Gandhi & Churchill (51 page)

For the first time in twenty-two years, Winston held no elected office. But after his initial shock and despair, he found other outlets for his restless energy.

One of them was painting. Not until he was forty did he discover this “wonderful new world of thought and craft,” as he called it. It became a lifelong passion. His friend Violet Asquith was astonished to discover that it was the one activity Churchill could engage in without talking. “When golfing, bathing, rock climbing, building sand castles on the beach,” she remembered, “even when playing bezique or bridge he talked”—and talked nonstop.

But while standing or sitting outdoors in front of his canvas, dressed in his white coat and broad hat, Churchill maintained a rapt silence, as he worked away with his brushes, paint tubes, and palette knife. “I felt that I was witnessing a miracle,” Violet Asquith said.

She also believed that squeezing the paint tubes, with their bright colors of vermilion, orange, scarlet, and Prussian blue, gave him “a voluptuous kick.”
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Characteristically, Churchill himself compared painting to fighting a battle. It required the same surveying of the terrain and landscape, the same devising of a strategy to capture the scene with its variety of objects and colors, “each different in shadow and sunlight.” Armed with paintbox, brushes, and paints, he made a forward plunge and finally met with success or defeat on “the pictorial battlefield,” meaning he had created either a painting or “a sea of mud.”

Painting “is, if anything,” he would write, “
more
exciting than fighting if [done] successfully.”
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His pictures, with their sharp vivid colors and quasi-impressionistic landscapes, were soon decorating the rooms of friends and colleagues, as well as the children’s nursery.

He also traveled—he now had time for an extended trip to Italy and the Côte d’Azur. He also began working on his war memoirs, the first volume of which appeared in 1923. Rising Tory star Samuel Hoare wrote sardonically to a friend, “I hear that Winston Churchill has written a big book about himself and called it
The World Crisis
.” The volumes were in fact the first comprehensive history of the Great War told by a genuine Whitehall insider, and the sale of the serialized rights (plus the death of a cousin who left him several thousand pounds) allowed him to buy a new house, called Chartwell, in Kent.

Churchill fell instantly in love with the place; Clementine’s feelings were mixed. But with his enforced leisure, Winston had happy hours to spend redoing the gardens, supervising renovation of the bathrooms, and constructing a new wing, as well as building a tree house for the children. He laid bricks by hand for the garden walls, often in three-and four-hour stretches. Having discovered the pleasures of domesticity, Churchill sensed that, at age forty-eight, he was finally growing up. His mother had died in June 1921; his youngest daughter Marigold in November, of septicemia. Both events severed his ties to the past and sobered his view of the future. Like his Dundee defeat, they reminded him that he had to decide what was really important to him, including his political allegiances.

Winston was still a Liberal and still a leading member of his party. But the party was quickly shrinking into political insignificance, squeezed as it was by the resurgence of Toryism on one side and the rise of Labour on the other. The 1922 election defeat left Liberals sparse on the ground and bitterly divided between the Asquith and Lloyd George wings. Neither considered Churchill a very desirable or reliable asset. And so in his forced retirement Winston found himself being wooed from a very different quarter: the Conservatives.

Clementine resolutely hated the Tories, almost as much as she disliked Chartwell.
⁶
She prayed that her husband would remain loyal to his Liberal convictions or at least trade away his loyalty at the highest possible price. Winston had little in common with the Conservative Party. He and they continued to clash over free trade and over “doing something for the poor” through progressive legislation (although thanks to the Labour Party, the recipients of the liberal welfare state’s largesse were no longer as grateful and deferential as they had once been).

