Gandhi & Churchill (75 page)

By the same token, Churchill’s opposition to appeasement was the logical extension of his fight against Gandhi and the India Act. He even used the same term for it. His friend Lord Birkenhead had first used “appeasement” in a disparaging political sense on November 5, 1929, when he spoke in the House of Lords against “the appeasers of Gandhi.”
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Churchill had borrowed the word when he discussed the government’s “policy of appeasement” on India with a sympathetic German diplomat in 1930. In 1933 he was already using it to describe British policy toward Hitler.

For Churchill also saw parallels between Gandhi and Hitler, but very different ones. What scared him about all mass national movements of the twentieth century, including Gandhi’s, was that they lacked moorings in any pre-established social or political order. Churchill rejected the conventional wisdom that movements for “national self-determination,” were voices for freedom. Since the Versailles treaty, he believed, they had proven rather to be a formula for chaos. The path to peace was to preserve empires, the historical accretions of centuries of legitimate rule and stability; not to break them up. But instead Britain was planning to break up one empire in India just as it was performing last rites for another in Central Europe, the old Habsburg Empire. In both cases the result was a terrible new barbarism unleashed on a helpless humanity.

Churchill sensed something chillingly new and modern, but also frighteningly ancient and familiar, about the Nazi movement. In an article in October 1935 he wrote that Hitler’s “triumphant career has been borne onwards, not by a passionate love of Germany, but by currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them.”
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Hitler had turned Germany into “an armed camp,” where “concentration camps pock-marked the German soil.” Absolute power had been entrusted to a single ruthless man. Nothing was new about this “odious, pernicious, and degrading” form of one-man rule, Churchill said: “it can be seen in the history of every despot.” He had even seen it in Gandhi and his “almost god-like” status among Indian nationalists.
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But the angry marching crowds; the vicious anti-Semitic measures applied against every Jew from famous scientists to “wrecked little Jewish children” the trampling of innocence and the conventions of mercy, tolerance, and decency; above all, the thirst for weapons and war: all suggested a resurgence of the barbarism that had once destroyed civilization in Europe. Now armed with modern weapons and “the irresistible power of the Totalitarian State,” that barbarism was threatening to do it again.

Churchill believed the only antidote was “the great theories of government which the British race devised” and that reflected the essential English character. Constitutional democracy was, he concluded, “the foundation on which [modern] civilization rests and without which it will fall.” Britons needed to value “these treasures—glories I call them—as we do our lives; and there should be no sacrifice we would not make…to hand them over unmutilated and unbesmirched to our children.”
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He confessed to George Bernard Shaw, “I hope I shall die” before those glories were “overturned.”
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Those glories of civilization had seemed to sound their death knell in India. Gandhi explicitly turned his back on them. Churchill feared the same was happening in Europe. Years ago in India Edward Gibbon had taught him that the twin destroyers of the Roman Empire had been barbarism and fanaticism. Just as Churchill had seen himself trying to save the British Empire from Gandhi’s fanaticism, now he had to rally England against Hitler’s barbarism.

Just as he finished his multivolume biography of Marlborough in 1934, he chose as his next historical project an epic saga on the rise of Anglo-Saxon civilization. It would be entitled
The History of the English-Speaking Peoples
.
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For Churchill, “those institutions, laws and customs and national characteristics which are the common inheritance, or supposed to be, of the English-speaking world,” which he had believed were the last hope for India, would now become the last ray of hope for the rest of the world.
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His absorption in historical work, and the constant stream of magazine articles, essays, and travel pieces he wrote, were a welcome distraction in these years. “It is a comfort to me,” he confessed to historian Mortimer Wheeler, as he began work on
English-Speaking Peoples,
“to put a thousand years between my thoughts and the twentieth century.”
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For in addition to his political isolation, he experienced personal disappointment.

