Dan Snow's History Hit - Was Winston Churchill Racist?

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

The former Prime Minister has faced a renewed controversy as people are calling for his statues to be removed due to his racist views. We are joined by Professor Richard Toye and Dr Warren Dockter to discuss where his personal views and political policies collide.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today in 1874, November the 30th, 1874. Winston Churchill was born. He was born at Blenheim day after General Hood sent his Confederate troops into heavily entrenched Union lines outside Franklin, Tennessee. He destroyed the army of Tennessee. He destroyed his own army in a frontal assault against fixed positions as the Industrial Revolution had put awesome firepower into the hands of infantrymen and artillerymen. It was a battle that the military planners of Russia, Japan, and Europe would have been wise to study. Devastating and one-sided losses. Anyway, that was 10 years before Winston Churchill was born. To mark the anniversary of Winston Churchill's birth, we're talking to not one but two historians of Churchill. One of them is Professor Richard Toy, who we've had on the podcast before.

He's Professor of History at the University of Exeter. We talked recently about his latest book, Winston Churchill, A Life in the News. The other is Dr. Warren Docter. He's a lecturer and aberrist with university. He's also written about Churchill, particularly Churchill and the Islamic world. I got the two of them on, actually, I was talking to them earlier this summer for the History Hit Live on YouTube. This is the selected highlights of our conversation. I asked them about Churchill and his reputation. It's striking that whenever I refer to Churchill now on social media, someone immediately pops up in the comments section and describes him as a

racist. Where are we with Winston Churchill? How should we think about him? Was he a racist? Is he a racist? How does it all work? These two excellent scholars are the right guys to ask. If you want to watch my tour around Benham Palace, Churchill's birthplace, if you want to watch my trip around the Churchill war rooms, and frankly, we've got quite a lot of Winston Churchill content on the old History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. You head over there. It's actually still the Black black friday weekend offer i mean don't talk to me about it it still is and if you go and use the code black friday all lowercase black friday you get a month for free and then 80 off the first four months it's completely insane for less than a price of beer in a bar that you'll be going to as soon as this lockdown ends you will be watching five months of History Hit TV, including our big drama documentary coming soon.

So head over to historyhit.tv. And obviously, you can buy face coverings. You can buy the Churchill face covering on our shop. You can also buy the Oscar Wilde face covering who died today in 1900. We're all about the anniversary. We've got all of them covered. So go and check out shop.historyhit.com as well. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy Warren Doctor and Richard Toy.

In the meantime, everyone enjoy Warren Docter and Richard Toy. Warren and Richard, great to have you both on the podcast. Thank you very much for coming on. Let's hit the ground running here. Let's start with the big question. Was Winston Churchill a racist? I guess as we understand it today. It's interesting that you say as we would understand it today, because essentially it comes down to how we define racism. I think if racism is a binary, then he was a racist. He said racist things in his life, particularly against Indians and Hindu Indians in particular. Richard knows a lot more about the particularities that he said, but I do think that Winston Churchill was a racist in the sense that most people were during the time. But, you know, he holds on to a peculiarly Victorian notion of racism far past

many people, contemporaries even, who would have denounced his views, for instance, on India as being backwards and out of touch, even into the 30s. Richard, what do you reckon? Let's develop Warren's point. Was he a racist even by the standards of his own time? Well, I think that, you know, again, throughout his career, and particularly as time went on. So I think that if one were to sort of look at the 1890s, for example, if we sort of distinguish somewhat between his racial and his imperial views, we can see that he was sort of pushing the envelope on the right of the spectrum on what he thought about the expansion of the British Empire and was concretely arguing for it to get bigger. At the same time, he was criticised for that. I mean,

the people who were saying he's clearly really pushing the envelope here, it's been extreme, but people weren't talking about his views of race, which he did express at that time as throughout his career. So at that time, he wasn't really criticised for them. Whereas through the 1920s, the 1930s, through to the 1950s, the end of his active career, people were starting to say, well, actually, these racial views that he's expressing, often ones which he expressed in private, it should be said, rather than things which he said publicly, that these sort of show that he's old fashioned, he's out of touch, he is as extreme as some of the most extreme white Kenyan settlers who were really some of the most racist people really in the world in

the 1920s, for example. Clearly, his Victorian background was important. But it wasn't that his ideas got frozen at the point when Queen Victoria died. He would remember that he switched parties twice. So he joined the Liberals in 1904, and then switched back to the Conservatives in the mid 1920s. And at the beginning of that liberal phase, he's being presented by some critics as a little Englander, which is a term which implies somebody who's not very interested in the empire or is hostile to it. He's being portrayed even as a danger to the empire. So my argument is that actually it's in the interwar years that he consciously takes a right-wing turn and knows what he's doing. He's aware of the significance of the kind of language that he uses. So he isn't simply stuck in the past. This is an

