College to study Churchill’s views on race and empire

By Amit Roy

SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL’S controver­sial views on race and empire are being examined by Churchill College, Cambridge, the very institution set up to honour Britain’s war time prime minister.

Announcing a year-long programme of events to analyse “the racial consequences of Mr Churchill”, Professor Dame Athene Donald, master of Churchill College since 2015, added a damning comment: “Church­ill, as a successful leader in time of war, must not be mythologised as a man without significant flaws.”

“On race, he was backward even in his day,” added Prof Donald, who is professor of experimental physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.

Academics will next Thursday (11), un­dertake “a critical reassessment of Church­ill’s life and legacy in light of his views on empire and race”. Participants will include Prof Priya Gopal, a fellow of Churchill Col­lege who holds a chair in the faculty of English at Cambridge; Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University; Dr Onyeka Nubia, a leading historian on the status and origins of Afri­cans in pre-colonial England; and Madhus­ree Mukerjee, who has set out why she be­lieves Churchill was responsible for aggra­vating the effects of the 1943 Bengal Famine in her book, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II.

Churchill College said in a statement: “On October 27, 2020, we launched our year-long programme of events to engage with the facts surrounding Sir Winston Churchill’s words, views and actions relat­ing to empire and race with a discussion between Professor Priya Gopal of Churchill College and Professor Richard Toye of the University of Exeter.”

In 1958, a trust was established with Churchill as its chairman of trustees to build and endow a college for 60 fellows and 540 students as a national and Com­monwealth memorial to the wartime lead­er. Its Royal Charter and Statutes were ap­proved by the Queen in August 1960. The first postgraduate students arrived in Octo­ber 1960, and undergraduates a year later.

Prof Donald explained the reason why the college was undertaking a critical analy­sis of the very man it was set up to remem­ber: “I’m sure I speak for the whole college community when I say that we were horri­fied by the death of George Floyd, a truly appalling event, which quite rightly reignit­ed the long smouldering grievances sur­rounding systemic, if often casual, racism on both sides of the Atlantic.

“I hope that the statements issued at the time by the university and this college made our support for the aims of the Black Lives Matter protesters very clear.”

Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square was twice daubed with the word, “racist”.

Prof Donald said: “That those protests in London focused on the Churchill statue was naturally a cause of particular concern here at Churchill College. We have an addi­tional responsibility given the name that the college carries.

“As an educational and research institu­tion, we acknowledge the need for and in­deed welcome an honest and critical en­gagement with history in all its fullness. We accept this will involve some difficult dis­cussions around important historical features, which we will actively seek to facilitate.”

She pledged: “We aim to lead an ongoing critical dialogue about his own legacy in global history, utilising not only the full depth of our fellowship, staff and student body, but also the rich material contained in the papers of the Churchill Archives Centre (at Churchill College).

“Our aim is to engage accurately and truth­fully with all aspects of our founder and foundation, and by better understanding our past seek to shape our future better.”

She referred to Prof Gopal, who has been a prominent figure in the debate on Churchill – and suffered as a consequence. She said: “Priya has been leading the fight against racism locally, nationally and internationally for a long time, sometimes fac­ing horrible and huge amounts of vitriol. Her primary interests are in colonial and post-colonial studies. Her most recent published work is Insurgent Empire: Anti­colonial Resistance and British Dissent.”

During the first debate, Prof Gopal had one question put to her by Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre, on behalf of a participant: “What would you say to those people who are saying that this panel is inherently imbalanced? And that this is a panel of essentially anti-Church­illian panellists?”

A visibly angry Gopal shot back: “I would say that if we’re going to talk about balance, the amount of Churchill hagiography and uncritical takes on Churchill outweigh any criticism by several thousand tons. So in order to even reach anything like balance, we would have to have a panel like this every single day, for two hours for the re­mainder of the century. And then we might achieve something like balance. You’re right – there is no balance.”

She added: “I also am cognisant that for the bulk of the time that I’ve taught here, it has been an extremely racially homogene­ous place, and the entry of more black stu­dents, and to some extent more Asian stu­dents, has made a difference to the kinds of discussions that we are having.”

Asked whether the discussion of diversi­ty made any difference, she responded: “We wouldn’t be having this discussion if there weren’t black students at Cambridge and at Churchill, asking us to discuss these ques­tions. So I’m not willing to dismiss diversity wholesale. That said, I agree that diversity must be an opening point for discussions of racial justice, and for discussions of some­thing that’s very, very different – and that is decolonisation and structural change.

“So I would say, yes, diversity is not enough. But I wouldn’t exactly turn my face against it either.”

Although unconnected, events at Churchill College have coincided with the US president Joe Biden’s decision to re­move Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office, which George W Bush had first installed, to be expelled by Barack Obama, only to reap­pear under Donald Trump.

Daniel Kawczynski, the Conservative MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham, said: “Winston Churchill, more than any other politician, personifies what acting together can achieve by the UK and the US. I hope his bust will always have a special place in the White House to symbolise this partnership between us.”

Nigel Farage, a leading figure in the Brex­it movement and a supporter of Trump, told the BBC: “It doesn’t surprise me at all be­cause Joe Biden is anti-Brexit. Joe Biden is pro-the European Union. Joe Biden is pro-the Irish nationalist cause.

“And Joe Biden was the vice-president when Obama came here in 2016, looked down his nose at us and said if we dared to vote for independence, we would go to the back of the queue.

“So don’t expect Biden to be a great friend of this country, he won’t be.”

Farage revealed: “I spoke to Trump three days after the election in 2016 and asked him, ‘will you put the Churchill bust back in the Oval Office’ as a symbol of how he felt about the United Kingdom, how he felt about the things that over the last 100 years we have done together? And he put it back there the first day.”