1. Same old, same old…

An Indian colleague writes:

I’ve noticed that the same accusations about Churchill repeated frequently. Many writers seem to recycle them on trust. Take for example a new anti-Churchill article which I think needs a thorough debunking. In fairness to the author, it is not all bad; she concedes for instance that Churchill wanted to use tear gas in Iraq, not poison gas. But there are some things that stand out as seriously misinformed.

For example, the article claims inter alia that (1) Churchill admired Hitler in the 1930s. (2) Churchill’s decisions derived from romantic intuition, not intellectual consistency. (3) Churchill’s convictions about the “Aryan race” were why Churchill was unpopular in the 1930s. Are these exaggerated, or just wrong?

The answers…

We can’t respond to every ahistorical attack on Churchill; we would simply end up repeating ourselves. But we can certainly supply links to published material. Feel free to quote from these articles.

(1) The notion that Churchill “admired” Hitler in the 1930s stems from inadequate understanding. Churchill approved of Germany’s revival after the Great War. As a politician was careful not to condemn a whole people; but on Hitler he was right from the beginning. For the first of three articles on this, click here.

(2) Decisions guided by “romantic intuition”? Churchill was certainly guided by a deep understanding of history. In Marlborough, his greatest biography, one can see all the great war speeches developing. See Andrew Roberts, “Marlborough.”

(3) “The Aryan stock is bound to triumph” (remarked by young Winston when he was 26) is a favorite bogeyman among his critics. He certainly said those words, but he was not predicting a triumph by the British. He was referring instead to the likely outcome of a Russia-China dispute, now 120 years ago.

2. “Defending” Boer War prison camps

Our correspondent continues:

Many allegations seem to derive from Johann Hari’s review of Churchill’s Empire, now over a decade old, in The New York Times. Hari claims that Churchill defended the British prison camps set up in the Boer War as causing the “minimum of suffering…. At least 115,000 people were swept into them and 14,000 died, but he wrote only of his ‘irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.’ Later, he boasted of his experiences. ‘That was before war degenerated,’ he said. ‘It was great fun galloping about.’”

Churchill’s “minimal suffering” remark apparently stems from his letter to The Times (London) on 25 June 1901. At almost the same time, Emily Hobhouse returned from a fact-finding trip to South Africa. Meeting the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, she told of appalling conditions in the ‘concentration camps.’ At that point, it seems to have become a big scandal in Britain.

I’ve found nothing in the Churchill Archives flagging Boer War concentration camps. The government at first denied Hobhouse’s claims. It wasn’t until later that the appalling conditions were confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt.

Camps: what Churchill said

To quote Professor Warren Kimball, “‘Concentration Camps’ as a term for anything but the Nazis’ work is ‘politically’ incorrect and should stay that way.” In any case, having read Churchill’s letter to The Times, I cannot imagine what the critics are talking about. Readers may judge his letter for themselves. (Excerpt below, click here for the full text.)

Churchill does not defend inhumane conditions in the British camps. In fact he condemns them. The “civilized combatant,” he writes, “is obliged, at peril of being classed a savage, to avoid unnecessary cruelty to his enemy.”

His letter mainly criticizes Campbell-Bannerman and Lord Crewe for blaming the government, while excusing the military, for cruelty in the camps. Nevertheless, Churchill allows for the possibility that both may be at fault. The government indeed appointed the Fawcett Commission, which found Emily Hobhouse’s description of the camps accurate.

The phrase about natives firing on white men is not from this letter. It is from a 1900 letter to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Churchill was commenting on Boer troops being hardened by facing non-whites in the war. After all, he also said, “we have done without the whole of the magnificent Indian army for the sake of a White man’s War…’” This suggests quite a different attitude than the one Hari implies.

Emily Hobhouse

Churchill’s 1901 letter does not mention Emily Hobhouse. He did, however, write favorably of her more than half a century later, when he knew the full story:

Then, area by area, every man, woman, and child was swept into concentration camps. Such methods could only be justified by the fact that most of the commandos fought in plain clothes, and could only be subdued by wholesale imprisonment, together with the families who gave them succour. Nothing, not even the incapacity of the military authorities when charged with the novel and distasteful task of herding large bodies of civilians into captivity, could justify the conditions in the camps themselves. At length an Englishwoman, Miss Emily Hobhouse, exposed and proclaimed the terrible facts. [Italics added.] Campbell-Bannerman, soon to be Prime Minister, but at this time in Opposition, denounced the camps as “methods of barbarism.”

The truth

Churchill was always horrified at inhumane treatment of civilians or prisoners, from Kitchener’s in the Sudan to Britain’s in South Africa to the Germans’ in the 1940s. On the Holocaust he was as censorious as anyone who ever lived:

There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved.

During the Boer War, Churchill certainly was sympathetic to the Boers, as he was to most brave enemies. including the Indian Pashtuns and the Sudanese Dervishes while “galloping about.” He also knew that in dealing with South Africa, Britain was walking on eggshells. Every British action had to be based on the art of the possible, not on fantasy. t is, I fear, fantasy that drives such warped historical visions as this one.

Excerpts: Churchill to The Times, 25 June 1901

Sir, In his rejoinder to Lord Hugh Cecil, Lord Crewe deals chiefly with two questions. First, if the war in South Africa is being prosecuted by “methods of barbarism,” are the generals responsible or only the Government?… If the methods are of the general’s own choosing, the balance of responsibility, if any exist, rests with him…. Unless there has been unnecessary cruelty, whatever the suffering, there can be no barbarity. If there has been unnecessary cruelty, all who are in any way responsible for it are infected with the taint of inhumanity.

[Second,] is the policy of concentrating the civil inhabitants barbarous? As Lord Hugh Cecil pointed out, the privations of the women and children in the refugee camps are nothing in comparison to those endured by the civil inhabitants of a fortified town during a siege. Nevertheless, as the death-rate shows, they have undoubtedly been severe….

The supreme question is—Was there any alternative action by which this suffering might have been diminished without impeding the military operations? Lord Crewe is silent. He does not tell us…whether they would have faced the alternative to the concentration camps. Would they have refused to accept any responsibility for the Boer women and children left in the devastated districts?… Would they, having trampled the crops—the enemy’s commissariat—or destroyed the houses—often his magazines—have left the women sitting hungry amid the ruins? The mind revolts from such ideas; and so we come to concentration camps, honestly believing that upon the whole they involve the minimum of suffering to the unfortunate people for whom we have made ourselves responsible.

I am, Sir, Yours faithfully
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

Click here for the full text.

Continued from Part 1…

Youthful discretions

Churchill was born into a world in which virtually all Britons, from the Sovereign to a Covent Garden grocer, believed in their moral superiority. They preached it to their children. All learned that the red portions of the map showed where Britannic civilization had tamed savagery and cured pandemics. Churchill’s assertions, especially as a young man, were often in line with this. And yet he consistently displayed this odd streak of magnanimity and libertarian impulse.

It was Churchill, the aristocratic Victorian, who argued that Dervish enemy in Sudan had a “claim beyond the grave…no less good than that which any of our countrymen could make.” In South Africa, he asserted that Boer racism was intolerable, that the Indian minority deserved the same rights as all British citizens. (This was something Gandhi never forgot, though Churchill did—which Gandhi praised years later, when they were opponents over the India Bill.)

Fair play and magnanimity

After the Great War ended, this same Churchill urged that shiploads of food be sent to a starving Germany as the wartime blockade ended. Other leaders preferred to “squeeze Germany till the pips squeaked.” They did, and the long-term results were not good.

The Jallianwala Bagh or Armritsar massacre of Indians in 1919 found Churchill in full cry against the perpetrators. It was Churchill who in 1920 secured India’s support in the future Hitler war, and assured independent India’s military legacy. Arthur Herman in Gandhi & Churchill writes:

For every disgruntled or discouraged subaltern who joined Japan’s puppet Indian National Army, a dozen KCIOs and VCOs served with distinction on every front in the British war effort…. And the minister of war who created the KCIOs in 1920 had been Winston Churchill…. Churchill never grasped the full magnitude of what he had done, but Gandhi nearly did. Many times over the years he had spoken of brave Indian soldiers who would defend their country and then return home to carry the future burden of freedom.

