May 21, 2023

Winston Churchill, Wilfrid Blunt, and the British Empire in the Middle East

Finest Hour 196, Second Quarter 2022

Page 12

By Warren Dockter

Warren Dockter is President of the East Tennessee Historical Society and author of Churchill and the Islamic World (2015).


Much has been written about Winston Churchill’s unwavering devotion to T. E. Lawrence, who served as an adviser on Arab affairs during Churchill’s tenure at the Colonial Office.1 Little attention, however, has been given to Churchill’s relationship with the poet, orientalist, and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. This is an odd oversight given Churchill’s prominence as a historical figure and the friendship Blunt also had with Churchill’s father Lord Randolph. Additionally, this omission is odd because their relationship raises interesting historical curiosities owing to their radically different political beliefs regarding the British Empire. That Blunt, a strong voice of anti-imperial dissent in British high society, would befriend Lord Randolph and later Winston Churchill, a die-hard imperialist in the 1930s, seems strange indeed.

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Born in 1840 and raised in the Roman Catholic faith of his mother, Blunt was educated at Stonyhurst and St. Mary’s College. He served in the diplomatic service for eleven years before marrying a daughter of the Earl of Lovelace, whose maternal grandfather was Lord Byron. After extensive travels in the Middle East, the Blunts established a stud farm for Arabian horses at Crabbet Park in West Sussex.

By the 1880s Blunt had become “the avatar for antiimperial causes” and, despite having shed his own religious faith, an active force for the “regeneration of Islam” by means of “agitation and negotiation as well as by poetry and horse breeding.”2 He used his horse breeding operations to disseminate his political views among his social connections in the influential horse-trading community, especially in high Tory circles where such views were not common.

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Enraged by Prime Minister Gladstone’s decision for Britain to occupy Egypt in 1882, Blunt believed the policy to be one of fiscal self-interest and blatant imperialism. He published his own vision for the Levant in The Future of Islam (1882). His far-sighted design foresaw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as inevitable, due to its excesses and archaic use of the oppressive vilayet system, which split the administration of the Middle East into small manageable regions.

Once the Ottoman Empire had disappeared, Blunt reasoned, “The Caliphate—no longer an empire, but still an independent sovereignty—must be taken under British protection, and publicly guaranteed its political existence, undisturbed by further aggression from Europe.” Furthermore, he advocated the creation of an Arab state as the home of the new Caliphate. According to Blunt’s design, the English were singular amongst Europeans because they had a “tradition of tolerance towards Islam,” which would result in “Moslems, recognizing this,” and looking to “England as their advisor and protector.”3 According to Blunt, this was already evident in India.

“A Little Square Headed Fellow”

Blunt’s faith in the British Empire as a progressive force in the Islamic world waned heavily after he published The Future of Islam. Increasingly he became politically isolated from politicians of all parties. Three times he ran for Parliament in the 1880s as a “Tory Democrat” supporting Irish Home Rule. Three times he lost. Disagreement over Ireland also destroyed Blunt’s friendship with Lord Randolph Churchill.

Blunt first became connected with the Churchill family after befriending Lord Randolph at a chess tournament in the Strand in 1883. Always on the lookout for political contacts to aid his quest to end the recent occupation of Egypt, Blunt wrote to Lord Randolph in November 1882 prior to their meeting and asked if the Conservative MP would “defend the Egyptian nationalists against the charge of complacency in the Alexandria riots.”4 This led to an alliance and a friendship between Blunt and the opportunistic Lord Randolph, who was happy to grasp any issue that enabled him to attack Gladstone and the Liberals. Inevitably, therefore, the partnership failed once Gladstone embraced Blunt’s position on Ireland.5

Caricature of Blunt by “Ape” for Vanity Fair

It was not until Winston Churchill became embroiled in Egypt during the “Anglo-Dervish War” against the Mahdiyya and their leader the Mahdi in 1898 that Blunt became interested in Lord Randolph’s eldest son. In May 1899, Blunt learned that the younger Churchill was publishing his new book The River War. Blunt hoped that the book would blurt “out all kinds of inconvenient truths about the Sudan campaign.” The book did just that, and Blunt was impressed that Churchill had even called General Kitchener’s desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb “a foul deed.”6