On November 30, 1935, he celebrated his sixty-first birthday. Like Gandhi, he had a distinct feeling that the current generation was passing him by. Old friends were dying, not to be replaced. The death of “F.E.,” Lord Birkenhead, in September 1930, had hit him especially hard. Austen Chamberlain, one of his few prominent allies in the fight against appeasement, suffered a stroke and died in March 1937. T. E. Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1935. Earlier Churchill’s beloved cousin “Sunny” Marlborough suddenly died of cancer. “It was only a month ago,” Churchill wrote wistfully, “that he was riding out to watch his horses at Newmarket or preparing a speech for the House of Lords.” They had been friends since childhood; his death only reminded Winston that he too belonged to a vanished “bygone age.” He went into one of his notorious “black dog” depressions and spoke of his own obsolescence. “Please do not talk of yourself as a very old man,” a friend had to tell him. “You are letting us all down by doing so.”
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The chairs at the dinner table at Chartwell were empty for other reasons. “Thank God I am not a vindictive man,” he said after the India debates.
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But even former friends could feel the sting of his rage and bitterness if they supported a foreign policy he considered an invitation to catastrophe. Patrick Donner had loyally supported Churchill on India, but they fell out over appeasement. “I was no longer ‘Patrick’ after ten years,” Donner said years later. The happy frequent visits to Chartwell came to an end. “If somebody took an action which in [Churchill’s] judgement was contrary to the national interest,” Donner remembered, “he would have absolutely nothing further to do with that person…He was prosecution counsel and judge combined.”
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But Winston’s biggest disappointment was his son, Randolph. Randolph was no Harilal (although ironically he too would eventually succumb to alcoholism). Outwardly Randolph was devoted to his father, perhaps too devoted. (His accusations against Chamberlain and the appeasers were sometimes unbalanced and made Winston’s look mild.) Randolph had many gifts. He was slim and stunningly handsome, and he was verbally articulate to the point of glibness. However, he had more enthusiasm than ability, and more passion than energy. He tried desperately to follow in his father’s footsteps, but the result was almost always a bad stumble.

His independent run for the Wavertree parliamentary seat in January 1935 was “a most rash and unconsidered plunge,” Winston told Clementine, predicting exactly what did happen: Randolph split the Tory vote and a Labourite won.
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The next month Randolph put up an anti-India Act candidate for a contest in Norwood, against his father’s expressed wishes. The man turned out to be a British fascist; later during the war he had to be interned. He not only lost abysmally; the press used him to smear Churchill’s entire campaign against the bill.
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Later father and son had a knock-down, drag-out verbal fight at the dinner table. Randolph stormed out in a rage. It was the first of many such fights, often in the presence of eminent guests.

Randolph’s drinking, gambling, and womanizing landed him in the scandal sheets, causing embarrassment to his family. His drinking bouts often ended in physical violence, even against his father’s friends. Once he threw Brendan Bracken’s glasses into the sea.
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Clementine believed Winston spoiled Randolph, and he sheepishly agreed.
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He regularly paid the debts Randolph ran up with his extravagant lifestyle. Randolph had a lavish flat in Westminster Gardens, threw champagne parties at Claridge’s, and took yacht cruises in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. In 1933 Winston set up a trust fund for Randolph of £10,000 (the equivalent of one million dollars in today’s money.) A little more than a year later Randolph had to ask his father and his uncle Jack to advance him £6,000 to cover his gambling debts, including almost £2,000 owed to a casino in Cannes. Both men made him sign an agreement never to gamble beyond his means again. Yet later he and his father could be seen together at the baccarat tables along the Riviera.
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The understanding was that if Randolph married and had children, Chartwell would be his. But Randolph’s busy social agenda in the 1930s did not allow for marriage, let alone character-building adventures like Winston’s in India and the Boer War.
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It did not occur to Winston that their relationship reproduced his own with
his
father—or that whereas Lord Randolph had mercifully died before Winston was twenty, Randolph Junior could never hope to escape the aura of his famous dad.