In the 1920s, it was Churchill who argued that the coal miners should be compensated after the 1926 General Strike. In the 1940s it was Churchill, not FDR, certainly not Stalin, who declared carpet bombing German cities morally reprehensible. Ten years later, he denied South Africa’s demand for Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland without the consent of their inhabitants.

A singular record

No statesmen of stature exhibited such magnanimity for so long: Not the leaders of the Tory or Labour parties; not the chieftains of wars. Many who heard Churchill’s proposals shook their heads. Some thought him a mental case, a traitor to his class, or a good man gone soft. “I have asserted many times and without being contradicted,” writes historian Larry Arnn, “that Winston Churchill never said or implied that the rights of any person were conditioned upon the color of his or her skin.”

There are countless examples of Churchill’s magnanimity bucking what Andrew Roberts called “The Respectable Tendency.”  He recognized and cited the rights of minorities and the oppressed long before the World Wars. He understood that the claim to liberty was not Britain’s alone, and that understanding welled up in his finest hour. Yet similar views had governed his political thought virtually from the start.

Verdict of historians

I often quote what William Manchester wrote. Churchill, he declared,

…always had second and third thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of his pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity. Given time, he could devise imaginative solutions.

Martin Gilbert wrote about the thousands of documents he examined in writing the Official Biography:

I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me. I might find that he was adopting views with which I disagreed. But I always knew that there would be nothing to cause me to think: “How shocking, how appalling.”

Yet today some writers profess shock at Churchill’s stray, emotional, unworthy remark. Time and again, the full context of what he said produces an entirely opposite impression.

On the matter of Eugenics (Part 1), to equate Churchill’s record with “the extremities practiced to a tee by the Nazis is”—forgive me—pretty extreme.

Dear Superintendent Smith: I write in opposition to the petition to rename Winston Churchill High School. A hard copy of this is in the mail, but this digital version offers links which may be of interest.

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has a digital reference to all of Winston Churchill’s 20 million published words—books, articles, speeches, private papers—and 60 million words about him in biographies, documents and memoirs. They prove that he is not guilty of the charges in the petition reported by Caitlyn Peetz in Bethesda Magazine. I would be glad to participate with your committee or students by email or Zoom if they wish to examine this question further.

The petition on India

The petition argues that Churchill “stole grain from India to feed soldiers in World War II.” Nothing of the kind occurred. Indian grain did feed soldiers (most of them Indian), but it did not come from famine areas. In 1943, Churchill ordered the new Viceroy, General Wavell: “Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages, [preventing] the hoarding of grain for a better market.” He also urged Wavell to ease the strife between Hindus and Muslims: “No form of democratic Government can flourish in India while so many millions are by their birth excluded from those fundamental rights of equality between man and man, upon which all healthy human societies must stand.” (Italics mine.)

In the midst of a world war, Churchill scoured every grain source from Iraq to Australia, which helped bring an end to the 1943-44 famine. Arthur Herman, Pulitzer nominee for Gandhi and Churchill, wrote: “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine would have been worse.” Attached is a chapter from my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, which explains Churchill’s actions in detail. I would be glad to send you a copy of the book for the school library.

“Beastly”

The petition mentions a popular Churchill “quote”—which has only one source, and no other occurrences. Supposedly Churchill said Indians and their religion were “beastly.” This is actually hearsay, from the diaries of Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India. Amery was a good and decent man, but excitable and fiery. His own diaries are not lacking in racist language. In one sentence he used more racial pejoratives than Churchill used in his life. They include the most repulsive term for black people. There is not one instance in our records of Churchill using that word.

Whatever he said, Churchill was referring not to the Indian peoples but to Delhi nationalists, with whom Amery was negotiating. Why did Churchill use the term “beastly,” if indeed he did? The Indian historian Dr. Tirthankar Roy explains. In 1942:

…everything he said about Indians and the Empire was related to the Indian nationalist movement. Negotiating with Indian nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderate nationalists were demoralized by dissensions and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis powers to win on the Eastern Front. No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.

On Africa

The petition claims Churchill ordered Kenyans into camps “where they were subject to severe torture, malnutrition, beatings.” Churchill gave no such order. The Kenya Mau-Mau uprising had more native opponents than supporters. Both it and the local government indulged in atrocities, though the Mau-Mau’s were worse. There are only two instances where Churchill mentioned the Kenya uprising in Cabinet. In one he expressed concern over loss of life. In the second he warned against “mass executions.” Jomo Kenyatta, father of modern Kenya, said: “Mau-Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.”

The petition says Churchill “defended the use of concentration camps in South Africa.” There is no evidence, unless this refers to POW camps in the Boer War. (Churchill himself was incarcerated in one.) From age 25 (when he argued for black rights with his Boer captor in Pretoria), to age 80 (when he denied South Africa’s perennial demand to annex native-run protectorates), Churchill constantly supported native rights in South Africa. Perhaps this is why Nelson Mandela, before addressing a Joint Session in 1994, asked me for a copy of Churchill’s last speech to Congress.

For the rights of all

Dr. Smith, I have spent forty years studying Churchill and defending his good name. He had 90 years to make political and strategic mistakes, and they were sometimes big ones. But assaults on his character and sense of justice are unjustified.

In his time, Churchill expressed support for the rights of peoples of all colors, despite the prevailing prejudices. His defenders sometimes offer the excuse that he was “just a man of his time.” “Everybody,” they say, “was racist then.” Given the truth, this is a disservice. Again and again, Churchill’s views proved far in advance of his time.  As a result, the establishment of his day often regarded him as a dangerous radical.

Your high school deserves to keep his name. I note that one of the alternatives proposed is the name of Frederick Douglass. His statue, along with Churchill’s, is on our Hillsdale campus. A few days ago, a statue of Douglass in Rochester, New York, was ripped from its pedestal and hurled into a gully. In the onward march of ignorance, it appears no hero is safe.

Respectfully, Richard Langworth

This article is dedicated to the memory of Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), below with François Pienaar after the Springboks won the 1995 Rugby World Cup. (See videos at end of article.) Not only did he support and integrate the national sport; he combined Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and Die Stem van Suid-Afrika as a joint national anthem. His Churchillian magnanimity was a model for his time. And even more for ours.

“Almal sal regkom” 

Continued from Part 1.

In 1994 President Nelson Mandela’s representatives asked me for the text of Churchill’s third speech to Congress. He was to address a Joint Session soon after ending Apartheid (racial segregation). I assumed he wanted the 1952 text because it was delivered (for once) in peacetime. There were no Churchill quotes in Mr. Mandela’s speech. But there was a certain echo—of which more anon.

The article prompting this essay argued that Churchill’s support of South African union helped deprive Africans of their rights. The truth is more complicated. Churchill had his faults, and some stemmed from his stubborn optimism. “Almal sal regkom,” he often remarked in Afrikaans: “All will come right.” Much has since come right in South Africa, and Churchill made his contribution.

Apartheid did not begin when Britain united Natal, Cape Colony, the Transvaal and Orange Free State in 1910. It developed gradually, not taking legal form until 1949. Blacks were not everywhere disenfranchised. As Britain approved the Transvaal constitution in July 1906, Churchill and Colonial Secretary Lord Elgin strove to expand liberties against stubborn resistance.

“No cause for present apprehension”

Elgin and Churchill intended to lay the question of native rights before the cabinet. They faced several challenges. First, “nothing could be done for Africans involving the spending of British taxpayers’ money.” Second, there was the feeling: why rush? There was “no serious friction” between blacks and whites. “Each race goes its own way and lives its own life.” There was nothing like the racial animus in America, Britons told each other.

