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Winston Churchill - The Wilderness Years After 1929
how accurate a descri ption is this of Winston Churchill`s political career at this time?
Date : 11/01/2016
Churchill - The Wilderness Years 1929-1940How accurate is this descri ption of Winston Churchill`s political career after 1929 and up to the end of the 1930`s?Introduction. This period is often called the wilderness years
because Churchill was out of office but he remained a prominent politician and
he was rarely out of the limelight. The period started well enough Churchill
went on a lecture tour of the USA and Canada and he was impressed enough with
Canada that he wrote to his wife Clementine even considering moving there.
Churchill had many friends and associates, when he travelled across Canada by
train he did so in a private railway carriage lent by one of his many friends
and supporters. His family at home was growing although he lost one child
(Marigold) to illness, this would have been a blow but we forget how common
this was in an age before antibiotics and the kinds of medical technology that
we all take for granted today. Initially Churchill was extremely well off by
the standards of the day, he writes to Clem (his wife) saying that they have
around £21,000 but like so many Churchill’s investments were badly hit by the
Wall Street Crash of 1929 and he lost around £10,000.This was a bad setback,
Churchill had purchased Chartwell as a family home and he had to mothball it
and move the family into a cottage on the grounds. For Churchill this was
slumming it but compared with the desperate and grinding poverty caused by the
great depression this was nothing to moan about. Churchill could always find a
publisher for his writings, newspapers and magazines, he wrote about his
experiences in Canada and the USA and devoted time to writing his biography of John
Spencer Churchill the 1st Duke of Marlborough (his famous ancestor)
and his victory at Blenheim. In researching John Spencer
Churchill’s (Marlborough’s) biography Churchill travelled through Europe and
especially Germany. Her he came across the emerging Nazi movement quite early
on and was quick to see the perceived dangers on German National Socialism and
the rise of Hitler. Churchill’s open warnings about the rise and power of the
Nazi’s are a constant theme in the 1930’s and this made him very unpopular at
home at a time when the policy of appeasement meant trying to negotiate with
Hitler and meet his demands. Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing and the
legacy of the terrible carnage of the First World War remained a huge influence
particularly on the older generation that was now running the country. Equally
many young people were opposed to any future war and organisations like the
Peace Pledge un ion where people took an oath not to fight in any future war
were very popular. The Great Depression and mass unemployment meant that
government spending on the military came under great pressure both morally and
economically at a time when the government needed every penny to try and help
people through the problems of unemployment and poor housing. It is
understandable that money spent on slum clearance and building new council
homes seemed make far more sense than strengthening the air force or the army.
Military spending tended to prioritize the Royal Navy as protecting the routes
to empire with the army reduced to a police role for the empire (particularly
in India). In this context Churchill’s repeated calls for rearmament seemed
both unwise and nonsensical. To be fair to Churchill he also (like many)
campaigned to see the powers of the League of Nations strengthen to oppose
aggressors like Mussolini and Hitler (also Japan in the Far East) but none of
this brought him any popularity even with those who privately might have
considered that Churchill had a point.The second issue that had a big
influence was Churchill’s stance on the British Empire. Always a supporter of
British imperialism Churchill was greatly worried by what he called ‘imperial
dissolution’. The so-called White Dominions, Canada, Australia New Zealand and
South Africa had been given self-governing status. While the remained closely
tied to Britain (as WW2 would show) they elected their own government and had a
large degree of self-rule. This period saw the rise of Indian Nationalism and a
concerted and prolonged campaign for independence or at least self-rule for
India similar to that offered to the White Dominions. Churchill was very much
opposed to this and the INC (Indian National Congress) that supported it.
Churchill’s defence of British rule of India was based on his view that the INC
were a bunch of self-seeking lawyers who had no real popular support. He also
believed that British rule was fairer than that which India would produce. He
would point out that India was a vast mixture of different ethnic groups and
religions and that the caste system denied any chance in life to many groups,
particularly the sixty million ‘untouchables’ who were really seen that way by
most Indians who would not even allow themselves to be near such people. Of
course the arguments that Churchill presented were real but they did not
justify British rule of an entire subcontinent. Again Churchill’s outspoken
nature made him deeply unpopular in powerful places. The British government had
also given a degree of self-rule to Iraq and Egypt both measures of which
Churchill heartily disapproved. Churchill became a member of the Indian Empire
Society a group of people who were not close to Churchill in other ways and his
active support for this further alienated him from his few supporters in
Parliament such as Duff Cooper, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. As with
Hitler and re-armament it’s not just that Churchill’s stance was out of step
with current political views, it’s the outspokenness of his stance that kept
him out of office, to many he was a maverick, out of control and unreliable.One small point (for high marks) is
the status of Ireland. Ireland had finally broken free of British rule (first
as the Irish Free State and later as the Republic of Ireland) but part of the
settlement of this was that the British continued to maintain some important
naval ports that protected the sea routes to Britain (called the Western
Approaches). In 1938 Britain gave up theses naval bases, these would have been
incredible valuable to the defence of Britain and the protection of convoys in
WW2 had we kept them and Churchill rightly fumed at the British Governments
decision to give them up. The other issue of great importance
was Edward VIII and the abdication crisis of 1938. Churchill was close to
Edward Prince of Wales and indeed had stayed with the Prince at Blenheim Palace
in the summer of 1935 along with Wallis Simpson and her then husband and Duff
Cooper and his wife Diana. Churchill believed that Edward would get over Wallis
Simpson not realising the strength, power and influence of their growing
relationship. The political climate of the day could not accept the future King
marrying a twice divorced American and Churchill pleaded with Edward to
consider his duty to the nation. When Churchill heard the news that Edward
intended to abdicate and give up the thrown to marry Wallis Simpson he openly
wept. Once again Churchill was out of step with the mood of the time and his
outspoken views damaged him greatly although he had provided some service as an
influence of Edward in trying to change his decision this would not have been
made public and his wife Clementine realised that this issue could finally
finish him politically and warned Winston to this effect. Some of the damage
done was rectified in Churchill’s support for the new King George VI. George VI
wanted to confer the status ‘Her Royal Highness’ on Wallis Simpson and of
course Edward VIII now became the Duke of Windsor. Churchill was one of the few
who supported George VI in this stance and the King wrote privately to
Churchill in May 1937 to thank him for his public support. Conclusion - So to call these years ‘The Wilderness Years’ is
not really accurate, Churchill played no role in government (and for at least
part of this period there was a National Government made up of more than one
party. Churchill holding office would have been unacceptable to the labour
Party). However he remained an important voice in British politics and while
his views may have been unpopular with many even most his influence was always
there. The fact that he had never associated himself with appeasement and
attempts to pacify Hitler would play a part in him becoming Prime Minister in
1940 but even this momentous act was in no way seen as inevitable.
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