On the other hand, the Tories were reliable anti-Bolsheviks and dedicated foes of the wild-eyed radicals in the Labour Party. And above all they were “sound” on the empire, including India. In 1920 Lloyd George had half-jokingly called Churchill “the last specimen of a real Tory.” In fact, he was not the last Tory but the last Whig. He had made himself into the political heir of the expansive classic liberalism of the Victorian era, of Thomas Macaulay and John Stuart Mill. By 1924 the Conservative Party was the only refuge left for a robust Victorian faith in the healing powers of civilization, science, free trade, and the British way of life—and in taking up “the white man’s burden” with enthusiasm. And as Churchill told his wife, the Conservatives’ eyes “are fully open to the dangers that lie ahead.”
⁷

The Conservatives’ attitudes toward those dangers, however, were fundamentally different from his. Winston saw the dangers as bracing challenges, as opportunities to put history and Britain on a new course. But the average Conservative politician and backbencher only wanted to make them go away. The failure of Tory nerve in the face of great challenges had led him to leave the party in the first place. Over the next decade, on India and appeasement, they would let him down again. In that sense, nothing had changed. The truth was that Winston Churchill never did fit in with his Tory political brethren, then or later. His return to the Conservative Party was a matter not of homecoming but of finding a port before the impending storm.

Nonetheless, it was the Conservatives’ leader Stanley Baldwin who first sought out Churchill. The 1922 election had carried Baldwin into power, but just barely. He believed he could secure his government by hastening the Liberals’ demise. He shrewdly grasped that their middle-and upper-middle-class voters would flock to the Conservative standard rather than vote for the “Reds” of Labour. Recruiting Churchill was one way to help pull the Liberals to pieces. Even Winston thought that by joining the Conservatives, he might bring thirty MPs with him.
⁸

Baldwin and Churchill met in late February 1923. “He evidently wants very much to secure my return and cooperation,” Winston confessed to Clementine. He hesitated to take the plunge, and not only because Clemmie disapproved. Baldwin’s Conservatives had embraced protectionism, Winston’s bête noir, as their electoral issue for 1923. So when a seat opened up in West Leicester, Winston preferred to run as a Liberal free trader.

He lost to the Labour candidate by four thousand votes. Finally, when enough Liberals joined with Labour to give Britain its first Labour prime minister in Ramsay MacDonald, Churchill realized he had no place left to go except the Tory benches.

In May 1924 he made his first public appearance on a Conservative speakers’ rostrum in Liverpool in more than twenty years. The independent Liberal Party no longer had a home, he told his audience. Only the Conservative Party offered a strong enough base for “the successful defeat of Socialism.”
⁹
That October, in another general election, Winston won the seat for Liverpool and joined the Tory victory celebrations (although in his coy way he still preferred to call himself a “Constitutionalist” rather than a full-fledged, official Conservative).

Winston’s defection was solitary. Not a single Liberal joined him. But it no longer mattered. The election was a Conservative landslide. Baldwin secured two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons, while the Liberal membership shrank to just forty.
¹⁰

Baldwin was by no means finished with Churchill. Bringing a brilliant speaker with energy and ambition inside the government made more sense than leaving him out, he realized, where he might be tempted to cause mischief. The cabinet post Baldwin wanted to give Winston was, interestingly enough, his father’s first post: secretary of state for India.

But others in the Tory leadership demurred. If Gandhi and his supporters forced the government to take drastic action in India, they warned, the hot-tempered Winston would, as usual, overreact. Baldwin reluctantly agreed, and the post went to Churchill’s friend F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, instead.
¹¹

Churchill expected to become colonial secretary, the last cabinet post he had held before the 1922 election. Instead, Baldwin astonished and thrilled him by offering him the chancellorship of the exchequer. It was the second most influential post in the cabinet next to prime minister. Indeed, it was often the stepping-stone to the premiership itself. It was also the post Randolph Churchill had held before he died. “This fulfills my ambition,” Churchill gushed when Baldwin offered the post. “I still have my father’s robes as Chancellor. I shall be proud to serve you in this splendid office.”
¹²

An ambition had been fulfilled. Certainly it must have seemed to Churchill that he was now poised on a new exciting public course, one that would allow him to guide his newly chosen party in a new direction, toward moderate social reform and economic liberalism; one that must eventually take him to 10 Downing Street. He was right—only his timing was off by a decade and a half. In less than six years he would nearly wreck his political career almost beyond repair, even as Gandhi’s was scaling to new heights.