Elgin, with no experience of African Society didn’t share Churchill’s views on the rights of subjects of all colors. Natives could vote in Cape Colony, Elgin conceded. But that would end “when the whites begin to realise that political power is passing out of their hands.” Elgin thought Native councils should be established “to give them freedom to express their views.” How would those views matter? Elgin never addressed the question. “It is therefore all the more remarkable and impressive,” wrote Ronald Hyam, “that so much time was devoted to it.”

The protectorate issue

In April 1908 Lord Crewe replaced Lord Elgin as Colonial Secretary. Simultaneously, Churchill became President of the Board of Trade. This did not prevent Churchill from continuing to strive for native interests.

Churchill declared that a future South African state must concede “our right to be consulted effectively upon the native policy. I would not do anything for them without a sufficient return for the benefit of the native….” Nor should Britain jump to hand over the protectorates. What were these?

Within South Africa’s multiple components were three British protectorates. Basutoland (today’s Lesotho) and Bechuanaland (now Botswana) were established after the First Boer War (1880-81). Swaziland (renamed Eswatini in 2018) became a protectorate after the Second Boer War (1899-1902). All three, governed by native chiefs, proved a major bone of contention. For almost a century, South Africa would demand their annexation. Britain, including Churchill, found one excuse after another not to agree. Finally, in the heyday of Apartheid, Britain granted all three independence.

“Majestic, beneficent, far-reaching…”

The natives’ best security, Churchill told Crewe, was “our power to delay” handing over the protectorates. A few years would surely make a difference:

…the Government of United South Africa will take a broader and calmer view of native questions…. [And] the real security the natives are gaining in education, civilisation and influence so rapidly that they will be far more capable—apart from force altogether—of maintaining their rights, and making their own bargain…. [W]e should assert our intention to hand over the Protectorates…the more South Africa will swallow the better for House of Commons—and should then play steadily for time with all the cards in our hand. [Let us try] to get as much as we can for the natives…. The horse will draw the cart, if both are tied together. But do not let them get separated. Confront Parliament with a complete scheme, majestic, beneficent, far-reaching. Prove to them that you have done your best for the natives.

The drift toward Apartheid

On 31 May 1910 the Union of South Africa, united Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Apartheid was not a word in use then. In the mainly British Cape and Natal, qualified males retained the vote regardless of race. Of course, “qualified” then required minimum income or property ownership. White women received the vote in 1930. By then, as Elgin had predicted, the black franchise in the Cape and Natal had dwindled. Successive governments of the white supremacist National Party (often known as “Nationalists”) chipped away at it, and few blacks or Cape Coloureds were still voting in the 1930s.

Two world wars kept Churchill far from South African affairs. There is no comment in his ‘tween-wars writings on the drift toward segregated societies. South Africa reasserted its claim to the protectorates. Natives should be consulted and their “full acquiescence sought,” answered Edwin Smith in 1938. “Would anyone seriously maintain that the people of this country should keep the one pledge and not the other? A promise given to Africans is just as sacred as a promise given to Afrikaners.”

Botha and Smuts

Churchill’s two best Afrikaner friends were former Boer enemies. Louis Botha (1869-1919), was the country’s first prime minister. Botha succeeded in making South Africa a self-governing Dominion. Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts (1870-1950) became one of Churchill’s closest confidants.

Smuts was no egalitarian, but in his day he was considered moderate. He believed in the government by whites and “the inherent stability and good faith” of blacks. He resisted “breaking down their local tribal customs,” and opposed “the artificial half-baked white ideas we are foisting upon them.”

Malan and the Apartheid campaign

In 1946 the Fagan Commission on native laws recommended easing restrictions on natives in urban areas. It was self-serving, since it contemplated improving the supply of labor. Still, it was not Apartheid. It would have helped ease the poverty in which blacks were forced to live outside white urban areas. Smuts’s support for this reform outraged the National Party, led by Daniel François Malan, an ardent racialist. Malan fought the May 1948 election on color lines, and for the first time we heard the word Apartheid.

Smuts’s United Party ran in part on racial reconciliation—and lost. It was as surprising as Churchill’s defeat in 1945, and Smuts never got over it. He derided the Nationalists for calling his chosen successor Jan Hofmeyr a “kaffir boetie” and “gogga.” In grief and despair, he died two years later.

Smuts and Churchill

Churchill saw himself in Smuts’s defeat. “A great world statesman [was] cast aside by the country he led through so many perils and for whose independence he fought with such valour in bygone days, and for whose revival he worked with so much perseverance over long years, raising South Africa to a level of repute and influence in the world never known before.”

Malan’s drive for Apartheid depressed Smuts. The Population Registration Act of 1950 formalized identity cards specifying one’s race. The Group Areas Act ended mixed races living side by side, allotting each race its separate areas. The 1951 Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act demolished poor black neighborhoods within white enclaves. White employers had to pay for housing of any black workers allowed to reside in white cities. Laws proscribed mixed marriages. The 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act reserved to whites such public facilities as beaches, buses, hospitals, schools and universities. “Whites only” signs appeared, even on park benches. Apartheid seemed at least as severe as American Jim Crow laws, which Britons once proudly claimed “don’t exist here.”

Smuts saw his country “moving into a dark period of totalitarian politics.” In 1950, Malan’s government disenfranchised Cape Coloured (mixed-race) citizens. Government bureaus ran non-white affairs. Malan, Smuts told Churchill, could not “control his republican extremists. [Their propaganda] will influence racial feeling here as no other issue can.”

Bantustans

Before he left office, Malan made another claim to the protectorates. Churchill was Prime Minister when it arrived in 1954, His response stood foursquare for justice:

There can be no question of Her Majesty’s Government agreeing at the present time to the transfer of Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland to the Union of South Africa. We are pledged, since the South Africa Act of 1909, not to transfer these Territories until their inhabitants have been consulted [and] wished it. [South Africa should] not needlessly press an issue on which we could not fall in with their views without failing in our trust.

Within fourteen years, Britain would grant all three protectorates independence. Today, Botswana is one of the most prosperous and democratic countries in Africa.

In 1958 Malan’s successor Hendrik Verwoerd set up twenty “bantustans” or black homelands, nominally independent, but recognized by no other government. Churchill had thought South Africa’s repudiating the Crown inconceivable. He was wrong.  In 1961 Verwoerd proclaimed a republic, leaving a British Commonwealth increasingly critical of Apartheid.

“The oneness of the human race”

Back to Nelson Mandela’s speech to Congress. He did not quote Churchill. I preferred to think his request for Churchill’s speech meant that he shared the Churchillian spirit. There was an echo when he spoke of “the uneasy road to victory” for human rights…

Principal among these was, on the one hand, the willingness of the erstwhile minority rulers to concede political power without first resorting to such resistance as would reduce our country to a wasteland. On the other was the ability of the oppressed majority to forgive and accept a shared destiny with those who had enslaved them. That both black and white in our country can today say we are to one another brother and sister…constitutes a celebration of the oneness of the human race.

A half century before, Churchill told the House of Commons:

…when the ancient Athenians, on one occasion, overpowered a tribe in the Peloponnesus which had wrought them great injury by base, treacherous means, and when they had the hostile army herded on a beach naked for slaughter, they forgave them and set them free, and they said: “This was not because they were men; it was done because of the nature of Man.”

Ever since he asked for Churchill’s speech, I have regarded Nelson Mandela as a Churchillian. I am sure he would not approve of Churchill’s every act toward South Africa over the years. But I have no doubt that he shared two famous Churchill qualities: “In Victory, Magnanimity. In Peace, Goodwill.”

Reflections

Did everything come right in South Africa? An ex-pat friend says: “Not everything. The heady days of Mandela are long gone.” Corruption, crime and poverty still exist. “The best thing is that post-Apartheid it is not a racialistic country.” It is predominantly a two-party parliamentary system with open elections. The white population retains its economic power, but there are many black entrepreneurs, intellectuals and professionals. They are contributing much to the country.”

Was Churchill everywhere right on South Africa? No, but his efforts deserve consideration. Was his attitude paternalistic? “Of course, and you can quote Abraham Lincoln, and most of America’s founders, in precisely the same sense,” writes Hillsdale College’s President Larry Arnn:

The remarkable thing is that Lincoln, for the slaves, and Churchill, for the Empire, believed that people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of their country to protect those rights…. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist.