Others, even enemies, recognized the difficult relationship and sympathized. If many found Winston arrogant, they found his son odious. When Randolph had to have a benign tumor removed from his alimentary canal, Evelyn Waugh’s reaction was typical. “Trust those damn fool doctors,” he said, “to cut out of Randolph the only part of him that is not malignant.”
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The kindest analysis came from a political opponent, Lord Londonderry. He warned Winston that Randolph was “so like you” in his “enterprise, courage, and forcefulness” but was clearly unlike his father “because he does not seem to recognize that knowledge is the secret of power.”
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Someone once asked Winston how long it took him to prepare a forty-five-minute speech for the House of Commons. “Eighteen hours,” he said.
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That kind of application was beyond Randolph (and most people). It doomed any relationship between a son and a father who was still, after half a century, “a young man in a hurry.”

But if some old friends and guests were no longer in Winston’s orbit, his battle against appeasement brought him new ones. The last myth is that in the Wilderness Years Churchill stood alone against appeasement. The truth was that his name, reputation, and fearless speeches made him the standard-bearer for a growing number of people who were convinced, with Churchill, that “surely it is worth a supreme effort…to control the hideous drift and arrest calamity upon the threshold…NOW is the time to stop it!”
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Chartwell and Morpeth Mansions (where Winston and Clementine kept their London flat) became this group’s gathering places. One gatheree was Desmond Morton, the Industrial Intelligence Center number-cruncher who sweated German military preparations as much as Churchill. Two others were Sir Robert Vansittart and Ralph Wigram of the Foreign Office. Wigram, whom Churchill called “the departmental volcano,” was a victim of infantile paralysis but still came out to Chartwell to supply Churchill with full texts of all Hitler’s speeches until his own untimely death in 1936.

Another visitor in those years was G. D. Birla. In fact, even as Hitler’s shadow lengthened across Europe, India was never far from Churchill’s mind. He worried about the rise of Japan in Asia and the possible threat to India. The days when he had blithely claimed that “there was not slightest chance” of war with Japan were long gone. “One must consider” Germany and Japan, he told his wife in January 1936, “as working in accord.” (He made this remark fully four years before Japan, Germany, and Italy signed their Axis Pact.)
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The following April he confided similar fears to Birla. “You should certainly consider the present state of the world,” he wrote. “If Great Britain were persuaded or forced for any cause, Indian or European, to withdraw her protection from India, it would continuously become the prey of Fascist dictator nations, Italy, Germany, or Japan,” and suffer under a tyranny “even worse than any experienced in bygone ages.”
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Churchill thought this a powerful argument for Indians to stick close to Britain. Birla knew Indians had other things to worry about, but in July 1937 he did agree to go out for another lunch at Chartwell.

They spoke for two hours. “Well, a big experiment has begun,” Churchill asserted, meaning the new Indian constitution. Birla agreed but added that it needed “all your sympathy and good wishes.”

Churchill swore that Indians had them, adding that he had not said a word against the India Act since the king had signed it. He hoped for the best for India. “You know how democracy is attacked around the world,” Churchill said ominously. “It is only Great Britain that has preserved democracy, and if you can show by your actions that you can make democracy a success, you will have no difficulty in advancing further.”

Again Birla urged him to come to India and see for himself. Churchill conceded that the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, had invited him. “But if Mr. Gandhi also desires it,” he said lightly, “I will go.” He certainly had great respect for Gandhi, he told Birla: “Tell him that I wish him all success.”

Then they spoke of Europe, and Churchill’s mood darkened. “For one more year he did not expect war,” Birla told Gandhi later, “but he would not say about the far future.”
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Contributing to Churchill’s gloom that spring was the fate of Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Lord Swinton. He was minister of air and had shared valuable data with Churchill about Germany’s growing air force. Swinton had fought hard, if in vain, to compel Britain to close the widening gap with the Luftwaffe. Finally in March 1938 Chamberlain again vetoed Swinton’s plans for expanding the Royal Air Force, whereupon the peer announced he had no choice but to resign. The one remaining cabinet voice for rearmament had been silenced. He joined Churchill’s growing band of dissidents in the House of Commons.
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