Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

  Churchill and his party moved on to Santa Barbara and then, for five nights, to the Biltmore in Los Angeles—their hotel bills, Winston wrote, were paid by “a hearty Banker”—where they toured the Hollywood studios and were Hearst’s guests once again, at the Montmartre Club. That evening they dined with sixty guests, including Charlie Chaplin. Winston wrote his wife that Chaplin had “acted his new film for us in a wonderful way. It is to be his gt attempt to prove that the silent drama or pantomime is superior to the new talkies.”* Randolph noted in his diary: “Papa wants him to act the young Napoleon and has promised to write the Scenario.” Instead, said Chaplin, he intended to play Jesus Christ. Churchill thought a moment and then asked: “Have you cleared the rights?”249

  After a fishing expedition off Catalina Island (Winston caught a 188-pound swordfish in twenty minutes), his party proceeded eastward, again in Schwab’s private car, across the Mojave Desert, by the Grand Canyon, to Chicago. Baruch met him at the station there and introduced him to the Commercial Club. Asked about Ramsay MacDonald, who was also in the United States at the time, negotiating naval disarmament, Churchill replied that England was fortunate to be represented “by so experienced a statesman and so distinguished a man”—and then called for more British and American warships. On the Atlantic coast he paid a courtesy call on Herbert Hoover; toured Civil War battlefields, to pick up material for a series of Collier’s pieces; and was in New York, staying at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, when the market crashed. Still shaky on economics, he was slow to grasp what was happening. On the evening of “Black Tuesday,” when the stock market, honeycombed with credit, collapsed of its own weight, sixteen million shares changing hands, he dined at Bernard Baruch’s Fifth Avenue mansion. The other guests were bankers and financiers. When one rose to toast their British visitor, he addressed the company as “friends and former millionaires.”250

  Churchill visits Charlie Chaplin at his Hollywood studio

  The next morning Churchill heard shouts below the Savoy-Plaza apartment and looked out, he wrote, to find that “under my window a gentleman [had] cast himself down fifteen storeys and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion and the arrival of the fire brigade.” Ever the curious journalist, he made his way to Wall Street. There, recognized by a stranger, he was invited inside the Stock Exchange. “I had expected to see pandemonium,” he wrote, “but the spectacle that met my eyes was one of calm and orderliness.” No wonder; apparently he hadn’t been told that brokers are forbidden to run on the floor of the exchange, and the big sellout was over anyhow, stocks now being offered for a fraction of their value. Churchill concluded: “No one who has gazed on such a scene could doubt that this financial disaster, huge as it is, cruel as it is to thousands, is only a passing episode in the march of a valiant and serviceable people who by fierce experiment are hewing new paths for man, and showing to all nations much that they should attempt and much that they should avoid.”251

  He still hadn’t made the connection, still didn’t grasp that since September 3, when he had left Vancouver, Wall Street investors had lost over thirty billion dollars, almost as much as the United States had spent on World War I. Later he would realize that this “Economical Blizzard,” as he came to call it, was responsible for turning all England into “one vast soup kitchen,” driving the country back off the gold standard, doubling the number of British unemployed, and radicalizing politics throughout Europe, especially in Germany. In California, coming under the spell of a local stockbroker, he had been persuaded to speculate heavily. The Wall Street fever of that autumn had afflicted him; he had written his wife: “Since my last letter from Santa Barbara I have made another £1,000 by speculating in a stock called Simmons. It is a domestic furniture business. They say, ‘You can’t go wrong on a Simmons mattress.’ There is a stock exchange [ticker] in every big hotel. You go & watch the figures being marked up on slates every few minutes. Mr Van Antwerp advises me. He is a stockbroker & one of the leading firms. I think he is a vy good man. This powerful firm watch my small interests like a cat a mouse.” William Van Antwerp was a member of E. F. Hutton, a reliable company, but the most stable brokers were impotent in the panic selling of Winston’s last week in New York. Though he had not been wiped out, his financial independence had disappeared in the reams of ticker tape. Throughout the coming decade he would have to write furiously to keep his family and style of living afloat. This bleak dawn was just beginning to break upon him when he sailed from New York on October 30. But when he reached Southampton he momentarily forgot it. A more immediate threat hung over the world he loved. Lord Irwin,* the new viceroy in New Delhi, had recommended “the attainment of Dominion status” as Britain’s goal for its Indian Empire, Labour had endorsed Irwin’s proposal, and so, without consulting other leaders of the Conservative party, had Stanley Baldwin.252

