Gandhi & Churchill (106 page)

Attlee felt free to call Churchill’s Dardanelles conception “the only imaginative strategic idea of the war” and described how in 1940 he had been “the daring pilot in extremity…whom Britain had required.” Attlee described how time and again people had said, “Churchill is finished,” only to have him return to prominence, return to power, and wind up “the most distinguished member of the Parliamentary family.”

Churchill rose to thank Attlee and the members. “This is to me the most memorable public occasion of my life,” he told them. He thanked them also for their comments about his essential role in the war. However, “I have never accepted what many people have kindly said,” he added, “that I inspired the nation…It was the nation and the race dwelling around the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called on to give the roar.”
³²
Now the roar was fading—even as the national heart was fading, too.

No debate about who would succeed him took place, as Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had been his heir apparent since 1940. “I am now nearing the end of the journey,” Churchill told the Commons on his eightieth birthday. Yet he resisted the inevitable transfer of power. The truth was, he was terrified about what his successors might do once he stepped down. Britain’s army and navy were steadily shrinking; so was the empire; yet the world seemed more full of menace than ever.

The first test of the hydrogen bomb in 1954 deeply depressed him. “The greatest menace to civilization since the Mongols,” he called it. But it was also a sign that the future belonged to the wielders of this massive destructive power, the Soviet Union and the United States. “[The Americans] will make the big decisions now,” Winston confided to Eden in July. “Without their help, England would be isolated; she might become, like France, a satellite of Russia.” Then his voice broke, and his eyes filled with tears.
³³

Finally Eden decided fourteen years of waiting was long enough. By the spring of 1955 it was clear that Churchill could not go on. The Tories used his name once more to secure their reelection. Then on March 1 Winston gave his last major speech in the House of Commons. It was almost half a century from the day that he had crossed the gangway from the Tory benches to the party of Asquith and Lloyd George. Now he spoke of the bomb, and the division of the world into free and Communist camps. The partnership between Britain and the United States, he said, must never be injured or retarded as long as the forces of darkness continued to stalk the planet.

“Mercifully, there is time and hope if we combine patience and courage,” he concluded. “Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.”
³⁴
It was his farewell message to the British people. A little more than a month later he formally handed over the reins of office.

Jock Colville had been his faithful secretary when he first became prime minister in 1940. He had been with him during the darkest days of the war and in the dark days after the 1945 elections. Colville had been present during his massive stroke. Now he was with him at the farewell dinner at Number 10, including all the members of the cabinet, the successor prime minister Anthony Eden, and even the queen and Prince Philip. Afterward Churchill retired upstairs and sat half-undressed on the bed, silent and deep in thought.

Colville was about to leave when Churchill suddenly looked up and, with real vehemence but also resigned despair, said, “I don’t believe that Anthony can do it.”
³⁵

It was his first openly expressed fear that Eden could not keep Britain strong and influential in the world, as Churchill would have wanted. Indeed, the Great Imperial Unraveling was about to begin.

“If Winston has believed in anything at all in the course of his long life,” Lord Moran noted in his diary, “it has been the British Empire and all that it stands for.” British India had represented his youth. Now India was gone.
³⁶
The end of India in turn meant just what Winston had always feared: the end of the rest of the empire. The Raj had been the keystone of the great arc of empire from South Africa and Egypt to Singapore, Rangoon, and Hong Kong. Without it the pieces no longer fit together, and the design no longer made sense.

Palestine was the first to go, in 1947. Then Burma in 1948. In 1954 Churchill presided over the withdrawal of British troops from Egypt after seventy-two years, which the
Daily Express
blasted as “the greatest surrender…since the Socialists and Mountbatten engineered the scuttle from India.” Churchill was chagrined to be the target of this Churchillian rhetorical assault. “Fancy my ending my career with clearing out of Egypt,” he murmured.
³⁷

Suez was next. Even Churchill had to admit, “Now that we no longer hold India the canal means little to us.”
³⁸
Even after British troops left Egypt, Churchill had been adamant about keeping them in the canal zone. But in June 1955 Eden reversed that policy and ordered the evacuation of the last British garrison from Suez. A month later Egypt’s dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the vital water route for himself. Eden tried in vain to take it back by force with the help of French tanks and paratroops. When the Americans protested, Eden hesitated and finally pulled the plug on Operation Musketeer. It was an international humiliation for both the British and French. It also cost Eden his health and his job.

Churchill was horrified by the Suez debacle. Nasser he considered a blackguard and “malicious swine,” but he was equally disappointed in Eden’s vacillation and weakness. In a few short months Eden had destroyed the one imperial legacy Churchill had left, Britain’s credibility in the Middle East. Anthony Eden, the reliable son he always wanted
^*141
but never had, had in the end betrayed him.

So did Eden’s replacement, Harold Macmillan—another old Churchill crony. Macmillan’s aristocratic accents, ramrod-stiff manner, and drooping walrus mustache made him seem a Victorian survival, a throwback to palmier imperial days. In fact, it was Macmillan who would extend the Great Unraveling to Africa. Ghana (the former Gold Coast) became independent in 1957, then Nigeria in 1960. Both joined the commonwealth, but the principle was now established that British Africa would be ruled by native, not imperial, priorities.