Another thing to remember is that Lincoln and Churchill were political men. Also they were democratic men. They needed, and thought it was right that they needed, the votes of a majority. If they lived in an age of prejudice (and every age is that) then of course they would be careful how they offended those prejudices.

Videos

South Africa’s dual national anthems, Rugby World Cup, 1995: Click here.

Springboks’ Captain François Pienaar looks back: Click here.

Part 1: 1902-1909

In “Apartheid: Made in Britain,” Richard Dowden argued that Britain not South Africa cost black South Africans their rights. His account is factual as far as it goes, but there is more to say about Churchill’s effort to achieve justice in South Africa.

By the end of the Second Boer War, Britons were as weary as Americans are today over Afghanistan. Both British political parties fought the 1906 election promising peace in South Africa. From 1906 Churchill, now Under-Secretary for the Colonies, represented colonial affairs in the House of Commons. (His chief, the 9th Earl of Elgin, sat in the Lords.) Churchill declared their hope to build upon “reconciliation and not upon the rivalry of races.” It was tall order.

Churchill and the Africans

Churchill’s views about the rights of British subjects of all colors marked him as a dangerous radical. In 1899, imprisoned in Pretoria, he argued with a Boer jailer who mocked Britain’s racial policies:

Well, is it right that a dirty Kaffir should walk on the pavement—without a pass too? That’s what they do in your British Colonies. Brother! Equal! Ugh! Free! Not a bit. We know how to treat Kaffirs…. Ah, that’s you English all over. No, no, old chappie. We educate ’em with a stick…. Insist on their proper treatment will you! Ah, that’s what we’re going to see about now.

“Probing at random,” wrote Churchill “I had touched a very sensitive nerve.” Boer aversion to British rule was “the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man…. The dominant race is to be deprived of their superiority; nor is a tigress robbed of her cubs more furious than is the Boer at this prospect.” He would learn later the depth of that ferocity.

South Africa: spinning top of diversity

In 1907, Churchill made a tour of British East Africa. From the East Africa Protectorate (later Kenya) Churchill wrote the King: “There can be no question of our handing over this beautiful Protectorate upon which we have spent so much, with its 4 or 5 millions of Your Majesty’s native subjects, to the control of the first few thousand white men who happen to arrive in the country.”

Though Churchill respected Boer agronomy and fighting prowess, South Africa posed a knotty problem for any peacemaker. Natives outnumbered Boers and British by five to one. Cape Colony contained significant numbers of “Cape Coloureds” and Jews.  There were also Indians, on whose behalf Mohandas Gandhi was prominent. Years later, Gandhi remembered: “I have got a good recollection of Mr. Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.”

Churchill favored a generous settlement with the Boers. A war-weary public agreed. South Africa was quite different from other British African territory. So many peoples who cordially deplored each other suggests the enormity of Churchill’s task. Yet he was confident of the right tactic. Make the Boers “one of the foundations of our position in South Africa.” Then “we shall be building upon the rock.”

“Equal rights irrespective of colour”

Pro-native, Churchill was on the “radical wing” of the Liberal Party, but even that wing had its prejudices. He favored “party government…upon racial lines. It is so at the Cape.” In the British Cape Colony, qualified blacks voted.

Nothing more united the whites, Churchill declared, than politicizing natives. In the war it was “a nameless crime on either side to set the black man on his fellow foe.” Yet Churchill recognized Britain’s responsibility:

We will endeavour…to advance the principle of equal rights of civilized men irrespective of colour. We will not—at least I will pledge myself—hesitate to speak out when necessary if any plain case of cruelty of exploitation of the native for the sordid profit of the white man can be proved.

Pleasing Gandhi, he promised “a proper status for our Indian fellow subjects.” He demanded “good, well-watered land” for natives to “dwell secluded and at peace.” Examples of the latter were three British protectorates administered by native chiefs, Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland. Britain resisted periodic attempts by South Africa to annex these territories. In the 1960s they became the independent nations of Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini.

“Terminological inexactitude”

Churchill had also to address the problem of Chinese coolies, indentured workers in the Rand goldmines. The Liberals campaigned in 1906 against what they called “Chinese slavery.” Churchill abjured the term, since they were paid wages, not bought or sold, and free to return home. He famously quipped this could not be called slavery “without some risk of terminological inexactitude.”

Churchill’s contentions on behalf of the Chinese brought him into conflict with leading conservatives like Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain. But the South Africa High Commissioner, Lord Selborne, understood Churchill’s position. The Boers were simply bemused. Boer leader Jan Smuts remarked: “Winston’s pity for the Chinese-flogging [Transvaal Governor] Milner is no less Olympian than that for the benighted radical who thought the Chinese indentures partook of the nature of slavery.”

Ultimately, white and native labor gradually replaced the coolies, and a vexatious problem vanished. The greater challenge was: who would run the Boer colonies in the future?

The Transvaal constitution

Throughout 1906, Churchill pressed for Responsible Government in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. He also denounced Natal courts’ treatment of blacks. Elgin and Churchill hoped Boer territories would allow native governing councils, as in the British protectorates. But both agreed that “harsh laws are sometimes better than no laws at all.” Without Boer collaboration there would be “more injustice and tyranny on the natives.” Elgin believed that forced equality would “prejudice the just expectations of natives.” The right time was when “the two races stand more on an equal footing.”

Churchill insisted that “our responsibility to the native races remains a real one.” The Union of South Africa, he hoped, would finally place “treatment of native races upon a broad and secure platform….”

The Transvaal elected its first parliament in February 1907. Churchill thought a Boer majority  “quite impossible.” He was wrong. The Boer Het Volk Party won a majority of five, and Churchill’s only consolation was that his friend Louis Botha became prime minister. In December, the Orangia Unie (Orange Union) took twenty-nine of thirty-eight seats in the Orange Free State. Black voting was thus proscribed. Yet no one believed this was worth reopening the Boer War.

Pros and cons

Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman congratulated Churchill over the Transvaal constitution: “The finest and noblest work of the British power in recent times.” Randolph Churchill, writing his father’s biography, praised his “urgency and assiduity…the cogency of his arguments, his mastery of the task.”

But Campbell-Bannerman was writing in 1907, Randolph Churchill in 1967. That was then but this is now. In 2014, Christopher Beckvold wrote: “The British Government was partly responsible for Apartheid and…Churchill was just as responsible as a member of the Government. [But] historians do not want to slander a great man.”

Not exactly. Richard Dowden’s “Apartheid: Made in Britain” appeared twenty years before Mr. Beckvold’s thesis.

Let us add up the score. From his first encounter with South Africa in 1899, Churchill stood up for native rights. That was an uncommon thing among Victorian Englishmen. After the Boer War, he publicly and privately emphasized fair play for black Africans. In Parliament he promoted “good, well-watered land” for native cultures. Without Boer cooperation, nothing could be done. Churchill hoped, vainly, that the Boer colonies might merge into a more liberal union. As late as 1954, as we shall see, he denied South Africa the British protectorates. One of them is now among Africa’s most prosperous countries.

“The Art of the Possible”

It is quite true, as Mr. Dowden wrote, that Churchill’s policies in 1906-07 abetted Boer power. That power waxed with the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the election of Louis Botha as its first prime minister. Under later National (aka “Nationalist”) Party governments, the black vote in the Cape and Natal gradually withered. So did Churchill’s hopes for more moderate evolution. But as Bismarck said, “Politics is the art of the possible.”

Mr. Dowden ended his 1994 article with “half a cheer” for Churchill’s chief, Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Elgin. In 1906, he wrote, Elgin hoped “that Afrikaners would, ‘in some time to come’ see the good sense of granting ‘reasonable representation to the natives.’ I suppose you could say his wish has come true—at last.”

In 1907, Elgin wrote Churchill: “I am not satisfied that a compromise is impossible.” Churchill favored just such an arrangement. “I would not,” he replied, “do anything for them without a sufficient return for the benefit of the native.”

