Churchill visits Charlie Chaplin at his Hollywood studio

The next morning Churchill heard shouts below the Savoy-Plaza apartment and looked out, he wrote, to find that “under my window a gentleman [had] cast himself down fifteen storeys and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion and the arrival of the fire brigade.” Ever the curious journalist, he made his way to Wall Street. There, recognized by a stranger, he was invited inside the Stock Exchange. “I had expected to see pandemonium,” he wrote, “but the spectacle that met my eyes was one of calm and orderliness.” No wonder; apparently he hadn’t been told that brokers are forbidden to run on the floor of the exchange, and the big sellout was over anyhow, stocks now being offered for a fraction of their value. Churchill concluded: “No one who has gazed on such a scene could doubt that this financial disaster, huge as it is, cruel as it is to thousands, is only a passing episode in the march of a valiant and serviceable people who by fierce experiment are hewing new paths for man, and showing to all nations much that they should attempt and much that they should avoid.”²⁵¹

He still hadn’t made the connection, still didn’t grasp that since September 3, when he had left Vancouver, Wall Street investors had lost over thirty billion dollars, almost as much as the United States had spent on World War I. Later he would realize that this “Economical Blizzard,” as he came to call it, was responsible for turning all England into “one vast soup kitchen,” driving the country back off the gold standard, doubling the number of British unemployed, and radicalizing politics throughout Europe, especially in Germany. In California, coming under the spell of a local stockbroker, he had been persuaded to speculate heavily. The Wall Street fever of that autumn had afflicted him; he had written his wife: “Since my last letter from Santa Barbara I have made another £1,000 by speculating in a stock called Simmons. It is a domestic furniture business. They say, ‘You can’t go wrong on a Simmons mattress.’ There is a stock exchange [ticker] in every big hotel. You go & watch the figures being marked up on slates every few minutes. Mr Van Antwerp advises me. He is a stockbroker & one of the leading firms. I think he is a vy good man. This powerful firm watch my small interests like a cat a mouse.” William Van Antwerp was a member of E. F. Hutton, a reliable company, but the most stable brokers were impotent in the panic selling of Winston’s last week in New York. Though he had not been wiped out, his financial independence had disappeared in the reams of ticker tape. Throughout the coming decade he would have to write furiously to keep his family and style of living afloat. This bleak dawn was just beginning to break upon him when he sailed from New York on October 30. But when he reached Southampton he momentarily forgot it. A more immediate threat hung over the world he loved. Lord Irwin,^* the new viceroy in New Delhi, had recommended “the attainment of Dominion status” as Britain’s goal for its Indian Empire, Labour had endorsed Irwin’s proposal, and so, without consulting other leaders of the Conservative party, had Stanley Baldwin.²⁵²

Describing his new Hollywood acquaintances to Clementine, Winston had written that he had entertained “the leading men I like best, mostly British born, & all keenly pro-England.” Among the English expatriates there was a craggy-faced, forty-six-year-old ex-soldier named Victor McLaglen who had served three years in the Life Guards, commanded a company of the Irish Fusiliers in the Middle East during the war, and, during the months which followed the Armistice, policed Baghdad as provost marshal. After touring the Empire as a boxer, wrestler, and vaudeville stunt man, McLaglen had arrived in Hollywood and found employment on the Fox lot, where he was now rehearsing The Black Watch under the direction of John Ford. A few blocks away, MGM was shooting two other motion pictures: Trader Horn, with W. S. Van Dyne, Harry Carey, and C. Aubrey Smith, and, simultaneously, Son of India, starring Smith. These three were the first in a series of films which, for the next several years, would provide millions of moviegoers with images of the glory, legends, and myths of the British Empire. They included The Lost Patrol (McLaglen, Gary Cooper, Boris Karloff), Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Cooper, Franchot Tone), Clive of India (Ronald Colman and Loretta Young), Rhodes of Africa (Walter Huston), The Charge of the Light Brigade (Errol Flynn), Gunga Din (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Sam Jaffe, Joan Fontaine, Cary Grant, McLaglen), Wee Willie Winkie (Shirley Temple, McLaglen, Smith), and Stanley and Livingstone, which tugged at many a heart when Spencer Tracy, courteously removing his hat, approached Sir Cedric Hardwicke and said: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”²⁵³

It was great entertainment, if poor history—Colman and Huston were not in the least like the ruthless Clive and Rhodes—and the lush California countryside was far more romantic than the stark Khyber and the African bush. But it was presented as history, something over and done with, and therein lies its real significance. No one outside England, not even Hollywood’s dream merchants, could pretend that the Empire was still like that. Inside England was another matter. Opinion was divided there. Imperial destiny still had its rapt congregations in Britain, even in the Labour party; they believed that Britain’s position in the world, even its self-confidence, depended upon its far-flung realms. The faithful joined the Victoria League, the United Empire League, the British Empire Union, the League of Britons Overseas, and the Empire Day movement, whose only achievement was securing a half-holiday once a year for England’s schoolchildren. The Tory press, notably the Daily Express, remained fiercely chauvinistic. Boy Scouts, then at the height of their popularity, wore the broad-brimmed hats of the Boer War and shared their motto “Be Prepared” with the South African police. British soldiers continued to fight colonial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Palestine, battling first the Mad Mullah of Somaliland and then a Burmese monk whose followers believed he could fly if he chose, though to their disappointment he never so chose. Indeed, imperial possessions were still being acquired; the Empire reached its territorial peak in 1933 with the conquest of the Hadhramaut, a remote (and worthless) tract in southern Arabia. When a battle cruiser bearing the Prince of Wales passed through the Suez Canal and sailed down the Red Sea, with RAF biplanes forming a ceremonial umbrella overhead, native troops on both banks cheered, and in Aden the prince was greeted by massed Union Jacks and an enormous streamer: TELL DADDY WE ARE VERY HAPPY UNDER BRITISH RULE. In Buckingham Palace, Daddy addressed all his global subjects by radio every Christmas. Imperial conferences, determining policies vital to the Dominions, were still held regularly in London. So enlightened a parliamentarian as Boothby, visiting Jamaica, was reassured to see four Royal Navy battle cruisers anchored off Kingston, “one of them waving the flag of the Commander-in-Chief, West Indies Station…. The British Empire still existed.” At No. 10 Stanley Baldwin proclaimed: “The British Empire stands firm as a great force for good. It stands in the sweep of every wind, by the wash of every sea.” No public event in England was complete without a passionate chorus of “Land of Hope and Glory” or “Soldiers of the Queen,” with its affirmation that “England is master” and:²⁵⁴

We’re not forgetting it

We’re not letting it

Fade away and gradually die

Yet Baldwin was now preparing to let the Indian Raj do just that. He wasn’t moved by principle. If Churchill’s symbol is the hand forming a V for victory, Baldwin’s was the wetted forefinger held up to test the wind. He did it very well. In England, he knew, ardent imperialists were a minority. Labourites were at best indifferent to the Empire; the billion pounds invested in India wasn’t theirs. The passion of the new age was egalitarian. Even among the aristocracy one found young patricians who felt guilty about their membership in a privileged class. For most postwar Britons, it seemed, imperial songs and slogans had become empty rituals; in their hearts they didn’t much care. “The British were losing interest in their Empire,” James Morris wrote, “and there was a falling-off of recruitment for the Indian services.” By the early 1930s the Indian Civil Service had shrunk to five hundred men. In England news from remote colonies interested the older generation; their children, including Oxbridge graduates, found it rather tiresome. As late as February 9, 1933, with Hitler in power, the Oxford Union debated the resolution “that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”—and then approved it, 275 to 153. The King himself, still Emperor of India and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, wrote somberly, if awkwardly: “I cannot look into the future without feeling no little anxiety about the continued unity of the Empire.” Walter Lippmann, echoing Burke while pondering the indifference or even hostility of young aristocrats to imperial strength, reminded them that no empire in history has long survived without a devoted, steadfast ruling class.²⁵⁵

The fashionable—and fashionable Englishmen have far greater influence than their counterparts in, say, the United States—rejected every symbol of the Victorian era, from oratorios and organs to antimacassars. Kipling was mocked. The Prince of Wales was popular because he himself was rebelling against the Establishment he soon would lead, it was then assumed, for the rest of his life. When abroad he flirted with unsuitable young colonial women, fox-trotted until long after midnight, and rode bucking broncos. He didn’t even dress properly. Tieless, in trousers too short to cover his ankles, his cap on the back of his head, he looked far more like one of Mayfair’s Bright Young Things than the royal family’s heir apparent. This was not only conduct unbecoming to England’s future sovereign; it was downright “un-British.” His critics didn’t actually mean he seemed Jewish. The term had been expanded during the 1920s. In the past, English dignity had been stiffened by the intangible concept of British national character. Even Ireland had been awed by it. The Dominions and Crown Colonies were expected, not only to admire it, but to imitate it. As the 1920s were succeeded by the 1930s it became evident that they were letting the side down, were becoming un-British. Canadians were aping the Americans; Toronto was indistinguishable from Buffalo. The Australians talked like cockneys, and loud cockneys at that. English settlers in South Africa, it was said, had become effete, unlike the robust Afrikaners. Worst of all, for those loyal to the Empire, was the mockery of imperial solemnity at home—the braying, irreverent laughter of their own intellectuals. The image of the traditional, fatherly British colonel, once exemplified by men like C. Aubrey Smith, was being replaced by David Low’s Colonel Blimp, who told tedious barracks tales to obese chums in a Turkish bath. P. G. Wodehouse depicted sons of the aristocracy as weak, incompetent, dipsomaniacal clowns, and J. B. Morton—a Harrovian and an Oxonian who had led troops in France—ran mocking little pieces in the Daily Express: “ADVERTISEMENT CORNER: Will the gentleman who threw an onion at the Union Jack and repeatedly and noisily tore cloth during the singing of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the Orphans’ Outing on Thursday, write to Colonel Sir George Jarvis Delamaine Spooner, late of Poona, telling him what right he has to the Old Cartbusian braces which burst when he was arrested?”²⁵⁶

The Raj was the chief target of the English literati. Aldous Huxley, grandson of the great Thomas Henry, was another traitor to his class; India, he wrote, reminded him of the old man of Thermopylae, who never did anything right. “All over India,” wrote George Orwell, “there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part.” E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, perhaps the finest English novel of the 1920s, written by a Bloomsbury author who had been private secretary to a maharaja, was a devastating, though perhaps unjust, portrayal of Indian Civil Service racism. In the eyes of such men all imperial achievements were dross. Burma was part of the Indian Empire; Orwell had served there as a policeman, and he dismissed the sum of British efforts there as “second-rate.” Bombay was, in Huxley’s opinion, “one of the most appalling cities in either hemisphere.” The architecture of rebuilt Kuala Lumpur, the capital of British Malaya, was similarly derided, and so was New Delhi, the work of Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker, though here the critics may have had a point. The only city expressly designed to intimidate a people, New Delhi was begun in 1911, when George V traveled there during the Coronation Durbar to lay the foundation stone, and it was finished just in time for the British to move out, an ambiguity vaguely preserved in its disconcerting Secretariat. But what dismayed traditionalists most was the intellectuals’ total renunciation of every value, every standard, every icon which had been cherished in the imperial past. Nothing was sacred, not even the Crown. When George V died his last words were: “How is the Empire?” The story got around London drawing rooms and the common rooms in Oxford and Cambridge that he had actually said: “What’s on at the Empire?”²⁵⁷

All this was threatening to the defenders of a rich national legacy, and it was a new experience for them. Their fathers had snorted and had ignored the Ruskins and Paters and Wildes because British supremacy, in those days, had been unquestioned. No more; since the Armistice, England had steadily lost ground to competitors abroad in virtually every field of endeavor. Yet Englishmen could not rid themselves of the old complacency. Cunarders, they told one another, were the world’s finest ocean liners, and R.M.S. Queen Mary, now about to be launched, would set a standard none could surpass.^* They were right, but steamships, like locomotives, in the construction of which the Victorians had also excelled, were not the transport of the future. Britannia had ruled the waves and the railway tracks, but was far from indomitable on highways and in the air—especially the air. Imperial Airways, Morris wrote, “enjoyed semi-official privileges,” yet its management was inefficient and its schedules ridiculous; a person flying from London to Cape Town had to change planes six times.²⁵⁸ Seasoned British travelers preferred KLM. But Britain’s greatest aerial fiasco was the maiden voyage of the R 101, the costliest airship ever built in England, a few months after Churchill’s return from the United States. Great hopes were reposed in the R 101. A pet project of Ramsay MacDonald’s, it was expected to demonstrate Britain’s enduring dominance in technology and provide mail and passenger service between Canada, South Africa, Australia, and India. This superzeppelin, powered by diesel engines, took off from Cardington in Bedfordshire on October 4, 1930, bound for Karachi, 3,652 miles away. It had traveled 300 miles when it struck a low hill on the outskirts of Beauvais, northwest of Paris, and collapsed in flames. The Empire’s prime ministers, assembled in London to draft the Statute of Westminster, observed a minute of silent prayer. It should have been longer. They were mourning the passing of something far more momentous than a dirigible.

