Mr. Gandhi: another myth exploded

For many years Churchill’s view of India has been distorted, quoted out of context or based on hearsay. The Prime Minister’s attitude toward Mohandas Gandhi is part of this demonology. Now Hira Jungkow, an Indian student at the London School of Economics, has blown away another lie—one of the more despicable. It is that Churchill wished Gandhi dead as a casualty of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Mr. Gandhi certainly raised Churchill’s hackles on many occasions. But wishing he would starve to death is not in the record.

In a 2021 interview with one of Churchill’s foremost defenders, Andrew Roberts, The New Yorker raised this old canard: “It is just striking to read about Churchill being alerted to the massive number of deaths of Indians in territory that his government ruled, and asking questions like why Gandhi hadn’t died—which he hoped for—if things were so bad.” (The bad things were food shortages and famine in Bengal.)

Research however indicates Churchill didn’t say that. And what he did say was not in context of the Bengal Famine. After reading the New Yorker interview, Mr. Jungkow did the research and published his findings, which are summarized and amplified below. Why didn’t The New Yorker?

Why Gandhi hadn’t died yet

In September 1943 Churchill appointed Field Marshal Archibald Wavell Viceroy of India. Arthur Herman noted the irony: Churchill, long blamed for ignoring it, had appointed the very man “who would halt the famine in its tracks.”

Wavell’s and Churchill’s actions to ease the famine are explained elsewhere. We focus here only on the specific misrepresentation of Churchill in two frequently quoted books. Both cite Wavell’s diary from July 1944: “Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask why Gandhi hadn’t died yet! He has never answered my telegram about food.”

Wavell did write this, but it was not a quote—and fairly peevish itself. Why don’t the critics publish what Churchill actually said? Here it is:

Surely Mr. Gandhi has made a most remarkable recovery, as he is already able to take an active part in politics. How does this square with the medical reports upon which his release on grounds of ill-health was agreed to by us? In one of these we were told that he would not be able to take any part in politics again.

Wavell replied that Gandhi was released from detention because it was thought he was near death, but he “can hardly be said to have resumed an active part in politics yet.” Wavell added: “His release has not worsened [the] situation on the whole and I am clear it was right and justified.” Churchill did not contest this, and the correspondence ended.

“He has never answered my telegram about food”

Mr. Jungkow did not investigate Wavell’s complaint that Churchill hadn’t answered him about food, but that has a qualification too. Published documents reveal that Wavell’s requests for food mainly went to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India. It is odd that Amery, often described as India’s sympathizer, did so little himself to ease the Famine. It was a lot less than Churchill and Wavell. And Amery’s diaries, laced with nasty Churchill hearsay about Indians, are full of Amery’s (but not Churchill’s) racial pejoratives.

This misrepresentation is peculiar in its timing: July 1944, when the Famine was easing. In January Bengal received 130,000 tons of Iraqi barley, 80,000 tons of Australian wheat (with 100,000 more to come), 10,000 from Canada. Wavell wanted more, so on 14 February, Churchill called an emergency meeting of the War Cabinet. Could they find more grain without wrecking plans for D-Day? In April, Churchill declared that “his sympathy was great for the sufferings of the people of India.” The War Cabinet referred him to Roosevelt. No, said the President. D-Day and the Pacific had stretched U.S. shipping too thin.

Churchill kept at it, wrote Zareer Masani. “By the end of 1944 Wavell’s much-requested one million additional tons had been secured from Australia and the allied South East Asia Command…” Churchill’s actual words to Wavell referred to Mr. Gandhi’s “fasts to death,” not the Famine.

Lots of blame to go round

Another prominent figure never questioned for ignoring the famine is Gandhi himself. “For all his reputation as a humanitarian,” wrote Arthur Herman,

Gandhi did remarkably little about the emergency. The issue barely comes up in his letters, except as another grievance against the Raj. Yet in peacetime throughout the 20th century, the Raj always handled famines with efficiency. In February 1944 Gandhi wrote to Wavell: “I know that millions outside are starving for want of food. But I should feel utterly helpless if I went out and missed the food [i.e. independence] by which alone living becomes worthwhile.” Gandhi felt free to conduct his private “fast unto death” even as the rest of India starved.

Leo Amery, however little he’d done to help, was still full of advice as the famine ended. Acknowledging “His Majesty’s Government’s help over food grains,” he advised Churchill: “…you may say that you cried wolf unnecessarily to [Roosevelt], and you may wish to send him a personal telegram explaining that the additional 200,000 tons has only been found by a drastic cutting down of our military maintenance provision….”

Churchill was not willing to carry Amery’s bleat to the President. “I do not propose to send a personal telegram on this,” he wrote on Amery’s note.  Will you be so kind as to explain the matter to the State Department, quoting my personal [appeal] to the President as the key?” It would appear that Amery, like Wavell, expected the Prime Minister to attend every detail of the famine problem personally.

More evidence

Printed War Cabinet Paper, note by the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence [WSC] on “India” (9 October 1943) with a copy of a “Directive to the Viceroy Designate” [Lord Wavell] by WSC (8 October). Subjects of the directive include the need for India to be a “safe and fertile base” for the British and United States offensive against Japan in 1944; famine in India and the need to make every effort to deal with local shortages, stop grain hoarding and ensure a fair distribution of food between town and country; the gap between rich and poor needing examination; that [Wavell] should make every effort to ease tension between Hindus and Muslims and encourage them to work together, as a democratic government can not work without equality.

Wavell’s main aims should be to defend the frontiers of India, appease communal differences, rally all sections of society to support the war effort, and maintain the best possible standard of living for the largest number of people; and the British Government’s commitment to establishing a self-governing India as part of the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations. —Notes by the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge

Further reading

Arthur Herman, “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine Would Have Been Worse,” 2017

Zareer Masani, “Churchill and the Genocide Myth: Last Word on the Bengal Famine,” 2021

Richard M. Langworth, “Hearsay Doesn’t Count: The Truth about Churchill’s ‘Racist Epithets,’” 2020

Precepts for defenders (continued from Part 1)

Here are two precepts for us to follow when confronting perversions of the truth surrounding Winston Churchill.

