Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (51 page)

The campaign mainly focused on the economy and on Churchill’s suggestion of a summit conference with the Soviet Union. The Conservatives made little effort to attack Labour’s decolonization record. The party manifesto spoke of developing Empire trade and pledged to maintain ‘whatever preferences or other special arrangements may be necessary’.
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Nothing was said about the political future of Britain’s colonies. Churchill did, however, make some play with the failure of the government’s scheme to grow groundnuts in Tanganyika, a piece of attempted Empire development gone expensively wrong.
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He also criticized the practice of sending so-called ‘unrequited exports’ – goods for which no payment was received – to Egypt and India by way of paying off wartime debts. He appeared to hint that some of these sterling balances should be written off in consideration for the expense to which Britain had been put in shielding the countries concerned from invasion.
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The election resulted in a narrow Labour majority, sufficient to allow the government to limp on for some time.

Over the next months, Labour’s problems got worse. The outbreak of the Korean War in June set back economic recovery, forcing tough choices about how rearmament would be paid for. Early in 1951, Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell’s insistence on introducing prescription charges in the National Health Service led to the resignation of the fiery socialist health minister Aneurin Bevan. In May, a new crisis emerged in Iran, a country which could fairly be described as part of Britain’s informal empire. (Informal empire is the domination of one nominally independent nation by another country, especially by virtue of economic control.) For years there had been much political meddling. In 1941, the British had deposed the Shah and replaced him with his son. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) was also of vital importance. Before World War I, Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had played a part in securing a majority government stake in the company, a move intended to help secure the Royal Navy’s oil supplies.
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Now, AIOC was Iran’s most sizeable foreign investor. Its refinery at Abadan was the world’s biggest and represented Britain’s largest overseas investment.
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Many Iranians felt, with some justification, that they did not get a fair deal from the existing concession agreement. After the British refused to allow moves that would have increased Iran’s annual payment, Mohammed Mossadegh’s nationalist government announced it would nationalize AIOC’s operations in the country. The Attlee government did consider military action, but concluded that it would be unwise without US backing. This was not forthcoming; at this stage the Americans saw Mossadegh as a buffer against communism. Churchill had a difficult line to steer too. On the one hand, he had to satisfy backbenchers eager to lay into the government for pusillanimity. On the other, he too saw the need not to act without US support, and he wanted to avoid the ‘warmonger’ label that Labour was keen to pin on him.
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On 19 September Attlee called another general election. Things then developed fast. On the 26th the Iranians issued an ultimatum, demanding the withdrawal of AIOC’s remaining personnel from Abadan. The British complied within a week. Churchill now had a clear reason to revive the charge of ‘scuttle’. A few days later Egypt denounced its 1936 treaty with Britain, and proclaimed King Farouk to be King of the Sudan.
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(In practice, the British ignored this and its troops remained in the Suez Canal Zone.) Churchill spoke of ‘the great decline of British prestige and authority in the Middle East which followed inevitably from the loss of India’. Now it was known that Britain would ‘not in any circumstances offer physical resistance to violence and aggression’ it was to be expected that ‘Egypt will treat us more roughly still’.
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This in turn helped Labour make use of the ‘warmonger’ card. The
Daily Mirror
had already cast the issue in terms of ‘Whose finger on the trigger?’ Was it to be calm, methodical Mr Attlee or the unpredictable Churchill? Herbert Morrison, the Foreign Secretary, stopped short of saying that the Tories actually wanted war: ‘I do not accuse the average Conservative of being a warmonger [. . .] it would not be fair and it would not be true. But it is their temperament; it is the background of their mental outlook – the old imperialist outlook.’
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Churchill, for his part, tried to rebut the charge that, had he been returned in 1945, Britain would have become involved in a war with the Indian people. At that time, he said, all parties had been pledged to granting India Dominion status, ‘carrying with it the right to secede from the British Empire and Commonwealth. The only question was how the transference of power was to be made.’
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This was an interesting reading of history, given that there had been no unequivocal Tory pledge in 1945 (although at that time Churchill had publicly lauded Amery’s efforts ‘to bring India to the status of a Dominion’).
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Churchill had, of course, spent many years opposing Dominion status precisely because it carried with it an implicit right of secession.

It is not clear whether either side drew a clear advantage from such rows. Amery observed at the end of the campaign that ‘Winston has wound up with an impassioned defence of himself as a lover of peace. I am sure he does in principle, but he has always thoroughly enjoyed a war.’ He added the charge, ‘Naturally, as usual, the Empire might be non-existent so far as his speeches are concerned’ – an apparently absurd accusation best understood in terms of Churchill’s failure to talk constructively about imperial development in the future.
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After the election dust had settled, the
Manchester Guardian
suggested that, although the warmonger charge had not brought much response from voters, the crises in Iran and Egypt helped the Tories less than once they would have done. Moreover, ‘The Empire, still fragrant with the aroma of groundnuts, was hardly in the picture.’
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Austerity and the cost of living were the major issues, and Churchill worked hard to portray Bevan as a left-wing extremist who would call the shots in a new Labour government. ‘Abadan, Sudan and Bevan are a trio of misfortune’, he said.
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Polling day was 25 October. Labour won a majority of the votes cast but, owing to the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system, the Conservatives won a seventeen-seat majority in the Commons. At the age of seventy-six, Churchill was back in Downing Street.