Perhaps we might offer half a cheer for Winston Churchill, too.

Concluded in Part 2: From 1910 to the Age of Mandela.

Please can you comment on, the “Dutchman, Burgener by name,” mentioned by Churchill in his account of his escape from the Boers in his autobiography, My Early Life? Is he one and the same person as the Charles Burnham mentioned by Sir Martin Gilbert in Churchill: A Life? Perhaps the surname was changed to protect Mr Burnham`s position in South Africa? Yet thoughthree decades had elapsed by the publication of My Early Life. It seems certain that Churchill knew of Burnham and the role that he had played. The latter had written to him in 1908 (Vol. 1 of the Official Biography, 502-04). He was one of those to whom WSC sent an inscribed gold watch in appreciation of their assistance. —W.A.

“Burgener” was Burnham

You are right. “Burgener” was in fact Charles Burnham. Whether Churchill  disguised his real name in My Early Life I am not sure. In that book, Churchill divulged the name of the mine manager, John Howard. Perhaps he had simply mistaken Burnham’s name.

At any rate, “Dutchman Burgener” was the name WSC assigned to the man who helped Churchill stow away in a consignment of wool on a railway car bound for Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, Mozambique. Further on, Churchill adds that “Burgener” met him in Delagoa Bay and led him to the British Consulate, which enabled his return to Durban and the British lines.

Burnham Identified

Randolph Churchill divulged Burnham’s identity in the official biography document volumes. Randolph received a letter from John Howard’s son, which corrects Churchill’s own account. (Re Burnham, see the paragraph in bold face below).

Howard fils added that the Boers came to arrest Howard some time later. Captain Haldane (who later also escaped) tipped them off about Howard’s role. But Howard entertained them with drinks. Then, with pistols in his pockets and standing over rifles they’d stacked in a corner, he convinced them to go away.

Churchill himself did not let out Howard’s name until My Early Life. But one John Hulme published an account of the escape in The Temple Magazine in 1901. He mentioned Mr. Dewsnap of Oldham (as did Churchill in his first political campaign, but Dewsnap was not harmed). Hulme also implied that the miners had killed a Boer who had learned they were hiding the fugitive.

From the Official Biography

The Churchill Documents, vol. 3, Early Years in Politics 1901-1907 (Hillsdale College Press, 2007), 1132-35:

L. C. B. Howard to RSC

EXTRACT

31 May 1963 10 Coronation Buildings, Germiston, Transvaal

… First of all, on reading through your Father’s narrative I see he does not mention the fact that while down the mine at the T. and D. B. Collieries, a few days after he was lowered into the mine, he took ill and had to be brought to the surface again, where he was ensconced in a room in the mine office building, which was used for storing office equipment; of course big empty packing cases and bundles of grain bags etc, were introduced into the room to make his concealment more secure, and so safeguard his presence there; how many times didn’t my old Dad relate these facts to me, and how he arranged special signals for your Father, so that he would not be taken unawares should any unwanted person happen to knock at the door….

Secondly, your Father in his writings, talks about the Transvaal Collieries, the correct name of the mine is the Transvaal and Delagoa Bay Collieries.

Thirdly, he says, our house where he first met my Dad that memorable evening many years ago, was a double storey building, it was only a single storey structure; however, no one could blame your Father for these mistakes, under these very trying circumstances, and what is more it was very dark at the time.

“A fine type of man”

Fourthly, the name of the man whom my Dad had to introduce into his plans for your Father’s safety, in helping him out of the country, because of the wool which was urgently required, was a Mr. Burnham and not Burgener as your Father has it. Burnham was also a fine type of man.

And lastly, your Father mentions the corrugated iron fence at the Staats Model School in Pretoria, which he scaled in his escape from there as being about ten feet in height; it was only 6 ft and is there to this very day. I went and had another look at it, on the afternoon of our gathering of the 20th instant. The house which stood on the other side of the fence, I see, has been demolished. Too bad; it should have been preserved as well….

See also my tribute to Lee Remick as “Jennie.” and Part 1 of the film. 

David Lough…

…added significantly to our knowledge with No More Champagne (2015), his study of Churchill’s finances. Now he fills another gap in the saga with this comprehensive collection of Churchill’s exchanges with his mother Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill. They range from Winston age seven to the very last letters before Jennie’s death, aged 67, in June 1921.

On the surface it may seem an easy task. Most of the letters are at the Churchill Archives in Cambridge. What could be simpler than digitalizing and publishing the lot? Not so fast. To publish them all would overwhelm the reader, not to mention the publisher. David Lough had to eliminate (or insert ellipses in) many of Winston’s letters from school, for example. This was acceptable, especially for the mandatory weekly “letter home.” Repeatedly those ask for money or parental visits, or offer exaggerated tales of prowess at sport or lessons. Lough offers “a representative but not exhaustive sample.”

Jennie was much better at keeping Winston’s letters than he hers. As a result, “connecting tissue” is often required from the editor to explain the context. The dearth of Jennie’s letters requires familiarity with her own story. At this Mr. Lough excels, providing us with just enough narrative, without taking over and distracting the reader from his subjects. He also provides excellent maps and uncommon photographs.

“You are in danger of becoming a prig!”

Having David Lough as narrator is like having a skilled tutor guiding us through the four-decade relationship between mother and son. He never falls short. “If we accept that Jennie ‘forgot’ about Winston during his schooldays,” Lough writes, “the ease with which they took up the striking intimacy of their correspondence after Winston left school suggests that she must have forged a stronger bond in his pre-school years than was typical of Victorian parents.” She certainly did—witness her own diaries, and her loyal support of Winston when rebuked by his father. Do well in your grades, she wrote him, and it will eclipse your father’s low view of your prospects. Yet she didn’t hesitate to criticize. Once, finding him adopting a “pompous style,” she warned: “You are in danger of becoming a prig!” For the most part, though, she took joy in his letters.

There are early examples of Churchill’s wry wit and powers of observation. Take Calcutta—please: “A very great city and at night with a grey fog and cold wind—I shall always [be] glad to have seen it—for the same reason Papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbon—namely ‘that it will be unnecessary ever to see it again.’” On his grandmother Frances, 7th Duchess of Marlborough: “Old age is sufficiently ugly and unpleasing without its too frequent accompaniments, capriciousness and malevolence.” Ouch.

Once commissioned, Winston was desperate for action: “scenes of adventure and excitement,” where he could “gain experience and derive advantage.” He felt hampered in “tedious” India, denied both “the pleasures of peace and the chances of war.” Before long, he was yearning for Crete. Why? Because, Lough explains, he hoped for assignment as a war correspondent during the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule. In a paragraph, Lough explains how this promising fracas was resolved, much to young Winston’s frustration. Yet India would soon provide plenty of war’s chances with the Malakand Field Force. It was the grist for Churchill’s first book.

“Your political career will lead you to big things”

Throughout his letters, notably in his soldier years, we see how Churchill planned his course, always aiming toward politics. “My soldiering prospects are a present very good,” he wrote Jennie from India. “I should continue in the army for two years more. Those two years could not be better spent on active service.” He would ride fame into Parliament. And he did. Politically, his mother’s predictions were more accurate than his. Winston was sure the Conservatives would lose power by 1902, for example. As Jennie expected, they hung on for another four years. Yet, with the sense of timing for which he was renowned, Winston managed to bolt to the Liberals in time for the 1906 election.

Jennie “did nothing to discourage a switch of careers,” David Lough tells us. Indeed his “political ambitions excited her after the premature end of her husband’s ministerial career.” This is exemplary of Lough’s penetrating observations. It is often overlooked that Lord Randolph’s precipitate political fall greatly depressed Jennie, more even than his death. Their son revived her hopes, especially after his hair-raising Boer War adventures: “I am sure you are sick of the war,” she wrote. Now “you will be able to make a decent living out of writings, & your political career will lead you to big things.” She was right again. He was also safer—relatively. In politics you can be killed many times, he later observed; but in war only once.