First, “Surrender nothing”

In protecting his good name we cannot dissemble. As Mark Steyn says in another context[13], “Unless you’re prepared to surrender everything, surrender nothing. When President Macron declared that no statue or street in France would be renamed, miraculously the threats against them dissipated.” That takes courage, and the strength of one’s convictions. Churchill’s example eight decades ago is apposite.

“Surrender nothing” means never using weak precepts like “Churchill was just a man of his time,” or “everybody was a racist back then.” This is not good enough. It doesn’t do him justice. Churchill was not a man of his time—he was far ahead of it. He was demanding human rights for people of color long before it was expedient to do so. He was, in fact, considered a dangerous radical when, early on, he took up the causes of non-whites in the far reaches of the Empire.

“Traitor to his class”

It didn’t take young Winston long to start prodding the establishment. Aged 25, he was imprisoned as an accused British combatant in the Boer War. No sooner was he locked up than he engaged his Boer captors over their treatment of native Africans.

“Is it right,” his jailor demanded, that they “should walk on the pavement [sidewalk]—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 them…. We’ll stand no damned nonsense from them.”[14] Recording this, Churchill asked:

What is the true and original root of Dutch aversion to British rule? It is 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.[15]

Churchill labeled his jail time “In Durance Vile.”[16] Ever afterward he nursed a deep sympathy for convicts. As Home Secretary a decade or so later, he commuted sentences and stopped jailing people for petty offences, causing many a harrumph from the John Bulls of Edwardian Britain.

He was called a “traitor to his class” by the Tory aristocracy—even by his cousin Sunny, 9th Duke of Marlborough.[17] Churchill might have replied quoting his mentor David Lloyd George, whose name the Duke had forbidden at Blenheim Palace. “A fully-equipped Duke costs as much to keep as two dreadnoughts; and Dukes are just as great a terror and they last longer.”[18]

“Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem…”

Consider India and Gandhi, which today’s experts wish us to believe Churchill despised. In 1906, when young Winston was Undersecretary for the Colonies, Mohandas Gandhi appealed to him over the oppressed Indian minority in South Africa. A quarter century later, Churchill lost his battle against the Act which granted India more self-government. So he invited Gandhi’s friend, Ghanshyam Das Birla, to Chartwell. (Apparently he didn’t hate Indians enough not to invite them to lunch.)

“Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables,” Churchill told Birla. Indeed the abysmal treatment of Untouchables, or Dalits, had been basic to Churchill’s opposition to self-government. “You have got immense powers,” Churchill continued. “So make it a success.”

Birla asked, “What is your test of success?” Churchill replied—as he often replied when such questions arose: “Improvement in the lot of the masses, morally as well as materially. I do not care whether you are more or less loyal to Great Britain…but give the masses more butter…. Make every tiller of the soil his own landlord….Tell Mr. Gandhi to use the powers that are offered and make the thing a success.” Does that sound like a man who hated Indians?

Birla went home and repeated the conversation to the Mahatma. Gandhi replied: “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.”[19]

On Segregation and Africans

Here is another quote which his detractors always ignore. In 1942, Churchill was confronted with an influx of American forces in Britain, accompanied by the segregation of black troops. In cabinet he declared:

We need not, and should not, object. But they must not expect our authorities, civil or military, to assist them…. So far as concerned admission to canteens, public houses, theatres, cinemas, and so forth, there would, and must, be no restriction of the facilities hitherto extended to coloured persons as a result of the arrival of United States troops in this country.[20]

One more example—because we must be armed to the teeth against the charge that he was racist. In 1954, when he was still Prime Minister but nearing retirement, the Apartheid government in Pretoria made one of its periodic demands to annex three black-run British protectorates within its borders. Once again, Churchill’s precepts were consistent, and he minced no words:

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.[21]

Within a few years, Britain had granted all three protectorates independence. Today, Botswana, the former Basutoland, is one of the most prosperous and democratic countries in Africa.

Second, honor the whole

Among precepts frequently forgotten is Churchill’s broadness and modernity of thought. His notoriety rests on the 18 months that began 81 years ago today. Of course he didn’t win the war. His achievement was that, when Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone, he didn’t lose it.

“Take away Churchill in 1940,” wrote Charles Krauthammer, “and Britain would have settled with Hitler—or worse. Nazism would have prevailed. Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known.”[22] And Churchill himself declared: “Nothing surpasses 1940.”[23]

Nevertheless, like the Nobel Prize Committee who insisted on considering not just the war but his life’s work, Churchill cannot be remembered only in terms of his finest hour. This is the mistake almost every casual admirer makes. Unlike us, they don’t know the whole story—one of the key precepts. It is up to us to tell it.

The whole of Churchill’s philosophy concludes in Part 3…

Endnotes

[13] Mark Steyn, “Surrender Nothing,” Mark Steyn Show, 18 December 2020 accessed May 2021.

[14] Winston S. Churchill, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (London: Longmans Green, 1900), 60.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 273.

[17] R.W. Thompson, The Yankee Marlborough (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 127.

[18] Non-Churchill quotes in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta Books 2016) Kindle edition, 273.

[19] Remarks by Birla, Churchill and Gandhi are in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5, The Prophet of Truth 1922-1939 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2008), 618-19.

[20] War Cabinet: Conclusions (Cabinet papers, 65/28) October 1942, in Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, Testing Times, 1942 (Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 1278.

[21] WSC, House of Commons, 13 April 1954, in Martin Gilbert & Larry Arnn, eds., The Churchill Documents, Vol. 23, Never Flinch, Never Weary, October 1951-January 1965 (Hillsdale College Press, 2019), 1538.

[22] Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter (New York: Crown Forum, 2013), 23.

[23] Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949), 555.

Further reading

For Churchill’s lifetime support of native rights in South Africa see “‘The Art of the Possible’: Churchill, South Africa and Apartheid, in two parts starting here.

“The Aryan stock is bound to triumph”

Sufferers from “Churchill Derangement Syndrome” hold “Aryan stock” high among Winston Churchill’s appalling utterances. The remark rose again in correspondence with a journalist. I dug out for him the background of that remark, but his report omitted it. Out of context the quote is misleading, so I guess that’s just as well. But rather than write off several hours’ research, the facts might here serve to advance reality.

