Piers Brendon
WHAT WINSTON REALLY WANTED
Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made
By Richard Toye (Macmillan 484pp £25)
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In 1957 Sir Winston Churchill, who had visited east Africa fifty years earlier as a junior minister in the Colonial Office, provided a short prologue to a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film about the Mau Mau revolt entitled Something of Value, starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier. Churchill's message, that Kenya's current problems were the problems of the world, was innocuous. But he himself did not go down well at MGM, where a studio executive said: 'You have got to get rid of this fucking Englishman.' The director asked if he was referring to Sir Winston Churchill, the greatest statesman in the world. 'Whoever the fuck he is, I don't care!' came the reply. 'Out of the movie!'
This was crass even by the standards of Hollywood. Churchill had been famous on both sides of the Atlantic for most of his adult life - when he left on his 1907 safari, Punch asked who was going to govern England? And if he was best known in America for his opposition to fascism and communism, he was notorious for his defence of imperialism. 'We mean to hold our own,' he had memorably pronounced in 1942. 'I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.'
The Empire, indeed, was the main bone of contention between Churchill and Roosevelt during the war. The President found it hard to believe that they were fighting Axis tyranny but not working to free people all over the world from colonial oppression. He openly disagreed with Churchill's assertion that the promises of self-government in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to the British Empire. The Prime Minister thought it was 'pretty good cheek' for the Americans, who had blood on their hands in the Philippines, to try 'to school-marm us into proper behaviour' in the Empire. And with the Empire behind him, he felt able to stand up to the Great Republic. According to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's plea that India should be allowed to rule itself wrung from Churchill a 'string of cuss words [that] lasted for two hours in the middle of the night'.
Young Winston had vowed to devote his life to the maintenance of the British Empire. As warlord during the struggle against Hitler he fought to preserve it even though that meant testing the Anglo-American alliance, which he also championed. As an old man he lamented that his life had been for nothing: 'The Empire I believed in has gone.' In view of all that it is remarkable that no substantial scholarly work on this subject has hitherto appeared. There have been essays and a couple of partial studies, and the topic has been aired in some of the many volumes about Churchill published since the opening and electronic cataloguing of his papers. But Churchill's Empire is the first book to cover all the ground. It does so in a masterly fashion, drawing on much fresh evidence, teasing out the nuances of Churchill's attitudes and providing a marvellously illuminating appraisal.
Lord Beaverbrook once said that Churchill had held every opinion on every subject and what Richard Toye demonstrates above all is that his opinions on the British Empire were anything but simple or consistent. Of course, Churchill was a Victorian - especially during the 1930s, when Baldwin said that he had reverted to being a subaltern of hussars (which he had joined in 1895). But many Victorians were more liberal than Churchill, particularly regarding racial prejudice and military ruthlessness.
Churchill was 'anti-black', hated 'people with slit eyes and pigtails' and damned Hindus as a foul race 'protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due'. He defended 'punitive devastation' against the Pashtuns. In South Africa he justified harsh measures against the Boers, including farm burnings and concentration camps. In Iraq he urged the use of mustard gas against 'uncivilised tribes'. In Ireland he favoured machine-gunning Sinn Fein meetings from the air. He hoped for 'bitter and bloody' communal violence in India to make the white Raj seem essential, and he reacted callously to the 1943 Bengal famine.
On the other hand, Churchill genuinely believed that British rule - benevolent, humane and just - would bring progress, commerce and civilisation to backward countries. He condemned abuses: the killing of wounded Dervishes at Omdurman; the exploitation of Africans by European settlers; and 'the disgusting butchery of natives' in Natal, which he dubbed 'the hooligan of the Empire'. He warned that the gap between conquest and dominion was being filled by 'the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier and the lying speculator'. He appeased the Boers, conciliated the Irish and denounced the Amritsar massacre. He sometimes opposed imperial expansion. Moreover, he issued a caveat of profound contemporary relevance: the North-West Frontier was ideal guerrilla territory since regular troops were sitting ducks and could not 'catch or kill an impalpable cloud of skirmishers'.
Paradoxically, Churchill's fight to save the Empire led to its loss. As Toye shows, he was as pragmatic and as contradictory about the imperial sunset as about the high noon. After the war he acknowledged that India 'must go' and did not oppose its going; but he occasionally condemned the 'cowardly abandonment of our duties'. He showed surprising sympathy for Mau Mau rebels and criticised the 'execution of men who fight to defend their native land'; but he disliked Macmillan's 'wind of change' speech. He embraced the Commonwealth, though without marked enthusiasm. He was ambivalent about Egypt but he became reconciled to Eire and to India, which he called 'The Light of Asia'.
Toye traces Churchill's shifts and velleities with impressive skill and erudition, using a vast range of contemporary newspapers to particularly good effect. He might perhaps have dwelt on the rhetorical and psychological importance of the Empire to Churchill. The great man's real tyrant, as Sir Robert Menzies said, was the glittering phrase; and the greatest Empire in history not only inspired him to flights of oratory but gave him the opportunity to declaim on a global stage. Vitally, too, the Empire helped to invest him with the copper-bottomed confidence and armour-plated toughness he needed to combat the Third Reich. Nevertheless, Richard Toye deserves all credit for producing such an important and original book.
Piers Brendon's 'The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997' is published in paperback by Vintage.