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.

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.