‘The British Empire seems to be running off almost as fast as the American Loan. The haste is appalling. “Scuttle” is the word, and the only word, that can be applied.’
Churchill in the House of Commons, 20 December 1946
By December 1946 it had become obvious to the British Government that it needed a shift in policy over India as much as over Palestine. Attlee and Cripps, who really determined the Government’s stance on India, accordingly opted for bringing the British Raj to a speedy end under a new Viceroy entrusted with this task. Churchill, who had already publicly voiced the case for handing the Palestine mandate back to the United Nations, found an exasperated Labour Government ready to pick up this suggestion (or ploy) in default of American support. The making of a new consensus between Government and Opposition, however, was thwarted by Churchill’s continued refusal to accept the inevitability of independence for India. The threat that he might intervene, which had some effect in prompting policy moves by the Government, had even more in shaping the rhetorical contest over the end of Empire.
The agreed settlement for India envisaged by the cabinet delegation – the constitutional statement of 16 May plus the interim government statement of 16 June – was as dead as the Morrison–Grady Plan. But nobody wanted to be the first to say so. Thus the British Government went on pretending that a constituent assembly might still work, and Congress was determined that it should still be convened, with only the Muslim League ready to state the obvious and declare that the moment for an historic compromise had now passed. Indians meanwhile went on killing other Indians in Bengal and Bihar. Gandhi was naturally distressed and courageously went to Bihar himself. His self-appointed spin doctor, Sudhir Ghosh, despondently told Cripps: ‘We have been dragged down to the level of beasts.’1.
True, Wavell had brought representatives of the Muslim League into the interim government. This proved as unreal as Congress’s acceptance of grouping. Though Jinnah himself stood aside, his influence was exerted through his faithful lieutenant, Liaquat Ali Khan. Liaquat was personally far from abrasive but claimed an independence of action for the Muslim League ministers that obviously vitiated any real sense of cabinet responsibility and undercut Nehru’s position as First Minister. Preparations for the constituent assembly went ahead, despite the fact that it was premised on a statement only nominally accepted by Congress in June and repudiated by the Muslim League since August.
All the characters in this charade were frozen into their habitual postures, at a time when decisive action was more necessary than ever. Though Cripps was busy enough running the Board of Trade, he was again relied upon by Attlee for strategic advice and was instrumental in getting Nehru to come to London for direct talks with Jinnah.
The ensuing London conference was convened on 4 December. Maybe it too was a charade but at least a consequential charade this time. Jinnah, visibly a sick man, was accompanied and supported by the urbane Liaquat; Patel declined to accompany Nehru, his rival and usurper. Party divisions in India now mirrored those in Britain. Jinnah’s presence in London meant that Churchill could open a private line to the Muslim League: an ominous development since, as Wavell now learned from Rab Butler, ‘Winston was anxious to make it a party issue.’2 Likewise, Nehru’s presence meant that he and Cripps could resume their informal discourse in private as well as spar with each other in formal sessions over the interpretation of the contested constitutional statement. The Viceroy meanwhile had produced another variant of his breakdown plan, this time as a pre-emptive strategy, stating that the British would withdraw in their own way and in their own time. Wavell was surprised to find an unanticipated ally in Cripps, who was also moving towards the idea of setting a date for independence.
After three days, it was the familiar deadlock – in London, as in Delhi, as in Simla (twice). Congress wanted to take over a united India and the Muslim League wanted to take over an independent Pakistan. Faced with this, Cripps unveiled his thinking to his colleagues on 5 December, arguing that ‘there was a strong case for a declaration now that we would only stay a year or 18 months in India. We should have to hand over to a government set up by the Constituent Assembly.’ This evaded the question of what would happen if no such government could be set up; but in that event, Cripps argued, ‘we should have to hand over piecemeal to such authorities as we thought best at the time.’3 And since the official communiqué at the end of the conference went on to say that there was no question of forcing a constitution on unwilling parts of the country, a new logic was now emerging. British withdrawal was no longer to be dependent on an agreed settlement between the Indian parties; the default position in the absence of agreement was, in effect, partition of some kind; and setting a date for withdrawal injected the requisite note of urgency in bringing matters to a head.
Simply on the desirability of a deadline, Wavell and Cripps were in unlikely agreement. But they disagreed about Wavell’s military plan, with its abdication from political responsibility; and a further dimension of Cripps’s thinking was kept from the Viceroy – the need for a new Viceroy. Cripps, moreover, having toyed with the remarkable notion of going out himself as the last Viceroy, had hit upon the perfect candidate: someone of high profile, charismatic presence, flexible views and proven acceptability to the Congress leadership. Evidence is now available to confirm what has long been suspected: that Cripps covertly reached an understanding with Nehru during the London conference that Wavell should be replaced by Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, who may indeed have met discreetly with the two of them at this time.
Cripps had tried his best to bring the Muslim League into an agreed settlement. Indeed in June 1946 he had really been closer to Jinnah than to any of the Congress leaders, faced with sabotage from Gandhi. Attlee later held to the extraordinary belief that the cabinet delegation ‘broke down on the absolute refusal of the Moslems to come in’.4 Whether he operated on this misperception in 1946 is unclear but it may help explain his conduct. Certainly Cripps, who obviously knew better, changed tack following the League’s resort to direct action in its renewed campaign for Pakistan; and he henceforth lived up to his prior reputation as a partisan of Congress.
Hence Cripps’s deal with Nehru over the change of Viceroy. Their intermediary, as during the negotiations with Gandhi the previous summer, was Ghosh – a man with the mien of a stage villain but one whose testimony on this occasion, almost in spite of himself, turns out to be well founded. Thus when Cripps later wrote to Ghosh of ‘the two suggestions I made to Jawaharlal’, he was surely alluding to a highly confidential proposal on 4 or 5 December that Wavell be replaced by Mountbatten.5 It was plainly Cripps rather than Attlee who originated this idea. Nehru went home knowing of the plan nearly two weeks before Attlee put it to the King – and two months before Wavell himself knew of it.
It had been part of the Government’s strategy – or at least its hand-to-mouth tactics – to ensure that India had not been debated in the House of Commons for several months. But Churchill insisted that a debate take place on 12 December, a few days after the London conference broke up. ‘It would be a pity,’ he claimed, ‘if the British Empire in India passed out of life into history, without the House of Commons seeming to take any interest in the affair, and without any record, even in Hansard, of the transaction.’ The debate duly broke the conspiracy of silence in bringing the Raj back into the news in Britain. ‘INDIA: CHURCHILL ATTACKS CRIPPS’ was the banner headline in the tabloid Daily Graphic the next day. Churchill adopted a controversial tone in scorning the legitimacy alike of the Indian election results and of the constituent assembly, currently in session despite the Muslim League boycott. It was at this point, stung by Labour interventions, that he not only turned directly on Cripps but for the first time reopened the history of the Cripps Mission of 1942, claiming that ‘we had to pull him up because’ – at which point Hansard records an interruption, followed by a challenge from Cripps to disclose all or nothing of what had happened on that occasion. Churchill prudently declined, amid laughter.6 It was widely known that Churchill had never really been behind the Cripps Offer but he hardly wanted this shown up in public. The debate marked the end of the increasingly uneasy bipartisanship that had hitherto been maintained. Instead India became the subject of Churchill’s fitful but influential interventions, in which he adopted a strikingly contentious rhetoric to cloak the Conservative Party’s lack of a viable alternative strategy.
Churchill’s interventions were fitful mainly because of his other commitments. The most important of these was the writing of his war memoirs, the six volumes eventually published as The Second World War (1948–54). This was a huge undertaking, with a correspondingly huge advance payable; the aim was to secure both Churchill’s historical reputation (already high by ordinary standards) and his finances (hitherto precarious, given his expensive lifestyle). After his American expedition – memorable for the Fulton speech – Churchill had settled down to work in the latter months of 1946, discovering in the process that the five chapters he had planned on the 1930s had expanded to eleven by January 1947 and to seventeen by the time he had a presentable draft of the whole volume ready by July.7 The final text of the first volume, published as The Gathering Storm, runs to 260,000 words – about one-third longer than the book you are reading at this moment – and although Churchill had considerable assistance, it remains true that big books do not write themselves without trenching heavily on an author’s time, energy and ability to pursue other activities.
It is not surprising, then, that Churchill gave his duties as Leader of the Opposition only intermittent attention during the last twelve months of the Raj. But, as Fulton had shown, when he chose to speak the world still listened. His warnings about a cold war could claim justification from the train of events during 1946–7, just like his pre-war warnings on Nazi Germany, about which he was currently writing; his warnings on India, likewise stuck in the mindset of the 1930s, attracted similar attention. On 12 December he talked of the ‘confusion, uncertainty and gathering storm, which those who have studied the Indian problem over long years might well have foreseen’.8 Eight days later, getting into his stride, he spoke again in a debate on the cabinet’s offer of independence to Burma. ‘The British Empire seems to be running off almost as fast as the American Loan,’ he told the House. According to The Times report the next day, he added: ‘The haste is appalling. “Scuttle” is the word, and the only word, that can be applied.’9
It was not the first application of the word. But what this great connoisseur of words had now done, in his spare time from dictating the war memoirs, was to invest it with a connotation that was henceforth canonical. A search of The Times shows that it had printed this versatile word only a dozen times in the previous eighteen months, not only as a noun (as in coal scuttle, real or metaphorical) but as a verb, chiefly with reference to birds that scuttle – the Oxford English Dictionary suggests the usage, to scuttle away or to scuttle off. But to scuttle also specifically meant deliberately to sink vessels, notably naval vessels, as the German Navy had famously done at Scapa Flow after the Great War. That was an action obviously within the ken of Captain Arthur Marsden, a former Royal Navy officer, now an obscure Conservative backbencher, who had spoken in the Egypt debate on 25 May 1946. ‘People are getting bothered,’ he had reflected, ‘about all this scuttle and run and the surrender of what so many hold dear and sacred.’10 Whatever the etymology, the pejorative force of the term was unmistakable. Two days later, Marsden’s front-bench colleague Oliver Lyttelton had picked it up in his speech about ‘scuttle and skedaddle’ in both Egypt and India.