  Describing his new Hollywood acquaintances to Clementine, Winston had written that he had entertained “the leading men I like best, mostly British born, & all keenly pro-England.” Among the English expatriates there was a craggy-faced, forty-six-year-old ex-soldier named Victor McLaglen who had served three years in the Life Guards, commanded a company of the Irish Fusiliers in the Middle East during the war, and, during the months which followed the Armistice, policed Baghdad as provost marshal. After touring the Empire as a boxer, wrestler, and vaudeville stunt man, McLaglen had arrived in Hollywood and found employment on the Fox lot, where he was now rehearsing The Black Watch under the direction of John Ford. A few blocks away, MGM was shooting two other motion pictures: Trader Horn, with W. S. Van Dyne, Harry Carey, and C. Aubrey Smith, and, simultaneously, Son of India, starring Smith. These three were the first in a series of films which, for the next several years, would provide millions of moviegoers with images of the glory, legends, and myths of the British Empire. They included The Lost Patrol (McLaglen, Gary Cooper, Boris Karloff), Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Cooper, Franchot Tone), Clive of India (Ronald Colman and Loretta Young), Rhodes of Africa (Walter Huston), The Charge of the Light Brigade (Errol Flynn), Gunga Din (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Sam Jaffe, Joan Fontaine, Cary Grant, McLaglen), Wee Willie Winkie (Shirley Temple, McLaglen, Smith), and Stanley and Livingstone, which tugged at many a heart when Spencer Tracy, courteously removing his hat, approached Sir Cedric Hardwicke and said: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”253

  It was great entertainment, if poor history—Colman and Huston were not in the least like the ruthless Clive and Rhodes—and the lush California countryside was far more romantic than the stark Khyber and the African bush. But it was presented as history, something over and done with, and therein lies its real significance. No one outside England, not even Hollywood’s dream merchants, could pretend that the Empire was still like that. Inside England was another matter. Opinion was divided there. Imperial destiny still had its rapt congregations in Britain, even in the Labour party; they believed that Britain’s position in the world, even its self-confidence, depended upon its far-flung realms. The faithful joined the Victoria League, the United Empire League, the British Empire Union, the League of Britons Overseas, and the Empire Day movement, whose only achievement was securing a half-holiday once a year for England’s schoolchildren. The Tory press, notably the Daily Express, remained fiercely chauvinistic. Boy Scouts, then at the height of their popularity, wore the broad-brimmed hats of the Boer War and shared their motto “Be Prepared” with the South African police. British soldiers continued to fight colonial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Palestine, battling first the Mad Mullah of Somaliland and then a Burmese monk whose followers believed he could fly if he chose, though to their disappointment he never so chose. Indeed, imperial possessions were still being acquired; the Empire reached its territorial peak in 1933 with the conquest of the Hadhramaut, a remote (and worthless) tract in southern Arabia. When a battle cruiser bearing the Prince of Wales passed through the Suez Canal and sailed down the Red Sea, with RAF biplanes forming a ceremonial umbrella overhead, native troops on bot
h banks cheered, and in Aden the prince was greeted by massed Union Jacks and an enormous streamer: TELL DADDY WE ARE VERY HAPPY UNDER BRITISH RULE. In Buckingham Palace, Daddy addressed all his global subjects by radio every Christmas. Imperial conferences, determining policies vital to the Dominions, were still held regularly in London. So enlightened a parliamentarian as Boothby, visiting Jamaica, was reassured to see four Royal Navy battle cruisers anchored off Kingston, “one of them waving the flag of the Commander-in-Chief, West Indies Station…. The British Empire still existed.” At No. 10 Stanley Baldwin proclaimed: “The British Empire stands firm as a great force for good. It stands in the sweep of every wind, by the wash of every sea.” No public event in England was complete without a passionate chorus of “Land of Hope and Glory” or “Soldiers of the Queen,” with its affirmation that “England is master” and:254