But the Dominion leaders had much to celebrate, too. In 1926 England and its white possessions had become “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to each other in any aspect of their domestic or foreign affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.” Now came the Statute of Westminster, which was just beginning its two-year progress through the parliamentary process. It was a historic measure, international in its implications, perhaps the vastest piece of legislation ever to pass through this or any other legislative body. Arthur Balfour called it “the most novel and greatest experiment in Empire-building the world has ever seen.”²⁵⁹ Jan Christiaan Smuts, its author, knew better. The statute was in fact a blue-print for the dismantling of the Empire. Under its terms, the Mother Country relinquished all authority over the white Dominions; laws passed by the House of Commons were inapplicable in them, and the House could not overrule acts of Dominion parliaments, which, indeed, were granted veto power over the succession to the British throne.

The Statute of Westminster was not only flexible; it was equivocal. Its language might be interpreted any way you liked. Civis Britannicus Sum could be translated to mean everything or nothing. A New Zealand lawyer could cite a precedent in Britain’s elaborate imperial judicial system; the New Zealand judge could defer to the precedent or laugh it out of court. Ireland could and did quote the statute as justifying its complete secession from the Commonwealth, converting itself into “a sovereign, independent and democratic State.”²⁶⁰ While the imperial conference was deliberating over the phrasing of the statute, and the R 101 was disappearing in a bellying sheet of flame, taking forty-eight British lives with it, Mohandas Gandhi was observing his sixty-first birthday in a Poona jail. Since the statute in this early draft excluded possessions inhabited by men with pigmented skin, Gandhi and his cause, it would seem, gained nothing from it. But the language of Lord Irwin’s presentation defined the Commonwealth as color-blind—if it hadn’t, the pressure of twentieth-century history would have made the discrimination indefensible anyhow. Even as Victor McLaglen, Ronald Colman, and C. Aubrey Smith held audiences enthralled, the Empire they were celebrating was fading with the credits.

In every age there are certain articles of faith which society accepts unquestioningly, with or without evidence; often, indeed, in the face of inconvenient facts. The faith may be religious, moral, or political. During the last quarter of the twentieth century it has become political. Creeds, like streams, gather strength as they narrow, thriving on bigotry—at present, liberal bigotry. In our time the institution of European colonialism is condemned as an abomination. No defense of it is admissible. The transformation of former colonies into emerging nations is regarded as inherently benign, one of the few great achievements in a troubled century. Africa, we are told, is free. Certainly it is free of foreign administration, but the question of whether the people of Libya, Uganda, Angola, or Katanga enjoy political freedom—not to mention the four freedoms, from fear and want and of religion and speech, proclaimed by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941—is so provocative that raising it is bad taste. Yet despite the hopes raised by Gandhi and his gifted successor, Jawaharlal Nehru, the results of their statecraft are rather different from those they anticipated. The old Indian Empire is now split into five nations. In all of them the beneficence which was expected to replace the departed Raj is, if present, extremely well camouflaged. This is not an argument against the rise of national pride in what we have come to call the Third World. To disapprove of what Macmillan called “the winds of change” would be like passing judgment on the decline of Rome, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution. History can never be put in the dock. But before examining it, one should clear the mind of cant.

In 1885 a clique of upper-class Indians established, as an annual custom, a three-day Christmas-week picnic. They called it the Indian National Congress. Except in 1906, when its members approved a mild resolution favoring some form of Indian self-government in domestic affairs, the congress had no political overtones until 1920. Nevertheless, the damage to imperial authority had been done long before that. It is obvious now that the ultimate failure of the Raj was social, not political. Lord Willingdon told Boothby he once invited a distinguished Indian prince, a friend of his, to lunch at Bombay’s Yacht Club. When they were ordering drinks, a porter came over and told Willingdon: “I am sorry, your Excellency, but the secretary has asked me to tell you that niggers are not allowed in this club.” Boothby himself agreed with Clemenceau’s observation that Englishmen and Indians in the Raj “do not mingle at all.” Had the picnickers of 1885 included English families, the congress might have remained a frolic. Like Gandhi, who conceived of England as “a land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization,” the original congressmen were fervent anglophiles.²⁶¹ But this, from the British point of view, was less a blessing than it seemed. The most sophisticated of them spent several years in the Mother Country—Gandhi was admitted to the Inner Temple, one of London’s four law colleges (“inns of court”)—or sent their sons there: Jawaharlal Nehru, like Churchill, attended Harrow. Inspired by the liberal idealism of their English teachers, they returned home with a new sense of purpose, which grew, after the Armistice, when they followed the events in Ireland with intense interest. Under Gandhi’s guidance the congress became a mass movement, with Indian freedom as its objective. Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father, became co-founder of the Swarajya party. Hind Swaraj is a subtle Hindi phrase; under Motilal it was translated as “Indian home rule,” or the achievement of dominion status; later, when his son rose to power, it came to mean independence—a socialist republic.

In either case, the task confronting the congress was almost beyond imagining. Ireland was difficult, but in India the problems of nationhood were increased a thousandfold. The Raj wasn’t even entirely British; France ruled five small colonies there and Portugal three. The subcontinent’s vast population, which increased by some thirty-four million each decade, was divided into four dominant ethnic strains: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, and Negroid. They spoke 225 main languages; each of the most popular 12 was the native tongue for at least ten million Indians. The illiteracy rate in the Indian Empire was 88 percent; the average diet, between six and seven hundred calories a day. Idols, and there were thousands of them, were worshiped by Hindus, Moslems, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians, and the possibilities for religious conflict were limitless. Moslems regarded swine as unclean. To Hindus, cows, monkeys, and the waters of the Ganges were sacred. Assam head-hunters knelt before the skulls of their victims and chewed their fathers’ bones, regarding the marrow as an aphrodisiac. To offer a Sikh a cigarette, or to light up near one of his shrines, could be suicidal. Hindus and Moslems were forever stalking one another with daggers, swords, spears, and torches. The followers of these warring faiths did not live apart; they mingled daily. Segregating them, even roughly, would require the relocation of between fourteen and sixteen million people. Moreover, native rulers and their subjects often prayed at different altars. The nawab of Junadagh was a Moslem; 81 percent of his people were Hindus. The maharaja of Kashmir was a Hindu; of his four million Kashmiris, 80 percent were Moslems. “India is an abstraction,” Churchill said. “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.”²⁶²

Two out of every three Indians were Hindus. Because of their beliefs, seven hundred million cattle roamed unharmed in a country which always teetered on the brink of starvation and sometimes plunged into famine. Hinduism is an exquisite maze of twistings and circlings and doublings-back, of poetry and philosophy and taboos, of hauntingly lovely corridors and frightening tunnels into the darker places in the human mind, and many pilgrims from the West, having studied it, have emerged the better for the journey. One of them, Frank Lloyd Wright, once told a group of fellow architects that Hindu thought takes a longer route on its way to reach a conclusion and “gathers more richness along the way.” In an illustration which would almost certainly have baffled Churchill, Wright drew a diagram:²⁶³

To those who have not mastered it, the reasoning in the Bhagavad-Gita or the more complex Upanishads can be immensely frustrating. A single idea sets off a series of cerebral reactions so complex that one may become quickly, and hopelessly, entangled—as in the Dharma Chakra, or Wheel of Asoka, now displayed on the Indian flag. The wheel dates from 228 B.C., and its hub, rim, and spokes blend concepts of light, truth, simplicity, compassion, renunciation, humility, faith, strength, fellowship, and interdependence, all entwined in an image which links, reinforces, and merges them. You do not have to understand it to feel its conceptual power, but the learned Hindu will pity you for your ignorance. He will also feel superior to you in other ways. High Brahmins, for example, seem to their Western friends to bathe incessantly. They are probably the cleanest people in the world. To them, Englishmen and Americans are coarse and crude, with unspeakable personal habits.

But the social expression of Hinduism is the doctrine, or, more accurately, the practice, of caste, and though its scholars find the subject distasteful, the historical origins of this pernicious system lie in a racism starker than any bigotry found in the veld of South Africa or the red clay of northern Georgia. Over a thousand years before the birth of Christ, Aryans of uncertain origins conquered the black Dravidian and Munda natives and imposed a hierarchical structure on the entire subcontinent. Brahmanism and its major gods—Siva, Vishnu, Krishna, Rama, and the creator Brahma—evolved through successive generations, but the basic principle, or lack of it, endured: the lighter your skin, the higher your caste. Historically, the four great castes are the Brahmins, scholars and priests; Kshatriyas, soldiers and administrators; Vaishyas, merchants; and Sudras, servants and manual laborers. Gandhi was a Vaishya; Nehru, a Kashmiri Brahmin. But there are countless subcastes, including one for prostitution: if a girl is born into it, she spends her life as a whore; if the child is a boy, he will be a pimp until, having raised another generation of whores and pimps, he dies. You can see his sisters and daughters today, locked in the Cages of Bombay.^* One caste makes beds, another washes dishes, a third dries them—which is why every British household in the Raj required swarms of servants. Any member of any caste would perish before moving his own garbage, which is the duty of those who have no caste at all—the Untouchables. There were between sixty and seventy million Untouchables in Gandhi’s day. He called them harijans (“beloved of God”) and worked hard to better their lot, but even Mahatma (“great-souled”) Gandhi never suggested the abolition of caste, a reform which, Churchill held, would be absolutely necessary before India could be considered civilized.