Maybe it is true that run-of-the-mill orators plagiarize but great orators steal. Certainly Churchill had felt no inhibition, a couple of months later, in himself purloining what Lyttelton had cribbed from Marsden, and ‘the scuttle from Egypt’ was held to show how Britain was ‘falling in influence and authority in the world’.11 At any rate, when Churchill again hit upon ‘the only word’ that could be applied to the Government’s India policy after the London conference, he indelibly made it his own. Lord Cranborne, leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords, rallied to the cause after the Christmas recess with a speech bemoaning the taunts about ‘the Big Two and a Half’ that were now directed at his nation. ‘The reason for that change was simple,’ said Cranborne. ‘Ever since the Government had come into office they had pursued a policy of undignified scuttle from one country after another.’12
As yet, of course, the Government’s new India policy had not been announced. A White Paper had been drafted by Christmas Eve, in the presence of the innocent Wavell, who then returned to Delhi, unaware that he would not have the responsibility of implementing its proposals. The publication of the White Paper had to be deferred until 20 February 1947, and in it the date set for British departure from India was fixed as June 1948.
The cabinet faced a political crisis: not only what to do but also how to justify it. Scuttle, in short, had now entered the lexicon and Bevin was not alone in not liking the concept at all. At a fraught meeting on 31 December, Attlee and his colleagues, prompted by their potential political vulnerability, developed a new ideological robustness. The end of bipartisanship, which had previously constrained them in every cautious consensual utterance, in fact liberated them to counter the taunts about scuttle with arguments that Labour actually believed in (as did liberals in other parties too).
‘The general feeling of the Cabinet was that withdrawal from India need not appear to be forced upon us by our weakness nor to be the first step in the dissolution of the Empire,’ ran the minute. ‘On the contrary this action must be shown to be the logical conclusion, which we welcomed, of a policy followed by successive Governments for many years.’ Attlee was therefore asked to frame the statement, with which he would introduce the White Paper, along such lines. ‘There was, therefore, no occasion to excuse our withdrawal,’ it was suggested: ‘we should rather claim credit for taking this initiative in terminating British rule in India and transferring our responsibilities to the representatives of the Indian people.’13
As in the construction of any political myth, the generalizations were edited so as to skirt many awkward questions. In particular, this version sought to give credence – far more than historical scholarship would sanction – to the dissembling utterances of some frankly reactionary Viceroys and British governments in the past. But Attlee was in a position to deliver his lines with a straight face, in a way that Churchill simply could not have got away with: just as Churchill in 1940 could construct the necessary and inspiring myth of national salvation in a way that Neville Chamberlain could not have done. As with many myths, it was the more persuasive the closer it stuck to the truth. The political record of Attlee and Cripps, as longstanding supporters of Indian claims, thus gave them credentials that were henceforth to prove valuable in winning over public opinion for their Indian policy.
The rhetoric of the end of Empire had found its paradigm – or rather each rival version had found its voice and its cry. The fact that scuttle became a cliché was in fact a tribute to Churchill’s continuing ability to shape the terms of debate – as was the fact that its catchphrase salience belatedly stirred the Attlee Government into arguing for its own convictions in Indian policy.
Churchill threw into one of his speeches in April the remark that ‘we were living to a large extent upon the American loan, and he had been shocked to see the rate at which it was flowing out because a great part of it was being spent on tobacco and films.’14 This was an unexpectedly edifying and austere reflection from a man whose favourite after-dinner relaxation was a private showing of the latest Hollywood movie while he smoked a big cigar.
Everyone knew that the North American loan underpinned Britain’s financial position; few at the time claimed to know precisely how; and what they thought they knew often turned out later to be wrong, or at least misleading, once the official statistics were subjected to subsequent revision. In The Times of 14 February 1947 Lionel Robbins, with the authority of a former head of the Economic Section, publicly warned of bankruptcy unless increased British exports filled the gap in the balance of payments before the American loan was exhausted. This came not from an opponent of the loan but from a supporter, who understood the assumptions on which it had been framed.
When Keynes negotiated it in Washington, he had put the cumulative deficit on the British balance of payments for the three years 1946–8 at a total of £1250 million. This married nicely with the final amount advanced by the United States and Canada: $5000 million (with the exchange rate at just over four dollars to the pound). The first published estimates put the cumulative deficit at £1245 million. It looked as though Keynes had scored a posthumous bullseye.
Not so. Virtually everything was worse than it looked at first sight – and was made worse by the faulty signals that the available figures initially gave. The underlying problem was that Keynes had guessed completely wrong about the post-war strength of the dollar. He thought that once the British balance of payments came into equilibrium, there would be no shortage of dollars; and he did not live to see himself refuted on this point. During 1946 Britain was struggling along with a net current account deficit of £230 million, corresponding almost exactly to the gold and dollar deficit of £225 million. The one explained the other, or so it seemed. During the transition period to a peacetime economy, this was just the sort of predictable financial gap that the loan negotiations had envisaged. Drawing down the best part of a billion dollars from the loan to finance it presented no problem.
Privileged by hindsight, we can see where it all went wrong in 1947. The root cause was not the deficit for that year of £380million on the balance of payments; this amounted to another billion and a half dollars, which could again easily be covered by the loan – still, on this arithmetic, leaving half of it untouched. And since we now know that the British balance of payments was indeed to be brought into balance by the end of 1948, it looks as though Keynes’s scenario ought to have coped with the problems of transition. But the reality is that, because he had been wrong about the dollar, the deficit in ‘hard currencies’ (gold and dollars) zoomed above one billion pounds in 1947, or 4 billion dollars – thus exhausting what was left of the loan a year ahead of time. And there was no way of meeting this ‘dollar gap’ through the export surplus (including invisible earnings) that Britain was notching up in soft currencies, which holders of dollars would not accept.15
It was thus not until 1947, and fairly suddenly, that the British cabinet became aware of the warning signs. Dalton had writen in his diary before Christmas 1946: ‘as I constantly tell my colleagues, we shall be on the rocks in two years’ time, if we have exhausted the Canadian and U.S. Loans, unless we have severely cut down our overseas expenditure (military and other) and built up our exports to a much higher level than now.’16 This was a reasonable analysis, given what the Treasury then knew. It is true that American tobacco and films cost dollars; but not every Briton consumed them on a Churchillian scale. These were petty luxuries in a bleak world, whereas the maintenance of the pretensions of the British Empire was more evidently a luxury that the country could no longer afford.
By March 1947, evidence of the dollar drain was immediate and unmistakable. Post-war American prosperity was part of the problem since it fuelled an unanticipated rise in dollar prices which, so Dalton estimated, reduced Britain’s spending power by a billion dollars. The other main reason was ‘our ever rising dollar bill to feed the Germans’ – the costs of victory again. The Chancellor had already told the cabinet that ‘we were racing through our United States dollar credit at a reckless, and ever-accelerating, speed.’ He went on to warn his colleagues that ‘if we continue from now on to draw these dollars at the same rate at which we have been drawing them since 1st January, i.e., at the rate of $700millions a quarter, the United States Credit will now be exhausted in February 1948.’17 This was his best prediction; the true position turned out to be worse.
What could be done about it was less easy to see. Consumption of imports had already been cut to the bone, with the British people subsisting under austere conditions: ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed. In the New Jerusalem, milk and honey were among the few foodstuffs not to be rationed. Even bread was to remain rationed until the summer of 1948. Yet defence expenditure still accounted for 40 per cent of the budget in 1947, with the amount spent overseas a direct drain on the precarious balance of payments. Dalton’s efforts secured a cut of 5 per cent in military spending – half of what he had sought.
Almost every aspect of the looming crisis had an American dimension. Not only was it a dollar loan, but the main call upon it was specifically to finance the dollar gap, and this would be made worse once convertibility of sterling into dollars was enforced, under the loan agreement, within a few months. Cuts in British dollar imports would offend not only the British electorate but the Virginia tobacco lobby and the media moguls of Hollywood, who had influence and means of retaliation. Any cuts in military expenditure also affected US interests, maybe not so much in India, but politically in Palestine and strategically in Greece, if there were to be a British military withdrawal.
Relations with the United States during the past year had not engendered mutual confidence, still less blossomed into the sort of special relationship advocated in the Fulton speech. Decisions over atomic energy exemplified the friction between the self-confident, self-reliant, self-absorbed Americans and the touchy, exasperated and importunate British. The Quebec Agreement of 1943 was not worth the paper it was written on (and the United States administration, as we know, had mislaid the paper anyway). Its provisions for granting Britain an ongoing partnership over nuclear weapons were simply ignored. Senator Brian MacMahon, chairman of the Senate Committee on Atomic Energy, was unaware of the Agreement; the eponymous MacMahon Act was passed in the summer of 1946, prohibiting the sharing of nuclear secrets. The British Government’s response was covertly to sanction a programme of their own in October 1946, clearly aimed at producing atomic weapons. Bevin’s intervention was later recalled as crucial, notably his claim, which made up in fervour what it lacked in syntax, that ‘I don't want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked at, or to, by the Secretary of State in the United States as I have just had in my discussion with Mr Byrnes.’18
The British atomic bomb was thus commissioned for two reasons. One was that Bevin’s assertive reflexes about the British Empire were much the same as Churchill’s: it simply should not be pushed around. And the other was mutual mistrust between Britain and the United States. The lack of personal empathy between Bevin and Byrnes was only one manifestation of an underlying tension.
Bevin’s six weeks in New York in November and December 1946 proved sobering. He was there mainly for another foreign ministers’ conference, which was not the lowest point in the Byrnes–Bevin relationship if only because they had the common problem of dealing with the obdurate Molotov. Byrnes had his own troubles. He was not well (the excuse offered when he resigned at the end of the year) but then neither was Bevin (by whom resignation was considered neither a virtue nor an option). Byrnes no longer had Truman’s confidence; and the President himself suddenly faced a hostile Congress, following the Republicans’ success in winning both Houses in November 1946. Though Vandenberg, now Chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, held to an internationalist line (and a generally good opinion of Bevin) and though the Republicans had already developed a mythology of betrayal over Yalta, they were unreliable cold warriors. The fact that they were mainly focused on reining in what they saw as the free-spending ideology of the New Deal, both at home and abroad, left the United States reluctant to take up such a burden if it meant sending forth either troops or dollars.
