Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (31 page)

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.
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Churchill had contrasted Labour ministers’ desire for good relations with Soviet Russia with the ‘frigid repulsion’ they supposedly offered to Britain’s Dominions.
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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.’)
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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Nevertheless, he was not an absolute slave to Treasury orthodoxy. In 1925 Amery proposed a
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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(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.’
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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 Minister 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?’
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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’.
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.’
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