Separated as they were by oceans and continents, two-thirds of their letters span the years before Churchill entered politics. The rest are largely from early in his political career. There is much more than politics, including details of his romances. He broke up with Pamela Plowden, whom Jennie was sure he would marry, writing his mother in 1901: “We had no painful discussions, but there is no doubt in my mind that she is the only woman I could ever live happily with…” (Not quite.)

Disappointingly, there are no Jennie letters about Lord Randolph’s death. We have no inkling of what she thought: relief, grief, both? Neither will the prurient find the oft-rumored, unsubstantiated, Jennie letters about Clementine Hozier, another woman with whom Winston soon found he could live happily. Jennie had reintroduced them in 1908, after a bad start four years earlier. A long, happy marriage began that year. A fine coda to their early relationship is Winston’s letter to his mother a few days after she ceased being the most important woman in his life: “Clemmy v[er]y happy & beautiful…. You were a great comfort & support to me at a critical time in my emotional development. We have never been so near together so often in a short time.”

“I might have known that 50 miles behind the line was not your particular style…”

Nor do we find revealing letters at critical junctures to come: Churchill’s appointment to the Admiralty, the outbreak of the Great War, his abrupt fall from power. Only after he has resigned to join his regiment do we find him in Jennie’s thoughts again: “I might have known that 50 miles behind the line was not your particular style….It is no use my saying ‘be careful.’ It is all in the hands of God. I can only pray & hope for the best.”

God granted her prayer and he was soon back in the thick of politics. But they never indulged much in political exchanges, as Winston did with Clementine. Jennie’s few letters now were filled with family things: pride in grandchildren, happiness at Winston’s political success, her 1918 marriage to Montagu Porch. His step-father was actually three years younger than Winston, but the marriage worked somehow. Moreover, his mother was happy, and that was what mattered to her son.

This is quite a wonderful collection, shedding bright light on the youthful Churchill’s hopes and dreams, while revealing the worldly, solicitous, loving influence of his American mother. No son could wish for more. For those of us similarly blessed in our lives, David Lough conveys an understanding of why a man is fortunate if he is his mother’s son. As Jennie would write to him often, as our mothers wrote to us: “God bless you my darling and keep you safe.”

Quotations scholar Ralph Keyes writes:

Cicero and Livy wrote of  “sweat and blood.” A 1611 John Donne poem included the lines “That ‘tis in vaine to dew, or mollifie / It with thy Teares, or Sweat, or Bloud.” More than two centuries later, Byron wrote, “Year after year they voted cent per cent / Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions—why?—for rent!” In his 1888 play Smith, Scottish poet-playwright John Davidson wrote of “Blood – sweats and tears, and haggard, homeless lives.” By 1939, a Lady Tegart reported in a magazine article that Jewish communal colonies in Palestine were “built on a foundation of blood, sweat, and tears”….Since this phrase was obviously familiar when Churchill gave his memorable speech the following year, even though he rearranged the words and added “toil” for good measure, our ears and our memory quickly returned them to the more familiar form.¹

Blood, tears and (occasionally) toil

In the Boer War, imprisioned in Pretoria, he had a conversation with Mr. Grobelaar, the Boer Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Churchill told Grobelaar that Britain would win: “…as I think Mr. Grobelaar knows, [it] is only a question of time and money expressed in terms of blood and tears.”² In a 1900 article entitled, “Officers and Gentlemen” he used the phrase again:

…the knowledge gained at every manoeuvre must be used remorselessly to control the progress of mediocre men up the military ladder; to cast the bad ones down and help the good ones towards the top. It will all seem very sad and brutal in times of peace, but there will be less blood and tears when the next war comes.³

Thirty years later, in The World Crisis, he regarded the demise of European empires—a precursor, though he could not know it then, of the Second World War to come:

In the Parliaments of the Hapsburgs bands of excited deputies sat and howled at each other by the hour in rival languages, accompanying their choruses with the ceaseless slamming of desks which eventually by a sudden crescendo swelled into a cannonade. All gave rein to hatred; and all have paid for its indulgence with blood and tears.⁴

* * *

“Toil” was in the mix as early as 1932. Leaving New York after a lecture tour, Churchill was asked whether “a war between two or more powers is about to take fire.” He responded with one of his few strikingly bad predictions:

I do not believe that we shall see another great war in our time. War today is bare—bare of profit and stripped of all its glamour. The old pomp and circumstance are gone. War now is nothing now but toil, blood, death, squalor and lying propaganda.⁵

“Blood and tears” next appeared in when war was almost certain, in 1939″

Although the sufferings of the assaulted nations will be great in proportion as they have neglected their preparations, there is no reason to suppose that they will not emerge living and controlling from the conflict. With blood and tears they will bear forward faithfully and gloriously the ark which enshrines the title deeds of the good commonwealth of mankind.⁶

Toil, waste, sorrow and torment

An allied expression came in an article Churchill wrote during late stages of the Spanish Civil War, reprinted in his 1939 collection of articles, Step by Step:

Nearly all the countries and most of the people in every country desire above all things to prevent war. And no wonder, since except for a few handfuls of ferocious romanticists, or sordid would-be profiteers, war spells nothing but toil, waste, sorrow and torment to the vast mass of ordinary folk in every land. Why should this horror, which they dread and loathe, be forced upon them? How is it that they have not got the sense and the manhood to stop it?⁷

Blood, sweat and tears

Churchill added “sweat” in 1931, in the last volume of The World Crisis, as he described the devastating battles between the Russians and the Central Powers. His pages, he said, “record the toils, perils, sufferings and passions of millions of men. Their sweat, their tears, their blood bedewed the endless plain.”⁸ Another piece on war in Spain carried the expanded phrase:

But at length regular armies come into the field. Discipline and organisation grip in earnest both sides. They march, manoeuvre, advance, retreat, with all the valour common to the leading races of mankind. But here are new structures of national life erected upon blood, sweat and tears, which are not dissimilar and therefore capable of being united. What milestone of advantage can be gained by going farther? Now is the time to stop.⁹

Blood, toil, tears and sweat

Finally, on 13 May 1940, all four famous words came together in Churchill’s inspiring first speech as Prime Minister: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Clearly he had considered and arranged the words for maximum impact. His postwar recording of the speech comes down very hard on the“sweat.”¹⁰ The response to those words was electric and gratifying, though Churchill was had mixed thoughts about it: “One would think one had brought some great benefit to them, instead of the blood and tears, the toil and sweat, which is all I have ever promised.”¹¹

* * *

An indefatigable reviser, like most good writers, Churchill created an addendum to his famous phrase a year after he first used it, at a grim time. Rommel was rebounding in North Africa, Nazi submarines were taking a deadly toll on the Atlantic, the Blitz continued, and Britain was still alone. Churchill recognized the perils, but ended on a high note:

I have never promised anything or offered anything but blood, tears, toil, and sweat, to which I will now add our fair share of mistakes, shortcomings and disappointments….When I look back on the perils which have been overcome, upon the great mountain waves through which the gallant ship has driven, when I remember all that has gone wrong, and remember also all that has gone right, I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.¹²

A more hopeful evaluation of the cost of the war to date was offered just before the attack on Pearl Harbor:

I promised eighteen months ago “blood, tears, toil and sweat.” There has not yet been, thank God, so much blood as was expected. There have not been so many tears. But here we have another instalment of toil and sweat, of inconvenience and self-denial, which I am sure will be accepted with cheerful and proud alacrity by all parties and all classes in the British nation.¹³

Votes of no confidence

Although Russia and America had joined Britain in the battle by the end of 1941, the situation was bleaker than ever when Churchill called for a vote of confidence in January 1942. He handily won, 464 to one. Winding up for the Government, he reminded the House that nothing had changed: “I stand by my original programme, blood, toil, tears and sweat, which is all I have ever offered, to which I added, five months later, many shortcomings, mistakes and disappointments.”¹⁴

A more contentious vote of no confidence was faced down in July. After Tobruk had fallen to Rommel, dissident MPs tabled the motion, but Churchill defeated that one, too, 475 to 25, falling back on his old prescription and giving it a new twist:

I have not made any arrogant, confident, boasting predictions at all. On the contrary, I have struck hard to my “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” to which I have added muddle and mismanagement, and that, to some extent, I must admit, is what you have got out of it.¹⁵

Hinge of fate

Finally in the autumn of 1942, the victory at Alamein turned the tide of the war for Britain. It marked, wrote Churchill, “the turning of ‘the Hinge of Fate.’  It may almost be said, ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.’”¹⁶ Doubtless he felt it right to reiterate the original phraseology:

I have never promised anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat. Now, however, we have a new experience. We have victory—a remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all our hearts.¹⁷

Endnotes

¹ Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (New York: St. Martin’s, 2006), 15.

² Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter “WSC,” London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (London: Longmans, 1900), 166.

³ WSC, “Officers and Gentlemen,” The Saturday Evening Post, 29 December 1900, reprinted in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill(London: Library of Imperial History, 1975, 4 vols., I, 53.

⁴ WSC, The World Crisis, vol. V, The Eastern Front (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931), 21.

⁵ Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 45. From a radio interview in Boston on 10 March 1932. It is most unlikely that he would have made the same prediction a few months later. By May 1932 the National Socialists had become the largest single party in Germany.

⁶ WSC, “Will There Be War in Europe—and When?,” News of the World, 4 June 1939. Also published slightly abridged as “War, Now or Never,” Colliers, 3 June 1939 and reprinted in full in Collected Essays I, 443.

⁷ WSC, “How to Stop War,” Evening Standard, 12 June 1936, reprinted in Step by Step 1936-1939 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), 25.

⁸ WSC, The Eastern Front, 17.

⁹ WSC, “Can Franco Restore Unity and Strength to Spain?,” Daily Telegraph, 23 February 1939; reprinted as “Hope in Spain,” in Step by Step, 319.

* * *

¹⁰  Winston S. Churchill: His Memoirs and His Speeches 1918-1945, New York: Decca Records (12 LPs), 1965.

¹¹ WSC, House of Commons, 8 October 1940.

¹² WSC, House of Commons, 7 May 1941.

¹³ WSC, House of Commons, 2 December 1941.

¹⁴ WSC, House of Commons, 27 January 1942.

¹⁵ WSC, House of Commons, 1 July 1942.

¹⁶ WSC, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1950), 541.

¹⁷ WSC, Lord Mayor’s Day Luncheon, Mansion House, London, 9 November 1942, in The End of the Beginning (London: Cassell, 1943), 265-66.

See also: “Churchill on the Broadcast.”

Attlee was the first prime minister of a socialist government with an outright majority (1945-51). In 1940-45, he had served Churchill’s wartime coalition government, chiefly as deputy prime minister. Attlee presided over the cabinet whenever Churchill was abroad (which was a lot). In early 1945, it was he who gave the fateful order, later much regretted, for firebombing Dresden. In May 1945, on behalf of his party, Attlee told Churchill that Labour was withdrawing from the coalition. Churchill, who wanted it to last until the Japanese surrender and end of World War II, was deeply distressed. In the ensuing election of July 1945, Churchill’s Conservatives were routed, and Attlee took over as the head of British government.

Churchill regarded his wartime Labour associates with gratitude and admiration. In the dark days of 1940, when he thought it might come to some grim last stand against the onrushing Germans, he said he had thought to fight it out with a triumvirate of Lord Beaverbrook and another Labour colleague, Ernest Bevin.

Domestically, Attlee and Churchill agreed on nothing significant. But both had fought as soldiers in the deadliest war in history. And both had governed together in the worst war in history. The respect and collegiality they shared is a model for our time. Or any time.

The supposed Attlee gags—”an empty cab drew up and Mr. Attlee got out”; “He is a sheep in sheep’s clothing”—do not track to Churchill. He did say, when President Truman said that Attlee seemed a modest man, “he has much to be modest about.” But that was a private remark, which someone on Truman’s staff overheard and repeated. When confronted with the other Attlee barbs, Churchill would vehemently deny them. Sometimes he would say, “Mr. Attlee is a gallant and faithful servant of the Crown and I would never say such a thing about him”—or words to that effect.

No wonder, then, that Mr. Cohen and I appreciate what Attlee said. He was truly, in the words of the old song, one of the Giants of Old. It why so many, Churchill friends and opponents alike, found Attlee’s speech deeply moving.

The Rt. Hon. The Lord Attlee

My Lords, as an old opponent and a colleague, but always a friend, of Sir Winston Churchill, I should like to say a few words in addition to what has already been so eloquently said.

My mind goes back to many years ago. I recall Sir Winston as a rising hope of the Conservative Party at the end of the 19th century. I looked upon him and Lord Hugh Cecil as the two rising hopes of the Conservative Party. Then, with courage, he crossed the House—not easy for any man. You might say of Sir Winston that to whatever Party he belonged, he did not really change his ideas. He was always Winston.

The first time I saw him was at the siege of Sidney Street, when he took over command there, and I happened to be a local resident. I did not meet him again until he came into the House of Commons in 1924. The extraordinary thing, when one thinks of it, is that by that time he had done more than the average Member of Parliament, and more than the average minister, in the way of a Parliamentary career. We thought at that time that he was finished.

Not a bit of it. He started again another career, and then, after some years, it seemed again that he had faded. He became a lone wolf, outside any party; and yet, somehow or other, the time was coming which would be for him his supreme moment, and for the country its supreme moment. It seems as if everything led up to that time in 1940, when he became prime minister of this country at the time of its greatest peril.

* * *

Throughout all that period he might make opponents, he might make friends; but no one could ever disregard him. Here was a man of genius, a man of action, a man who could also speak and write superbly. I recall through all those years many occasions when his characteristics stood out most forcibly.

Not everybody always recognised how tender-hearted he was. I can recall him with the tears rolling down his cheeks, talking of the horrible things perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany. I can recall, too, during the war his emotion on seeing a simple little English home wrecked by a bomb. Yes, my Lords, sympathy—and more than that: he went back, and immediately devised the War Damage Act. How characteristic: Sympathy did not stop with emotion; it turned into action.

Then I recall the long days through the war—the long days and long nights—in which his spirit never failed; and how often he lightened our labours by that vivid humour, those wonderful remarks he would make which absolutely dissolved us all in laughter, however tired we were. I recall his eternal friendship for France and for America; and I recall, too, as the most reverend Primate has said already, that when once the enemy were beaten he had full sympathy for them. He showed that after the Boer War, and he showed it again after the First World War. He had sympathy, an incredibly wide sympathy, for ordinary people all over the world.

* * *

I think of him also as supremely conscious of history. His mind went back not only to his great ancestor Marlborough but through the years of English history. He saw himself and he saw our nation at that time playing a part not unworthy of our ancestors, not unworthy of the men who defeated the Armada, and not unworthy of the men who defeated Napoleon.

He saw himself there as an instrument. As an instrument for what? For freedom, for human life against tyranny. None of us can ever forget how, through all those long years, he now and again spoke exactly the phrase that crystallised the feelings of the nation.

My Lords, we have lost the greatest Englishman of our time—I think the greatest citizen of the world of our time. In the course of a long, long life, he has played many parts. We may all be proud to have lived with him and, above all, to have worked with him; and we shall all send to his widow and family our sympathy in their great loss.

The most touching and durable vision left by Mr. Maier comes toward the end of this long book: the famous White House ceremony in April 1963, as President Kennedy presents Sir Winston Churchill (in absentia) with Honorary American Citizenship—while from an upstairs window his stroke-silenced father, Joseph P. Kennedy, watches closely, with heaven knows what reflections:

Whatever thoughts raced through the mind of Joe Kennedy—the rancor of the past, the lost opportunities of his own political goals, and the tragic forgotten dreams he had once had for his oldest son, could not be expressed. His weak, withered body, with its disfigured mouth, no longer served him…could say nothing in his own defense.