In this context, the Greek situation took on a new significance. Bevin had always been as strong a supporter of British intervention as Churchill; but Churchill, of course, had simply been denounced for his pains, at least in the United States, as an unreconstructed imperialist. Admittedly, after Fulton, after the barren disputes with Molotov at successive international conferences, after a succession of incidents signalling Soviet ambitions in Europe and the Middle East, American public opinion was no longer set in this mould. Conversely, Soviet propaganda shifted from its chiefly anti-British focus, and the arrival of the US Navy off Athens was now denounced by Moscow Radio as the work of ‘American imperialists’. But when Bevin told Byrnes that economic necessity might force Britain to withdraw its troops, still trapped in action against the Communist guerrillas in northern Greece, there was certainly no offer of US forces. Instead, the British continued for the moment to borrow dollars from the Americans in order to defray the costs of keeping troops in Greece.
Bevin was shaken by evidence of his own unpopularity in New York, where this former leader of the British dockers found that American dockers would not handle his baggage. A meeting with President Truman was another matter. It was agreed that Palestine might be easier to handle now that the American elections were over. Bevin acknowledged that the British had given conflicting pledges – ‘so have we,’ Truman interjected. They were not friends but they could be friendly: men of a similar age, experience and outlook, happy to exchange reminiscences of how, forty years previously, the one had been selling mineral water in Bristol while the other was selling corn in Missouri. Neither of them was anti-semitic but they talked together about the Jews in a stereotyped way, commiserating about how difficult they were. That Rabbi Silver, said Harry, ‘he thinks everything I do is wrong.’ Yes, yes, yes. ‘They sometimes expect me to fulfil all the prophecies of all the prophets,’ said Ernie. ‘I tell them sometimes that I can no more fulfill all the prophecies of Ezekiel than I can those of the other great Jew, Karl Marx.’19
While he was away, Bevin got a candid insight into the Prime Minister’s thinking, which, probably responding to party feeling, was now set on a different tack from his own. Attlee typed the letter himself on 1 December; he did not want anyone else to see it; he did not want to undercut a Foreign Secretary of whom he thought so highly, and on whose backing his own leadership of the Labour Party often depended. But in Greece, as in India and in Palestine, it seemed to Attlee a time for ruthless reappraisal. ‘The Middle East position is only an outpost position,’ he told Bevin. ‘I am beginning to doubt whether the Greek game is worth the candle.’ Indeed he went further in wondering how far such commitments were viable in the absence of more effective support from the United States. ‘There is a tendency in America to regard us as an outpost,’ he concluded, ‘but an outpost that they will not have to defend.’20
Facing Labour backbench criticism in his absence, Bevin already realized that he was getting out of touch. He returned to London just before Christmas and had a proper talk with Attlee for the first time in a couple of months. Attlee confirmed his own wish to withdraw British troops from Greece and to hand over the Palestine mandate. Moreover, only days later, Attlee brought Bevin into line on the exit policy for India.
The Foreign Secretary had played no part in any of the Indian negotiations and seemed not to be fully abreast of recent developments. He showed it when he wrote to the Prime Minister on New Year’s Day, saying that in India the Government appeared ‘to be trying nothing except to scuttle out of it, without dignity or plan’ and adding that he was against fixing a date. What Bevin was evidently slow to grasp was the difference between Wavell’s ‘breakdown’ timetable for piecemeal military evacuation, which the cabinet had repeatedly rejected, and the Attlee–Cripps idea of using a fixed date to achieve a kind of political handover otherwise unattainable or indefinitely postponed. Attlee therefore responded to Bevin the next day that ‘a scuttle it will be if things are allowed to drift’ and – always at his best when laconic – concluded: ‘If you disagree with what is proposed, you must offer a practical alternative. I fail to find one in your letter.’21 Bevin was not used to being reprimanded in this way; but he henceforth accepted Attlee’s lead. The Foreign Secretary had come home chastened, not to say chastized.
And a cold coming he had of it, with the weather sharp and the days short in the very dead of winter. December was already severe. Coal stocks were desperately low, with the minister responsible, Emanuel Shinwell, seemingly oblivious of the danger should the weather get worse. As it happened, this was the worst winter for over sixty years. The snow of mid-December, after a short thaw, returned at the end of January, when record low temperatures were recorded. On 7 February, Shinwell told the House of Commons that there would be no electricity for industrial production over much of the country; by mid-February coal stocks at the power stations were down to ten days’ supply; 2 million workers were laid off; the supply of newsprint was restricted for two weeks. Little improvement was felt throughout the month and at the beginning of March renewed blizzards were still piling up ten-foot snowdrifts.
It would be frivolous to suppose that most British people spent these weeks worrying about the British Empire. It is not even true that the public turned against the Labour Government as a result of these hardships. Labour’s opinion poll lead over the Conservatives was already down to 3 or 4 per cent in January – the same as in the previous May – and Gallup polls in March, June and July 1947 all showed the parties (remarkably) in an exact dead heat. Nonetheless, the fuel shortage, and the failure of socialist planning to cope with it, could obviously be used against the Government by an Opposition that had now found its voice. The Conservative grandee Lord Swinton told the Lords that the crisis was not due to ‘an act of God, but the inactivity of Emmanuel’ (sic).22 If Churchill wanted to be prime minister again, once he had got his memoirs written, there were tangible, populist issues of government competence nearer to home than India and Palestine.
The chronology, as usual, is worth bearing in mind. On Friday, 14 February, Bevin announced that Britain would refer the Palestine mandate to the United Nations; on Tuesday, 18 February (just after London’s coldest day for eighteen years), the cabinet agreed to withdraw British troops from Greece; on Thursday, 20 February, Attlee made the dramatic announcement of the Government’s decision to quit India.
Wavell knew what was coming – by then. A fortnight previously he had been entertaining Harold Macmillan, currently an Opposition front-bencher, in the Viceregal Lodge. Macmillan disclosed that Patel reminded him of Bevin, and opined that the ‘charming but nervy’ Nehru ‘would not stand the racket of great events’. (When Nehru died in office in May 1964, he had been prime minister of India for nearly seventeen years, whereas Macmillan had resigned as British prime minister the previous October after six and a half years.) ‘Just after lunch,’ Wavell noted that day, ‘I had a letter from the P.M. by special messenger, dismissing me from my post at a month’s notice. Not very courteously done.’23 True, but Wavell had refused to go to London (where Attlee would have told him personally). The old soldier still went like a gentleman, confessing his own failure and wishing his successor well.
There were three historic arguments about India and its place in the British Empire. One was strategic. The defence of India remained a priority for the chiefs of staff, just as it had for generations of their predecessors. Indeed this concern had largely governed ‘the official mind of imperialism’ during the nineteeth-century era of annexation: not only to protect India itself but the route to India, which had given Suez and the Nile valley and much of Africa such a high strategic priority. But the chiefs of staff had already been overruled in 1946 during the negotiations of the cabinet delegation; they would have to make the best of whatever settlement emerged; and the experience of the Second World War suggested that the defence of India was a strategic liability beyond Britain’s current capacity.
This sense of fundamental change interlocked with the second argument: economics. The traditional view again was that possession of India was a great boon to Great Britain; and not only committed imperialists but also their anti-imperialist critics took this for granted. Whichever of these species he can be assigned to, Ernest Bevin had been in no doubt on this score. ‘When I say I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire, what do I mean?’ he had demanded in the Commons in February 1946. ‘I know that if the British Empire fell… it would mean that the standard of living of our constituents would fall considerably.’24 This was an axiom or an assumption rather than an established fact, especially in relation to India, which may be why little was subsequently heard of the contention. For the measures of self-government already instituted in India had made it politically impossible to extract substantial commercial advantages for British interests, as evidenced in the collapse of the Lancashire cotton trade. Financially, too, the boot was on the other foot. As long as India was a debtor, fear of default had been an argument against trusting an independent government to honour its obligations. But the the war had left India a creditor on a vast scale, with Britain owing it huge sums in the form of the sterling balances.
When India emerged as a party cry in British politics during the winter of 1947, both of these historic aspects of the issue were already moribund. Instead the debate turned on a third argument: the alleged moral dimension. Here the Conservatives made their final stand on the principle that it was not right for the British to abandon the cause of good government in India in face of the obvious dangers of communal unrest. Hence it was unworthy of their own best traditions to scuttle. These were sentiments that had widespread appeal, certainly within a governing class raised to respect such ideals, and this included high-minded anti-imperialists. As Sudhir Ghosh had told Cripps at one point: ‘this extraordinary sense of moral responsibility which our British friends feel for everyone else’ was itself a final barrier to quitting India.25
For the Labour cabinet, the moment of truth had been delayed until December 1946. For it was then that the preliminary decision to expedite independence in Burma cleared the way for the crucial decision on India (to which Burma had been attached until the 1930s). When this was coupled with the failure of the London conference, it plainly demonstrated to the cabinet that moral absolutes had to yield to the second-best solutions that might prove viable in an imperfect world. In this sense it was a replay of the arguments between Cripps and Gandhi some six months previously, and tough-minded politicians like Hugh Dalton had taken a relish in putting the choice in the starkest of terms. ‘It is quite clear that we can't go on holding people down against their will, however incompetent they are to govern themselves,’ he had written in his diary, ‘for the whole pace, as determined in the East, has quickened over the war years, and it would be a waste both of British men and money to try to hold down any of this crowd against their will. They must be allowed to find their own way, even through blood and corruption and incompetence of all kinds, to what they regard as “freedom”.’26
It is evident, then, that a number of strands came together in the making of the Government’s new policy on India. It was to be officially published on 20 February 1947, after further adjustments, notably in settling the transfer date as June 1948. Mountbatten played some part in tinkering with the exact date but certainly did not write his own ticket, as he subsequently liked to claim, and some of his recollections in fact confirm that it was Attlee and Cripps who were firmly in control. Thus Mountbatten reminisced about putting to them his demand for ‘plenipotentiary powers’ as Viceroy and doing so during an interview where no notes were taken: ‘But Cripps nodded his head and Attlee replied, “All right, you've got the powers and the job”.’27
Where Cripps went too far was in making a quixotic offer to go out as a member of the new Viceroy’s staff. Mountbatten graciously declined, privately telling the King: ‘I don't want to be ham-strung by having to bring out a third version of the Cripps offer!!!’28 Instead he suggested that Cripps take the India Office; but Attlee demurred, intent now on adopting an active role himself (and consequently replacing Pethick-Lawrence with his deputy, the pliant Lord Listowel, as the last Secretary of State for India).
