‘Racist’ read the spray-painted epithet on Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square following a climate protest in 2020. This brutal assessment of Britain’s wartime leader wasn’t a one-off: ‘Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one,’ says the Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal. In recent years, a movement to ‘tell the truth’ about Churchill has sprung up. He should be knocked from perch, plinth and prominence, his critics argue. So what is the truth about Churchill?
Churchill’s critics say the language he used is proof he was a racist. But is this right? Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project has put together every one of Churchill’s 20 million published words, including nearly 60 books, 2,000 articles, thousands of speeches and private letters and papers. It also includes 60 million words about Churchill by biographers and memoir writers. With some trepidation, my research team and I searched for every racist epithet in this enormous canon.
From the way accusations of Churchill using racist slurs are flung about by his critics, one would think they were part of his everyday language. What we found was that, while they do occur, they are extremely infrequent. Most come, not from Churchill himself, but from memoirs or the diaries of colleagues, making them hearsay at best. Of course, this doesn’t excuse Churchill’s use of racist tropes: some of the words he used are unacceptable today. But while we should not brush over such comments, we must see them in context. By doing so, we realise that summing up Churchill as a racist is an appalling and unfair slight against Britain’s most famous prime minister.
Churchill is the most quoted political figure of the 20th century. If each of us had our every word so widely disseminated and recorded – including what others thought were our words – would we stand up to scrutiny?
Among those colleagues who took down Churchill’s words, Leo Amery, a friend from his Harrow School days, makes the most references to his apparent use of racial slurs. ‘Racist’ was not then a common term, and Amery never used it. But without Amery’s diaries, critics would have no source at all for many of Churchill’s alleged racial outbursts.
Amery himself used many terms we now regard as racist — including the most offensive word for black people. So when Amery writes: ‘Winston said…’ it is reasonable to ask a question in response: Were those Winston’s words, or Amery’s routine expressions, representing what he believed Winston said?
Leo Amery was a decent and honourable man. His sympathy for the plight of Indians when he served as Secretary of State for India in the Second World War was profound. He abhorred appeasement and gave a speech that helped propel Churchill into office in 1940. But there is no doubt that he was far freer with racist language than Churchill.
If each of us had our every word so widely disseminated and recorded, would we stand up to scrutiny?
This isn’t to say Churchill never used offensive terms. In his bestselling biography of Marlborough, he wrote ‘What did it matter if a few blackamoors resigned?’ and when his doctor, Lord Moran, asked if he’d seen film Carmen Jones, he replied, according to Moran, that ‘he didn’t like “blackamoors”, and had walked out early in the proceedings.’ Yet those are the only two occurrences of the word in Churchill’s canon.
Churchill has also been accused of calling Indians ‘babus’ (a contemptuous term for clerks), upon whom, according to Rab Butler, he ‘launched into a most horrible attack’. But we should be careful in attributing this specific comment to Churchill himself. Why? Because these are Butler’s words, not Churchill’s. It’s true that Churchill did use this word once. On 22 March 1898, angered by typos in his first book, he wrote to his mother: ‘last but not least this atrocity “Babri” for babu, meaning an Indian clerk.’
But this offensive reference seems almost bland compared to what Amery said Churchill said about Indians in 1942 during negotiations with separatists in Delhi. It’s a quote for which Churchill’s critics have long condemned him. On 9 September, he allegedly said: ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ On 12 November, Amery says ‘Winston went off the deep end in a state of frantic passion on the whole subject of the humiliation of being kicked out of India by the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans.’
As usual, these epithets are Amery’s hearsay. It isn’t hard, though, to believe Churchill might have said something like that in the circumstances. He clearly loved to prod Amery; he’d done so since they were at school. Whether or not that was the reason for Churchill’s outbursts, for his detractors these words look like concrete evidence that Churchill was indeed racist.
Before rushing to judgement, though, we should consider the view of Indian historian Dr. Tirthankar Roy. He argues that ‘the context for almost everything Churchill said about Indians and the Empire was related to the Indian nationalist movement’. In short, these terms then – while unacceptable – were not intended to refer to those from India in general. Indeed, Churchill’s detractors often forget the affection he had for Indian soldiers. During the Second World War, the prime minister spoke of ‘the glorious heroism and martial qualities’ of soldiers, ‘both Moslem and Hindu’, from the subcontinent. ‘The response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire,’ he wrote. These hardly sound like the words of a racist.