Wales in its Welsh Wisdom is thinking of moving statues of Churchill, Nelson and Gandhi to a museum, the Daily Telegraph informs us. My correspondent wrote: “Churchill is again under fire, this time from the Welsh government. It cites his support for the British Empire and his supposed belief in the superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race. The official Welsh government report examines what monuments and streets commemorate various figures. It throws in Gandhi for good measure.”

I wondered idly what Mohandas Gandhi, who didn’t suffer fools gladly, would say about all this? I think he would be amused, but then depressed, by the onward march of invincible ignorance. Gandhiji said some regrettable things about black Africans around 1906. Against that, the statue of this great man who led India’s quest for independence is to be proscribed in Wales? I should think the Welsh would approve of this champion of Home Rule. (And of Churchill, who campaigned for devolution before it became popular.)

“The Anglo-Saxon race”

Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project holds digital references to 80 million words of Churchill’s writings, speeches, letters, papers, plus biographies and memoirs about him. This resource reveals that he used the term “Anglo-Saxon race” exactly twice. The first referred to U.S. and British sailors, the second to US-UK Free Trade. You tell me whether either sounds racist:

The union of the Anglo-Saxon race is a great ideal, and if ever it is to be achieved it will be by increasing and not diminishing the friendly intercourse of trade between this country and the United States. Against such wanton folly as a tariff war with the United States, Free-traders appeal with confidence to Lancashire, and we hope that, as in years gone by, Lancashire will point the path of honour and wisdom to the people of the British islands. —Speech supporting Home Rule for Ireland, Public Hall, Cheetham Hill, Manchester, 16 June 1904, Complete Speeches I, 317

Churchill’s comment on Aryan stock occurred in an interview with Gustavus Ohlinger of Michigan University in January 1901. Ohlinger published part of that interview, entitled “Success in Journalism,” in the university’s journal The Islander. But much of the interview, including the Aryan remark, went unpublished. Decades later, Ohlinger published the full transcript.  (Michigan Quarterly Review, February 1966).

The context is significant. Ohlinger was born and grew up in China, where his parents were missionaries. Naturally, he and Churchill talked about the confrontation then going on between China and Russia. Ohlinger asked: what was his opinion? Churchill’s replied:

…we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them…as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph. Personally, I am not greatly concerned about Russian development in China.

Now, most today would object to “barbaric” as a description of China, or at least its people. One hundred twenty years ago, perhaps not. Churchill was however predicting the outcome of a Russia-China dispute. (Cynics will smirk over his idea “to take the Chinese in hand.” That’s still in vogue among certain politicians 120 years later.)

Who were the Aryans, anyway?

Taken out of context, “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph” certainly sounds racist today. In the original context, Churchill was talking about a rivalry between Chinese and Russians. Undoubtedly they are of two races, and Churchill thought the Chinese needed taking in hand. Did he mean absolute dominance of the white race? I think not. Nor do I think “Aryan” is quite the right term for Russians.

It took Adolf Hitler to give the word “Aryan” a bad name. It wasn’t aways thus. Defending Churchill from being called a “barbaric Monster” in a Canadian newspaper, Terry Reardon wrote:

The Toronto Star doesn’t inform us that Aryan horseman warriors from Central Asia migrated into the Indus Valley in the third millennium B.C. They were “as arrogant as they were tough,” wrote historian Arthur Herman. “Their very name, Arya, meant ‘master’ or ‘noble.’” They evolved into four classes, led by the Brahmins. Ironically, in view of the Star’s charges, “Aryan stock” is today the dominant demographic group in India.

On a radio talk show distributed by National Public Radio, one Aliyah Hasinah said World War II had been started by a Eugenics-besotted Winston Churchill. On August 8th, the Editorial Board of The Blade replied: “NPR gave airtime to an activist who has a clear ax to grind against Churchill, yet it couldn’t find a scholar or biographer to give us a depiction of the whole man? …. Churchill was not a perfect human being. He was often wrong and some of his failures were spectacular, But for the most part, he epitomizes eloquence, courage and love of country. He also saved Britain and therefore, arguably, the West.” This was soo much for reader Zareer Hasan, who sent a flamer which The Blade published a week later.

Mr. Hasan’s salvo

The Blade, wrote Mr. Hasan on August 16th, “reflects a limited and myopic reflection of history, supporting the romantic adulation of Winston Churchill…. He is responsible for many historical atrocities, from the Afghan wars 1897, Boer War, and support of Apartheid, the persistent subjugation of the subcontinent of India, the failed Gallipoli Campaign, massacre of Greek nationalists on his orders, praise of Nazi collaborators, and engineering the Bengal famine 1944 that left 4 million dead because he ordered the diversion of grain to Europe. Churchill was the biggest impediment towards independence of India and had a disdain for Indians, disparaging their leaders openly. He hated other races with deathly passion….

“His blatant quotations, which are plentiful, express his profound hatred, bigotry, and racism, which was overt…. he could be held today for crimes against humanity and perpetuator of profound racism. And, yet, he is glorified in many an institution. I am amazed that your editorial justifies these actions as ‘mistakes,’ to save Britain and the West. It calls into question your moral standing to ever criticize other bloodthirsty tyrants and evildoers.” There was more along these lines, as the link above will demonstrate.

A reply in The Blade, August 30th

Mr. Hasan reminds one of Churchill’s response to a fulminating critic. “The Right Honorable Gentleman should not generate more indignation than he can contain.”

How to answer this cacophony of generalities without a single reference? Mr. Hasan has read his Twitter and Facebook. He has made up his mind. But facts are stubborn things:

Churchill’s first two books denounced British atrocities in Afghanistan and Sudan. From age 25 he consistently supported equal rights for South African blacks. Aged 80, he refused the Apartheid regime’s demand to annex protectorates like Botswana and Lesotho. He also backed South Africa’s Indian minority, earning Gandhi’s gratitude. (Does Mr. Hasan know they ended respectful of each other?)

Churchill came out for Indian self-government in 1918. Equally, he deplored Hindu-Muslim strife and the dominance of one caste and religion. His wartime outbursts against disputatious bureaucracy in Delhi (reported by only one colleague) did not affect his efforts to ease the Bengal Famine. Churchill scoured the world for grain, getting much from Australia. Indian historian Tirthankar Roy writes that the Bengal government failed to bring food “to the region internally, where there was no famine. The real question is why this didn’t happen, rather than what Churchill did.”