active choice. This is why I said in my book, Churchill's Empire, which was published 10 years ago now, that it was in the interwar years that Churchill decided to become a Victorian. That is to say, he knew the significance of this Victorian imagery and he decided to exploit it. I mean, such a good point there. Apart from anything else, Churchill's career stretched for decades. Extraordinarily long political career. Of course, there would have been a huge amount of evolution and development and expediency and contradiction within that career. Warren, can I ask you, a lot of people say this racism was normal for the time, we shouldn't judge. Well, let's come back to that point. But let me ask if the premise is true. Were late Victorians endemically racist? I think it's a really excellent point. It goes back to sort of what Richard said earlier

about Churchill consciously deciding to become Victorian in the 1930s. Because actually, I argue in my book, Churchill in the Islamic World, that as a sort of Victorian soldier, he's kind of fairly progressive as a Victorian, in fact, because he's writing that even natives should be awarded the Victoria Cross and things after his experiences on the Northwest frontier in Sudan. He's thinking about these things in a more equitable way than we would traditionally imagine. But I do think that for him, it's an imperial mindset. And that's essentially what's fueling his views, not so much concepts of race, because he really isn't talking so much about race. He's more talking about cultures. And he sort of imagines a kind of cultural hierarchy in which he places, at least into the Edwardian era,

this comes out of his book, My African Journey, where he establishes this sort of hierarchy, which of course, white Protestant British people at the top, and then it sort of cascades down. And, you know, one of the interesting things I discovered is that he has greater sympathies with Muslims than one would suspect, owing in part because of the shared Abrahamic traditions with Judaism and Christianity and Islam. So I think he's thinking imperially and culturally, less racially. Richard, are there any other insights we've gained over the last few years that give us a fuller understanding of his views on race? It's an interesting question, exactly where did his ideas come from?

I think that he was very much influenced by his schooling, for example, at Harrow School, where there was a self-consciously sort of imperial tradition where the headmaster, J.E.C. Weldon, explicitly wanted to sort of inculcate an imperial mentality. And so that's clearly part of the explanation. So I think that it is trying to consider the range of opinions that were around Churchill. And I think that, you know, people say, well, everybody thought this way. Well, of course, not everybody did think exactly like Churchill. There was a spectrum of opinion. There were sort of angry differences about the empire within

British politics during the late 19th century. That doesn't mean that there was one set of people who were sort of perfectly politically correct, if you like, by modern standards. Richard, can I just stick with you and ask about the Bengal famine? Because that's something that now comes up all the time. The charge that he was, at best, uninterested in the plight of millions of Bengalis as they faced an appalling famine. Can you tell me a bit more about that famine? First of all, remember, this was a devastating famine, which started in 1943. The Japanese had invaded Burma, destruction of rice supplies and all sorts of things going on in the war helped explain why this occurred. In Britain at the time, it wasn't a big issue. It wasn't

something which Churchill was ever criticised for in his own lifetime, in part, I suspect, because a very large number of people in Britain were indifferent to the fate of people in Bengal, and also because it wasn't being reported to a great extent in the UK either. So from the 1970s, when the famine started to be studied as a very serious example of why famines are caused and what brings them about. This was also the time at which revelations came out about what Churchill had said because of new documentary publications and releases. There are real serious criticisms to be made of Churchill insofar as he certainly didn't react quickly enough. And he said some really, really horrible things in cabinet meetings,

which Amory recorded about sort of Indians breeding like rabbits and so on. So it's partly about documents becoming available. But in order for documents to be regarded as publicly significant, some historian has to take them up and start making arguments on the basis of them. Warren, in a year of statue toppling, some voices here in the UK have said that we need to think about Churchill's vast statue in Parliament Square outside just opposite Big Ben. What's your response to that?