Churchill’s reported use of racial slurs extends beyond just those for black and Indian people. Amery records that on 13 June 1944 ‘Winston muttered and growled and mumbled for a quarter of an hour or more in order to ventilate his emotions of disgust at anything that could extend self-government to brown people [in Ceylon].’ Again, this is Amery writing, not Churchill.
In January 1952, an Egyptian mob attacked the British Overseas Airways Cooperation offices in Cairo. Churchill described them as ‘lower than the most degraded savages now known’. He added: ‘When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings, it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking.’ Egypt, however, is not a race. When Churchill said ‘race’ he usually meant ‘nation’. His words were, more accurately, xenophobic.
Very rarely, Churchill did use racist words to describe Asians. We found one instance where he used the word ‘chink’ as a slur against Chinese people in a comment to his colonial secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd MP. Prior to the Korean War, Churchill was warned about the size of the Chinese army. ‘Four million pigtails don’t make an army,’ he replied. In 1954, writing about a Labour party visit to China, he said, ‘I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails.’
Such words are troubling – and defenders of Churchill must not shy away from his use of these terms. But we should remember, too, that much of Churchill’s alleged racism is often recorded by people quarrelling with him.
Desmond Morton, Churchill’s 1930s advisor on German rearmament, felt ignored and rejected after the war. In Churchill’s view, he wrote, ‘all Germans were Nazees, all Italians organ-grinders.’ Inexplicably, though, Morton – no fan of Churchill by this point – thought Churchill romanticised Arabs:
[He] really and truly believed these twopence coloured and highly erroneous images. The superlatively courageous, courteous, urbane, masculine Arab, terrible in his wrath, living an ascetic life in company with Allah, a camel, a spear and rifle…like a medieval knight of chivalry. This he really believed and nothing could persuade him that en masse the Bedu is a dirty, cowardly cut-throat, with very primitive passions indeed and about as trustworthy as a King Cobra.
It is sad that what Morton said Churchill believed about Bedouins has disappeared, and what Morton said substituted, to stand as proof of Churchill’s hatred for Arabs.
Churchill has also been accused of failing to do more to discourage racial segregation among US forces in Britain. He has been accused of making an offensive remark about a black official from the Colonial Office who was barred from his favourite restaurant because it was patronised by white American officers. Unacceptable, yes, but again this is hearsay: it comes from the diaries of civil servant Alexander Cadogan. But if we assume it is true, it is worth contrasting with the Churchill war cabinet decision of 13 October 1942:
[We] need not, and should not, object to the Americans [segregating] their coloured troops. 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.
Or take his comments in My African Journey, written in 1908 as he toured British East Africa:
For my own part I rejoice that the physical conditions of the country are such as to prevent the growth in the heart of happy Uganda of a petty white community, with the harsh and selfish ideas which mark the jealous contact of races and the exploitation of the weaker. Let it remain a “planters” land.
Such words in 1908 must have struck some of Churchill’s contemporaries as revolutionary.
We must, too, consider Churchill’s wider references to race in his writings, as well as his documented belief in equal rights, such as his fierce opposition to Apartheid in South Africa. In 1954, denying South Africa’s perennial demand to take control of the protectorates of Botswana, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, he declared: ‘We are pledged, since the South Africa Act of 1909 not to transfer these Territories until their inhabitants have been consulted [and] wished it.’ Decades earlier, in debating that Act, he had said: ‘We will not — at least I will pledge myself — hesitate to speak out when necessary if any plain case of cruelty or exploitation of the native for the sordid profit of the white man can be proved.’
So let’s not turn a blind eye to Churchill’s faults. He was human, after all. But condemning Churchill over a handful of words is an unfair way to treat a leader who stood alone against the Nazis until the rest of the world, ‘hitherto half-blind’ as he put it, ‘were half-ready’.
This article is an extract from ‘The Truth About Churchill’s ‘Racist’ Epithets in Grand Alliance: Churchill Studies at Hillsdale College, 2022‘
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