When he spoke in a cold and dimly lit House of Commons on 20 February, the Prime Minister publicly set a timetable for Indian independence under the Viceroyalty of Mountbatten. He justified this with an authority that impressed his hearers, balancing the claims of morality and expediency, at once talking about a mission fulfilled in India and delicately scorning Churchill’s views as half a century out of date. ‘It is a fact that in spite of all the declarations we have made there are still people in India who think they can hang on and let things drift,’ he asserted. ‘We are against drift.’ Naturally, Opposition laughter greeted this claim and a Conservative member duly called out: ‘Scuttle.’29
Churchill himself took up the cry. When the Indian proposal was debated a fortnight later, he asked whether Mountbatten’s mission was ‘merely “Operation Scuttle” on which he and other distinguished officers have been dispatched? (Opposition cheers)’. His peroration was preordained: ‘Let them not add by shameful flight, by premature hurried scuttle – let them not add to the pangs of sorrow that they all felt – the taint and smear of shame. (Loud Opposition cheers).’
After this, it was downhill all the way, as the tired tropes succumbed to repetitive strain injuries through over-exercised metaphors. It is a blessing to posterity that The Gathering Storm took off the cream of Churchill’s eloquence, leaving the House of Commons with a thin diet of curds and whey. Churchill’s speech in the three-day debate in mid-March 1947, supposedly on economic affairs, managed to get back to the familiar lines: ‘Scuttle everywhere was the order of the day: Egypt, India, Burma.’ Then, only three weeks later, there was the Government’s new plan to reduce the period of conscription to twelve months – ‘another example of the the policy of scuttle before anything that looks difficult or fierce which has characterized the Socialist Government administration, and which in less than two years has reduced us from our victory day to our present confusion and disrepute.’30
Churchill ploughed on unabashed. When the formal motion on the national service cut was debated a month later, he again worked himself up about ‘this sudden volte face, change and scuttle’, this time provoking the intervention of a young backbench Labour MP, James Callaghan. ‘Mr Churchill had used the words “demoralize”, “squalid”, and “scuttle” in the last three debates in the House,’ Callaghan observed, to ministerial laughter. ‘He was sure that Mr Churchill, with the richness of his language, could find some other words. (Ministerial laughter).’31 Jim Callaghan had not yet learnt – more than thirty years before ‘the winter of discontent’ – that repetition is the essence of a successful soundbite.
Palestine and India had already been linked, not least by Churchill, who was ready to attack Government policy on each – from opposite flanks. And on Palestine a lot of flank was exposed. The final attempt by the British to find an agreed solution was by now faltering towards impasse, as yet another London conference was soon to confirm. This time it was the Arabs who agreed to attend, the Jews who refused. Previously, key representatives of the Jewish Agency, gaoled by the British, could not come to London; but now they would not, following the decision of the World Zionist Congress, at its meeting in Basle in December 1946, to boycott negotiations in favour of direct action.
This had been a body blow to Chaim Weizmann. The split in Basle, as Baffy Dugdale recorded it, was that ‘broadly speaking the Americans and the Palestinians oppose the Conference. Chaim says that if they do not enter the Conference, Zionism is dead as a constructive political movement for a generation.’ For entering the forthcoming conference necessarily meant considering an agenda for partition of some kind – something that most pragmatic Zionists would now settle for, but which the hardliners were unprepared to avow. Hence the dramatic moment (which Dugdale’s diary catches) when Rabbi Silver ‘threw down the gauntlet – against partition and in favour of “resistance” – but not one word to distinguish it from terrorism’.32 As she could well see, Weizmann’s re-election as President of the World Congress meant little in this context – it was exactly because he was perceived as pro-British that he faced defeat. Though Nahum Goldmann bravely put the case for partition, as he had done for four months now, the American delegates were set on rejection.
Long foreshadowed, the American takeover of the Zionist movement now put it on a course that repudiated the axioms on which British Zionism had worked for thirty years. Weizmann’s eloquent speech, as always making clear his own abomination of terrorism, was well received in the hall but Dugdale saw on the following day how it was dismissed by many delegates: ‘Too flippant – too pro-British, etc.’ This marked Weizmann’s eclipse, and with it the withdrawal of Dugdale from her life’s work – ‘I cannot work for or with any Executive that is pursuing a policy of non-cooperation with Britain.’33
Churchill has too readily been co-opted in indulgent accounts as a lifelong Zionist. This is to ignore the integral link that he, even more than Weizmann, had always seen between the Jewish national home and British imperialism. The new nexus of Jewish terrorism in Palestine plus American pressure-group politics had little appeal for either of these old men; but Weizmann, as a Jew, could hardly jump ship whereas Churchill, despite professions of personal regard, instigated a personal as well as a political breach. The stark fact is that he never again met Weizmann after Moyne’s assassination in November 1944. In the House of Commons, moreover, Churchill’s tone was surely that of a former rather than a current adherent. ‘All my hon. Friends on this side of the House do not agree with the views which I held for so many years about the Zionist cause,’ he told the House at the end of January 1947. ‘But promises were made far beyond those to which responsible Governments should have committed themselves.’34
It was now that Churchill modified his earlier suggestion that Britain might hand back the mandate to the United Nations within twelve months by saying that this should be done within six months. Although he was to mock Attlee for announcing a deadline over India (and then shortening it), he did much the same himself over Palestine. This was Churchill’s own policy of scuttle.
The London conference meanwhile hobbled along against a background of mounting terrorist activity in Palestine. Its co-chairman with Bevin was the new Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, a conventional Labour Zionist. He began as an advocate of partition; the Arab delegates rejected any mention of partition; the Zionists were only unofficial participants and were anyway officially opposed to partition. None of this was at all promising. Creech Jones himself soon decided that partition was unworkable. ‘It would be very difficult to establish a viable Jewish State without prejudicing the vital interests of the Arabs,’ he advised the cabinet on 7 February; ‘and wherever the frontiers were drawn, large numbers of Arabs must inevitably be left under Jewish rule.’35 Creech Jones therefore joined with Bevin in putting forward a final set of proposals: trusteeship under the United Nations as the prelude to a binational state, which would be based on both Jewish and Arab cantons. The plan proposed to admit 96,000 Jewish immigrants over two years. Again a time-limit was to be applied – this time a five-year transition period under the mandate before independence.
The Bevin Plan, as it became known, found no takers. As Ben Gurion put it: ‘They were first and foremost Jews and they wanted a Jewish state in Palestine in which the Jews would be a majority.’36 So while the Arabs thought the Bevin Plan looked too much like a Jewish state in embryo, the Zionists maintained that it did not look enough like one. Hence Bevin’s announcement to the last session of the conference on 14 February that Palestine would now be referred to the United Nations.
The Zionists thought that this must be a trick. Their reasoning was that partition, and hence a Jewish state, would require a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly – which was inconceivable unless not only the United States but also the Soviet bloc supported it, as the clever British must have realized. True, there was an inescapable logic in the situation. What the Foreign Office feared was that Arab hostility over a possible partition would stoke anti-British sentiment if it were Britain that imposed this solution. So if Palestine were to end up partitioned, why not let the United Nations itself incur the odium, especially since its members were so free with their advice and criticism? And the two-thirds threshold for varying the mandate in this way, giving the Arab states their leverage at the United Nations, was indeed built into the internationally agreed procedures. Why not let the people who were so ready to play politics with this issue instead play their share in finding the solution?
Even so, Bevin still shied away from evacuation of Palestine at this stage, if only because of its strategic importance. Admittedly, the safeguarding of vital British oil interests in the Middle East always militated against upsetting the Arab states that now controlled these resources. And, unless the old Italian colony of Cyrenaica (Libya) were to fall to British trusteeship, the lack of an alternative base to support British troops in the Canal Zone was a problem, even if Palestine was not much of an answer to it. As a Machiavellian ploy in great-power politics, however, reference of Palestine to the United Nations left much to be desired. Far from being an adroit move to shift responsibility onto others, it still left Britain meanwhile with the increasingly burdensome task of actually administering the mandate – responsibility without power.
That this was not an ideal solution was readily apparent; whether it was even a second-best solution, failing American support, was doubtful. Bevin’s own apprentice boast to do better in Palestine, advanced in more hopeful days, was now hung round his neck. Critics on the Labour left, like Richard Crossman, were scathing; when he and his friends Ian Mikardo and Michael Foot (ultimately to become leader of the Labour Party himself, against Margaret Thatcher) published their pamphlet Keep Left in May, its main target was the Government’s alleged subservience to American foreign policy – but Crossman’s fury over Palestine was an obvious ingredient. Yet even at this low point in Bevin’s fortunes, the Gallup poll in February 1947 had shown that 58 per cent of the British people thought that he was doing a good job as Foreign Secretary. This speaks of some realism about their view of Britain’s influence in the world, or perhaps just of low expectations.
In Churchill’s ‘Operation Scuttle’ speech of 6 March, a cogent point lurked behind the rodomontade. His contrast of the Indian decision with the unresolved situation in Palestine obviously had the immediate aim of identifying Bevin’s hand – ‘I do not know who it is, I only have my surmise’ – in maintaining a residual British commitment. ‘The sustained effort we are making, if applied to India,’ Churchill argued, ‘would have enabled the plan of the Cripps Mission to be carried out and be fully discussed with full deliberation.’ Churchill made the connection, as he had done before, because he thought the Government’s policy was wrong in both Palestine and, above all, in India. ‘Two bottles of powerful medicine had been prepared, but they had been sent to the wrong patients. (Laughter).’37
He worked for his laugh and got it; but if his argument was serious, it was because it deftly identified some contradiction in analysis. After all, from the British point of view, both the Indian and the Palestine problems exhibited many similar features: deep-seated conflict between intermingled ethnic groups, a claim by one militant religious minority for partition and its own state, a growing resort to violence, and the confident but contradictory assertions that bloodshed would either cease or escalate if the British withdrew. Churchill’s inherent difficulty was that when he built on the maintenance of an expensive British presence in tiny Palestine to argue for the desirability of deploying such resources instead in vast India, he was using a weak lever to support a strong policy. The unspoken converse seemed more to the point: that if there was no profit for Britain in trying to maintain its ongoing presence in Palestine, where it sought ineffectually to hold down fewer than 2 million fractious inhabitants, there was certainly no case for trying to do likewise on the scale required in India, with a population two hundred times bigger.