“Scaling new heights” would have seemed a bizarre prediction to anyone watching Gandhi shuffle slowly out of the Yeravda prison on February 6, 1924.

His release had come at the order of Ramsay MacDonald’s short-lived Labour government. Gandhi had served only two years of his six-year sentence. Frail and ill, he was angry that his poor health had forced an end to his incarceration and placed him under obligation to a government that preferred to have him die out of prison rather than at Yeravda. “I still have much to do,” he petulantly told a Gujarati interviewer.
¹³
In jail he had had some moral leverage. As a free man, he was compelled to sweep up what remained of his movement.

His program of Noncooperation was a shambles. The riots, Chauri Chaura, and his subsequent arrest had sapped away his credibility as a political strategist. He had declared that he wanted “independence inside the Empire, if possible; outside it, if necessary.”
¹⁴
Old-style liberals like Srinivasa Sastri and M. R. Jayakar thought he had pushed the British too far; fiery radicals like the young Jawaharlal Nehru thought he had not gone far enough. In June Gandhi felt strong enough to attend the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) meeting in Ahmedabad. The same figures who had stood with him in 1920 were there, but they were no longer so deferential.

Gandhi stoutly presented his program one last time. He asked the AICC to renew its endorsement of khadi, including the proposal that all Congress members learn to spin their own cotton thread, and to endorse nonviolence as official Congress policy. The result, in the words of one distinguished Gandhi historian, was “dramatic.” At the mention of the spinning wheel, his erstwhile colleagues, Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das, walked out. Others shook their heads in disgust. They, and many others, had had enough of Gandhi putting his own personal obsessions ahead of constructive action. The resolution on nonviolence passed, but with a majority of only ten.
¹⁵

When the votes were counted, Gandhi wept at the rebuke. He confessed to the conference that he was “defeated and humbled” by the hairbreadth measure of the Congress’s support. His remaining supporters urged him to continue the fight by creating his own Swarajist party, but he refused. He worried that it would only further divide the Congress and the national movement. “I do not despair,” he wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru. “My faith is in God. I know only the moment’s duty. It is given to me to know no more. Why then should I worry?”
¹⁶
To his mind, and the minds of friends and foes alike, Gandhi’s political career was over.

The Raj breathed a deep sigh of relief. “Poor Gandhi has indeed perished!” crowed the new secretary of state for India, Lord Birkenhead. He felt free to dismiss Gandhi as a “pathetic” figure. Certainly he was no one the Raj would have to worry about again.
¹⁷

After a brief recuperation in Poona, Gandhi withdrew to Sabarmati. He was immensely proud of the semimonastic community he had set up there, always calling it “my best creation.” Now it would be the setting for a self-imposed period of rest, reflection, and reassessment. This was something new for Gandhi; something he would never have time for again. Out of it would emerge the Mahatma Gandhi that the world has come to respect and revere, one ready to do battle again with the Raj.

In some ways the years from 1924 to 1927 were a continuation of his routine at Yeravda. The truth was Gandhi had enjoyed his time in prison. It had been a chance to read, experiment with his diet (at one point he was living on nothing but goat’s milk, oranges, and raisins), and sleep without the interruptions of his usual furious schedule. During his two years at Yeravda he read an estimated 150 books. They included Kipling’s
Barrack Room Ballads
and
Second Jungle Book
; Macaulay’s
Lays of Ancient Rome
and Goethe’s
Faust
;
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
and
Ivanhoe
; Buckle’s
History of Civilization
and that Churchillian favorite, Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
which Gandhi hugely enjoyed.
¹⁸

He also finally had time to read the entire
Mahabharata
(it took six months) and other Indian classics. And he intensely reread the
Bhagavad Gita,
which inspired him to compose a series of lectures on the
Gita
when he returned to Sabarmati as well as an autobiography, which he dubbed
My Experiments with Truth
. He had tried to start the latter during the months of solitude in prison, but had found no time. But he did manage to write thirty chapters of another autobiographical work,
Satyagraha in South Africa.