* * *

The Kenya Mau Mau practiced more atrocities than the British and had more native opponents than supporters. British Cabinet minutes show Churchill speaking of Kenya exactly twice: once out of concern over loss of life, once to warn 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.”

Churchill, born when Darwin was still alive, did believe in a hierarchy of races, an idea repugnant and ridiculous today. Nevertheless, his ideas on equal rights for peoples of all colors marked him as a dangerous radical among the establishment of his time. Like all humans, he made mistakes. He also in 1940 made possible the survival of free peoples, including those with lungs powerful enough to witheringly denounce him.

Mr. Hasan should educate himself, simply by googling the works of serious historians. Try Arthur Herman (“Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine would have been Worse”). Or the Indian scholar Zareer Masani: “Churchill a War Criminal? Get Your History Right.” —RML

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.

Case for  the defense: “If we allow our monuments and statues and place-names to be torn down because of our present-day views, and claims of people being offended by our built environment that has been around for decades and sometimes centuries, it speaks to a pathetic lack of confidence in ourselves as a nation. We are on the way to a society of competing victimhoods, atomized and balkanized into smaller and smaller communities, which ironically enough is something racists want too.” —Andrew Roberts

Defense of the good

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has joined many other groups and individuals in defense of the good. The good in this case is the name and legacy of Sir Winston Churchill.

Who would have thought, a few weeks ago, that anyone would suggest moving his statue from Parliament Square? Because it was defaced? Statues of Lincoln and Gandhi also suffered. Even the statue of Nelson Mandela is boarded up—a defense in his case from neo-Nazi demonstrators. What a world we live in.

Some advise we beat a retreat before these expressions of unlearned ignorance. Let’s fence off Parliament Square, they say. Or move the statues to museums. NO.

Please read Andrew Roberts’ “Stop this Trashing of our Monuments—and our Past”. It is one of the finest pieces he has ever written:

Churchill’s attitude to the native peoples of the British Empire, for example, is a nuanced one that cannot be summed up by three words spray-painted on his statue. He undoubtedly make remarks and the occasional joke about non-white people that today we would find completely unacceptable…. he also made equally or more disparaging remarks about Europeans too. Unlike Karl Marx, Churchill never used the N-word, which dyed-in-the-wool racists tended to in those days…. throughout his life, Churchill fought to protect the non-white peoples of the Empire.

Churchill’s life matters

We have assisted others in defense of Churchill’s good name, responding to ignorant articles full of factual distortions. One of these refuted a particularly egregious article in the June 15th Sunday Times. The Churchill Project has been in the forefront of correcting myths, distortions and lies. For example:

Not “a man of his time”

His defenders sometimes excuse Churchill by saying he was “only a man of his time.” That is not good enough. From age 25, when he argued with a Boer captor about native rights, to age 80, when he denied South Africa’s claim to Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, he was viewed as a naive progressive by the forces of repression. True, he was sometimes paternalistic. And, says Hillsdale’s President Larry Arnn, “you can quote Abraham Lincoln in precisely the same sense….

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. Therefore to say that Churchill was “a man of his time,” or that “everyone back then was a racist,” is to miss the singular feature.

We spend a lot of time arguing that Churchill was remarkable. Then when something comes along that we do not like, we excuse it or explain it as typical of the age. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist.

Another thing to remember was 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.

Nothing can save us if we will not save ourselves

The time for courtesy and niceties, for backing off to avoid confrontation, for hoping things will die down, is over. The truth must refute excessive, unlearned, biased assertions. Winston Churchill was aware of this long ago, when he spoke following St. George’s Day, 1933:

“The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within… from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength…. from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals…. from acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians.… Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.”

Let’s hope we have not learned nothing since then.

__________________________________

Addendum: Subscribe to the Hillsdale College Churchill Project

“The study of statesmanship is central to the teaching mission of Hillsdale College, which includes cultivating the moral and intellectual virtues. Winston Churchill’s career presents an unsurpassed opportunity for such study. because it was so long, because the facts of it are so well recorded, and because its quality was so very high. His career spanned the most traumatic events in history. As he faced these crises, Churchill wrote with profuse detail and with great ability, leaving one of the richest records of human undertaking.

“Hillsdale College launched the Churchill Project to propagate a right understanding of Churchill’s record. It has completed the remaining volumes of The Churchill Documents, a series in his official biography. Archived at Hillsdale are the papers of his official biographer, Martin Gilbert, and the Ronald Cohen collection of his published contributions. The project promotes Churchill scholarship through conferences, scholarships, online courses, and an endowed faculty chair. Through these endeavors, Hillsdale College is at the forefront of Churchill research, scholarship, and analysis.” —From the HCCP mission statement

We invite you to keep abreast of this work with a free subscription. You will receive regular notices of events and new posts as published. Click here, scroll to bottom, and fill in your email in the box entitled “Stay in touch with us.” (We will not share your email with anyone.)

John Ivison in Canada’s National Post makes the point: “Donald Trump is no Winston Churchill, and the comparison is ludicrous.” He refers to a June 3rd statement by the President’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany. (She compared Trump’s appearance at St. John’s Episcopal Church across from the White House to Churchill visiting the blitzed East End in 1940.)

I think from a purely historical point of view we can all agree with him. In 1940, Churchill wrote, “There was a white glow, over-powering, sublime, which ran through our Island from end to end.” The scene in Washington the week of June 1st was anything but a white glow.

This was an egregious example, but many have deplored Trump-Churchill comparisons. I too have made my contribution. (Personally, I’d settle for Trump being more like Ronald Reagan. It is possible to implement a conservative agenda without driving the opposition into apoplexy. Remember President Reagan’s relationship with his Speaker of the House? How adroitly Reagan rid himself of Michael Deaver? When sacking subordinates, there is no need to “embalm, cremate and bury,” to use a Churchill phrase.)

Unfortunately, Mr. Ivison also found it necessary to assert that Churchill himself “was massively flawed,” a drive-by shooting in the onward march of invincible ignorance. A good journalist, he did some homework—just not enough.

Gassing the Indians

Mr. Ivison quoted journalist Murad Hemmadi for saying Churchill advocated gassing Indians rebelling against the British Raj in 1919. Ivison says “it was closer to tear gas than mustard gas.” It wasn’t “closer.” It was tear gas. Churchill specifically stated it be non-lethal. The facts are readily available. They require only elementary research.