Perhaps his line of thought was best revealed, not in the Commons, but in a speech at Wanstead at the end of April 1947. ‘The Government, always ready to scuttle away from any difficulty, had evidently cast away our mighty Indian Empire,’ he claimed. ‘In Palestine a different processs was at work in the minds of the Government. There we had to go on fighting at all costs.’ So far, so familiar. Yet what was the practical, constructive conclusion to be drawn about future British policy? It was all very well to satirize the Government’s propaganda: ‘We must carry on this “squalid war on terrorism”. We were fighting the Jews in order to give the country to the Arabs.’ But Churchill was not actually soft on terrorism himself, as his waning support for Zionism testified. Thus when he argued that ‘Palestine was not a twentieth part of the importance of India to us, and was an immense source of expense and worry, and was bringing upon us a great deal of disapprobation from many countries’, the implicit thrust of his argument was surely to propose an ‘Indian’ solution for Palestine rather than to press the lost cause of a ‘Palestinian’ policy in India.
One way or another, once it became clear that British policy was to leave India sooner rather than later, the logic of applying this thinking to Palestine too became more appealing. All it needed was for events on the ground in Palestine to render the option of staying sufficiently odious. In this sense, the final decision on India was to carry Palestine too – and after a fairly short time-lag – on this occasion with Churchill anticipating rather than resisting what the Government eventually proposed.
General George Marshall, who had played such an outstanding role in achieving victory as Roosevelt’s wartime chief of staff, was the surprise nominee to replace Byrnes as Secretary of State in January 1947. Truman had thus found a man whom he could trust and Marshall’s bipartisan support was shown by the way that Vandenberg stage-managed the nomination through the Senate in a single day. The appointment was well received both at home and abroad, giving Marshall unique authority in determining American policy. He was no stranger to the British, who had found him firm but fair, and always as good as his word, in resolving such conflicts as arose; but he and Bevin had had little personal contact and the first major crisis to be handled between them arrived unpropitiously in February.
Marshall remembered well enough how Greece had often surfaced as a problem in Anglo-American relations, from the days of its liberation by the British in the autumn of 1944. At that time it had been an axiom in Washington that British troops were only in Greece to further Churchill’s atavistic imperialist ambitions; and Lend-Lease itself had been imperilled because of Roosevelt’s suspicions on this score. Yet Bevin, who had played a key role in mobilizing political support for British intervention, now faced an entirely different situation. Far from the Americans welcoming the suggestion that Britain might pull out, they were appalled at the very thought of it; and far from the British showing a dogged determination to stay the course, they now seemed ready to cut and run.
There was a further twist to the way that Greece was perceived by the great powers. It was, of course, one of the countries listed on the ‘naughty document’ which recorded Churchill’s confabulations with Stalin in October 1944 (again annoying Roosevelt). Crudely, their deal had been that Britain was to have 90 per cent influence in Greece in return for Soviet influence of 90 per cent in Rumania; but in practice the reciprocity turned on a different hinge. Whenever Churchill subsequently asked pointed questions about Soviet control of Poland, Stalin would respond by talking about British activity in Greece. And initially the Americans stayed out of such exchanges.
Their purported indifference did not, however, represent the real view of influential figures in the State Department, notably Dean Acheson, now acting as Marshall’s chief of staff. Not only was there increasingly overt American concern to safeguard Greece from Communist insurrection but, on the other side of the balance, the situation in Poland had now deteriorated in an alarming way. All too steadily, the political influence of Mikolajczyk’s Peasant Party was being undercut by Communist control of state machinery; the elections of January 1947 were blatantly rigged, in a way that made a mockery of the democratic phrases of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, this time provoking protest from the United States. Hence the new imperative for some further response by the Western powers, either through idealism, in order to protect Greek democracy, or through realism, in order to compensate in the Balkans for what was now lost on the Baltic.
Bevin had had no change of heart about Greece. But, in the same week that the Government’s new policies on India and Palestine were declared, the cabinet agreed to withdraw the remaining British troops (already in the process of being scaled down to 8000, a tenth of the original force). Britain’s financial plight was pressing, Greece a strain too great. It was left to a rueful Foreign Secretary to settle for the best terms he could get from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, short of an immediate unilateral withdrawal – ‘that we should put up a strong telegram to the United States asking them what they were going to do and on the other hand telling the Greeks that we could not continue’ – in order to prompt urgent joint action.38
Consternation in Washington! Acheson had got the news on Friday, 21 February, and tried to spare his boss, enjoying a much-needed weekend away (though it seems that Bevin nonetheless managed to get through to Marshall by telephone on the Sunday). James Forrestal was at the cabinet luncheon on Monday: ‘Marshall said that this dumped in our lap another most serious problem – that it was tantamount to British abdication from the Middle East with obvious implications for their successor.’39 Truman quickly agreed with Marshall and Acheson that the United States would have to provide the necessary resources. Meanwhile, over lunch at his club with a journalist, Acheson was apocalyptic about the possibilities that now opened up for further Soviet expansion. ‘There are only two powers left,’ he said. ‘The British are finished. They are through.’40
The problem for the administration was to get the necessary funds from a Congress elected on the Republican platform of cutting expenditure. Congressional leaders at the White House, faced with a sombre assessment from Marshall and a more fervent appeal from Acheson, gave key pledges of support. The most important came from Vandenberg, now not only chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and majority leader but also president of the Senate, in the absence of a Vice-President since Truman’s elevation. For him, as for others, Greece suddenly had a new significance. ‘But I sense enough of the facts to realize that the problem of Greece cannot be isolated by itself,’ he wrote in early March. ‘On the contrary, it is probably symbolic of the world-wide ideological clash between Eastern Communism and Western democracy; and it may easily be the thing which requires us to make some very fateful and far-reaching decisions.’41
It was in such terms that Truman made his historic speech to a joint session of Congress on 12 March – twelve months after Fulton. ‘At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life,’ he declared, making this the ground for giving a specific commitment to Greece (and also Turkey). He asked for $400 million to back his pledge of American support against ‘subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure’.42 Here was what became known as the Truman Doctrine, with the might of the United States thus guaranteeing the future of a strategic part of the eastern Mediterranean, hitherto regarded as a purely British concern. In telling newsmen of his full support, Vandenberg was evidently concerned about how the new stance might look. ‘We should evolve a total policy,’ he explained. ‘It must clearly avoid imperialism.’43
Of course it must. If Churchill had gone into Greece for the sake of the British Empire, nobody must be allowed to think that Truman had gone in for equivalent motives. Subtle and astute, Acheson was well aware of such nuances when he went to give evidence before the relevant congressional committees. Nonetheless it is little wonder that Churchill concluded the chapter on British intervention in Greece in Triumph and Tragedy by quoting Acheson’s testimony on the security threat to the United States that a Communist government in Greece would pose. ‘If Greece has escaped the fate of Czechoslovakia and survives to-day as one of the free nations,’ Churchill commented, ‘it is due not only to British action in 1944, but to the steadfast efforts of what was presently to become the united strength of the English-speaking world.’44
By the time Truman spoke, his Secretary of State was in Moscow. The council of foreign ministers set up at Potsdam had had conferences in London, Paris and New York; now its fourth meeting began in Moscow on 10 March. There were forty-three sessions between then and 25 April; and, as at previous conferences, there was excruciatingly little progress to report, with wearisome recriminations in which Molotov and Bevin played the leading roles.
Some wondered whether this might be the final appearance of the British Foreign Secretary, who had set out for Moscow in poor shape. ‘Bevin is in no fit condition to go on much longer,’ Dalton had noted after one of their meetings at the end of February, adding: ‘Just how he will fare in Moscow is anybody’s guess. It is quite on the cards, I fear, that he may not come back.’45 Unable to fly because of his heart, constantly accompanied by a personal physican, exposed to bleak views of eastern Europe from the windows of a slow train, Bevin nonetheless benefited from the trip. He found Moscow reinvigorating, and not just because of the frequent satisfaction of giving Molotov a piece of his mind. The new factor was the presence of Marshall, offering plenty of time to establish a personal relationship between the British and American Secretaries of State. Here was an opportunity to foster closer co-operation, given the combination of Russian obduracy and the Truman doctrine.
When Bevin got back home, everyone noticed the difference. Among the first to feel the force of his renewed confidence and vigour were the authors of Keep Left, especially since this was now answered in kind from a pro-Government standpoint. The rival pamphlet, Cards on the Table, was written by the Labour Party’s able and combative International Officer, Denis Healey (within twenty years to become Secretary of State for Defence). He offered a cogent analysis of the need to check Russian ambitions in central and eastern Europe. This was not simply a matter of rival national interests, with their own historic legitimacy. Rather, Healey pointed to the concentration of power within the Soviet system, with its lack of responsibility to public opinion giving a sinister turn to a ruthless foreign policy executed in the name of international socialism. Published just before the Labour Party conference, Cards on the Table disclosed the intellectual justification for a social democratic foreign policy, while what Dalton described on 29 May as ‘the tidal wave of the Bevin speech’ ensured a personal triumph over left-wing critics. ‘He has a most astonishing – and unique – conference personality,’ Dalton commented in some awe. ‘There was no come-back.’46
The real come-back was Bevin’s own. He felt on top of his job; he felt vindicated by events in his longstanding wariness of the Soviet Union; and he felt, after seven weeks together in Moscow, that he had an intuitive understanding of Marshall, notoriously not a man to wear his heart on his sleeve. All of this was just as well in view of the looming crisis.