Indeed, as the Conference of Commonwealth Ministers met every year, the number of black and brown faces grew. Macmillan, always a popular figure at these conferences, made this development seem more a matter of celebration than regret. “The processes which gave birth to the nation-States of Europe have been repeated all over the world,” he told an audience in a tour of Africa in 1960. “We have seen the awakening of a national consciousness in people who lived for centuries in dependence upon some other Power.” In short, what Gandhi had started in India had been, not the extraordinary dream of a living saint or (alternately) a seditious fakir, but part of a historically inevitable process; part of what Macmillan called the “wind of change.” This shift in perspective truly marked, as one chronicler has put it, “the end of the imperial ideal.”
³⁹

It also signaled the death, at least in public, of the assumptions about race and culture that had governed Churchill’s and Gandhi’s generation. Racism and racial ideologies were now seen as uniquely evil. Even Gandhi’s own remarks about preserving India’s “racial purity” would by 1960 have caused embarrassment, if not quite outrage. And far from assuming that nonwhites were unfit to rule themselves, the new view was that they must rule themselves immediately, whether they were prepared for the task or not.
⁴⁰

British decolonization would trigger many problems and crises, particularly in Africa. The bloody scenes that ended British rule in India would be repeated in Nigeria, Uganda, the Congo, and other former European colonies. But the battle Gandhi had fought all his life, to end the color bar within the empire and the commonwealth, had finally been won.
^*142

Not surprisingly, Churchill was unhappy with this development. He realized his views were outdated. “When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking,” Churchill confided to his doctor in 1952. But he also told Clementine that he believed Macmillan had made a mistake in going to Africa “to encourage the black men.”
⁴¹
Churchill’s once-standard view of Empire and the white man’s burden no longer found purchase in his Conservative Party. As he had said several autumns before: “I am now merely a retired, and tired old reactionary.”

He was also losing his power to focus on events. As he entered his late eighties, Churchill’s awareness of the outside world was coming and going, and he became a fading shadow of his former self. But, there could still be small unexpected flashes of the old Winston, as one day in April 1958, when Clementine was reading from
The Oxford Book of English Verse
at the dinner table.

Winston’s eyes suddenly lit up. “Give it to me,” he said eagerly. The book was open to a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough, “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth.” As prime minister in 1942 he had evoked its lines in one of his most famous speeches. Now he read the lines aloud again in his old, strong voice, lines that might have been a summary of his life:

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,

Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creaks and inlets making

Come, silent, flooding in, the main,

And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

But westward, look, the land is bright.

“When Winston came to the last line,” an observer at the table noted, “he sat up, making a vague gesture as if he were directing our eyes to the light, as he had done in the war. And then he slumped back, the effort had been too much for his tired mind.”
⁴²

In 1960 he stopped painting. He seldom spoke anymore, did not seem to know friends, and had to be supported by nurses as he moved from room to room. Visitors might find him huddled in a chair on the yacht of his newest friend, Aristotle Onassis, or at Chartwell, where he would sit and stare into the fire for hours. Thinking, remembering, then suddenly moving a hand to stir the fire.

His ninetieth birthday on November 30, 1964, was a very different event from the public celebrations ten years earlier. It was “a half-hearted affair,” his doctor of more than thirty years, Lord Moran, sadly noted. “Those near to him made suitable noises, but they knew it was all make believe, and that he did not wish to live.”
⁴³

At eight o’clock in the morning of January 24, 1965, Winston’s wish was realized. His daughter Mary was present, as was his lifelong friend Violet Bonham Carter, who watched as “his face from which all age and infirmity had dropped away,” turned “young, calm, and resolute in death.”

It was exactly seventy years to the day since his father had died.

By the queen’s order, Churchill’s body was laid in state in Westminster Abbey—the first prime minister to receive that honor since Gladstone. Around the clock for three days, in a biting winter wind, a never-ending queue of Britons filed past the coffin to pay their respects to the man whom the headline in the
Times
(the newspaper with which Churchill had fought so bitterly over India and then appeasement) called “the Greatest Englishman of His Time.” At one point the line extended two miles from Westminster Bridge and the Lambeth Embankment on the east bank of the Thames, across Lambeth Bridge to Parliament Square and Westminster.

The bitterness, anger, and envy directed at Churchill all his life, from all sides, was finally gone. All that remained was the memory of the man who had saved his country in World War II; and recognition that he had come to symbolize an era in British history—and world history—that was gone forever.

Tributes poured in from every country and continent. Around the world flags flew at half-mast, stores shut, and theaters closed. Three American presidents wrote their condolences along with the pope. Canada’s prime minister Lester Pearson wrote, “All Canadians are grief-stricken.” Leaders from every corner of the globe and former empire offered the same sentiments. “Sir Winston Churchill’s death deeply affects the Belgian people,” “The whole German people share in the loss,” “Nepal has lost a great friend,” “It is with profound sorrow that the people of India learn of his death.”
⁴⁴

Then on January 30 came the funeral. The day was gray and raw, with the same biting wind. Eight thousand police and seven thousand soldiers were in place to control the crowds, who jammed the sidewalks of the route, from Whitehall to Trafalgar Square and up the Strand and Fleet Street to Ludgate. Another estimated 300 million people—one tenth of the world’s population—watched on television, from Vancouver to Bombay as the procession slowly made its way behind the Union Jack–draped coffin and gun carriage, preceded by three hundred RAF veterans of the Battle of Britain and drawn by one hundred Royal Navy seamen, to the strains of Beethoven’s Funeral March. Meanwhile, the Royal Horse Artillery in St. James’s Park fired a ninety-gun salute, one shot for each year of Churchill’s life.

More than three thousand mourners and leaders of 110 nations attended the thirty-minute memorial service at St. Paul’s. One of them was a bearded, turbaned figure, the foreign minister of India, Swaran Singh. Singh had been an intimate of Prime Minister Nehru, who had died at age seventy-five the year before. At one time Nehru had been the youthful rebel and upstart who, Churchill warned Gandhi, would exploit his popularity to gain power and whose rule over independent India would be, Churchill predicted, a “complete disaster.”