity – strong enough to make for true common allegiance, especially in times of peril – struck Churchill, deep down, as contradicting everything he knew about human nature. But of course that was exactly the great promise that Macaulay had made in his speech in 1833: that language, law and literature would indeed achieve, in the fullness of time, precisely such a transformation. In fact Macaulay had gone even further, imagining that such ties would in the end prove stronger than the sword. It is a promise redeemed in this 21st century, although not quite in ways that Macaulay could have anticipated, on every page of great Indian Anglophone literature. But it was impossible for Churchill to imagine that a cultural bond could possibly take the place of paramount power. It would be the end not just of the empire but of Britain itself. ‘The loss of India’, he said in 1930,‘would mark and consummate the downfall of the British empire. That great organism would pass at a stroke out of life into history. From such a catastrophe there could be no recovery.’ That Churchill, who believed so passionately in the power of the word, should be so much of a cultural defeatist is one of his saddest failings.
When in 1931 the viceroy, Baron Irwin, who, as Edward Wood, had once served under Churchill and who would later be Viscount Halifax, released Gandhi and 30 other Congress leaders from prison so that they could participate in talks about India’s future, Churchill was apopleptic. Gandhi was famously dismissed in insulting terms that have never been forgotten or forgiven in India: ‘It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace … to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.’
Although he had read Macaulay in Bangalore, Churchill evidently had not read, or had forgotten, the speech of 1833 in which the most glorious moment in the British Empire’s history was supposed to be the day of its responsible self-liquidation. He seemed even to have lost track of his own remarks, made in 1920 after the Amritsar massacre in 1919, and the inquiry into General Dyer’s conduct, that Britain neither could, nor should wish to, rule India by force alone: ‘it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it. The British way of doing things … has always meant and implied close and effectual co-operation with the people of the country.’ Churchill still believed, in fact, in the late Victorian truism that the vast mass of the Indian people were content with British rule, and felt they were being disgracefully misled by an unrepresentative gang of ‘agitators’. Put them out of action, by detention if necessary, and the rank and file would soon fall away. This, of course, had also been said about Irish nationalists, with whom, in the end, accepting the hollowness of the theory, Churchill ended up making peace.
Had he been to Blackburn, like Priestley, and listened to the mill hands lament the disappearance of their Indian market in ‘dhootie cotton’ (the coarse grey fabric used for Indian loincloths and loose trousers), Churchill might also have had more respect for Gandhi’s powers of mass mobilization. And he might have understood why Gandhi’s symbolic ‘half-nakedness’, together with the campaigns to boycott imported cloth and favour the homespun alternative, were, alongside the unstoppable growth of other Indian manufactured goods, radically and unalterably changing what for so long had been the unequal terms of trade between Britain and India. This, too, was an old history lesson but one which somehow Churchill had missed: India had made printed cottons long before the British had ever come to the subcontinent. Indeed, the very reason for their coming in the first place had been to buy those ‘calicos’. Only the assertion of British power had prevented the restoration of what was economically inevitable.
Like many of those who had served briefly in the Raj, Churchill also probably overestimated the strength of British administration, police and military power, when faced with a genuine mass movement like Gandhi’s. Although he had paid lip service to the British way of ‘collaboration’ he probably had in mind the ‘responsible’ native princes and magnates, rather than the millions of clerks, tax collectors and postal workers who walked out of their offices when Congress told them and were capable of shutting down the government of India almost overnight. By restricting any sort of suffrage in the 1930s to no more than 10 per cent of the population, British administration had actually forced the political nation to seek expression outside official channels. The economic discrimination built into imperial power still drove the engine of grievance. If Churchill had been in India in 1930–1 at the time of Gandhi’s great march to the sea to break the enforced British monopoly on salt; had he even understood how the salt issue went to the very heart of the unequal imperial relationship; then perhaps he might have changed his mind about Gandhi as he had about Michael Collins. But salt, except on his lunchtime venison, was seldom on his mind. Instead, he attacked the national government at Westminster, and even more so Irwin in India, for weak-kneed buckling to agitators: ‘The British lion, so fierce and valiant in bygone days, so dauntless and unconquerable through all the agony of Armageddon, can now be chased by rabbits from all the fields and forests of his former glory. It is not that our own strength is seriously impaired. We are suffering from a disease of the will. We are the victims of a nervous collapse.’
Churchill’s reactionary determination to fight, tooth and nail, the promise of provincial s
elf-government for India that was contained in the India Act of 1935 put him in the same company as men of the hard right who had always suspected the ‘dear vicar’, Stanley Baldwin, of being a spineless compromiser, whether to the unions or to the Indian rebels. After the Act passed its second reading by a majority of 400 to 84, Churchill, showing his usual magnanimity, as well as a modicum of pragmatic self-preservation, had the sense to declare the matter closed. But his son Randolph still fought, and lost, an election as an anti-India Act candidate. And the effect of Winston’s prolonged, furious and heavily publicized opposition had been to raise serious doubts in India itself about the sincerity of the British commitment to self-government. What, after all, if Churchill should return some day to power, perhaps even as foreign secretary?