The costs of victory were still being totted up. The country was pledged under the terms of the Loan Agreement, as signed by Truman in July 1946, to make sterling freely convertible into dollars within twelve months (at least for current transactions) on the expectation that the Loan would sufficiently cushion this shock. Convertibility was now only weeks away. Yet the drain of dollars meant that the cushion was getting smaller while the gap between sterling and dollar prices was getting bigger. Britain’s great war leader had the occasional pang about this (before taking partisan advantage of the Government’s predicament, of course). Churchill declared in May that ‘he was extremely glad to hear Mr Dalton say the other day that he was going to raise the question of why Britain should be the only debtor country in the world, while those she had rescued and those she had conquered went into the future without having to drag a terrible chain of war debts behind them.’47
Dalton repeatedly went back to his cabinet colleagues asking for more cuts. He had already made this a resigning issue and reiterated at the end of May ‘that we were racing through our United States dollar credit at a reckless pace, and that they should be prepared to take hard and difficult, but necessary, decisions in the early future’. Further cuts in food imports were high on the list of remedies: economically feasible if politically damaging. ‘Our overseas income is insufficient for our overseas needs,’ the Treasury warned, while pointing out that even a general rise in British exports would not be sufficient to do the trick: ‘Superimposed on this is the hard currency problem which can be solved only by a recovery of the non-dollar world; this is not yet in sight.’48
The dislocation of the European economy was an obvious result of the war, just as much as the prosperity of the American economy. The disparity between them was thus an outstanding post-war problem. With a smaller economy than Britain’s, France was running up a visible trade deficit of nearly a billion dollars with the United States in 1947, almost exactly the same as the eventual British figure; and, though much smaller, Belgium and Luxembourg together had a dollar deficit of nearly half this size, as did the Netherlands. These were certainly symptoms of big anomalies in international finance, compounded in Britain’s case by the complexities of handling the sterling balances. Yet the European economy, based on soft-currency transactions, was already recovering; it was actually on the low slopes of the trajectory that was to deliver thirty years of unprecedented growth. Indeed, as throughout Europe, what distorted the British visible trade balance was the import of American capital equipment. The dollar deficit was really due not to consumption of tobacco and films but to investment in the machinery that would provide higher levels of both production and productivity as the recovery gathered momentum.
What needs explaining, then, is the temporary setback of 1947. The severity of the north European winter was a large part of the story. This was especially so in Britain, where the dependence of the economy on coal, and on its movement by an antiquated rail network to the power stations, had been cruelly revealed. Power interruptions brought a sharp fall in output for February. Since coal, railways and electricity supply were all high on Labour’s list for nationalization, the political charge was pretty obvious. The vesting date, bringing the coalmines into public ownership, amid much publicity, had been 1 January 1947; the country’s acute coal shortage was blatantly apparent six weeks later.
All of this was dramatic, especially in American eyes. When Will Clayton, still assistant secretary for economic affairs at the State Department, returned home from Europe in May he struck a note of alarm. ‘Europe is steadily deteriorating,’ he told the State Department, asserting that successive political crises resulted from ‘grave economic distress’, with millions of people ‘slowly starving’, in a scenario of impending general collapse – ‘The modern system of division of labour has almost broken down in Europe.’49 To Clayton, the true believer in the efficacy of free markets in providing for mankind’s salvation, it was obvious what was needed: hardly more nationalism, certainly not more nationalization, but instead action to push these benighted people into acting more like a united states of Europe.
Such ideas enlisted some generous economic impulses in Washington. But the context was inevitably political, shaped by the analysis of Kennan’s long telegram of February 1946 and the public declaration of the Truman Doctrine. Clayton thus caught a sense that, if alternative ways of life were at stake, the Soviet model was the standing alternative if the United States were to fail in sustaining its own ethic of freedom in beleaguered Europe.
Charles Bohlen, who had sat with the Big Three at Yalta, was told to draft a speech for the Secretary of State, who was to receive an honorary degree at Harvard University. In it Marshall was to propose a recovery programme for ‘Europe as a whole’, backed by the United States, but dependent on an initiative from the Europeans themselves. Two murky issues were deliberately not made explicit: nothing about European integration and a private decision to ‘play it straight’ in ostensibly inviting Soviet co-operation.50 British participation was simply taken for granted. The British embassy in Washington was given a prior briefing by Acheson but the official who wrote it up for the Foreign Office sent his comments to London by surface mail and they only arrived on 5 June, the day of the Harvard commencement ceremony.
The BBC at least had been given the right spin on Marshall’s message, but the reaction of the Foreign Secretary depended unusually upon his own hunch in making sense of what he heard. The story goes that Ernest Bevin, after tuning in his portable wireless on the morning after the speech, was immediately seized with a vision of what Marshall’s plan might achieve – a story that may have been improved in the telling but still seems basically correct. Given the American reluctance to act on the assumptions of a special relationship in which Britain had privileged access, but given also that Bevin now felt that he could read Marshall, the prompt British response undoubtedly helped to turn rhetoric into policy. Bevin not only replied warmly to the American initiative but made arrangements to fly to Paris himself to begin putting together a joint European response, including a formal invitation to the Russians to a forthcoming conference, also in Paris.
The Marshall Plan was merely a phrase, or at most an aspiration, in June 1947. It was, however, from the outset an idea with wings. ‘The terms of the offer to finance European recovery on a continental plan,’ The Times commented on 16 June, ‘inevitably suggest a parallel with those of the lend-lease agreement. That “most unsordid act”, it seems, is not to stand alone.’ This elevated comparison was taken up by Anthony Eden, acting as leader of the Conservative Party. ‘It is indeed a generous action,’ he told the Commons, ‘and one which deserves to rank with the most unsordid act in history.’51 Yet, like Lend-Lease, Marshall Aid was naturally predicated on American self-interest – if only to make it politically feasible in Congress – and had clear policy objectives which the language of philanthropy and good works failed to capture.
Any misconceptions that the British may have entertained about their own role were soon dispelled. At talks in London at the end of June, Will Clayton was accompanied by the American ambassador, Lew Douglas. For the British Government, Attlee, Dalton and Cripps supported Bevin, who did most of the talking. A central issue was what was meant by ‘Europe’ in Marshall’s proposal. Did it include Russia? Not really, seemed to be the answer, but it was politic to let the Soviet Union exclude itself (as was shortly to happen at the Paris conference on the plan). Did it include Britain? Yes, of course, Clayton was happy to clarify, but he did so in accordance with his own conception of Britain as one of an integrated group of recipients on one side of the table rather than in any special position on the other side of the table where the American paymasters sat.
These exchanges have an element of pathos. When he looked back on the Marshall initiative, as Bevin was to tell American journalists a couple of years later, ‘it was like a life-line to sinking men’ in offering hope, generosity, the inception of a mutual effort – ‘I think you understand why, therefore, we responded with such alacrity and why we grabbed the lifeline with both hands.’52 This is a valid perspective on how Marshall Aid came to alleviate Britain’s dollar crisis in the nick of time and fostered the economic recovery of western Europe. As an imaginative exercise in enlightened self-interest, it was indeed the true successor to Lend-Lease.
The record of the first Anglo-American talks of June 1947 freezes the moment when the patriotic British Foreign Secretary had to get used to this new dispensation. ‘If the UK was considered just another European country,’ he argued with Clayton and Douglas, would it not ‘fit in with Russian strategy’ and put Britain at the mercy of the Russians? As it seemed to Bevin, if Britain were thus ‘lumped in’ and regarded ‘as merely another European country’, it would sacrifice ‘the little bit of dignity we have left’. Clayton, so Bevin expostulated, surely could not be seeking to treat Britain like the Soviet Union treated Yugoslavia – ‘Britain with an Empire is on a different basis.’53 The new basis, however, was simply that the United Kingdom, with whatever qualms about its European identity, could afford neither to spurn Marshall Aid nor to maintain the British Empire.
Wavell’s last day as Viceroy had been 22 March, when he received the Mountbattens in the Lodge for the briefest of briefings, before departing the next day. After his modest soldierly farewell, Delhi had to get used to the flamboyant style of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had all the obsession with punctilio of a minor member of the royal family yet had been selected by the austere Cripps and the dowdy Attlee as the agent of a socialist government’s great act of imperial abnegation.
‘Dickie’ to his intimates, Mountbatten was well suited to play the part, with a theatrical talent all his own and a canny sense of political realism. He was supported, as he had been as Supreme Commmander in South East Asia, by a huge entourage known in Delhi as ‘Dickie Birds’. A key appointment was that of General Sir Hastings Ismay as his chief of staff, a role in which he had served Churchill as wartime Minister of Defence – and one in which he was currently again helping the author of the six volumes of the The Second World War, from which labours ‘Pug’ Ismay took a sabbatical to go to India.
The new Viceroy, with his outgoing and sexually vibrant wife Edwina at his side, signalled a new order. This was at once immensely grand and engagingly informal. Under Wavell, admittedly, the Congress leaders had already been dined in the Lodge, overcoming their own principled refusal to be suborned; but under the Mountbattens Indians were welcomed as never before. It was no accident that, as the months unfolded, the lonely widower Jawaharlal Nehru came to find a close confidante in Edwina Mountbatten – a relationship which shocked some at the time for its supposed impropriety and which has affronted Pakistani historians for its breach of impartiality, but which would have been inconceivable in the time of Viceregal predecessors as recent as the Linlithgows. What the Mountbattens brought to the extraordinary challenge of this posting, in short, was an equally extraordinary mixture of qualities, attributes and instincts. Their response to near-famine conditions in Bengal was to implement rationing in the Viceregal Lodge. A lot of this was symbolic; but the British Raj had been ruled by symbols and would be wound up likewise.
Mountbatten presided over one last effort with the Indian parties to find an agreement that might have averted partition. Gandhi, though shaken by his first-hand experience of communal violence in Bengal and Bihar, which his own presence helped to temper, still abhorred any vivisection of India. He thus maintained to the new Viceroy that he ‘considered it wicked of Sir Stafford Cripps not to have recommended the turning over of paramountcy to the Central Government representing the sovereignty of the Indian nation’.54 But the British Government, for all its sympathies with Congress, was simply unprepared to impose a unitary settlement in the absence of consent from the Muslim League – which was itself now bent on achieving Pakistan at all costs. Nehru and Patel, breaking from Gandhi’s tutelage at last, tacitly accepted the inevitability of partition, provided that the two disputed provinces of Bengal and Punjab were themselves partitioned. Gandhi himself belatedly came round to the merits of the cabinet delegation scheme, which he had effectively killed a year before and now ineffectively championed.