More notably, Churchill excoriated the British general who reacted to the 1919 rebellion with the Amritsar Massacre: “Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.” (Amritsar” only ever refers to 1919, writes Andrew Roberts, “rather than the Indian massacre of ten times the number of people there in 1984.”)

Mr. Ivison quotes someone that “Churchill ‘signed off’ on terms at Yalta that consigned tens of millions to Soviet rule.” This is an interesting juxtaposition of charges, but Churchill is fair game for the Right as well as the Left. Whatever one’s politics, it’s an empty accusation. Terry Reardon rebutted it in Churchill Society of Canada’s reply to National Post: “Soviet troops occupied almost the whole of Eastern Europe and the only alternative for Churchill would have been to start a Third World War.” (In Moscow, 1944, Churchill did work out a “deal” keeping Greece out of Stalin’s clutches. Naturally he was roundly condemned for that, too.)

Starving the Bengalis

Indians nevertheless have grievances, Mr. Ivison continued. “Churchill was prime minister at the time of the Bengal famine in 1943, when an estimated three million people died and the sub-continent was still exporting rice to the rest of the British Empire.” Churchill’s “only possible defence was that he was pre-occupied by the war in Europe.”

True, a little matter of the Second World War did tend to distract Churchill. Mr. Ivison fails, however, to acknowledge all Churchill did to alleviate the famine. Mr. Reardon again: “The fact is that on 8 October 1943, Churchill sent an order to Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India. [He ordered that] every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes to deal with local shortages.”

That is only part of the story. Arthur Herman, author of Gandhi and Churchill, wrote the definitive reply to the famine canard. If one discusses this, it would seem elementary to refer to a Pulitzer-nominated scholar. “Absent Churchill,” wrote Arthur Herman, “the Bengal Famine would have been worse.”

Amidst the cacophony of ignorance surrounding this Churchill myth rises the truth, via Indian historian Tirthankar Roy: Large supplies of rice were stockpiled in Bengal by grain merchants, in the hope of higher prices. “The War Cabinet did not divert enough ships from the theatres of war to Bengal or order India to divert army rations to feeding people because the Cabinet believed what the Bengalis told it: there was no shortage of food in Bengal.” (How British Rule Changed India’s Economy, 130.)

Gandhi: whilst on the subject

“Churchill considered Gandhi ‘a bad man and an enemy of the Empire,’” Ivison wrote. “He was widely blamed for the Dardanelles disaster in the First World War, which saw him demoted as First Lord of the Admiralty and consigned to the trenches on the Western Front.” He wasn’t “consigned,” he volunteered. But on the Dardanelles, no argument. Churchill himself recognized this as one of his cardinal errors. That was a big one—maybe his biggest.

On Gandhi, the subject is nuanced, for there was more to the Gandhi-Churchill relationship than the 1935 India Act. The “bad man” quote does not apply to all of their relationship (1906-45). Also, it is hearsay—from the memoirs General Sir John Kennedy (The Business of War, 1957, 288; Kennedy was Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff, 1943-45.) It appears only in that book. Whether Churchill said it or not, a modicum of fairness would be to stipulate that the quote is from someone else.

Which is not to deny any of the insulting things Churchill said about Gandhi before they resumed exchanging pleasantries. It is only to suggest a more complicated relationship than one out-of-context quote suggests. In the end, they respected each other. There is abundant proof.

“Racial hierarchies and Eugenics”

Churchill, Mr. Ivison continued, “has been roundly criticized for his views on racial hierarchies and Eugenics…. His views were not exceptional in his time.” Again this is both right and wrong. Churchill briefly favored Eugenics—segregating or confining the “feeble minded” to avoid lowering the intelligence of the populace. This lasted for about eighteen months in his mid-thirties. The story is well known. “Churchill’s intentions were benign,” wrote historian Paul Addison, “but he was blundering into sensitive areas of civil liberty.” Addison was not however totally censorious: “It is rare to discover in the archives the reflections of a politician on the nature of man.”

Churchill “was born a Victorian aristocrat,” Ivision continued, “and his attitudes on race, class and Empire were entirely typical of the era.” This is wide of the mark, although it’s an excuse often trotted out by Churchill’s defenders. To describe his views as typical of his time is unlearned and wrong.

In fact, young Churchill’s attitudes toward race marked him as a dangerous radical in the minds of the British establishment. One has only to consider his wrangles with the Boers in South Africa to appreciate this. In 1900 he wrote of their “abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man.” This was not what contemporary Englishmen expected from the scion of a ducal family.

True, Churchill spoke betimes in ungenerous terms about non-whites. “And,” says a leading scholar of them both, “you can quote Abraham Lincoln in precisely the same sense.” You can similarly quote America’s founders (who abolished slavery in two-thirds of the Union during their lifetimes). “That is not the singular feature.”

The remarkable thing…

…is not that Churchill or Lincoln had the standard view of racial questions: “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. Therefore, to say that Winston Churchill was ‘a man of his time,’ or that ‘everyone back then was a racist,’ is to miss the singular feature….

We spend a lot of time arguing that Churchill was remarkable. Then when something comes along that we do not like, we excuse it or explain it as typical of the age. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist. Another thing to remember was 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.*

_________

*These remarks will be quoted more fully in Part 2 of my piece on Churchill and South Africa for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

Lionized villain or necessary hero?

Murad Hammadi described Churchill as a “lionized villain.” This is not, he wrote, simply to throw “great men down George Orwell’s memory hole.” It is, rather, to dredge the “misdeeds and crimes” of those leaders up out of it.

What crimes, exactly? Criticism is fine, provided it’s legitimate. I’ve written much of it myself. Massively flawed? Churchill’s flaws like his virtues were on a grand scale, but the latter vastly outweighed the former.

One can’t help feeling that Mr. Ivison agrees, despite his scattershot catalogue of sins. “Some people,” he writes, “would like to promote an alternative version of history that portrays the values and events they hold dear. But the historical record should not be re-written to suit political ends.” I think that might be true! He views with alarm the possible removal of Churchill’s name from schools, or vandalizing memorials—in London his statue was recently defaced twice. He is certainly right. On balance, Winston Churchill remains a hero, and these words of John Ivison are worth remembering:

As the plaque on his likeness at Toronto City Hall proclaims: “His faith and leadership inspired free men to fight in every quarter of the globe for the triumph of justice and liberty.” My father recalled sitting around the radio with his family in Scotland listening to Churchill’s wireless addresses, and well remembered their power. Churchill was the necessary hero at the most troubled moment in modern history.