IV

In Canada the news was greeted warmly by the press, although the Liberal government of Louis St Laurent, Mackenzie King’s successor, was more doubtful. Churchill’s talk of Commonwealth solidarity was thought to raise the old threat of centralization.
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In Australia, Robert Menzies had been back in power since 1949 while Labour had been defeated in New Zealand by the opposition National Party. The
Canberra Times
, welcoming Churchill’s comeback, suggested, ‘Within the British Empire the disappearance of socialist governments may pave the way to a more closely knit and effective organisation’.
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In India there was some scepticism about his return, but it was generally viewed with a slight sense of detachment. The
Hindustan Times
said that it was no secret that Asian countries would have preferred Labour to stay in power: ‘As far as India is concerned, she cannot forget Mr Churchill’s references to the scaling down of her sterling balances [. . .] Now that Mr Churchill is at the head of the British government, he will have to undo his own past mischief if the faith in Britain is to be preserved.’
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Some reassurance was offered by Churchill’s appointment of Lord Ismay, his wartime military secretary, as Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations. In 1947 Ismay had risked Churchill’s disapproval by acting as Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, but it appears that he won the confidence of Indians. The
Times of India
felt that the Tories could help the cause of international peace, but warned Churchill not to ‘reimpose some of the outmoded concepts of Empire and colonialism’.
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Nehru himself was relaxed.
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African nationalists, who had yet to win their independence, felt a greater sense of alarm. According to the
West African Pilot
: ‘As the return of the “old war horse” means to Britain “more raw materials from the colonies” and [a] greater rearmament drive, so too to the West Africans, it symbolises the era of greater youth solidarity; it is the climax of our struggle; it is the period when, perhaps like the Americans of 1776, we might have to sing one tune, and one tune only: “independence in our life time”.’
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The Soviets, unsurprisingly, portrayed the Tory victory as a sign of imperialism’s menacing progress.
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At home, the installation of the new government coincided with a moment of national optimism. In February 1952 George VI died of lung cancer and was succeeded by his daughter Elizabeth. In his broadcast tribute to the late King, Churchill gave a subtle reworking of an old theme. ‘The Crown has become the mysterious link – indeed, I may say, the magic link – which unites our loosely bound but strongly interwoven Commonwealth of nations, States and races’, he said. ‘People who would never tolerate the assertions of a written constitution which implied any diminution of their independence, are the foremost to be proud of their loyalty to the Crown.’
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With Britain fading as a great power, Churchill stressed the moral authority of the Crown as a substitute for military might. He spoke effectively to the public sense that the new reign might usher in an era of British resurgence. It seemed highly symbolic, for example, that, on the eve of the coronation in 1953, news came through that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had conquered Mount Everest. The former was from New Zealand and the latter from Nepal, but Churchill was far from unique in hailing their climb as a ‘memorable British achievement’.
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Such episodes could boost optimism about a ‘new Elizabethan age’, but the Empire could not survive on prestige alone. The economic situation was serious. At a time of global shortage, Britain could no longer rely on cheap supplies of raw materials from the colonies. Oliver Lyttelton, the new Colonial Secretary, told the Cabinet, ‘Amery economics are no longer applicable.’ He also warned that financial constraints made colonial economic development ‘impossible’.
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Far from launching a new rearmament drive, the new government was forced to retrench the existing programme inherited from Labour. In July 1952 – by which time the government had already ditched a bold plan, Operation ROBOT, to free up the economy by floating the pound – Churchill told a rowdy House of Commons of his concerns.

Tragic indeed is the spectacle of the might, majesty, dominion and power of the once magnificent and still considerable British Empire having to worry and wonder how we can pay our monthly bills. I fully admit I am tortured by this thought and by the processes which I see around me, and I shall do everything in my power – [Hon. Members: ‘Resign!’] – to bring home to the mass of our race and nation the sense of peril and the need for grave and far-reaching exertions.
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Meanwhile, nationalist pressures were making themselves felt in many parts of what was left of the Empire. Perhaps the most pronounced crisis was the communist insurgency in Malaya, where a state of emergency had been in place since 1948. Just prior to Churchill’s re-election the High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, had been shot dead when his car was ambushed. The man appointed to replace him was General Sir Gerald Templer, who is generally credited with devising the strategy that eventually defeated the insurgency. ‘You must have power – absolute power – civil and military power,’ Churchill said to him at the outset. ‘And when you’ve got it grasp it, grasp it firmly. And then never use it. Be cunning – very cunning. That’s what you’ve got to be.’
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Sitting above all these problems was that of America. Churchill returned to power at the tail-end of the Truman era. The 1952 election race was between the Democrat Adlai Stevenson and, for the Republicans, Dwight Eisenhower, with whom Churchill had worked closely during World War II. The sculptor Oscar Nemon was visiting the Prime Minister at Chequers when the news of the result was due and, according to Nemon’s unpublished memoirs, Churchill was hoping for a Stevenson victory. He was looking at his tropical fish tanks when an assistant told him of Eisenhower’s win. ‘And now I shall also have a fish that can talk’, he said. Nemon replied that he did not know that any such fish existed. ‘Believe me it does,’ answered Churchill, ‘and this one speaks with an American accent.’
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Whatever his reservations about the new President, Churchill understood the importance of cultivating him, although his efforts to this end were rather transparent. Eisenhower noted in his diary that Churchill had ‘fixed in his mind a certain international relationship he is trying to establish – possibly it would be better to say an atmosphere he is trying to create’. He felt that Churchill’s hope that Britain and the Commonwealth would receive privileged treatment from the US was inappropriate and was reluctant to be seen to be propping up colonialism. ‘In some instances immediate independence would result in suffering for people and even anarchy’, he acknowledged, but, ‘In this situation the two strongest Western powers must not appear before the world as a combination of forces to complete adherence to the status quo.’ He concluded: ‘Much as I hold Winston in my personal affection and much as I admire him for his past accomplishments and leadership, I wish that he would turn over leadership of the Conservative Party to younger men’.
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