Vaishyaism was not the only theological influence in Gandhi’s childhood home. Jainism was also esteemed there, and his respect for it was to shape the destiny of the subcontinent. Jains believe in tolerance, vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and ahimsa, the doctrine of the sanctity of every living creature. A devout Jain will not even swat a mosquito. Gandhi never went that far, but his belief in nonviolence was absolute. That was why he had become a stretcher-bearer, not a soldier, in the Boer War, and satyägraha, Hindi for “nonviolence,” was to be his most effective tactic in the struggle for Indian independence; among its subsequent converts were American civil rights workers, who adopted it in the 1960s. Punishing a man who keeps turning the other cheek is frustrating and, eventually, pointless. Beginning in the 1920s, Raj policemen arrested thousands of the Mahatma’s satyägrahis, who cheerfully lined up outside prisons, waiting to be escorted to their cells. Unfortunately, the tension between Hindus and Moslems mounted as their enthusiasm for the movement grew; and the possibilities of violence multiplied. The Mahatma sought to overcome it by calling for national unity, coining the slogan “Hindu-Moslim ek hai!” (“Hindu and Moslem are one!”) Few accepted it, however, and after a series of sinister ritualistic murders a congress mob stormed a police station in the United Provinces and slew the constables. Gandhi called off his campaign. His people, he said, had failed to grasp his message. But the British, who had been itching to get their hands on him, arrested him just the same, and on March 18, 1922, he was tried for sedition in what the docket called “Case No 45 of the Ahmedabad Sessions, Rex Imperator v Gandhi.” The evidence was a series of articles he had written in his political journal, Young India. He pleaded guilty and asked for penal servitude: “To preach disaffection towards the existing system of Government has become almost a passion with me… I am here therefore to submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me, for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.” The puzzled young English magistrate paid tribute to his sincerity and sentenced him to six years, adding: “I should like to say in doing so that if the course of events in India should make it possible to reduce the period and release you, no one would be better pleased than I.”²⁶⁴

Gandhi was out in two years. He found his movement was in disarray. It had split into two factions over whether or not to accept a British invitation to join local legislatures. More depressing, the enmity between Hindu and Moslem members was deepening. Gandhi fasted for three weeks; it solved nothing. In London, Birkenhead, adamantly against any concessions to congress demands, was winning every skirmish. Immediately after the war Parliament had authorized an investigation of the Indian political scene by a royal commission. Appointing the members was F.E.’s job. In 1927, after a long series of delaying actions, he named a panel of undistinguished British back-benchers—not a single Indian—under the chairmanship of Sir John Simon, of whom Birkenhead said patronizingly: “How much better in life and how much more paying it is to be blameless rather than brilliant.”²⁶⁵ By the fall of 1929 Simon and his colleagues (who included the still unknown Clement Attlee) were completing a ponderous document which, when published the following year, would omit any mention of dominion status, the key issue in India. Then Lord Irwin surprised everyone by facing the issue squarely. He asked Labour’s William Wedgwood Benn, father of the future Tony Benn and later Birkenhead’s successor in the India Office, to summon a conference which would include, not only Britons, but also members of the congress and representatives of the maharajas ruling India’s princely states. Wedgwood Benn was delighted. Depressed by the stodgy Simon Commission, Labour had been searching for some way to mollify the Indian nationalists. Here, clearly, was a superb opportunity. Notice of the conference was published in the Indian Gazette of October 31, 1929. The same issue carried Irwin’s declaration that granting dominionhood was implicit in the humane, enlightened tradition of the Raj, and Baldwin’s endorsement of this position.

Uproar followed. Birkenhead furiously attacked Irwin in the House of Lords. Lord Reading, following him, said flatly: “It is frankly inconceivable that India will ever be fit for Dominion self-government.” In the House of Commons, Baldwin was facing a revolt. Tories were questioning, not only his wisdom, but also his integrity. On October 23, when Winston was visiting the War Museum in Richmond, examining a tattered Confederate flag, the Conservative leader had informed the shadow cabinet of Irwin’s coming statement and added that he approved of it. Churchill would disagree, of course, and so would the City, with its massive investments in the subcontinent, but Baldwin believed that the voters, weary of India, would be glad to shuck off the burden. With the exception of Sir Samuel Hoare, the prime minister’s senior colleagues had told him they thought it would be a mistake to support the viceroy. They thought they had convinced him. And now he had done it anyway. Three of them threatened to resign. Faced with the possibility of a party split, he offered lame excuses. He had acted in his “personal capacity,” he said, not as leader. They weren’t having any of that. Then he told them he had been under the impression that Irwin had spoken out at the urging of the Simon Commission. But the commission hadn’t completed its inquiries, and friends of its members knew the report would be weak. The shadow cabinet meeting broke up in confusion. To make sure his views were understood, the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, son of the great prime minister, wrote Baldwin: “I need not say what a shock it was to learn that the declaration was to be made before anything had been laid before the country, though we had appointed a Commission for this very purpose.” He felt mortified: “What a dislocation! Poor Conservative Party!” Salisbury regarded Indian self-government as an “extreme absurdity” and hoped “you will be able to stop it, to convince the Gvt and to convince Edward Irwin that the Party will be shaken to its centre” if this line were not abandoned. He ended: “We must resist it.” George Lane-Fox sent Irwin word that the Tories were “not very comfortable” with his position. Geoffrey Dawson, who thought the viceroy was right, nevertheless wrote him: “The tide here is running pretty strongly against your ideas, and you cannot hope to carry them out by depending on the Labour Party alone.”²⁶⁶

Baldwin refused to budge. As leader of the Conservatives and a superb politician, he had resources stronger than his party critics’, even though they constituted, at that time, a majority. The whips belonged to him, and also the party machine, including the constituency committees and associations. He could count on the support of The Times and of Reith at the BBC. Most of his MPs were indebted to him in one way or another. He called in these IOUs and had just about suppressed the rebellion when, on Tuesday, November 5, Winston Churchill returned from the United States.

Earlier, Irwin had urged Churchill to update his views on India by talking to some members of the congress. Winston had replied: “I am quite satisfied with my views on India, and I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indians.” Since leaving Bangalore in 1899 he had taken little interest in the subcontinent. He seems to have been unaware that the Simon Commission and all that followed were the consequences of a pledge made by Lloyd George in 1917, defining England’s aim in India as “the granting of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible Government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.” But although Winston had seldom thought of the Raj, his feelings about it were strong. No Englishman was more persuaded of Queen Victoria’s wisdom in saying, “I think it very unwise to give up what we hold.” Indeed, that summed up his attitude toward the entire Empire. He considered it, among other things, a matter of national self-interest. To Churchill, Amery observed, “England is still the starting point and the ultimate object of policy.” The Empire gave Britain its prestige; it made Britain the world’s most powerful nation. Without its imperial possessions the country would be merely an obscure island lying off the European continent. England deprived of its imperial possessions would, for him, be like Samson shorn of his hair or Antaeus without his feet on earth. Moreover, his vision of India, in particular, was crowned by a romantic nimbus. It was the magic land he had known as an impressionable young cavalry officer, a realm of rajas’ palaces, the Taj, shikar, bazaars, fakirs, temples, shrines, and howdahs, a symbol of imperial splendor and proud glory, Britian’s most priceless possession. To yield it, he said, would be “a hideous act of self-mutilation.”²⁶⁷

Many, including some who were close to him, concluded that he lived in the past, a “mid-Victorian,” as Amery called him in August 1929, “steeped in the politics of his father’s period, and unable ever to get the modern view.” Certainly Churchill often quoted pronouncements about the subcontinent made long ago by men now deep in their graves. One of them, indeed, was Lord Randolph: “Our rule in India is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread out over and keeping free from storms a vast and profound ocean of humanity.” Another was Lord Morley: “There is a school of thought who say that we might wisely walk out of India and that the Indians could manage their own affairs better than we can. Anybody who pictures to himself the anarchy, the bloody chaos that would follow from any such deplorable step might shrink from that sinister decision.” And, from J. R. Seeley’s Expansion of England, published in 1883, when Winston was an Ascot schoolboy, he remembered the judgment that British withdrawal from the subcontinent would be “the most inexcusable of all conceivable crimes and might possibly cause the most stupendous of all conceivable calamities.”²⁶⁸

There was another side to this, and it should be examined thoughtfully. As a boy at the Crystal Palace Winston had described the ruffian who accosted Count Kinsky as a “sort of Kaffir” and a “Mulatto.” In Cuba, fresh out of Sandhurst, he had distrusted “the negro element among the insurgents.” He never outgrew this prejudice. Late in life he was asked if he had seen the film Carmen Jones. He had walked out on it, he replied, because he didn’t like “blackamoors.” His physician was present, and Winston asked what happened when blacks got measles. Could the rash be spotted? The doctor replied that blacks suffered a high mortality rate from measles. Churchill said lightly, “Well, there are plenty left. They’ve got a high rate of production.”²⁶⁹ He could greet Louis Botha and Michael Collins as equals, but his relationship with any Indian, even an accomplished barrister like Gandhi or a fellow Harrovian like Nehru, could never be as between compeers. It followed, therefore, that their country must remain a vassal state. This was the underside of his position in the great debates over India’s future which began in 1929. Today it would be called an expression of racism, and he, as its exponent, a racist. But neither word had been coined then; they would not appear in the Oxford English dictionary or Webster’s for another generation. Until recently—beginning in the late 1940s—racial intolerance was not only acceptable in polite society; it was fashionable, even assumed.

The popularity of prejudice when Parliament was pondering the India question is demonstrated by the extraordinary success of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, which went through forty printings in the 1920s. Churchill read it in 1927, as two notes by Chartwell visitors attest. On August 10 Victor Cazalet reported that his host “admires the book Mother India very much,” and on September 27 Lord Lloyd wrote: “I was staying a weekend recently with Winston who was immediately struck with Mother India—Miss Mayo’s book. It’s all true.” Viewed from the 1980s, her work seems almost comparable to the Protocols of Zion. Vile in its insinuations, wildly inaccurate, and above all hypocritical, this single volume by an elderly prig poisoned the minds of millions who might otherwise have reflected thoughtfully on Gandhi’s movement. Her case against the Hindu custom of child marriage is indisputable, but she did not stop there. Hindu mothers, she said, taught their sons and daughters to masturbate. Citing “highest medical authority,” she charged that every child practicing onanism “bears on its body the signs of this habit,” and that “when constantly practiced during mature life,” which she declared was the case in India, “its devastation of body and nerves will scarcely be questioned.” This chapter ends: “Given men who enter the world physical bankrupts out of bankrupt stock, rear them through childhood in influences and practices that devour their vitality; launch them at the dawn of maturity on an unrestrained outpouring of their whole provision of creative energy in one single direction; find them, at an age when the Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood, broken-nerved, low-spirited, petulant ancients; and need you, while this remains unchanged, seek for other reasons why they are poor and sick and dying and why their hands are too weak, too fluttering, to seize the reins of Government?” “Miss Mayo has dropped a brick,” Irwin wrote Neville Chamberlain. “It will make the Hindus of course see red.” Winston Churchill, being a larger figure than Katherine Mayo, dropped a bigger brick by sanctioning it. The same can be said of liberal men and women on both sides of the Atlantic who accepted her vicious fantasy without demur. The Spectator observed that “the evils which Miss Mayo attacks are widespread and deep-rooted,” and that until they had been expunged, “India can hardly take the place that she ought to occupy in the family of nations.” Survey’s reviewer called the book “challenging, prickly with facts and neglected angles of approach…. I confess I learned more from this book on the inner Indian and why the East is East than I ever knew before.” The leftist New Statesman described it as “the most important and truthful book that has been written about India for a good deal more than a generation.” Across the Atlantic, the New Republic welcomed it. Outlook found it “free from sentimentalism, artisanship, and preconceived notions. It is a straight-forward account.” Catholic World commented: “There is no gainsaying her statements.” To the New York Herald Tribune, Mother India was “calm, hard-headed—though not hard-hearted.” The New York Times reported: “Her detachment is obvious. If she quotes, she gives her authority. If she describes, it is an eyewitness. The facts that she states are not likely to be disputed.”²⁷⁰

Churchill, however, always had second and third thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of his pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity. Given time, he could devise imaginative solutions. Russia had been more than he could handle—though it should be remembered that he would have been content to see a socialist regime there provided it renounced wholesale slaughter—but his record had been impressive in South Africa, the Middle East, and Ireland. He was prepared to accept provincial self-government in India provided Britain retained certain rights of “paramountcy,” including control of foreign affairs, communications, and defense. What he could not overlook was that India, Gandhian satyãgraha notwithstanding, was a land of violence. Even as Churchill was binding up his loins to confront Baldwin in the House, Indian terrorists tried to assassinate Irwin, of all people, as the viceregal train entered Delhi. (Churchill cabled Irwin congratulations on his escape; the viceroy, who himself was not untainted by racial condescension, replied that, luckily for him, Indians “seem to be less efficient in their execution than in their design.”) Bengalis then raided an arsenal in Chittagong, killing eight British guards. An uprising in Peshawar left thirty dead. After a terrorist had been executed in Cawnpore (now Kanpur), Hindus rioted and murdered over three hundred Moslems. Churchill said: “Wednesday’s massacres at Cawnpore, a name of evil import”—in June 1857 the British community there had been wiped out by mutineers who, legend has it, threw their corpses down a well—“are a portent. Because it is believed that we are about to leave the country, the struggle for power is now beginning between the Moslems and Hindus…. The British troops are now pacifying and calming the terrified and infuriated populace. But the feud is only at its beginning.” His dire warning outraged leaders of the congress, and was discounted by Wedgwood Benn and Baldwin. Today it is discredited; in 1967 Professor Arno J. Mayer of Princeton wrote that the freeing of India “never produced any of the dire consequences predicted by Churchill.” But it did. Eighteen years after his warning, when the Raj ended and the last British soldiers sailed from Bombay, over two million Hindus and Moslems were slain during six months of savagery. Like Turkey’s slaughter of the Armenians, the Russian civil war, and the destruction of the European Jews in the early 1940s, it was a great human disaster; in a word, a holocaust.²⁷¹