Alas we live in a time of madness, if we define madness as the absence of reason.

Whether invented by the President or his scriptwriters, some of Trump’s nicknames were very effective. “Low-energy Jeb” torpedoed Governor Bush‘s 2016 presidential campaign better than any debate gaffe. “Mini-Mike” didn’t help Mayor Bloomberg‘s in 2020. But except in extreme cases like Hitler, Churchill’s name-calling was more effective and less wounding. Especially when he rather admired certain qualities in opponents. (He called Lloyd George a “cad” in his youth, but ever after praised the “Welsh Wizard.”)

* Asterisks indicate nicknames not used in a public setting. Churchill, after all, had some discretion. But I leave them in for fun. 

Nicknames: Admiral Row-Back to Can’t Tellopolus

Admiral Row-Back: Admiral Sir John Roebuck (1862-1928), Royal Navy officer. Commanded the initial Anglo-French attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1915. Having nearly succeeded, he turned back after losses to mines, incurring Churchill’s permanent loathing and censure and an appropriate nickname.

*Block: Herbert H. Asquith (1852-1928), Liberal Prime Minister, 1908-16. He let Churchill dangle in the Dardanelles/Gallipoli debacle, which sent WSC packing as First Lord of the Admiralty. This was a private nickname between Churchill and his wife. It may refer to Asquith’s frequent role as a block to Churchill’s proposals.

Bloodthirsty Guttersnipe: Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), German Chancellor and Führer, 1933-45. First publicly declared in a broadcast after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. It wasn’t the first Churchillian jab, nor by any means the last.. There is no shortage of insulting nicknames in Hitler’s case; but this is as good an example as any. (See also “Corporal Schicklgrüber,” in comments below.)

Boneless Wonder: James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), Labour Prime Minister, 1924, 1929-35. A devastating comparison to a circus attraction, applied in 1931. Churchill was ridiculing Ramsay Mac’s lack of principle and wavering domestic policies. In private he considered MacDonald a servant of Crown and Parliament. But only in private.

Canting Bus Driver: Frank Pick (1878-1941), headed London Passenger Transport Board 1933-40. “Never let me see that-that-that canting bus driver again.” Churchill wrote this in red ink on a memorandum from Minister of Information Alfred Duff Cooper when Pick resigned.

*Can’t Tellopolus: Panagiotis Kannelopoulos (1902-1986), Minister of Defense, Greek exile government in Cairo, 1942-45. Churchill was impatient with his indecision about Greek resistance to the occupying Germans. Alexander Cadogan, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, heard these “mutterings from Churchill’s bathroom, between the splashings and gurgles.”

Chattering Cad – Green-Eyed Radical

*Chattering Little Cad: David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Liberal Prime Minister 1916-22. Said in 1901, when Churchill was still a Conservative. After he switched to the Liberals in 1904, his attitude changed. He rarely spoke ill of Lloyd George afterward, despite many provocations. WSC’s wife regarded LG as treacherous. He duly refused to join the Churchill coalition in 1940.

*Coroner: Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940). Conservative Prime Minister, 1937-40. Originally coined by Brendan Bracken (also “Ironmonger” for Baldwin), this remained in the family lexicon. In 1961, Lady Diana Cooper introduced young Martin Gilbert to Randolph Churchill by saying “he hates the Coroner.” (A bit strong—he surely didn’t hate Chamberlain).

*Dull, Duller, Dulles: John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, 1952-60. After Stalin’s death, Churchill argued for a “settlement” of the Cold War, but Dulles (and Eisenhower) were obdurate. “Ten years ago I could have dealt with him. Even as it is I have not been defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay.” —Churchill at the Bermuda Conference, December 1953.

Green-eyed Antipodean Radical: David Low (1891-1963), New Zealand cartoonist. Churchill had a certain affinity for the left-wing cartoonist whose attacks he admired. He called Low the greatest of modern cartoonists. There was mutual respect despite political differences, and Low drew a beautiful cartoon tribute on WSC’s 80th birthday.

Half-Naked Fakir – Llama

Half-Naked Fakir: Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948, Indian independence leader. The worst sobriquet attached to the Great Mahatma, when Churchill thought Gandhi an upperclass Brahman posing as a champion of the downtrodden. Yet they both nursed a private respect for each other and, in the end, were more forgiving. See “Welcome, Mr. Gandhi” herein.

Holy Fox: Edward Wood, 3rd Viscount Halifax (1881-1959, Foreign Minister, 1938-40, Ambassador to Washington, 1940-46. Verified by Halifax biographer Andrew Roberts, who writes: “It was a Churchill family nickname, of course a reference to his High Church beliefs as well as his love of hunting. And a certain amount of political foxiness….”

*Home Sweet Home: Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Home of the Hirsel (1903-1995), British Prime Minister 1963-64. Neville Chamberlain’s “eyes and ears” in Parliament, he always maintained that the Munich deal had saved Britain by giving it an extra year to prepare for war, ignoring the fact that it also gave Hitler an extra year, and he prepared far more rapidly. (His name was pronounced “Hume,” but that didn’t stop Churchill.)

*Llama: Charles de Gaulle ( 1890-1970 ), French General and President. Lord Moran wrote: “Was it true, [Lady Limerick] asked, that he had likened de Gaulle to a female llama who had been surprised in her bath? Winston pouted, smiled and shook his head. But his way of disavowing the remark convinced me that he was in fact responsible for this indiscretion…”

Limpet to Prince Palsy

Lion-hearted Limpet Leader: Clement Attlee (1883-1967), Labour Prime Minister 1945-51. Many disparaging cracks about Attlee (arriving in an “empty taxi”) are apocryphal. But this was an April 1951 jibe at Attlee and Labour MPs clinging to power. Churchill and the Conservatives turned them out in a general election the following October.

Minister of Disease: Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Labour Minister of Health 1945-51, founder of the National Health Service. One of the rougher nicknames, applied in the Commons, 1948. “…is not morbid hatred a form of mental disease, and indeed a highly infectious form?” Churchill asked. He also called Bevan a “squalid nuisance.”