  We’re not forgetting it

  We’re not letting it

  Fade away and gradually die

  Yet Baldwin was now preparing to let the Indian Raj do just that. He wasn’t moved by principle. If Churchill’s symbol is the hand forming a V for victory, Baldwin’s was the wetted forefinger held up to test the wind. He did it very well. In England, he knew, ardent imperialists were a minority. Labourites were at best indifferent to the Empire; the billion pounds invested in India wasn’t theirs. The passion of the new age was egalitarian. Even among the aristocracy one found young patricians who felt guilty about their membership in a privileged class. For most postwar Britons, it seemed, imperial songs and slogans had become empty rituals; in their hearts they didn’t much care. “The British were losing interest in their Empire,” James Morris wrote, “and there was a falling-off of recruitment for the Indian services.” By the early 1930s the Indian Civil Service had shrunk to five hundred men. In England news from remote colonies interested the older generation; their children, including Oxbridge graduates, found it rather tiresome. As late as February 9, 1933, with Hitler in power, the Oxford Union debated the resolution “that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”—and then approved it, 275 to 153. The King himself, still Emperor of India and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, wrote somberly, if awkwardly: “I cannot look into the future without feeling no little anxiety about the continued unity of the Empire.” Walter Lippmann, echoing Burke while pondering the indifference or even hostility of young aristocrats to imperial strength, reminded them that no empire in history has long survived without a devoted, steadfast ruling class.255

  The fashionable—and fashionable Englishmen have far greater influence than their counterparts in, say, the United States—rejected every symbol of the Victorian era, from oratorios and organs to antimacassars. Kipling was mocked. The Prince of Wales was popular because he himself was rebelling against the Establishment he soon would lead, it was then assumed, for the rest of his life. When abroad he flirted with unsuitable young colonial women, fox-trotted until long after midnight, and rode bucking broncos. He didn’t even dress properly. Tieless, in trousers too short to cover his ankles, his cap on the back of his head, he looked far more like one of Mayfair’s Bright Young Things than the royal family’s heir apparent. This was not only conduct unbecoming to England’s future sovereign; it was downright “un-British.” His critics didn’t actually mean he seemed Jewish. The term had been expanded during the 1920s. In the past, English dignity had been stiffened by the intangible concept of British national character. Even Ireland had been awed by it. The Dominions and Crown Colonies were expected, not only to admire it, but to imitate it. As the 1920s were succeeded by the 1930s it became evident that they were letting the side down, were becoming un-British. Canadians were aping the Americans; Toronto was indistinguishable from Buffalo. The Australians talked like cockneys, and loud cockneys at that. English settlers in South Africa, it was said, had become effete, unlike the robust Afrikaners. Worst of all, for those loyal to the Empire, was the mockery of imperial solemnity at home—the braying, irreverent laughter of their own intellectuals. The image of the traditional, fatherly British colonel, once exemplified by men like C. Aubrey Smith, was being replaced by David Low’s Colonel Blimp, who told tedious barracks tales to obese chums in a Turkish bath. P. G. Wodehouse depicted sons of the aristocracy as weak, incompetent, dipsomaniacal clowns, and J. B. Morton—a Harrovian and an Oxonian who had led troops in France—ran mocking little pieces in the Daily Express: “ADVERTISEMENT CORNER: Will the gentleman who threw an onion at the Union Jack and repeatedly and noisily tore cloth during the singing of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the Orphans’ Outing on Thursday, write to Colonel Sir George Jarvis Delamaine Spooner, late of Poona, telling him what right he has to the Old Cartbusian braces which burst when he was arrested?”256

  The Raj was the chief target of the English literati. Aldous Huxley, grandson of the great Thomas Henry, was another traitor to his class; India, he wrote, reminded him of the old man of Thermopylae, who never did anything right. “All over India,” wrote George Orwell, “there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part.” E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, perhaps the finest English novel of the 1920s, written by a Bloomsbury author who had been private secretary to a maharaja, was a devastating, though perhaps unjust, portrayal of Indian Civil Service racism. In the eyes of such men all imperial achievements were dross. Burma was part of the Indian Empire; Orwell had served there as a policeman, and he dismissed the sum of British efforts there as “second-rate.” Bombay was, in Huxley’s opinion, “one of the most appalling cities in either hemisphere.” The architecture of rebuilt Kuala Lumpur, the capital of British Malaya, was similarly derided, and so was New Delhi, the work of Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker, though here the critics may have had a point. The only city expressly designed to intimidate a people, New Delhi was begun in 1911, when George V traveled there during the Coronation Durbar to lay the foundation stone, and it was finished just in time for the British to move out, an ambiguity vaguely preserved in its disconcerting Secretariat. But what dismayed traditionalists most was the intellectuals’ total renunciation of every value, every standard, every icon which had been cherished in the imperial past. Nothing was sacred, not even the Crown. When George V died his last words were: “How is the Empire?” The story got around London drawing rooms and the common rooms in Oxford and Cambridge that he had actually said: “What’s on at the Empire?”257