Back in England with Hearst and Wall Street behind him, Churchill took the boat train from Southampton, reaching Venetia Montagu’s house on the evening of Tuesday, November 5. Clementine had told him that a half-dozen worried Tories awaited him in the drawing room. They thought Baldwin wrong about India but were concerned about party reprisals. Not to worry, Winston told them cheerfully; he would stand alone, if necessary, and speak for all of them. As it happened, he had company. Lloyd George, though his powers were waning, was still effective and beyond Baldwin’s reach. The debate on the Irwin declaration opened on Friday. MacDonald spoke for it; Baldwin announced that the Conservatives supported him. George then rose to reply. Davidson wrote that Churchill had “sat through S.B.’s speech glowering and unhappy” but he leaned “forward during the ‘Goat’s’ speech cheering every mischievous passage in it.” Davidson estimated that at least a third of the Tory MPs would vote against the declaration. They had listened glumly to their leader; their applause for him had been perfunctory. Dawson wrote Irwin: “The naked truth is that his speech, to which I listened, was heard in almost icy silence by the House.” Hoare wrote: “It is certainly true that scarcely anyone in the party liked it. The diehards were much upset and… Austen, FE, Winston and Worthy [Sir Laming Worthington-Evans] were violently opposed to it.” Hoare thought he himself had been “the only supporter of Stanley’s attitude.” It was his impression that “Winston was almost demented with fury.” Lane-Fox observed that “there were several people such as Winston and Worthy whom I saw and heard crying ‘No.’ ” Had there been a vote, he thought, half the Tory MPs would have defected, but he felt confident that “since they have had time to think, the vast majority of the Conservatives have returned to their loyalty to SB.”²⁷²

Churchill’s first attack on the declaration came, not on the floor of the House, but in the columns of the Daily Mail. It appeared on November 16, establishing a position on the issue from which he never wavered. Britain’s “rescue of India from ages of barbarism, internecine war, and tyranny,” he wrote, “and its slow but ceaseless forward march to civilisation” constituted “upon the whole the finest achievement of our history.” Now it was “the duty of public men and women to make it plain without delay that the extension of Dominion Status to India is not practicable at the present time and that any attempt to secure it will encounter the earnest resistance of the British nation.” Self-government was unthinkable for a community which “treats sixty millions of its members, toiling at their side, as ‘Untouchables,’ whose approach is an affront and whose very presence is a pollution,” and it was absurd to contemplate it “while India is a prey to fierce racial and religious dissensions and when the withdrawal of British protection would mean the immediate resumption of medieval ways.” If the viceregal proposal were adopted the British Raj would be replaced by a “Gandhi Raj” because “the political classes in India represent only an insignificant fraction of the three hundred and fifty millions for whose welfare we are responsible.” England could not, and indeed should not, “close the long avenues of the future.” But the idea that “Home Rule for India or Dominion Status or full responsible status for India can emerge from anything that is now being done is not only fantastic in itself but criminally mischievous in its effects.”²⁷³

The struggle over Indian self-government mounted throughout 1930 and was fought against a background of tumultuous events. The Cawnpore riots resumed and the death toll passed one thousand, Afridi tribesmen emerged from the hills and attacked a strong British garrison in Peshawar, and Gandhi delivered his most brilliant political stroke, his Salt March to the Indian Ocean. He had been searching for some way to make his movement comprehensible to the masses. The Raj held a monopoly on the production and sale of salt. But salt should be free, said the Mahatma; the seas alone held enough to satisfy the world’s population a thousand times over. So he began his trek on March 12, scooping a spoonful of salt from brackish earth along the way. He never reached the seaside. While sleeping by a river, he was arrested by nervous British policemen; they had arrived stealthily in the middle of night to avoid a riot. But the Salt March continued without him. His original spoonful was sold for sixteen hundred rupees. Professors led their students to the shore. The Raj banned newspapers congratulating them. Indian youths raided a Raj salt depot. The British police responded with brutality and mass arrests; by the end of May, 100,000 Gandhi followers were behind bars, Nehru among them. He wrote his leader, who was cheerfully spinning cotton in another prison: “May I congratulate you on the new India you have created by your magic touch?”²⁷⁴

Churchill’s response to all this was that the viceroy had asked for it. His declaration had displayed weakness; enemies of the Raj were exploiting it. The Afridis had stormed Peshawar because they had been encouraged to believe that “Lord Irwin’s Government was clearing out of India, and that rich spoils lay open to their raids.” During his service on the frontier, before the turn of the century, the fathers of these tribesmen had hidden in the hills. To hunt them had been “like going into the water to fight a shark.” Now they were witnessing “the shark coming out to the beach.” To Boothby he wrote that it would be “easy… to crush Gandhi and the Congress.” The party should be broken up and its leaders exiled to another British possession. The difficulty, as he saw it, was the indecisiveness of MacDonald’s government and the lack of leadership on either side of the House. “When eagles are silent,” he said, “the parrots begin to jabber.” On September 28 he distributed a brief statement to the press declaring that he would remain in public life until the India issue was settled. Lord Burnham, owner of the Daily Telegraph and a Tory ally, wrote him that “the scales are most unfairly weighted against such of us as believe that our betrayal of India would be a crime against civilisation…. The real tragedy is that India is crying out to be governed and we refuse to govern.” Burnham added: “F. E.’s illness is a great blow.”²⁷⁵

F.E.’s death, which swiftly followed, was a far greater blow. He was relatively young—still in his fifties—and to Churchill he had almost been a member of the family. On October 1 Clementine wrote Margaret Smith, Lady Birkenhead: “Last night Winston wept for his friend. He said several times ‘I feel so lonely.’ ” F.E., secure in the House of Lords, had confidently led the defenders of the Raj; now they turned to Winston. Churchill’s position in the Commons, very different from his lost friend’s, was growing more difficult every week. Yet he could see no alternative. He wrote: “When I think of the way in which we poured out blood and money to take Contalmaison or to hold Ypres, I cannot understand why it is that we should now throw away our conquests and our inheritance with both hands, through helplessness and pusillanimity.” On September 24 he had written Baldwin: “What times we live in! The most serious of all our problems is India. I am now receiving, in consequence of my speeches, streams of letters from our people in India and the feeling of anxiety that we are being let down…. I do earnestly hope that you will not allow your friendship with Irwin to affect your judgement or the action of your party upon what, since the War, is probably the greatest question Englishmen have had to settle. Very strong currents of feeling and even passion are moving under the stagnant surface of our affairs, and I must confess myself to care more about this business than anything else in public life.”²⁷⁶

Baldwin was unmoved. He had already confided to a friend that if he formed another government, Churchill would not be part of it. Winston’s incapacity for teamwork, he said, far outweighed his talents. Clementine saw what was coming. Politics, she wrote their son, “have taken an orientation not favourable to Papa.” India was the main issue, but Baldwin, strongly supported by the shadow cabinet in this instance, endorsed high tariffs. Churchill protested. On October 14 the two men held a long private talk and agreed that there was a definite breach between them. That evening Baldwin wrote Churchill of his “profound regret that there is a real parting of the ways and a friendship towards you which has grown up through six years of loyal and strenuous work together.” He insisted that he continued to “cherish the hope that you may yet see your way to stay with us,” but by his actions he was sabotaging that hope, if indeed it existed. The Tory tariff policy remained unchanged, and Winston contemplated resignation from the shadow cabinet. He was nudged again when Lord Lloyd, the strong British high commissioner in Cairo, was recalled with Baldwin’s approval as the first step in the evacuation of all British troops, except those in the canal zone, from Egypt. “During the last forty years,” a furious Churchill told the House, “everything has turned upon the British garrison in Cairo. With its departure the once glorious episode of England in Egypt comes to an end. It is not without a bitter pang that I contemplate this.” He observed that “there is a sombre philosophy nowadays which I hear in some quarters about Egypt and India. It is said: ‘Give them all they ask for! Clear out and let things go to smash, and then there will be a case for us to come back again!’ ” Such a doctrine, he said, “is no foundation for the continuance of British fame and power. Once we lose our confidence in our mission in the East… it will be a presence which cannot long endure.”²⁷⁷

Baldwin wrote a friend that Churchill wanted “to go back to pre-war and govern with a strong hand. He has become once more the subaltern of hussars of ’96.” But Winston was far from alone. The very die-hard members of the party to whom he had once been anathema founded the Indian Empire Society and invited him to address their first meeting. It was held in London’s Cannon Street Hotel, hard by St. Paul’s, on December 12, 1930. They wanted powerful political medicine, and he believed he knew the prescription. In Lahore, Kipling’s beloved citadel in the Punjab, members of the congress had burned the Union Jack. Their meeting, said Winston, should have been “broken up and its leaders deported.” Gandhi had been treated far too leniently in the beginning; he should have been arrested and tried “as soon as he broke the law.” Even now, firm measures, demonstrating Parliament’s resolve “to govern and guide the destinies of the Indian people in faithful loyalty to Indian interest,” could, perhaps within a few months, “bring this period of tantalized turmoil to an end.” Each Indian province should be given “more real, more intimate, more representative organs of self-government,” leaving the central authority in the hands of the Raj. But there could be no compromise with “the forces of sedition and outrage,” because “the truth is that Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him with cat’s meat. The sooner this is realised, the less trouble and misfortune will there be for all concerned.”²⁷⁸

“What a monstrous speech Winston has just made,” Irwin wrote Geoffrey Dawson at The Times. Dawson, agreeing, ran an editorial declaring that Churchill was “no more representative of the Conservative Party” than “the assassins of Calcutta” were of the Indian Congress, and his speech would “have just as little influence.” Dawson and his fellow lords of the British media were doing something about this last. Churchill wanted to address the nation on the issue. He offered Sir John Reith £100 for ten minutes on the BBC. Reith, like any trapped civil servant, scurried to higher authority, in this case Wedgwood Benn, who replied that he felt “most apprehensive” at the prospect of Winston on the air; he was afraid the consequence would do “immense harm to India.” Reith thereupon rejected Churchill’s proposal, explaining that he opposed “American” broadcasting methods. This, Winston said, was an “oppressive decision.” He thought “the American plan would be better than the present British methods of debarring public men from access to a public who wish to hear”; when “an Imperial issue like the discharge of our mission in India is being debated, it seems to me that at least an equal solicitude for impartiality is required from you.” The Establishment was closing ranks against him. News accounts of his speeches in Parliament shrank and appeared deeper and deeper in newspapers’ inside pages. He protested to Rothermere of the Daily Mail that they were “the only weapon I have for fighting this battle.” If the Mail buried its accounts of them, “Baldwin with the Times at his back is master of the fate of India.” Gagged, he struggled on, addressing the Indian Empire Society twice more, always assailing Gandhi, whose cause and dedication were incomprehensible to him. In his view the Mahatma was “a malignant and subversive fanatic,” a cynical manipulator of “Brahmins who mouth and patter principles of Western Liberalism and pose as philosophic and democratic politicians.” And all the time he continued to attend meetings of the shadow cabinet. If his colleagues felt awkward, he was not in the least embarrassed. As he saw it he was true to the widow’s uniform he had once worn:²⁷⁹

Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year,

Our fathers’ title runs.

Make we likewise their sacrifice,

Defrauding not our sons.