Old Grey Tabby: Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), Conservative Prime Ministers, 1902-05. After he succeeded Churchill at the Admiralty in 1915, WSC feared the “Old Grey Tabby” would dissolve the Royal Naval Division. (Balfour did resemble a tabby cat in old age, but Churchill continued to admire him, and memorialized him in Great Contemporaries.)

Pink Pansies: Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) and his friends. Member of Parliament, 1935-45. I am aware this violates P.C. decorum and will no doubt be added to Churchill’s “sins.” True, Nicolson was bisexual, but a) Churchill was emphatically not homophobic, and b), the reference (Parliament, late 1945) was to non-combative young Tory MPs.

Prince Palsy: Paul of Yugoslavia (1893-1976), Prince Regent of Yugoslavia, 1934-41. His palsied hand signed a treaty with Hitler. This  assured German occupation, the end of his Regency, and Churchill’s disdain. Exiled in Kenya, he appealed for refuge in Britain, but Churchill considered him a traitor and war criminal.

Scheming Prelate to Turnip

Scheming Prelate: Damaskinos Papandreou (1891-1949), Archbishop of Athens, 1945-49. Churchill, mediating the Greek civil war in late 1944, allegedly asked if he was “a man of God or a scheming Mediterranean prelate?” Assured that he was the latter, Churchill supposedly said, “Good, he’s just our man.” (Not verified)

Snub-nosed Radical: Liberal heckler, 1887. Aged only twelve, young Winston was attending a pantomime where he heard a man hissing a portrait of his father. He burst into tears, then turned on the perpetrator: “Stop that row, you snub-nosed radical!” This may be Churchill’s first political zinger.

Spurlos Versenkt (Sunk without a Trace): Sir Benjamin Smith (1879-1964), Labour Minister of Food, 1944-46. After he resigned from Parliament, Churchill searched “for the burly ‘and engaging form of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman. He has departed ‘spurlos versenkt,’ as the German expression says—sunk without leaving a trace behind.”

Turnip: Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947), Conservative Prime Minister, 1925-29, 1935-37. Baldwin made Churchill Chancellor in 1925, but later kept him out of the Cabinet. After his final resignation, “S.B.” appeared in the House of Commons smoking room. Churchill quipped, “Well, the light is at last out of that old turnip.”

Useless Percy to Wuthering Height

*Useless Percy: Eustace Percy, First Baron of Newcastle (1887-1958). Board of Education President, 1924-29. At the Exchequer 1924-29, Churchill tried to lower the defense budget. Percy and Minister of Health Chamberlain  were opposed. “Neville is costing £2 millions more and Lord Useless Percy the same,” WSC wrote his wife on 30 September 1927.  “…these civil departments browse onwards like a horde of injurious locusts.”

Whipped Jackal: Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Italian Prime Minister, 1922-43, Duce of Fascism, 1943-45. Churchill praised him briefly before the war, but after joining Hitler he became a “whipped jackal… frisking up at the side of the German tiger with yelpings not only of appetite—that can be understood—but even of triumph!”

Wincing Marquess: Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne (1845-1927), House of Lords, 1886-1927. Churchill, 1909: “he claimed no right…to mince the Budget, [only] the right to wince when swallowing it. Well, that is a much more modest claim…. If his Party are satisfied with the Wincing Marquess, we have no reason to protest.”

*Wuthering Height: John Charles Walsham, 1st Baron Reith (1889-1971),  BBC Director General, 1923-38. The towering Reith was briefly in the wartime Coalition Cabinet. But he’d kept Churchill off the air in the 1930s, and no love was lost between them. WSC rejoiced to have seen “the last of that Wuthering Height” around 1940.

Rightly or wrongly, every day on the Internet, Churchill is praised, lampooned, quoted and misquoted. But comparisons to modern politicians have worn thin. They may emulate him, but should not be compared to him.

Johnson’s Day in the barrel

On 15 June the Wall Street Journal focused on British prime minister in waiting Boris Johnson. Columnist Peggy Noonan wrote a perceptive piece about his prospects and challenges: “England Needs a Slap, and so does China.”

Aside from badly misrepresenting Churchill’s sobriety, she made good points. Boris Johnson’s friends, she wrote, are “have the grating habit of comparing him to Winston Churchill.” Grating is a good word. Mr. Johnson needs to talk to his friends.

Boris’s enemies adopted the same tactic after he was appointed Prime Minister on 24 July. Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman used Johnson’s own description of WSC in his Churchill biography to suggest they were peas in a pod:

“He wasn’t what people thought of as a man of principle. He was a glory-chasing goal-mouth-hanging opportunist…. As for his political career—my word, what a feast of bungling!…he was thought to be congenitally untrustworthy.”

The New York Times likened Johnson’s frequent allusions to the “Dunkirk spirit” in Britain’s exit from the European Union as a fetish: “The idea that Britain, acting alone, can exact favorable terms from much larger powers such as China, Europe or, indeed, the United States, is a delusion… Britain will become a middling provincial country, whose fortunes will be subject to the whims of others… Churchill would have been horrified.”

Since Britain is the world’s fifth largest economy, that is anything but a foregone conclusion. Nor does it suggest what Churchill really thought about a Britain within a federal Europe.

Next Mr. Trump

Then there’s Mr. Trump. His supporters extoll his Churchill characteristics: pugnacity, conviction, diehard devotion to causes and policies. Fans visualize him on Dover’s white cliffs, defying oncoming Democrat Messerschmitts and Dorniers. “We shall go on to the end…We shall never surrender.” (As far as I know, Trump has not yet proclaimed himself a Churchill, though he sometimes suggests he’s Lincoln or Washington.)

“Do you see any comparisons to the President?” I was asked recently. I waffled and gave a dusky answer. The question seemed so preposterous that it took me by surprise. Having now thought about it, yes, there are similarities—but also many differences.

Like Trump, Churchill said what he thought people should hear, straining nothing through advisors or focus groups. “Tell the truth to the British people!” he thundered in the 1930s as Germany armed. In war, he explained, they are “the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.” (For some three years, the worst was all he could tell them.)

Parallels and Divergencies

Like Trump and Johnson, Churchill often tackled the media: “A few critical or scathing speeches, a stream of articles in the newspapers, showing…how incompetent are those who bear the responsibility,” he said in 1933, “these obtain the fullest publicity.”