The outcome was not independence on the terms that either the Congress had long desired or the Muslim League had more recently demanded; nor on those that the British Government had earlier envisaged. But it was what was feasible in 1947. Mountbatten drew up proposals for an accelerated transfer of power on the basis of Dominion status, which was a legally expeditious antechamber to independence; but he suddenly ran into unexpected trouble from Nehru, horrified by what he saw as a Balkanization of India. Moving fast to repair this temporary breach in their growing mutual confidence, Mountbatten produced a second plan – only to find that meanwhile the cabinet in London had approved his first plan and were now understandably confused.
At the end of May, therefore, the new Viceroy was summoned home to London for ten days of consultation. He knew that he had the backing of Attlee and Cripps. Unlike Wavell, then, Mountbatten found the politicians amenable to Viceregal guidance; and since he himself was in turn guided by the work of his Reforms Commissioner, V. P. Menon, a close ally of Patel, the final plan was virtually assured of acceptance by Congress. In effect, the Indians were at last writing their own ticket for independence. The package deftly combined Dominion status and a quick handover – within months – to two central governments in India and Pakistan, with the option of choosing partition for Bengal and the Punjab. Congress got the degree of centralism that it wanted in inheriting sovereignty over the bulk of India; the Muslim League got Pakistan, albeit on a scale much reduced from their original claim; the British got a transfer to two governments which would remain members of the Commonwealth, initially as Dominions. The position of the princely states was left to be determined, but under conditions which made their accession to either India or Pakistan a foregone conclusion for most (and ultimately for all).
Mountbatten’s personal achievement lay in securing assent to this plan. He did so in London through successive meetings with Churchill, who, apparently bemused by the Dominion concept, agreed with deceptive readiness to give bipartisan support to the necessary legislation. Even more important, Mountbatten secured acceptance of the plan in Delhi on 3 June, within days of his return. Nobody was entirely happy; few were irreconcilably hostile; most were ready to make the best of it. At a press conference the Viceroy revealed that independence could be as near as 15 August.
This left a mere ten weeks to prepare. In London legislation had to be drafted at breakneck speed. In the Commons, Churchill had waxed benign about how ‘the many nations and States of India may find their unity within the mysterious circle of the British Crown, just as the self-governing Dominions have done for so many years after all other links with the mother country, save those of sentiment, have been dissolved.’55 Such rhetoric, of course, bore almost no relation to what was going on in India. Hence the shock to Churchill, if no one else, that the legislation was to be called simply the Indian Independence Bill. The old man’s understanding of the constitutional development of the Commonwealth had plainly not taken in the implications of the Statute of Westminster. The inherent principle of self-determination appeared to have passed him by; yet, as Attlee put it in a firm reply, this provided ‘a most valuable counter to the demands for independence outside the Commonwealth as it shows that this demand can be satsified within it’.56
It was actually left to the pragmatic and widely trusted Ismay, now on a visit to London, to save the day for bipartisanship. On 8 July, prompted by Attlee, Ismay went down to Chartwell, where work on The Gathering Storm was in full spate. Nobody was better placed than ‘Pug’, an off-duty member of ‘the Syndicate’ that was actually composing the work, to persuade a besieged author, up against a pressing deadline, that he need worry no further about India, which was now in good hands.
Churchill was absent when the Indian legislation went through the Commons without opposition on its second reading on 10 July, making the third reading a mere formality. ‘By passing this Bill,’ said Cripps, ‘we shall be firmly and finally establishing our honesty of democratic purpose.’57 He at least had a right to say this. Nobody contradicted these bien-pensant claims; nobody mentioned scuttle. ‘An Emperor of India no longer rules from London,’ declaimed the New York Times when the legislation received the royal assent. ‘Victoria’s great-grandson has cast aside that empty title. The Raj is dead.’58 And, within a month, its territory was to be subjected to a hasty partition between the two successor states.
Partition was an expedient that had often been peddled as the solution to rival claims for self-determination, in Palestine as much as in India. One difference was that it was demanded by a religious minority in India with the price to pay of receiving a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan; whereas partition was demanded by a religious minority in Palestine with the evident ambition of leaving the moth-eaten fragments to the Arab majority. Britain’s decision to submit the problem to the United Nations had meanwhile stalled any decision: on immediate issues of immigration as much as on the ultimate future of the country. In May 1947 the infant world organization showed its early addiction to acronyms by setting up UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine). Comprising members from eleven supposedly impartial countries, UNSCOP arrived in Palestine in mid-June.
In theory UNSCOP was to be left in tranquillity to come up with the internationally acceptable answer that had eluded the imperialist British. In practice its deliberations were conducted amid a propaganda assault aimed at influencing international opinion by any means that served. In this the Zionists proved more adept than the Arabs. Richard Crossman, though bested by Bevin in the Labour Party’s foreign policy debates, managed to catch the UNSCOP delegates in Geneva, with apparent success in heading them off from a Bevin-style binational state and pointing them towards partition. In New York, where the profits of the musical A Flag is Born went to Irgun, its author, Ben Hecht, had a widely quoted message to his terrorist friends published in the Herald Tribune on 15 May: ‘Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.’59
In Palestine itself, Irgun and the Stern Gang were plainly a small minority within the Yishuv. Haganah, by contrast, enjoyed widespread support in its campaign for direct action on immigration. Declining morale in the camps was stoking fears that not enough Jewish DPs might persist in their commitment to reach Palestine; and the British policy of housing intercepted ‘illegals’ in Cyprus simply created another set of camps. Both sides now raised the stakes: Haganah by organizing the purchase of bigger, better ships in the United States, the British by deciding that any future illegals would be returned to their port of embarkation.
A small news item appeared in the New York Times on 7 March: ‘Palestine-Bound Mystery Ship’. It was enough to alarm the British Foreign Office since the President Warfield, which shortly set out for Europe with an American crew, obviously presented a challenge on a new scale, with its capacity to carry up to 5000 passengers. An old flat-bottomed ship, now newly repaired, the President Warfield had seen service in the Second World War, notably in approaching the Normandy beaches – a problem not unlike that of making a clandestine landing on the Palestine coast.60
What happened on the high seas in late July was actually rather an anti-climax. The New York Times on 18 July interjected into an already obscure report of the UNSCOP sittings in Palestine a statement that the President Warfield was nearing the coast with 4500 illegals, embarked from Marseilles. The next day the ship’s attempt to resist boarding by the Royal Navy (while still actually outside Palestinian waters) made the front page, though only down-page in column 6: ‘3 Slain on Zionist Vessel As Refugees Fight British’. Rabbi Silver was quoted: ‘The assault in force by the British navy against a ship carrying Jewish refugees to their internationally promised homeland, reported in today’s press, fills right-thinking men and women everywhere with indignation and horror.’
Messages from the ship said that Haganah had renamed it Exodus 1947. It was the early blossoming of a potent exercise in Zionist propaganda, which later flowered luxuriantly in Leon Uris’s novel Exodus (1958; filmed 1960), which bears much the same relation to the actual history of the episode as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code does to biblical scholarship. True, Exodus 1947 was the usage employed by the Zionist Labour MP Sidney Silverman when he raised the matter in the House of Commons a few days after the boarding. But this renaming did not catch on in Britain, where news of the President Warfield was soon overtaken by reports of two more immigrant ships. These were different in that both sides backed down: Haganah ordered them to turn back peacefully and the British did not persist in sending the illegal immigrants back to their port of embarkation.
The big story from Palestine that week had a different focus. Three Irgun terrorists were due to be hanged, despite threats that two British sergeants, captured a fortnight previously as hostages, would be subject to reprisals. Beigin’s hard line was also seen in his deliberately embarrassing revelation that Haganah had been party to planning the King David Hotel blast twelve months previously; he now called Haganah ‘a militia protecting the British’. On 29 July the hangings were duly reported, as was Irgun’s promise that ‘the streets will run red with British blood’.61 In London two days later, The Times gave prominence to an unconfirmed report that the two British sergeants had been executed. For the New York Times, this was a minor item, barely making a down-column slot on the front page: ‘Hostages Hanged, Irgun Announces’.
On 1 August the contrast between American and British reporting was stark. ‘BRITISH SERGEANTS FOUND MURDERED’ was The Times headline; ‘Bodies Hanging from Tree Near Nathanya; Palestine Shocked by Crime’. Any shock was muted by the time it reached the New York Times – and now directed as much at the alleged response of the British troops as at the terrorists, in a report confined to column 8: ‘Incensed Britons Kill 5 in Tel Aviv To Avenge Hanging’. The Washington Post had the same angle in its down-column story: ‘Troops Avenge Hostages Deaths: 5 Jews Are Slain in Tel Aviv After Hanging of Two Britons’. The Times meanwhile was scornful of Irgun’s propaganda in justifying action against ‘a terrorist organization called the British Occupation Army’ and lamented ‘the harm done to Jewish aspirations’ by this outrage. It certainly reported the rioting in Tel Aviv but echoed official denials that any British troops had been involved (though it later became clear that some had).
These were different news values, formed by different viewpoints and different prime loyalties. The naive British reaction against terrorism as such was countered by a sophisticated American extenuation of the circumstances in which terrorism had arisen. The leader in The Times of 1 August, ‘Murder in Palestine’, was thus reciprocated next day by an editorial in the Washington Post, ‘Competition in Terror’, which blandly equated the two sides. Both the British and ‘the underground’ might be guilty, but the thrust of its conclusion was clearly in one direction: ‘Presumably the British authorities will take prompt measures to punish the men who exacted such a barbaric revenge.’ The Post did not have Menachem Beigin and his colleagues in mind.