As the rift grew between Baldwin and Churchill, Conservative MPs were faced with the nightmare of every workaday politician: the obligation to choose sides in an intramural quarrel. Some found it relatively easy. Lord Weir thought Britain needed “inspiration” and Winston could provide it. Lord Knutsford wrote him: “Some day you must lead the whole country. I look for this.” But others were more vulnerable. Neville Chamberlain privately wrote a young MP on November 29: “I, myself, would very much prefer to go more slowly in the matter of Indian reform, and try a series of cautious experiments, which might perhaps last for fifty years or more, before culminating in a complete system of Central and Provincial self-government.” Publicly, however, Chamberlain was among Baldwin’s most enthusiastic backers. Lane-Fox wrote Irwin that the party was “not very comfortable” with his declaration, and in another letter told him: “The average Conservative was of course rather shocked by the way in which Gandhi was originally allowed to break the law in the matter of his salt campaign and march to the sea.” A clear majority of the Tory MPs thought Churchill right, but most of them had too much to lose to say so. Despite their convictions, men like Chamberlain persuaded themselves that they were bound by a higher loyalty to oppose, in his words, those who were “either hostile” to their leaders “or disposed to join cliques led by men whose motives are much more complicated.” This last referred to the possibility that Winston was planning a revolt, deliberately dividing the party, as his father had, hoping to reach No. 10 through a coup. Davidson put it bluntly in a letter to Irwin: “Winston’s game, of course, has been obvious, as it always is. He is not the son of Randolph for nothing.” Beaverbrook thought Churchill’s stand revealed “a defect of character” and a willingness “to take up anything as long as it leads to power”; that he had changed “party, political friends and political dogmas so often” that his credibility was “nearly gone.” At present, said Beaverbrook, he was “trying to make a corner for himself in Indian affairs. He is now taking up the stand of a veritable die-hard. But,” he concluded, “he does not carry conviction…. His voice lacks that note of sincerity for which the country looks.” Irwin disagreed. To him, Churchill presented a real threat. Irwin noted that at least twenty times between March and December Winston had challenged the leadership’s position on India, and, on each occasion, Baldwin had barely mustered a majority of Tories.²⁸⁰

Clearly a break between Churchill and him was imminent. Yet where could Winston go? In 1904 he had crossed to the Liberals; in 1924, back to the Conservatives. But Labour was now the Opposition, and he and they glared at one another from opposite ends of the parliamentary spectrum. Therefore his only choice was what political journalists call “the wilderness”—the cold, bleak, barren limbo of discredited or incompetent MPs whom no party wants. Nevertheless, no one can doubt that he was moved by a genuine conviction. That cannot be said of those with whom he was parting company. The Tory leaders were uninspired by Indian nationalism. One searches in vain for ringing affirmations of freedom or admiration for Gandhian saintliness in their speeches, letters, and diaries. What comes through, like the pounding on a wall of a man who wants the party in the next apartment to quiet down so he can sleep, is a determination to avoid discord, unpleasantness, or any rude interruption of long serene weekends in the country. England’s ruling class, or those of them in power, had lost their fathers’ inflexible determination. A. G. Gardiner had described the English patrician as “a personality that is entirely fearless,” belonging to “a caste that never doubts itself.” A. L. Rowse, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, quotes Gardiner and then adds: “Never till 1931, we may say; for in that year the caste lost confidence in itself and, undermined by fear, it lost not only confidence but conscience. Confused in mind about everything, except the main chance—its own preservation—it survived from year to year, from month to month, from day to day, by blurring the clarity of all issues, even the most dangerous—that of the nation’s safety; it maintained its enormous majority by electoral trickery, it spoke and perhaps thought in the language of humbug, it hoped to stave off conflict… by offering appeasement.”²⁸¹

By January 8, 1931, Churchill had made his decision. He foresaw MacDonald’s fall and the formation of a new government, but, he wrote his son, “I have no desire to join such an administration and be saddled with all the burden of whole-hog Protection, plus unlimited doses of Irwinism for India. I shall be much more able to help the country from outside.” The “breaking-point in my relation with Mr Baldwin,” as he later called it, came less than three weeks later. Irwin wanted to lay the foundations for his “round-table” conference with the congress leaders, to be held in London. To clear the air he planned to release Gandhi from jail, and on January 23 he cabled Baldwin: “My immediate fear is lest, in the forthcoming debate in Parliament, Winston should make mischief. Do, if you can, get some helpful and cordial speeches made from our side to discount possible bad effect of what he may say. Best of all, speak yourself and send him to Epping for the day.”²⁸²

Gandhi was freed forty-eight hours later. Outraged Raj officials in India and Conservative associations throughout England were speechless. Churchill, of course, was not. On the evening of Monday, January 26, he rose in the House and—his other remarks on India having been delivered elsewhere, “out of doors,” in the parliamentary expression, and therefore being forgivable—took his first fateful step into the wilderness. “I must of course first of all make it clear,” he said at the outset, “that I do not speak for the official Opposition nor for my right hon[orable] friend the Leader of the Opposition.” He spoke, he said, “solely as a Member of Parliament, of some service in this House,” whose views ought not to go “unrepresented in this discussion.” He then laced into the viceroy’s declaration, deplored the tabling of the Simon Report, and criticized the government’s decision to bar Simon and his fellow commissioners from the round table. “Our trusted friends and lawful, formal authoritative advisers are set aside,” he charged, “in order to placate those who are the bitterest opponents of British rule in India.” The promise of dominion status was to be laid before “the gleaming eyes of excitable millions” while sixty thousand Indian agitators were locked up, a situation virtually without precedent, at least since the Mutiny. To imagine that these resentful men would emerge docile was, he thought, absurd. Britons should not permit themselves “to be edged, pushed, talked and cozened out of India.” After two hundred years of fidelity and achievement, and thousands of British soldiers’ lives sacrificed “on a hundred fields,” Englishmen had earned “rights of our own in India.” Public opinion in the United Kingdom would not tolerate the spectacle of British women and children “in hourly peril amidst the Indian multitudes,” yet this was the future to which, “step by step and day by day, we are being remorselessly and fatuously conducted.”²⁸³

By custom, either MacDonald or Wedgwood Benn should have replied to him. Baldwin did it instead. His decision was unwise; he answered Winston’s rolling, cadenced rhetoric with a meandering, legalistic defense of the round table. Lane-Fox reported to Irwin that “while S.B. was vigorously cheered by the Socialists, there was an ominous silence on our benches. And I am afraid this represents the position in our party on many things.” Nevertheless, it was Churchill who had sinned, and now he must pay the forfeit for flagrant disobedience of his party’s leader. Tuesday morning Lord Hailes approached him, like a summons server, with the formal request for his resignation from the shadow cabinet. Afterward Hailes set down Winston’s reaction. “Face reddened then went white. Pouted furiously. Walked to a corner of the room, picked up his silver knobbed cane, came back and brought the cane down full force on the table. As he looked at me, I imagined that I might be the next victim. Then his face suddenly puckered into a smile. ‘So the Conservative P. wants to get rid of me, does it? All right, I’ll go quietly now.’ ” He scrawled a paragraph to Baldwin: “Now that our divergences of view upon India policy have become public”—persisting in the quaint conceit that nothing in British politics becomes public until uttered in the House—“I feel that I ought not any longer to attend the meetings of your ‘Business Committee’ to which you have hitherto so kindly invited me.” Baldwin replied on Wednesday: “I am grateful to you for your kind letter of yesterday and much as I regret your decision not to attend the meetings of your old colleagues, I am convinced that your decision is correct in the circumstances.”²⁸⁴

Churchill’s departure left the shadow chancellorship vacant. To fill the void, Baldwin appointed Neville Chamberlain.

Churchill’s parliamentary career had come to resemble the Greek legend of Sisyphus, who was condemned to toil up a steep hill pushing a huge stone which, just before he reached the top, always rolled back to the bottom. Twice he had been regarded as England’s next prime minister, first as a Liberal, then as a Conservative. Now he was once more cut off from all inner political councils. But during those first months in the wilderness he felt unfettered, exhilarated, free to loose verbal thunderbolts whenever so moved. Young MPs who thought they had heard Churchillian philippics at their most venomous now learned otherwise. When Gandhi arrived in Delhi to meet Irwin, Winston thundered: “It is alarming and also 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, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.” And even as die-hard back-benchers howled with appreciative laughter, they were shocked at the cruel attack on MacDonald, the titular prime minister, who was permitting Baldwin to run his government. Winston told the House: “I spoke the other day, after he had been defeated in an important division, about his wonderful skill in falling without hurting himself. He falls, but he comes up again smiling, a little dishevelled but still smiling.” Then, staring at MacDonald across the well, he continued: “I remember when I was a child being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder.’ My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”²⁸⁵

Epping staunchly supported its member. His constituents, he wrote Clementine, were “loving, ardent, and unanimous.” Indeed, he believed there was “no doubt that the whole spirit of the Conservative party is with me, and that much of their dissatisfaction with S.B. turns itself into favour with me.” This was no illusion; that same week the party’s principal agent wrote Neville Chamberlain: “Many of our supporters are worried about the question of India. They lean much more towards the views of Mr Churchill than to those expressed by Mr Baldwin in the House of Commons.” Nevertheless, when a Gandhi-Irwin pact was signed in early March—the Mahatma agreed to call off all satyãgraha and attend the round-table conference in London to discuss India’s future—Baldwin endorsed it. He opened the House debate on March 12 and was followed by Wedgwood Benn, who accused Winston of advocating a policy of “the lathi, the bayonet, the machine-gun and artillery.” Churchill reminded the House of his speech in the Dyer debate and his repeated opposition to “brutal force in India,” and pointed out that most of the Indians who had died over the past year had been killed, not by British troops, but in “religious fights” between Moslems and Hindus. It was all true. Yet the feeling persisted that he was scheming for power. Leo Amery wrote in his diary that upon leaving Parliament he had “heard Winston haranguing a press correspondent in the Lobby to the effect that he was not going to let India be betrayed without telling England all about it. I am afraid we are in for some difficulties over the India business. Winston has chosen his moment and his excuse for separating with the Party very adroitly.”²⁸⁶

He enjoyed frequent successes. At his urging Lord Lloyd agreed to challenge Baldwin in the party’s India Committee, and at one point Lloyd mustered a majority of diehards against the round table. “Winston has done a good deal to corrupt them,” Dawson wrote Irwin. Churchill’s eloquent plea for the Untouchables was particularly effective. (“A multitude as big as a nation, men, women and children deprived of hope and of the status of humanity. Their plight is worse than that of slaves, because they have been taught to consent not only to a physical but to a psychic servitude and prostration.”) The Daily Mail and the Daily Express provided him with such full coverage that Baldwin, like virtually all leaders stung by a free press, protested. “What the proprietorship of the papers is aiming at,” he charged, “is power and power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot.” At the Albert Hall, Tory back-benchers heard Churchill describe how dissent was being suppressed by the alliance of political chieftains now sharing the same nest. Baldwin had “decided that we are to work with the Socialists, and that we must make our action conform with theirs. We therefore have against us at the present time the official machinery of all the three great parties in the State. We meet under a ban. Every Member of Parliament or Peer who comes here must face the displeasure of the party Whips.” In the House, despite jeers, hostile interruptions, and outbursts, he roared until he was heard: “By your actions you have produced misery such as India has not seen for half a century. You have poisoned relations between the Mohammedans and the Hindus.” Then he flourished photographs of Indian corpses mutilated in the communal killings, pictures taken on the spot which were, he cried, “so revolting that no paper would be able to publish them.” All spring and throughout the summer he kept up his drumfire, and in the Daily Mail of September 7, when Gandhi was on his way to London—no other Indian politician accompanied him; he alone would speak for India’s 350 million—Churchill warned that the round table would lead to “nothing but further surrenders of British authority.” Without the “guidance and control” of the Raj, he wrote, such “pure savagery” as the Cawnpore killings would be repeated all over the sub-continent, an inevitable consequence of unchecked Hinduism and its “whole apparatus,” as represented at Benares on the Ganges, “with its palaces and temples, its shrines and its burning ghats, its priests and ascetics, its mysterious practices and multiform ritual… unchanged through the centuries, untouched by the West.”²⁸⁷