When the BBC threatened to censor his broadcasts he quipped: “We can picture [BBC director] Sir John Reith, with the perspiration mantling on his lofty brow, with his hand on the control switch, wondering, as I utter every word, whether it will not be his duty to protect his innocent subscribers from some irreverent thing I might say about Mr. Gandhi, or about the Bolsheviks…”

Abroad, however, Churchill was far more careful than Trump—and his predecessor. In London before the Brexit vote, President Obama said that if Britain left the EU it would have to go “to the back of the queue.”

Trump cheered the Brexit vote.  In London in 2019 he endorsed Johnson for prime minister. (Another of his friends Boris needs to speak to?)

Churchill was very different. “When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country,” he said in 1947, when he was Leader of the Opposition. “I make up for lost time when I come home.”

Unlike Trump, Churchill abroad never took sides between foreign politicians. In Washington in 1954 he said, “I am not going to choose between Republicans and Democrats. I want the lot.” No foreign leader has said that for awhile.

Forget the Comparisons

Let’s be serious. We can’t compare Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, or anybody else to Winston Churchill. Superficial resemblances exist, but everything else overwhelms them.

My friend the college president has the best answer whenever anybody indulges in silly comparisons. I warmly recommend it to you, conscious that I intrude upon his copyright. When asked if  “X” is like Churchill, Dr. Larry Arnn usually responds:

Winston Churchill served in four wars and wrote five books by age 25. He held every major office except foreign minister.  Twice prime minister, he was politically prominent for fifty years. Writing fifty books he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He composed 4000 articles and speeches; in all he produced 15 million words. His official biography is thirty-one volumes, and there are a thousand books about him. Sure, X is just like Churchill.

Accurate, But Not Dispositive

Mr. Dowden’s article seems to me broadly accurate, but not dispositive.

It is true that Britain dropped its opposition to making South Africa a “white man’s country” in 1909 by passing the Union of South Africa Act. Winston Churchill supported that Act because he saw it as the way to ease lingering tensions with the Boers. He justified his support by saying explicitly that it was the best possible solution, but he did not like it.

Churchill was a political man. He needed, and thought he needed, the votes of a majority. If he lived in an age of prejudice (and every age is that) then of course he would be careful how he offended those prejudices. See “Churchill and Racism.”

Apartheid and Smuts

It is quite true that Smuts believed in a “white man’s country” and in segregation in his earlier years. But the article doesn’t mention that when the pro-Apartheid National Party won the 1948 election, it defeated Smuts, who had run in support of the Fagin Commission, which had recommended relaxing segregation.

Early on, Churchill and Smuts expressed very unfashionable attitudes toward races their societies generally considered inferior. In 1899, Churchill tells his Boer captors that blacks are entitled to the same rights as any others in the British Empire.* In 1939, Smuts writes an essay for a commemorative book on Gandhi’s 70th birthday. Although Churchill and Smuts were Gandhi adversaries at times, they had a mutual respect and even admiration for each other. See “Welcome, Mr. Gandhi.”

*Pretoria, 1899

Churchill’s Boer captor: “No, no, old chappie, we don’t want your flag; we want to be left alone. We are free, you are not free.”

Churchill: “How do you mean ‘not free’?”

Boer: “Well, is it right that a dirty Kaffir should walk on the pavement [sidewalk]—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….We know how to treat Kaffirs in this country. Fancy letting the black filth walk on the pavement!….Educate a Kaffir! Ah, that’s you English all over. No, no, old chappie. We educate ’em with a stick. Treat ’em with humanity and consideration—I like that. They were put here by the God Almighty to work for us. We’ll stand no damned nonsense from them. We’ll keep them in their proper places.”

Churchill: “Probing at random I had touched a very sensitive nerve. What is the true and original root of Dutch aversion to British rule?… British government is associated in the Boer farmer’s mind with violent social revolution…. 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.”

—From Winston S. Churchill, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900), 59-60.

Gandhi in the Square

Every time you realize how badly the media mangles something you know about, you wonder how well they are reporting everything else.

The announcement that a statue of Gandhi would be placed in Parliament Square near that of Winston Churchill unleashed a barrage of ignorance. Would Churchill wish to share space with his “onetime nemesis”?

The Associated Press quoted Churchill’s famous “half-naked fakir” crack (inaccurately), and said he called Gandhi a “middling lawyer.” (Churchill’s term was “Middle Temple lawyer,” something else entirely.)

The Wall Street Journal worried that Parliament Square also includes a statue of Jan Smuts, “a prime minister of South Africa in the early 20th century who favored segregation.”

Dear oh dear.

Smuts was prime minister in 1939-48, not early in the century. He was voted out when he campaigned in favor of relaxing segregation. As a junior minister in 1906 Smuts did oppose equal rights for the Indian minority. But here he disagreed with his longtime friend Winston Churchill, then Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies.

A few stray truths

Gandhi in 1935 remarked: “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.”

Gandhi said this to his chief lieutenant, Ghanshyam Birla, who lunched with Churchill at Chartwell following passage of the Government of India Act, a step toward independence. Churchill had opposed this bill, and had said some pretty rough things.

But Churchill was magnanimous—a quality sadly lacking among politicians today. “Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables,” he told Birla. “I do not like the Bill but it is now on the Statute Book….So make it a success.”

Birla asked: “What is your test of success?” Churchill replied: “…improvement in the lot of the masses….I do not care whether you are more or less loyal to Great Britain. I do not mind about education, but give the masses more butter….Make every tiller of the soil his own landlord….Provide a good bull for every village…. Use the powers that are offered and make the thing a success.”

Among other things, such statements suggest a better understanding of contemporary India than Churchill is said to have had by his many critics, who insist that he thought of it in terms of a 19th century Victorian.

On independence

Churchill did have a tic about an Indian independence movement led by the Brahmin class. But before we pigeonhole him as an unrepentant imperialist, consider what he and Gandhi had in common.

Gandhi and Churchill viewed a break-up of the subcontinent with regret and sadness. Both feared religious extremism, Hindu or Muslim. Each believed in the peaceful settlement of boundary disputes. Both strove for liberty. Such precepts more widely held would be welcome today. In Parliament Square, Churchill will be fine with Gandhi.