This is a readable book, elegantly written, which commits some errors. It contains much known information, except perhaps for encyclopedic revelations of which Churchills and Kennedys were sleeping with whom. In some ways one is reminded of a description applied by Warren Kimball to Volume 3 in the Manchester Churchill trilogy The Last Lion: “A nice cruise down a lengthy river you’ve sailed before.”

Meetings and consequences

The biographies surround occasions when the two families meet (or collide): 1933, 1935, 1938, and so on. Much of what we read about John F. Kennedy’s remarkable affinity for Churchill has been recorded earlier, by Barbara Leaming, in Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman (2006).

Along the way are interesting takes. Churchill’s interest in secret intelligence, for example, is traced to the Boer War, when young Winston “performed a bit of reconnaissance work, posing as a civilian riding a bicycle” in the Boer capital of Pretoria. Mr. Maier tracks the Joe Kennedy-Churchill relationship thoroughly, establishing that it began in 1933 (five years before JPK became Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Britain), when he and Churchill did some joint business involving the liquor trade. This, he suggests, might today be termed influence peddling—but Churchill held no office from 1929 to 1939.

Mr. Maier gets quite a few Churchill points wrong. There’s an incomplete account of the scandal involving Lord Alfred Douglas, who in 1916 libeled Churchill (“short of money and eager for power”), accusing him of manipulating war news to benefit his mentor Sir Ernest Cassel. Maier might have added that Churchill sued and won…or that in 1941, when Douglas published a sonnet praising the now-prime minister, Churchill forgave him on the spot, saying, “Time ends all things.”

Balanced criticism

Perhaps it is hard nowadays to credit many people with kindness and altruism, like Sir Henry Strakosch, who took over Churchill’s portfolio and preserved WSC’s dwindled finances. Maier calls this a “bailout plan…considered more a gift than graft by Churchill and his benefactors….” But graft is “the unscrupulous use of a politician’s authority for personal gain.” Strakosch never made one demand of Churchill. He acted only in appreciation for the man and the leader.

Churchill the imperialist is not ignored. “Winston showed little enthusiasm for the revolutionary spirit of independence among those living in former colonies of the British Empire such as India, South Africa, Kenya, or even neighboring Ireland,” Maier writes. Not so fast! What about his post-1935 encouragement to Gandhi and Nehru; his loyalty to Smuts, who opposed Apartheid; praise of locally-ruled Kenya in 1908; his instrumental role in the 1921 Treaty that brought independence to Ireland? Against such omissions, the canard that Churchill wanted to use “poison gas” against Iraqi tribesman stands in some contrast.

In World War II, Maier writes, “when the Communist guerrillas threatened to take control of Yugoslavia, Churchill underlined his concern by sending his only son.” No: Churchill had determined that Tito’s Communists were “killing more Huns” than the royalists, and sent his son to aid Tito. And Tito was not a “Soviet puppet.”

Kennedys and Winston

Maier says Joe Kennedy “blamed Roosevelt and Churchill for the death of his son Joe Jr.” No specific evidence exists for this.

A media kerfuffle was raised by the book’s report that after the war, WSC told Senator Styles Bridges (R., N.H.) that America should nuke Moscow before the Russians got their hands on the bomb. This was perfectly legitimate to record, but raised shock headlines among the ignorant media. As noted elsewhere, the story is not new. Churchill often voiced apocalyptic notions to visitors to observe their reaction. He never made that proposal to any plenary U.S. authority. As Graham Farmelo wrote in Churchill’s Bomb: “This was the zenith of Churchill’s nuclear bellicosity.” He soon softened his line, telling Parliament in January 1948 that the best chance of avoiding war was “to arrive at a lasting settlement” with the Soviets. Maier doesn’t acknowledge Churchill’s change of view until 1952. He adds that Churchill “would drop the bomb if he could.” That is simply unproven. And unlikely.

* * *

Other basic errors include the assertion that Winston’s father never visited him at school, that Churchill’s war memoirs comprised four volumes, that the Munich Agreement was in 1939, that Egypt was a former British colony (508). Among the trivial are mis-titling a Churchill article and identifying “Toby” the green parakeet as Churchill’s “white canary.”

Churchill’s description of Munich as a “choice between War and Shame” was not said in Parliament; “MBE” does not stand for Member of the British Empire. Lord and Lady Churchill, Lady Nancy Astor or “Sonny” Marlborough never existed. Tw0 nannies are misnamed: Elizabeth Everest (not “Everett”) and Marriott Whyte (not “Madeleine White).”

Fathers and sons

The book finishes with thoughtful reflections. Jack and Bobby got on much better with their father than Randolph with his, Maier suggests. Yet the Kennedy sons were far from their father in outlook and policy. After Joe’s stroke, “Jack and Bobby interacted with their father as they always did, as if he might suddenly talk back to them.” But poor Randolph Churchill just talked back. “I do so very much love that man,” Randolph says in tears, after being pointedly ejected from the Onassis yacht following a flaming attack on his aged father, “but something always goes wrong between us.”

Did Winston spoil Randolph to the point of disaster? Or did he subconsciously communicate a wish that Randolph could never be his equal? Did Joe Kennedy accept early on that great political prizes would not be his, but  for his sons? Mr. Maier leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions. His summary well crafted summary:

This legacy between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the eternal questions about families and fate, and our lasting impression of greatness, were all part of the shared experience between the Churchills and the Kennedys. In the twentieth century, no two families existed on a bigger world stage…. With courage, wit, and unforgettable determination, both Winston S. Churchill and John F. Kennedy helped define and save the world as we know it today.

That is a bit of overreach: comparing the lengths of their careers and the scales of the two salvations. But save it they did.

Young Winston Churchill’s second speech in Parliament was a bravura performance taking up his father’s theme for economy in the budget.

In Churchill in His Own Words (p 45) I date this quotation 12 May 1901 and cite Churchill’s Mr. Brodrick’s Army, his 1903 volume of speeches (facsimile edition, Sacramento: Churchilliana Company, 1977), 16:

Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time, and I am very glad the House has allowed me, after an interval of fifteen years, to raise the tattered flag I found lying on a stricken field.

The “tattered flag” was Lord Randolph Churchill’s campaign for economy in the late 1880s. (Thirty-nine years later to the day, in his first speech as Prime Minister, his son would raise another tattered flag upon a very stricken field.)

My colleague Andrew Roberts writes to advise that date was May 13th not 12th, and that “stricken field” is absent in Sir Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963 vol. 1, p 79:

Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time, and I am very glad the House has allowed me, 
after an interval of fifteen years, to lift again the tattered flag of retrenchment and
 economy.

This is confirmed by Hansard (13 May 1901, paragraph 1566). So when and where did Churchill actually deploy “stricken field”?

Here is another case of our boy embroidering Hansard in one of his speech volumes (and mis-dating it, which he did occasionally). Mr. Roberts reminds me that speakers were allowed to alter Hansard entries if they did so within 24 hours, but obviously our author did not change his wording until 1903.

Churchill, never forgot a melodious phrase. It is likely that he recalled “stricken field” from a poem by the Canadian John McCrae (later famous for “In Flanders Fields”). In “The Unconquered Dead” (1895), first stanza, McCrae wrote:

Of we the conquered! Not to us the blame                                                                                 Of them that flee, of them that basely yield;                                                                           Nor ours the shout of victory, the fame                                                                                    Of them that vanquish in a stricken field.

Churchill’s first usage (properly within quotes) was in The River War (London: Longmans, 1899) II 255-56, regarding the Battle of Omdurman:

The Emir [Ahmed Fedil] had faithfully discharged his duty, and he was hurrying to his master’s assistance with a strong and well-disciplined force of not less than 8,000 men when, while yet sixty miles from the city, he received the news of “the stricken field.”

Churchill again used “stricken field” in reference to the Battle of Majuba (The Boer War, 275); to the Dervish empire (My African Journey, 117); to Marshal Foch (Blood Sweat and Tears, 166); and to Charles II (History of the English-Speaking Peoples, II, 298).

I will add this to the corrections for my next edition of Churchill in His Own Words—”if there is one.”