This was Churchill at his most effective. His prose soared. His commitment was total. At that time, on that issue, he was speaking for most Englishmen. And yet…

It was all as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The public was distracted by the growing financial crisis. The House had wearied of India. Lloyd George had to enter the hospital for a major operation; Churchill, ostracized, left for Chartwell. Britain therefore was deprived of the two authentic geniuses in its public life; “as we have said several times in the last few days,” Hoare wrote Neville Chamberlain on August 31, “we have had some great good luck in the absence of Winston and L.G.” Thus Baldwin and MacDonald were free to pursue their separate grails: business as usual for Baldwin; disarmament for MacDonald. Winston returned and spent six months trying to pry them apart, but Baldwin ignored him, attending the round-table talks and accepting Labour’s lead in the conferences with Gandhi, while MacDonald—who never forgave him for the Boneless Wonder gibe—lost his poise but once. Baited by Brendan Bracken, who was quoting Churchill, the prime minister glared at Bracken and shouted, “You swine!”—an indiscretion which, Dawson being away for the time, appeared in The Times, to Winston’s delight. Some senior Tories worried about their restless back-benchers. Sir Malcolm Hailey wrote of the round-table discussion that he was “beginning to feel” that Baldwin “may not have been quite correct in believing that he could carry the whole of the Conservative Party in any decision at which he might arrive.” He concluded, however, that “the general block” of Tory MPs were likelier to follow the leader than be “swayed by the very extreme views of Winston Churchill.” Seeing Winston isolated, others were reluctant to join him in Coventry. Churchill, their elders told them, was a rogue elephant, an opportunist; his pleas for Indian minorities, his support of Indian self-government on the local level, and his prediction of a bloodbath should the Raj leave were dismissed as wily diversions or hyperbole. He wrote Boothby: “Politics are very interesting. My late colleagues are more interested in doing me in than in any trifling questions connected with India or tariffs.”²⁸⁸

They were careful not to accost him in the House, where he was at his most dangerous. After one of his most effective speeches, Wedgwood Benn completely ignored his arguments and evasively replied that although Winston had “entered the Irish Conference with a dripping sword, he emerged with a dripping pen, and I am not without hope that even here, as he did in the Irish case, he will come in this matter to a better judgment.” Baldwin blunted his thrusts with sweeping generalizations. Ignoring the issue of Indian independence, he said that it was England’s aim to introduce “self-governing institutions” to the subcontinent “with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible Government in India as an integral part of the British Empire”—an Empire which, although he did not say so, the Statute of Westminster, not to mention future events, would eventually dismantle. He said: “We have impregnated India ourselves with Western ideas, and, for good or ill, we are reaping the fruits of our own work.” But only a fraction of the subcontinent’s population had been exposed to Western thought, and it was this elite which would rule India when the Raj pulled out.^* Baldwin thought the House should agree “to keep India out of party politics.” It had been in party politics for three centuries; if Parliament couldn’t determine the future of the Raj, who should? He was “firmly convinced” that such articles as Churchill’s pieces in the Daily Mail “will do more to lose India for the British Empire, will do more to cause a revolutionary spirit, than anything that can be done in any way by anyone else.” Even though “the rank and file refuse to face facts,” he said, “the leader has to look at them, and he has to warn his people.” It was “the supreme duty of a political figure to tell the people of the country the truth, because truth is greater than tactics.” The question which stumped Pontius Pilate held no mysteries for Stanley Baldwin, and in his gentlest, most civil manner he advised his colleagues to keep their opinions in this matter to themselves and leave all decisions to him, the prime minister, and the secretary of state for India.²⁸⁹

Churchill entering the political wilderness over the India issue

But Churchill had the bone in his teeth, and wouldn’t yield it until events wrenched it from him. Intricate efforts to resolve the Indian question continued on what he called their “downward slurge,” ending in the Government of India Act of 1935, the longest single piece of legislation ever to emerge from the House of Commons—“a gigantic split,” said Churchill, “of jumbled crochet work.” He had fought it for three years in what was probably the most brilliant parliamentary performance of his life. He lost, but so did everyone else; the act’s ultimate objective, an all-India federation which would weave together all the provinces and states on the subcontinent, was rejected by the congress, the Moslems, and the Indian princes. Nevertheless, it was a long step toward dissolution of the Raj. British India was destined to vanish in Winston’s own lifetime. A harbinger was the welcome England extended to Gandhi when he arrived in the fall of 1931, clad only in his homespun shawl and swaddling dhoti, a long loincloth worn by Indian men at home but never, until now, seen in Britain. Had the phrase Radical Chic existed then, it would have described the Mahatma’s reception. He planted trees, gave unsolicited advice on a thousand topics, was extolled by Anglican clergymen, entered the goat which supplied his milk in an English dairy show and was awarded first place, had lunch with Lady Astor, and was invited to tea with the King and Queen. Everyone of consequence clamored to meet Gandhi, with one exception. Churchill refused to see him. Winston was roundly criticized for this, though he had company outside Britain. On December 13 the Mahatma called at the Vatican for an audience with the pope and was turned away. The reason, he was told, was his “inadequate clothing.”²⁹⁰

The Crash of ’29, like the Blizzard of ’88, is identified with a specific year. Even more is it associated with an American city and a particular street. But it wasn’t confined to Wall Street—the first European quake had come in Vienna, when the Credit-Anstalt, Austria’s largest bank, closed its doors—and the repercussions were international. Wall Street’s significance derived from the new role of the American financial community as successor to London’s City. It was the linchpin of the world’s economic system, and when it snapped the whole structure came tumbling down. The New York Stock Exchange, more familiarly known as the Big Board, was the trading center for Churchill’s securities, and he was among those who discovered to their dismay that the Crash was only the beginning; price levels sank lower and lower throughout 1930, and by the summer of 1931 they made the ticker readings of the ’29 panic look lofty. Britain, in trouble since the return to gold, was mired in its worst fiscal crisis since the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. Indeed, this was worse. South Sea stock had plunged to 13.5 percent of its highest quotation, but then it had rallied; the company had continued to do business for eighty years and paid dividends. By the end of 1931, however, the average securities in New York and London were worth 11 percent of their pre-Crash value. Investors in the Big Board had lost seventy-four billion dollars. The panic was spinning in vicious circles. Retail sales ebbed, so costs were cut by laying off workers. The workers laid off could not buy the goods of other industries. Therefore sales dropped further, leading to more layoffs and a general shrinkage of purchasing power, until farmers were pauperized by the poverty of industrial workers. In forming his second government, Ramsay MacDonald had hoped to break this cycle. Instead, the lines of jobless Britons grew longer. The TUC declared that it would accept no cuts in unemployment benefits. England having left the gold standard, the pound dropped from $4.86 to $3.49. The King called MacDonald to Buckingham Palace and asked him to remain in power as head of an all-party national government. Two Labour ministers, Snowden and J.H. Thomas, agreed to serve with him; the rest of the Labour party called them traitors and withdrew their support. Baldwin went along, however, and with Lloyd George still ill, Simon and Sir Herbert Samuel committed the Liberals.

Churchill was the last man in Parliament entitled to criticize any government’s Treasury policy, but, never conspicuous for lack of gall, he did so anyhow, describing Snowden’s management of the Exchequer as “incompetent.” He agreed that all parties should “come to the rescue of a Socialist Government reduced to impotence.” At the same time, he warned that he would remember his “grievous complaints” against those he held responsible for the plight of the economy. The dole was reduced despite the unions, and after £25,000,000 had been withdrawn from the Bank of England in a single day—a record—the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street was saved from bankruptcy by credits from Washington. But so many makeshift decisions trembled in the balance that the House required a national referendum. Before the general election, Hoare wrote that he was “very nervous” about the outcome. He needn’t have been. The results were an astonishing triumph for the national government, which won 554 of the 615 seats in the House. It was a landslide, but there was more to it than that; the largest part of the avalanche was a historic Tory sweep. The Conservative party was now represented by 473 MPs, over three-fourths of the House, while Labour had dropped from 236 to 52—the bitter fruit of MacDonald’s split with mainstream Labourites. So huge was the Conservative majority that Baldwin was expected to form a new government. He declined; they had campaigned as a coalition, he said, and should so rule. He knew he could oust MacDonald whenever he chose, but this was not the moment. Instead, he installed himself as lord president of the council and picked the new cabinet: eleven Tories, including Hoare at the India Office; five National Liberals; and four National Labourites. Under any other circumstances, Churchill, with his seniority and achievements, would have received a major ministry. His own reelection had been spectacular. Although MacDonald had disparaged him on the stump, and one government minister, Samuel, had actually appeared in Epping to call for his defeat, Winston’s margin of victory had exceeded twenty thousand votes, nearly two out of every three. He nursed a faint hope that a summons might arrive from No. 10. None did. His popularity in the country remained high, but his cause had been repudiated; only twenty candidates endorsed by the Indian Empire Society had been elected, and even before the polling Baldwin and MacDonald had agreed that there would be no place for Churchill. “Like many others,” he wryly wrote afterward, “I had felt the need of a national concentration. But I was neither surprised nor unhappy when I was left out of it…. What I should have done if I had been asked to join I cannot tell. It is superfluous to discuss doubtful temptations that have never existed.” Snowden was elevated to the peerage and Neville Chamberlain robed as chancellor of the Exchequer. To Winston, England’s political future seemed hopeless. MacDonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain—the reign of mediocrities stretched over the horizon and beyond. In all Parliament he could count on the absolute support of just two MPs, Boothby and Bracken. His isolation was virtually complete. “Now, truly,” writes Kenneth Young, Beaverbrook’s biographer, “Churchill was out in the cold.”²⁹¹

He accepted it, “defiant,” by his maxim, “in defeat.” In the House he sat on the front bench, on the government’s side, just below the aisle. “What a gap there is,” wrote Guy Eden, “what a vast, terrific chasm, between the Treasury Bench, seat of power, and that seat just two feet, six inches away, below the gangway!” Clement Attlee later recalled: “Here he was well placed to fire on both parties. I remember describing him as a heavily armed tank cruising in No Man’s Land.” What intrigued Eden “above all else was the manner of his treatment by the Tory members. I have watched him, accompanied by a sole companion, walking broodingly through the corridors of the House or conversing in the Smoking Room with a few admirers like Brendan Bracken and Robert Boothby. But generally, Tory members gave him a wide berth.” In opposition he adopted a technique of maintaining constant streams of objections, some audible and to the point, others quite unintelligible. One afternoon a minister in the middle of a speech was distracted by Churchill. Winston was making movements of disagreement. The irritated minister said: “I see my right honourable friend shakes his head, but I am only expressing my own opinion.” “And I,” said Winston, without looking up, “am only shaking my own head.”²⁹²

That was clever and gentle, but his tongue had a much rougher side, and many who had been slashed by it, inside the House and out, now descended upon him like vultures homing in on carrion, believing, as Beaverbrook did, that he had “finally shot his bolt.” Churchill had accused all MPs who favored dominion status for India, whatever their party allegiance, of defeatism and inadequate patriotism. Samuel now flung this back at him: “If indeed the truest patriot is a man who breathes hatred, who lays the seeds of war, and stirs up the greatest number of enemies against his country, then Mr Churchill is a great patriot.” Now that he was down, many MPs, hitherto silent, reached the conclusion that Churchill was obsessed by a relentless besoin de faire which had expressed itself in such adventures as Gallipoli, the Russian civil war, and the breaking of the general strike. Publicists wrote of him as an outcast, as untouchable as the harijans he had championed. “The tragedy of Mr Churchill,” one commented in 1931, “is that whilst in reality he had nothing to offer the genuine Labour man, he fails to command the confidence of the Conservative. For the ghosts of Gallipoli will always rise up to damn him anew…. What sensible man is going to place confidence in Mr Churchill in any situation which needs cool-headedness, moderation, or tact?”²⁹³