A couple of things. I personally don't think that the Churchill statue should come down because in the end, I do think Winston Churchill played such a large role in forming the 20th century. And the statue acts as an object, as we've seen, which allows us to discuss both the vices and the virtues. So in that way, it educates people on Churchill, so long as we're talking about it. But at the same time, the present has to exist in discourse with history. And, you know, it depends on how we use the statue. Do people want to engage in these conversations around the statue,

or do they want to just say he's a hero and that's it? And that's the problem, actually, is when we think of him as a god or as a myth and not as a man who was obviously fallible. And I just, you know, Richard and I probably are slightly different on the Bengal famine. I think there's evidence that Churchill did try to get through, particularly in August and September 1943, both from Australia, Canada. There was even, I think, an idea that maybe grain from Iraq would go there. But because the allies, including the U.S., when, of course, Churchill is still trying to project strength, he's loathe to ask the U. the US for help, but he has to, and he does. But ultimately, because the war is still ongoing, and the Japanese still largely own the Pacific, it makes it very, very difficult. And so I do fundamentally agree with Richard that Churchill's role in this is quite callous. And that's, you know, that's the problem. He did have

prejudices, particularly against Hindus there. Richard, where are you on the Churchill statue? Well, I mean, I'm not aware. I mean, there may be some comment which I've missed on some corner of social media, but I'm not aware that anybody actually has proposed to take down the statue. Rather, you know, at least one newspaper has started a petition saying, you know, the statue is under threat. We must have a petition to stop it being taken down. There is an element of people trying to sort of work up feeling about the statue to make it seem as it's under threat. Well, certainly, of course, it was defaced. But as I say, I don't think anybody has seriously proposed taking it down, and I wouldn't propose taking it down. With Churchill, there's clearly a possible

set of rational arguments that you can make as to why he deserves a statue. And you can sort of have a reasonable discussion about that. If you take the statue of Edward Colston, for example, the one that was pulled down sort of via direct action a couple of weeks ago in Bristol. Well, that guy was a slave trader who traded at least sort of 80,000 people. And I don't think that anybody's really been able to come up with any credible defence of anything they needed at all. So to me, I mean, whether or not you approve of sort of intervening to pull them down by the action of the crowd, there seems to be no justification for having a statue of this guy. And, you know, sort of shocking and mind-boggling,

Bristol Council had not even managed to get around to agreeing to have a sort of an explanatory plaque saying, well, actually, this guy was pretty dubious. When he was appointed Secretary of State for War and continuing as Colonial Secretary to some extent for the state of affairs in Ireland, where there had been brutal repression with the group of auxiliaries called the Black and Tans who took reprisals on suspected IRA terrorists by essentially burning down people's houses and so on. So from the point of view of some people at the time, you know, Irish Republicans would certainly have seen Churchill as being a diehard extremist. Let's come on to the Second World War now. Churchill's apotheosis, I guess you'd say. 80 years ago this year, Churchill hit his rhetorical heights during and after the Battle

of Britain. Warren, I talked to the excellent Professor Lucy Noakes at Essex University on here the other day, and she points out, she just reminds us that you can be two things at once. Churchill could both be a man who made an astonishing and important intervention in 1940, whilst also have profoundly suspect views on imperialism, racial hierarchy, things like that. Let's focus on his role in the summer of 1940. What was his contribution? I think that a few things happened. Number one, I do think that he was sort of the lone voice to stand up and push against the Nazis, because there was this feeling from Halifax and others, and even Churchill later wrote his own memoirs, of course, his history of the Second World War, that everyone was in agreement. We've since found out that that wasn't true.

So I think Churchill is a key player in that. But Churchill also, and this is something Richard's written quite a lot about, is extraordinarily important in giving the voice to the roar of the lion. What he did was he projected it to the American audience, and in many ways, bringing America in, which is also very peculiarly Churchillian, right, because he's half American himself, is a key way in which he has to be the man for the moment, right, because he sees America as an important player that he can bring them into the war, convince Roosevelt that there should be an alliance, and he is very successful in that. How should we think about Churchill within the context of what was going on on the other side of the channel? Because we probably should acknowledge that while we're criticising

him, in Germany, there was the genesis of what would become one of the worst genocides in history. It's a part of the whole spectrum of what we're discussing, that Churchill was able to recognise, even as early as 1932, just how sinister Nazism was, particularly towards Jewish people. He didn't say that that's what would happen in 1932. I don't mean to say that. But that he saw that there was a sinister intention here, that early on, I think is remarkable. To what extent did Churchill's Victorian views on the world contribute to his defeat in 1945, Richard? I don't think so. I would say that he was regarded

by many people as reactionary, somebody who was an arch-conservative. They looked at his record going back to at least the time of Gallipoli. They looked at his record during the general strike. But in general, although there was some relatively sort of low-key criticism of his imperial views during World War II, I don't think that was actually a major factor in him losing office. What do you reckon Churchill's greatest accomplishment was? Well, I will say recognising the danger of the Nazis in the 1930s, his leadership in the 1940s, I would say one of his great skills, perhaps not sufficiently recognised, is that when he was making those speeches, he wasn't necessarily...