American Sunday newspapers, with their copious use of newsprint, were a marvel to British readers in those days of rationing. In its section on the news of the week on Sunday, 3 August, the New York Times laid out a big map of Palestine: ‘As Terror and Counter-Terror Mount in the Holy Land’. Next to it, two large photographs were juxtaposed. One showed a train, ‘wrecked by Jewish extremists’, while the other was a shot of ‘the refugee ship Exodus 1947 after it was rammed by a British destroyer’ (which had not happened, though damage was sustained). The subsequent decision to ship the remaining illegals to Germany, since most of them refused to land in France when taken back to Marseilles, was an easily exploited propaganda gift to international Zionism. Only in Britain was it felt (in the words of The Times) that ‘this attempt at moral blackmail has failed and will continue to fail.’62
This was a war that the British could not win. Mass-Observation surveys had consistently shown that over half of the people interviewed in the street (57 per cent) either were not interested in Palestine or said that they harboured a vague feeling of ‘horror, regret or dismay’. Who to blame and what to do? In the whole sample, 13 per cent were angry with the Jews and another 5 per cent with both Jews and Arabs. While 7 per cent blamed the British, none blamed the Arabs alone. With whatever motives or biases, 26 per cent said that Britain should withdraw, only 5 per cent that Britain should be ‘firm’ – and a baffled 44 per cent did not know.
It is evident that Zionism had failed to enlist popular support, or even understanding, in Britain. Talking about a ‘Jewish national home’ evoked more support, though the Balfour Declaration was little known and quite often supposed to be pro-Arab. The hanging of the two British sergeants at this point, and the booby-trapping of their bodies, made a raw impact which undoubtedly heightened anti-semitism in Britain. In some cases the incident confirmed pre-existing prejudice against British Jews – ‘They're for them, the buggers,’ as one working-class woman put it. But this was a minority feeling – only 20 per cent approved of the demonstrations, generally regarded as anti-semitic, that took place in London, Manchester and Liverpool on 2 August. Terrorism in Palestine was another matter. ‘It’s a disgraceful way to fight,’ said a young middle-class man, and the sense of weariness came out in other responses, like that of an artisan-class housewife: ‘It doesn't matter what we do out there, they just fight and fight and fight.’63
A parliamentary debate on 12 August echoed such feelings. The formal end of the mandate was not to come until after further dispiriting months of occupation, in May 1948; but the British will to continue collapsed in August 1947. Within weeks of the two sergeants’ deaths, the British cabinet decided to leave Palestine.
The reasons were many. Failure to reconcile the claims of Jews and Arabs made a mockery of the original mandate. The absence of American support, when combined with the absence of American restraint from interference, unleashed a new phase in Zionist politics which made a difficult situation impossible. It seems inescapable to conclude that terrorism clinched the matter for the British. Lack of political will to continue combined with lack of economic resources to do so. Faced with an economic crisis at the end of July, the cabinet had already been under pressure from the left to make an immediate reduction in British forces in Palestine. A backbench petition to Attlee was signed, of course, by Ian Mikardo, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman of the Keep Left Group, but also attracted signatures from other MPs whose left-wing leanings were later less conspicuous, including Jim Callaghan and Woodrow Wyatt.
The Government was in trouble. It was not just the Keep Left Group but Labour loyalists who sensed a lack of leadership, amply documented from the inside in Dalton’s diary. A backbench move to substitute Bevin as prime minister in place of Attlee testified to the seriousness of a crisis that now revived memories of the collapse of a Labour Government in 1931, when faced with a financial panic which party mythology blamed on American bankers. It was a situation in which rumours that Bernard Baruch was on the line from New York to Tory MPs, talking of a change of government, could be given undue credit when taken in conjunction with the mounting partisan hostility of the Tory press.
This run on the pound had begun in early July, anticipating the formal establishment of convertibility on 15 July. Though Dalton could claim to have issued warnings which his cabinet colleagues had not taken seriously enough, when the storm broke it revealed Bevin and Cripps as the strong ministers among Labour’s Big Five. The two of them had to overcome a past history of mutual distrust, going back to Cripps’s fellow-travelling period. So when Bevin and Dalton spent a long journey together in the back of a heavily guarded ministerial car – ‘These Jews have made all this fuss necessary,’ the pro-Zionist Chancellor noted – Bevin’s outdated opinion of Cripps as ‘more than half-way to Moscow’ was still an obstacle to closer co-operation.64 This may indeed have helped Attlee to hang on to his job when Cripps, in a resigning frame of mind, later pressed the proposal that Bevin should instead take over.
The optimistic view was that the market had already discounted the effect of convertibility. The pessimistic view, that this was only the beginning, was steadily confirmed as the dollar drain went from bad to worse. At a meeting called to rally the Parliamentary Labour Party on 30 July, Dalton used a line given him by Bevin: ‘I think it will be a pity if they are left under the impression that I led anyone to believe that the Marshall Plan was a solution.’ Equally, Dalton roundly declared to nervous backbenchers that this would be no 1931: rather, ‘that Socialism did best when it marched in step with the rules of arithmetic’. That night the Big Five appeared to rather less advantage when Morrison, infuriated at Bevin’s post-prandial prolixity, walked out of their conclave saying that he had ‘had enough of this drunken monologue’. Attlee showed little grip. The meeting broke up well past midnight. To members of the wartime Coalition, it was all too familiar. ‘Anyhow it was often worse with Winston,’ Dalton assured the top civil servants in attendance.65
On 31 July, the same day that The Times first reported the Irgun claim to have hanged the two sergeants, its lead story was ‘GOVERNMENT PLANS TO MEET CRISIS’, with all eyes now set on a promised prime-ministerial statement in the following week. The cabinet agreed to make cuts in food imports and in supplies to Germany – putting victors and vanquished alike on short rations – and, despite opposition from Bevin and Alexander, to make large cuts in overseas military expenditure. This was the package unveiled by Attlee in the Commons on 6 August.
Attlee’s speech was a characteristic performance. Dalton privately termed it ‘most disappointing’, though the ‘very fine winding-up speech’ from Cripps the next day retrieved the position.66 But the Chancellor acknowledged that the Prime Minister’s statement had real substance, painfully crafted as it was within the Treasury, which may be why it reads better than it sounded. As so often in his career, Attlee’s political forte was to counter Churchill’s rich rhetoric with a deflationary appeal to hard fact. A few days previously the Leader of the Opposition had made a great oration at his birthplace, Blenheim Palace, dwelling amid its architectural splendours on the sorry state to which a socialist government had reduced the country after two years in which they had ‘blithely cast away India and Burma, regardless of what may happen in the near future after our slowly-built-up Empire has passed away’.67
Attlee put it differently. ‘The suggestion that the Government had frittered away the American loan was not true,’ he said to ministerial cheers, and proceeded to lecture the House on the true position. ‘We got through the world war with the help of Lend-Lease, which was rightly described by Mr Churchill as “the most unsordid act in history”,’ he explained. ‘But it left us in a most vulnerable position. We had to face the task of reconstruction, involving the whole remodelling of our economy and what we wanted essentially was time to effect the change-over.’68 No, the Loan had not proved big enough, as some had suspected all along. But, as Attlee liked to say, those were the cards that had been dealt at the end of the war.
‘After the 15th August all the “postwar problems” will loom as great out here as they did in Europe,’ Mountbatten confided to the Governor of Madras.69 Not until 8 August, with only a week to go, was the Viceroy’s secretariat informed where the boundary commission proposed to draw the line partitioning the Punjab. The task of implementing partition had been given to a British judge, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, working under a deadline that allowed only a month to prepare his recommendations. These were obviously imperfect; indeed, the inherent impossibility of a clean, clear, fair and amicable partition had been a prime reason for going to such lengths to avoid it. Everyone knew that bloodshed was inevitable; it was lessened in Bengal by Gandhi’s presence. None of this diminishes the tragedy that at least 200,000 people, and perhaps as many as a million, were to die. Even so, in 1946 talk of two or three million possible deaths had been common. Whatever Radcliffe proposed was bound to be wrong and catch unhappy people of the wrong ethnic identity on the wrong side of the line at the wrong moment.
What he actually proposed for the Punjab on 8 August was altered by 12 August. This fact is clear amid many conflicting charges as to effect, agency and intent. The crucial change affected the Sikh city of Amritsar (a famous name in imperial history) and it certainly made the city viable as a part of India by eliminating a salient that would otherwise have gone to Pakistan. It seems unlikely that Mountbatten knew as little as he claimed of this last-minute amendment; but his main concern was now to defer wider publicity of the award until immediately after the independence celebrations. Again, there are good reasons that can be cited on both sides of this decision. It was hardly the cause of the communal atrocities that were to disfigure independence; partition was the reason at one level and deep-seated issues of ethnic and religious identity a causal factor lying deeper still. What Mountbatten achieved was a transfer of power that maximized the goodwill at the hour of independence, midnight on 14–15 August.
‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny,’ declared Nehru, ‘and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.’ This was indeed a memorable speech and it caught a real sense of the significance of what was taking place. ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance,’ he claimed.70 Like Churchill, with whom he had so often clashed, Nehru was able to speak for his nation, giving its experience a historical resonance while history was actually happening, and thus helping to shape that history. And like Churchill, he told the truth – but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
For others the end of the Indian Empire naturally meant different things: hopes, triumphs, pathos or bathos. ‘Down comes the Union Jack,’ wrote Radcliffe in a letter home, ‘and up goes – for the moment I rather forget what, but it has a spinning wheel or spiders’ web in the middle.’71 V. P. Menon, who was, though not the architect, the clerk of works of Indian independence and soon to be the author of the Indian constitution, later wrote of the British whom he had hitherto served: ‘They left of their own will; there was no war, there was no treaty – an act without parallel in history.’72
The King had to get used to signing himself George R. and not George R. I., like his father. He did so a few days later to his mother, Queen Mary, who noted on the back of the envelope: ‘The first time Bertie wrote me a letter with the I for Emperor of India left out, very sad.’73 But for most British subjects, the event seems to have been a happy relief from the dispiriting news coming out of Palestine and the alarming news that they heard daily about sterling (with convertibility soon to be abandoned on 20 August). Kipling, the great poet of empire, was currently unfashionable, and his hard-pressed compatriots could not spare much time for mutual commiserations that all their pomp of yesterday was one with Nineveh and Tyre.