In the rooms and halls of Parliament he was humiliated and subjected to sneers, snubs, patronizing nudging, and indifferent shruggings from those who saw him coming and turned their backs. Detective Thompson, still assigned to him—Winston had told the Yard he no longer needed a bodyguard, but the Yard, intercepting threats on his life from Indian nationalists, decided otherwise—was angry and puzzled. A rough, brusque man, unintimidated by rank, Thompson questioned some who had slighted Churchill. “He’s like a weather-vane,” explained one. Another said: “His life is one long speech. He does not talk. He orates…. He does not want to hear your views. He does not want to disturb the beautiful clarity of his thoughts by the tiresome reminders of the other side.” Baldwin told friends and even casual acquaintances how pleasant it was to attend meetings without Winston there to ignore the agenda and introduce “some extremely clever memorandum submitted by him on the work of some department other than his own.” Churchill’s critics called him rash, impetuous, tactless, contentious, inconsistent, unsound, an amusing parliamentary celebrity who was forever out of step. “We just don’t know what to make of him,” a troubled Tory MP told Lady Astor. She asked brightly: “How about a nice rug?”²⁹⁴

He was hurt and baffled. Long afterward a legend arose that he had endured these slights philosophically. “In the midst of so many outward upheavals,” Alan Moorehead wrote, Churchill was “the least displaced person one could possibly imagine.” He himself lent credence to the myth. “There was much mocking in the press about my exclusion,” he said later, “but now one can see how lucky I was. Over me beat the invisible wings.” At the time they were both invisible and inaudible. Guy Eden has recalled: “He clearly hated it and a bitterness crept into his speeches which had not been there before and which has not been there since…. Political life is a merciless affair, and the man who has been at the top of the tree is most ruthlessly ‘clawed’—to use one of Churchill’s own favorite words—when he falls, or even slips.” Bewildered, Winston said: “I have never joined in an intrigue. Everything I have got I have fought for. And yet I am more hated than anybody.” In a rare moment of self-pity he told a friend: “Here I am, after almost thirty years in the House of Commons, after holding many of the highest offices of state. Here I am, discarded, cast away, marooned, rejected, and disliked.” There seemed no way out. He saw little to choose between Baldwin and MacDonald—“two nurses,” he called them, “fit to keep silence in a darkened room.”²⁹⁵

He missed Birkenhead terribly and found solace in one of F.E.’s old speeches: “The world still has its glittering prizes for those who have stout hearts and sharp swords.” But this, he realized, was not the time for either. No glittering prizes awaited Britons like him in 1931 or for long thereafter; stout hearts were suspect in the early 1930s, and sharp swords scorned, even by those whose lives would depend upon them in a crisis. It was time to hibernate. He let the lease on Venetia Montagu’s house lapse and made Chartwell his family’s year-round residence. The Churchills had no London home now. Winston kept a pied-à-terre in Morpeth Mansions, near Parliament, but the House seldom saw him. He was toiling on Chartwell’s outside grounds, driving his Black Dog away by hard manual labor and, inside, writing his way out of debt. If he were to survive his political wilderness, he would need much more than the £500 stipend of a back-bencher. He intended to make a new fortune and invest it wisely, relying on Baruch’s advice, avoiding speculation, and turning away from all the fiscal totems he had deified at the Treasury. “I have gone whole hog against gold,” he wrote Boothby. “To hell with it! It has been used as a vile trap to destroy us. I would pay the rest of the American debt in gold as long as the gold lasted, and then say—‘Henceforward, we will only pay in goods. Pray specify what goods you desire.’ ”²⁹⁶

Less than two weeks after surrendering his chancellor’s seals at Windsor he had begun research on his Marlborough biography, working in Blenheim’s archives with two assistants: Maurice Ashley, a young scholar whom he hired at £300 a year, and Colonel Charles Holdern, at £500. His literary approach, he wrote Ashley, “will probably not be to ‘defend’ or ‘vindicate’ my subject, but to tell the tale with close adherence to chronology in such a way and in such proportions and with such emphasis as will produce upon the mind of the reader the impersonation I wish to give. I have first of all to visualize this extraordinary personality. This I can only do gradually as my knowledge increases.” He was one of those authors—this writer is another—who believe that the past should not be judged by the standards of the present. He wrote: “One has got to find out what the rules of the age were—there certainly were rules. Murder plots, for instance, were treated quite differently from treason even in its grossest form.” To the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, who was dickering for the Marlborough serial rights, he wrote: “I have no doubt that I shall be able to tell this famous tale from a modern point of view that will rivet attention.”²⁹⁷

At Chartwell several pots were always boiling on his stove; while researching Marlborough he was finishing My Early Life, correcting galleys for an additional World Crisis volume, on the war’s eastern front, and pouring out a flood of magazine articles. At one point he was contracting to write twelve pieces for a British magazine, contributing regularly to Collier’s and the Hearst Syndicate, and denouncing abuse of wealth in the Daily Mail. Editors were bombarded with his suggestions for topics: “Women and the future. To what heights will the ascendancy of women go? Will there be a woman prime minister? Women and finance. A world controlled by women? If they had lived long ago. Take a number of the world’s most prominent men and imagine their careers in past eras. Henry Ford in Cromwellian days…. Mussolini with Henry VIII, Ramsay MacDonald in the French Revolution, Bernard Shaw with the ancient Greeks, and so on.” In a note to his son he wrote: “I have got a good crop of articles for 1931, and indeed am quite weighed down with work. But that is much better than being unemployed.” And while absent on a research trip he sent Clementine a hasty scrawl: “Am vy remiss writing. Much pressed business. Everything continues satisfactory. Arranged twenty-two new articles in weeklies, all maturing before June and usual terms, monthly in advance, all involving heavy work in return.”²⁹⁸ During the two years between his eviction from No. 11 and the end of 1931 he published 104 pieces, including excerpts from his books, in, among other periodicals, Scribner’s, The Times, the Strand, the Saturday Review, the Sunday John Bull, Nash’s Pall Mall, the News Chronicle, and the Daily Telegraph. His topics ranged from “Government of the / by the / for the Dole-Drawers” to (from him, of all people) “Back to the Spartan Life in Our Public Schools.” He dashed off twelve profiles of famous public figures—MacDonald, Nancy Astor, Bernard Shaw, Baden-Powell, Lloyd George, and Arthur Balfour among them—for which the Sunday Pictorial paid him £200 each. Then he published these sketches in a volume, Great Contemporaries. Another collection of pieces appeared in book form as Thoughts and Adventures in Britain, and in the United States as Amid These Storms. In addition, eight collections of his speeches appeared in the bookstores, including one volume dealing with India and the Raj. Few professional writers, who devote their working lives to their trade, produce as much over entire lifetimes as he turned out during this brief span.

In protesting the slack press coverage of his parliamentary speeches on India, he had written Rothermere that each of them required “an effort which is equal to that which would enable me to earn £3/400 by writing one of the numerous articles I have or my books.”²⁹⁹ This was no exaggeration. Churchill wrote superb copy, and eager editors on both sides of the Atlantic knew it. As a consequence, he was one of the world’s most highly paid writers. In America his World Crisis volumes had earned him, after Curtis Brown’s commissions, $20,633.10. In one month book royalties, publishers’ advances, and magazine checks brought in £3,750. The Sunday Pictorial paid £2,400 for a series of character studies. A single piece in the Daily Mail sold for £600, and a series for the Mail brought £7,800. George Harrap, the publisher, advanced him £10,000 for the Marlborough; Scribner’s paid £5,000 for the American rights. And his impressions of the United States, set down in twenty-two articles and widely reprinted abroad, eventually earned £40,000. By the end of 1931 his writing income for that year had reached £33,500, and his peak years lay ahead; in less than five years his magazine sales in the United States alone, after commissions, would bring him $35,379.78.

At fifty-seven he was a skillful literary craftsman, knew it, and rejoiced in his mastery of the language. “I have been reading a good deal on ‘Marlborough,’ ” he wrote Clementine. “It is a wonderful thing to have all these contracts satisfactorily settled, and to feel that two or three years agreeable work is mapped out and, if completed, will certainly be rewarded. In order to make sure of completing the task within three years instead of leaving it to drag on indefinitely, I am going to spend money with some freedom upon expert assistance.” Ashley, who was providing some of that assistance—though £300 a year does not suggest that his employer’s expenditures for expertise were particularly free—had found, as had others, that Winston’s method of composition was beguiling and unorthodox. He remembers how Churchill “would walk up and down the room (and when I worked for him it was usually his bedroom), puffing a cigar while a secretary took it down as best she could in Pitman. Occasionally he would say ‘Scrub that and start again.’ At times he would stop… at others he would be entirely swept on by the stimulus of his imagination.”³⁰⁰

Like a battlefield veteran who avoids any mention of combat, Winston seldom mentioned politics during his early days in the wilderness. Lloyd George and Bracken were fellow guests at a country weekend in Coombe. So was Harold Nicolson, who wrote in his diary: “LlG begins at once: ‘Now, what about this National Government? We here must form a National Opposition.’ ” George was “throwing out little sparks of compliments to right and left, drawing Winston in,” Nicolson noted. “The impression was that of a master-at-drawing sketching in a fig leaf, not in outline, but by means of shadows around it.” Nevertheless, Churchill, who had always found talk of political maneuvering irresistible, refused to be drawn. He was vivacious, but on other topics. Nicolson concluded: “Winston is very brilliant and amusing but not constructive.”³⁰¹ However, he continued to follow developing situations at home and abroad. Each morning he and Clementine carefully read newspapers and sent notes to each other, via servants, on significant items. One consequence of this was that Churchill became the first statesman in England to discover that, for the second time in a generation, a strange light had appeared and was growing upon the map of Europe.

Germany’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist Workers’ party), which became famous and then infamous as the Nazi party, began in Munich as one of hundreds of splinter movements spawned in the wake of Versailles. Adolf Hitler, then a police spy, attended a meeting—since only two dozen people were present, it could hardly be called a rally—in September 1919. Hitler came to observe, but, seeing possibilities invisible to almost everyone else, he enrolled as the workers’ party’s seventh member. After the country’s inflationary panic of 1923, he thought he saw his chance to lunge for power, but his attempted coup that November, which turned into a fiasco, was ridiculed throughout the Republic of Germany as the “Bürgerbräu-Putsch” (“Beer Hall Riot”) and his storm troopers’ public tantrums were dismissed as an example of postwar Germany’s black humor. The Nazis were to have the last, mad laugh, but not then; the 1920s were desperate years for Hitler and his movement. Prosperity means thin gruel for revolutionaries, and as long as the boom lasted, life in the Weimar Republic was, on the whole, calm, pleasant, and amusing. American bankers had lent the country seven billion dollars, on terms so generous as to make it almost a gift. Fueled by these loans, Weimar’s economy seemed stable. German business was good; unemployment dropped to 650,000, an irreducible figure which meant that just about everyone in the country who wanted a job had one.