  All this was threatening to the defenders of a rich national legacy, and it was a new experience for them. Their fathers had snorted and had ignored the Ruskins and Paters and Wildes because British supremacy, in those days, had been unquestioned. No more; since the Armistice, England had steadily lost ground to competitors abroad in virtually every field of endeavor. Yet Englishmen could not rid themselves of the old complacency. Cunarders, they told one another, were the world’s finest ocean liners, and R.M.S. Queen Mary, now about to be launched, would set a standard none could surpass.* They were right, but steamships, like locomotives, in the construction of which the Victorians had also excelled, were not the transport of the future. Britannia had ruled the waves and the railway tracks, but was far from indomitable on highways and in the air—especially the air. Imperial Airways, Morris wrote, “enjoyed semi-official privileges,” yet its management was inefficient and its schedules ridiculous; a person flying from London to Cape Town had to change planes six times.258 Seasoned British travelers preferred KLM. But Britain’s greatest aerial fiasco was the maiden voyage of the R 101, the costliest airship ever built in England, a few months after Churchill’s return from the United States. Great hopes were reposed in the R 101. A pet project of Ramsay MacDonald’s, it was expected to demonstrate Britain’s enduring dominance in technology and provide mail and passenger service between Canada, South Africa, Australia, and India. This superzeppelin, powered by diesel engines, took off from Cardington in Bedfordshire on October 4, 1930, bound for Karachi, 3,652 miles away. It had traveled 300 miles when it struck a low h
ill on the outskirts of Beauvais, northwest of Paris, and collapsed in flames. The Empire’s prime ministers, assembled in London to draft the Statute of Westminster, observed a minute of silent prayer. It should have been longer. They were mourning the passing of something far more momentous than a dirigible.

  But the Dominion leaders had much to celebrate, too. In 1926 England and its white possessions had become “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to each other in any aspect of their domestic or foreign affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.” Now came the Statute of Westminster, which was just beginning its two-year progress through the parliamentary process. It was a historic measure, international in its implications, perhaps the vastest piece of legislation ever to pass through this or any other legislative body. Arthur Balfour called it “the most novel and greatest experiment in Empire-building the world has ever seen.”259 Jan Christiaan Smuts, its author, knew better. The statute was in fact a blue-print for the dismantling of the Empire. Under its terms, the Mother Country relinquished all authority over the white Dominions; laws passed by the House of Commons were inapplicable in them, and the House could not overrule acts of Dominion parliaments, which, indeed, were granted veto power over the succession to the British throne.

  The Statute of Westminster was not only flexible; it was equivocal. Its language might be interpreted any way you liked. Civis Britannicus Sum could be translated to mean everything or nothing. A New Zealand lawyer could cite a precedent in Britain’s elaborate imperial judicial system; the New Zealand judge could defer to the precedent or laugh it out of court. Ireland could and did quote the statute as justifying its complete secession from the Commonwealth, converting itself into “a sovereign, independent and democratic State.”260 While the imperial conference was deliberating over the phrasing of the statute, and the R 101 was disappearing in a bellying sheet of flame, taking forty-eight British lives with it, Mohandas Gandhi was observing his sixty-first birthday in a Poona jail. Since the statute in this early draft excluded possessions inhabited by men with pigmented skin, Gandhi and his cause, it would seem, gained nothing from it. But the language of Lord Irwin’s presentation defined the Commonwealth as color-blind—if it hadn’t, the pressure of twentieth-century history would have made the discrimination indefensible anyhow. Even as Victor McLaglen, Ronald Colman, and C. Aubrey Smith held audiences enthralled, the Empire they were celebrating was fading with the credits.