The Nazis’ hopes had risen at the end of 1924, when their leader was released from Landsberg. Ludendorff had repudiated them, and Göring was in exile, but they believed Hitler’s gifts as a spellbinder would put things right. They forgot that he was only on parole. The judge had warned him against disruptive activities, which was like King Canute instructing the tides. In his first public appearance after leaving prison, the parolee told a crowd that Weimar, like Marxists and Jews, was Germany’s “enemy.” He cried: “In this struggle of ours there are only two possible outcomes—either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over theirs.” He was confident the Nazis would win because they would not shrink from wielding “weapons of spiritual and physical terror [geistigen und körperlichen terrors].” The judge decided he had violated his parole and enjoined him from public speaking for the next two years.³⁰²

But Hitler was more than an orator. He was also an excellent administrator. At that time there were fewer than 27,000 Nazis in the country. His recruiting drives slowly lengthened the rolls: 49,000 in 1923; 72,000 in 1927; 108,000 in 1928. Subgroups were organized: the Deutsches Jungvolk for children, the Bund Deutscher Mädel for girls, the N.S. Frauenschaften for women, and the Kulturbund for intellectuals. The most visible Nazis were the brawling brownshirts of the Sturmabteilung (SA), but while their leader spoke affectionately of these “alten Kämpfern” (“old fighters”), he relied more heavily on his Schutzstaffel (SS), who swore personal loyalty to him, wore black uniforms in frank imitation of the Italian Fascisti, and were led by a deceptively mild-mannered Waldtrudering chicken farmer, Heinrich Himmler. Hermann Göring (already known throughout Germany as the Fat One) was soliciting contributions from his family’s wealthy friends. And a crippled, twenty-eight-year-old Rhinelander with journalistic aspirations, whose applications for a reporter’s job had been repeatedly rejected by the Berliner Tageblatt, joined the small staff of the party’s fortnightly newsletter, the N.S. Briefe. This was Joseph Goebbels, who would become the Nazi megaphone. As chief of this tightly knit political conspiracy, Hitler invested himself with the title Partei- und Oberster-Sturmabteilung, Führer Vorsitzender der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Kerband. One word survived: Führer. It means “leader.” History would remember him by it. Later the mere mention of the German Führer would terrify Europe and countries beyond the seas, but during those lean years the Nazis were only impressing one another. In the national election of May 20, 1928, they polled some 810,000 votes—2.6 percent of the 31,000,000 cast. Hitler, now in his fortieth year, found diversion from defeat that summer by falling in love with his blond, beautiful, twenty-year-old niece, Geli Raubal, the daughter of his widowed half sister. Royalties from sales of Mein Kampf—the book had already earned 59,058 reichsmarks—permitted him to keep Geli, Geli’s mother, and Geli’s sister in the Villa Wachenfelt, on the Obersalzberg, overlooking Berchtesgaden. All three women acquiesced in the establishment of this strange household. His niece’s feelings seem to have been ambivalent. She admired her powerful uncle and was flattered by his attentions. Yet she slowly came to resent his tyrannical manner toward her, and she was, and was to remain, sexually passive. Hitler’s infatuation, on the other hand, was absolute. The following year he sent the mother and the sister packing and moved his niece into his nine-room luxury flat on Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse. There was talk. Several party members suggested to him that this was unwise; the party might pay a heavy political price for it. Infuriated, he forbade them even to mention her name in his presence. His intentions were probably honorable; he gave every sign of preparing for marriage. In retrospect his love for Geli seems to have been the one humane emotion in his life, though it was, of course, incestuous.

Nazi political prospects brightened after the Crash. The Republic of Germany was a victim of the Crash—the principal victim. No other country was hit so hard. All sources of American largess dried up; every scheduled loan was canceled. Lacking markets for Germany’s export trade, Weimar could not afford imports; not even essentials, including food. The republic’s most prestigious financial institution was the Darmstäder und Nationalbank. When it failed, all other Berlin banks closed, too. Thousands of businesses went bankrupt. The world’s longest breadline stretched down the Kurfürstendamm. Hitler, rejoicing in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi newspaper, wrote: “Never in my life have I been so well disposed and inwardly contented as in these days, for hard reality has opened the eyes of millions of Germans to the unprecedented swindles, lies and betrayals of the Marxist deceivers of the people.”³⁰³ Demoralization in the Reichstag led to legislative paralysis, which was succeeded, in turn, by new elections on September 14, 1930. Hitler furiously crisscrossed the country, promising jobs and bread for all, exposure of bureaucratic corruption, the rebuilding of a strong Germany, ruthless punishment of the Jewish financiers who had precipitated this crisis, and repudiation of the Versailles Diktat.

The election returns startled everyone, including Hitler. All extremist parties had gained. The Communist vote had risen 25 percent. But 6,409,600 Germans had cast their ballots for Nazi candidates—a gain of over 690 percent. In twenty-eight months, they had vaulted from the smallest party in the Reichstag to the second-largest, second only to the Social Democrats. Until now their leader had been regarded as a wild-eyed, seedy man in a dirty trench coat, consigned to the lunatic fringe of Weimar politics, constantly in trouble with the tax authorities, too humble to enter the halls of the great and powerful. Now he was courting industrialists and senior generals of the Reichswehr, and all of them were listening very carefully. In one of those flashes which demonstrated his political genius, he decided to testify at the trial of three Leipzig lieutenants who, in defiance of a standing order, had smuggled copies of the Völkischer Beobachter into their barracks. Those who expected him to defend the young officers did not yet know their Führer. In the witness box he disowned them and recommended that they be punished. Spectators gasped; they didn’t realize that he was wooing the defendants’ superiors. Using the trial as a forum, he promised that Nazis would “see to it, when we come to power, that out of the present Reichswehr a great Army of the German people shall arise.” The judge asked if the Nazis would reach power through constitutional means. Hitler affirmed it; knowing how the German mind worked, he had abandoned any thought of a coup and meant, instead, to become head of state by legal means, with a formal mandate from the Reichstag. But he was also aware of the Teutonic love for inflammatory phrases. Shifting in his chair, he added: “I can assure you that when the National Socialist movement is victorious in this struggle, there will be a National Socialist Court of Justice, too. Then the November 1918 revolution will be avenged and heads will roll [Köpfe rollen]!”³⁰⁴

Köpfe rollen! A delicious shudder passed through Germany. Here was the imperious voice they had missed since the kaiser had fled. By now the entire country was familiar with the Nazis’ symbol, their Hakenkreuz, or swastika—a black crooked cross imprinted on a white circle against a red background—and their party anthem, “Die Fahne Hoch” (“Raise the Banner”), written by Horst Wessel, a clergyman’s son who had abandoned his family and university classrooms to live in a slum with a retired prostitute, work for the party, and roam Berlin’s streets fighting Communists. In February 1931 the Communists murdered Wessel, making him an instant martyr. Over 100,000 men were now enrolled in the SA and SS, forming a private army larger than Weimar’s Reichswehr, whose senior officers, studying the transcript of the Leipzig trial, decided that they had found their man. Soldiers were no longer disciplined for reading the Völkischer Beobachter. The country’s millionaires conferred with Hitler, Göring, and the financial wizard Hjalmar Schacht, a recent Nazi convert. A majority of them decided that although the Nazi leader was a vulgar demagogue, he had an extraordinary gift for rousing latent patriotism in the people and might be able to suppress Weimar’s weak democracy, stubborn trade unions, and the Socialists and Communists. Contributions from big business, which had been distributed among other conservative parties in the past, were channeled into the Nazi coffers. Gustav Krupp, the munitions tycoon, became, in the word of a fellow industrialist, “ein Obernazi”—“a super Nazi.” As 1931 approached its end, Germany seemed sickened by a disease without a cure. Over five million men were out of work. Crippled veterans of the war were begging on street corners. Farmers’ mortgages were being foreclosed. Inflation had all but wiped out the middle classes. The Reichstag foundered in confusion; its 107 Nazi deputies were using fists and clubs to break up debates and drown out parliamentary motions. President Hindenburg, now eighty-four, was withdrawing into the stupor of senility. Gregor Strasser, who had led the party while Hitler was in prison, told a reporter: “Alles, was dazu dient, die Katastrophe zu beschleunigen… ist gut, sehr gut, für uns und unsere deutsche Revolution [All that serves to precipitate the catastrophe… is good, very good for us and our German revolution].”³⁰⁵

Adolf Hitler

At this historic moment Hitler was struck by a personal tragedy. Before their affair Geli had been taking voice lessons in Vienna, which she adored; now she wanted to return and resume them. Her uncle absolutely refused to consider it. They quarreled bitterly. On the morning of September 17, after he had descended the stairs from their apartment and was entering his car, she thrust her head out a window. Neighbors heard her cry: “Then you won’t let me go to Vienna?” He shouted back, “No!” and drove off.³⁰⁶ The next morning her body was found in the flat. She had shot herself through the heart. Hitler was incoherent with grief. In death she achieved what he had denied her in life; she was buried in the family’s Viennese plot. Hitler could not attend the funeral. Six years earlier, to avoid deportation while paroled, he had renounced his Austrian citizenship. Since his application for German citizenship had not been approved, he was staatenlos, stateless—a man without a country. Under these circumstances foreigners, who could not fathom his growing mystique in central Europe, found it difficult to take him seriously.

Churchill took him seriously. Germany had worried Winston since the Armistice. On September 24, 1924, when Hitler was still in Landsberg, dictating his book to Rudolf Hess, Winston had warned that “the soul of Germany smoulders with dreams of a War of Liberation or Revenge.” It could not, he wrote, “be kept in permanent subjugation.” He read Mein Kampf in its entirety as soon as E. J. Dugdale’s translation became available, but long before that he had studied translated excerpts, and, perhaps because of his own aggressive instincts, he grasped Hitler’s message. The book’s “main thesis,” he wrote, “is simple. Man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation, being a community of fighters, is a fighting unit.” It was Hitler’s argument that the ferocity “of a race depends on its purity. Hence the need for ridding it of foreign defilements. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist.” Hitler believed that only “brute force” could assure Germany’s survival. As Churchill understood it, Mein Kampf proposed a sweeping Teutonic political strategy, proposing that “the new Reich… gather within its fold all the scattered German elements in Europe. A race which has suffered defeat can be rescued by restoring its self-confidence. Above all things the Army must be taught to believe in its own invincibility.”³⁰⁷

Charisma and patriotism were qualities Churchill greatly admired. They had formed his first impression of Mussolini, and he did not, at first, find Hitler completely beyond the pale. He respected him, Guy Eden writes, “as a man of vision, even if it was distorted vision, and drive, even if it was a drive to evil.” Hitler’s early life had been a catalogue of failures, Churchill observed, but “these misfortunes did not lead him into Communist ranks. By an honourable inversion he cherished all the more an abnormal sense of racial loyalty and fervent and mystic admiration for Germany and the German people.” Afterward, when Hitler had become Führer of the entire nation, a prophet of outrageous dogmas, Winston said that while he despised Nazism, he hoped that, should England ever lose a war, it would “find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.” Nevertheless, he had realized, while Hitler was still in his own wilderness, that sooner or later the man must be destroyed. It is arguable that Churchill was one of the first to comprehend Hitler’s menace because each man was a mirror image of the other. Hitler, with his own remarkable instincts, seems to have sensed that Churchill, though a political outcast then, would ultimately be his archenemy. He told a British diplomat in Berlin that he regarded Churchill as a “Deutschenfresser”—a “devourer of Germans.” “I naturally cannot prevent the possibility of this Herr entering the Government in a couple of years,” he said, adding that he foresaw difficulties “if Churchill comes to power in Great Britain instead of Chamberlain.”³⁰⁸

Long before his countrymen understood the Nazi challenge, Winston realized that Hitler was the very embodiment of evil, but even when they were locked in the most desperate war Europe had ever known, Churchill referred to him as “this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame.” He meant Versailles. He agreed with Hitler; the treaty had, he believed, been a humiliating Diktat. This was not entirely reasonable. The Allied terms had been far less harsh than those Germany had imposed on Russia at Brest-Litovsk in 1918. German pride had been mortified at Versailles, however; the subsequent resentment was not rational but emotional, and Winston, emotional himself, grasped it because, had their roles been reversed, he, too, would have been enraged. That rage was a political reality, and, he believed, ugly consequences were inevitable. In 1925 he wrote that “from one end of Germany to the other an intense hatred of France unifies the whole population,” and he suggested the establishment of neutral zones on German frontiers. He also urged “a substantial rectification” of Weimar’s eastern border, consistent with ethnic realities. Sooner or later, he warned, “Germany will be rearmed”; steps should be taken to prevent “aggression against Poland,” which could draw both France and England into another European conflict. He saw them preparing to do it again and felt premonitions of “future catastrophe.” By 1928 he realized that the ten-year rule had been “a grievous error.” The United States was urging Britain and France to reduce their defense establishments and reduce German reparations payments. Churchill disagreed. Writing a friend about “these stupid disarmament manoeuvres,” he commented that “personally I deprecate all these premature agreements on disarmament.” In a cabinet meeting he opposed any reparations cuts as long as Washington remained adamant on the issue of Britain’s war debts; “we have given everything, and paid everything,” he argued, “and we cannot make any new sacrifice.” A strong French army, he maintained, would shield England from the “most probable danger” of being drawn into another conflict on the Continent.³⁰⁹