A few days later, Churchill gave a speech that became known as the “Brutal Act” speech.7 Churchill argued that he would not support the award of £10,000 to Kitchener for his victory in Sudan, because “it is beyond all contention that the manner in which the dismemberment and removal [of the Mahdi’s body] were carried out was such as to constitute the whole proceeding, a brutal act.”8 Years later, in 1909, Churchill told Blunt that Kitchener behaved like a “blackguard,” and Blunt informed Churchill that he believed Kitchener still had the head of the Mahdi as a trophy, despite being ordered to return the head to Sudan. To this Churchill replied, “I made a row about that though they told me it was bad taste for a young Lieutenant to say anything. I always hated Kitchener, though I did not know him personally.”9

It was not until October 1903, however, that Blunt met Winston Churchill for the first time. In his diary Blunt recorded his impressions:

He is a little square headed fellow of no very striking appearance, but of wit, intelligence, and originality. In mind and manner he is a strange replica of his father, with all his father’s suddenness and assurance….In opposition I expect to see Winston playing precisely his father’s game, and I should not be surprised if he had his father’s success. He has a power of writing Randolph never had.10

After this initial meeting, their relationship continued to grow during the early 1900s and, coincidentally, after Churchill switched political allegiances from the more traditional, imperialist Conservatives to the relatively less imperialist Liberals. Blunt and Churchill met several times, at first to discuss the younger Churchill’s impending biography of his father, but then simply as friends. On some occasions they even dressed in Arab clothing, a tradition Blunt and Churchill would carry on into the twilight of their friendship.

Differences of Opinion

As the first decade of the twentieth century came to a close, Blunt and Churchill saw each other socially with increasing regularity. During a luncheon in September 1909, Blunt tried to finesse Churchill to speak on India. All Churchill gave him was to say that “if they ever unite against us and put us in Coventry all round, the game would be up.” To Blunt’s dismay, Churchill spoke more definitively on Blunt’s old pursuit, Egypt: “We shall continue to hold it whatever happens; nobody will ever give it up—I won’t—except if we are driven out at the end of a war.”11

Blunt feared perhaps that Churchill was too much like his father and not really the champion of Islam Blunt had hoped for. Churchill reaffirmed his position a month later while he was spending the weekend with Blunt by calling himself an “Imperialist.” Despite this, Blunt had not given up on Churchill as a defender of the East. Blunt recorded in his diary that “Winston sympathizes much with my ideas about the native question in India, and in general about the enslavement of the coloured by the white race.”12 The next day after a long conversation with Churchill, Blunt recorded, “I think Churchill will come around to my views about India for in all essentials he is at one with me.”13

Blunt continued to press Churchill to be an imperial reformer. After discussing his new book India under Ripon with Churchill, Blunt concluded that Churchill was “much more favourable to my antiImperial views than he was two months ago. Indeed he is almost converted to the view that the British Empire will eventually ruin England.” Churchill also candidly told Blunt that “I think you may see me yet carry out your anti-imperial ideas.”14 In fact, he exclaimed to Blunt that the empire was “a lot of bother” and “the only thing one can say for it is that it is justified if it is undertaken in an altruistic spirit for the good of the subject races.”15

Annex Egypt
Engraving of Wilfrid Blunt, circa 1888

Despite Blunt’s hopes, he and Churchill soon began to diverge on the question of empire. While discussing Egypt at Blunt’s home at Newbuildings on 14 October 1910, Churchill argued that “we should hold on to Egypt as we hold onto India…a necessity of Empire.” Churchill’s last words to Blunt that night were “you must not quarrel with me if I annex Egypt.” Despite this pronouncement, Blunt still believed that Churchill was “shaken on the subject” and that he had “produced a considerable effect on him.”16

Blunt finally accepted that he was losing Churchill’s ear in January of 1911, when he noted in his diary that he “was sorry to find that Winston was getting more and more imperialist.”17 In early 1911 Churchill became the First Lord of the Admiralty, an office that increasingly concerned him with the welfare of the Empire at the expense of his other interests. Blunt feared Churchill was becoming too close to Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, a leading member of the Liberal Imperialists, and recalled a conversation they had in passing just before Churchill went to the Admiralty:

As I was going away Churchill called to me, “What will you say to our making a large increase in the Cairo garrison and putting the expense of it on Egypt as a result of your inflammatory pronouncement?” “You may keep 100,000 men there if you like” I said. “It will make no difference in the result.”18

After several months of silence between the two, Churchill wrote Blunt a letter in which he suggested that they sit down and have a talk. The letter also said that Churchill was “glad to find that [his] belonging to a government wicked enough to send Lord Kitchener to Egypt has not altered [their] relations.”19 Churchill clearly felt trepidation regarding Blunt’s opinions on Kitchener returning to Egypt, and in fact Blunt did have strong (if not delusional) opinions on the matter. He noted that “Churchill had abandoned his long-time feud with Kitchener” and went so far as to speculate that Kitchener, Churchill, and Asquith might be planning a coup.20

While Blunt’s frustration with Churchill was clear, these disagreements never altered their friendship. They continued to see each other into the twilight of Blunt’s life. Churchill even continued to defend Blunt privately, scolding Sir John Seely, the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, for being rude to Blunt.21 Churchill also arranged for T. E. Lawrence to visit Blunt a couple times before his death in 1922.22 Blunt never gave up on Churchill becoming his antiimperial champion. In a letter to Clementine Churchill in June 1921, Blunt wrote:

I believe [Winston] agrees with me in his heart of hearts about the regeneration of the East and the way it should be set about if the British Empire is not to go the road of ruin all other Empires have gone. I used to talk in the same way to his father and it pleases me to find myself, after so many years talking again to Winston, especially now he is in a position to carry out his ideas as his father never was except the few months he was at the India Office. About Egypt he was always with me to the last days of his life. You may tell Winston this with my love.23

Blunt’s Legacy

Finding traces of Blunt’s influence on Churchill’s later thinking can only be seen in the abstract but are clearest when considering Churchill’s time as Secretary for the State of the Colonies in 1921–1922. The most obvious instance is in Churchill’s solution for the post-war Middle East. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Churchill oversaw the creation of nominally independent Arab states under control of the Hashemite family. The Emir Hussein of Mecca became—for a time—King of the Hejaz. His son Feisal became King of Iraq, while another son, Abdullah, became King of Jordan. All three remained under informal British control.

This so-called “Sharifian solution” was very similar to what Blunt had proposed in his book The Future of Islam. Britain became the guarantor of a nominally independent Middle East under the control of Islamic leaders with whom Britain had forged a special relationship during the First World War. Elements of Blunt’s thinking were evident in Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons on 14 June 1921, when he defended this new Middle Eastern policy (see p. 38).

Like Blunt, Churchill rejected the Ottoman vilayet system, arguing that it was “cynical” because it kept the Arabs divided and discouraged their national aspirations. Churchill argued that his policy would build “around the ancient capital of Baghdad in a form friendly to Britain and her allies an Arab state which can revive and embody the old culture and glories of the Arab race.”24 After the speech, Churchill wrote to Blunt saying, “I knew you would be pleased about Mesopotamia….The Arabs have a chance now of building up in Bagdad a civilization and prosperity which will revive its long vanished glories.”25

Annex Egypt
Winston and Clementine Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Gertrude Bell on camels during Cairo Conference, 20 March 1921. Photo by G. M. Georgoulas, Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University, Pers_F_003.

Indeed Blunt was pleased. With the exception of Egyptian home rule, a matter the two had quarreled over for nearly a decade, Blunt noted in his diary, “They will have adopted my advice for pretty nearly the whole of the Near Eastern question.”26 While Blunt was largely satisfied with Churchill’s solution for the Middle East, he still had reservations about uniting all of the Bedouin tribes as one nation, a scheme Blunt felt was impossible because “each tribe had lived as an independent nation since Solomon.”27 Blunt tended to credit the solution, moreover, not to Churchill, whom he continued to mistrust over imperial matters, but to the Colonial Secretary’s famous protégé, T. E. Lawrence, who Blunt believed “forced his policy on the Foreign Office and Colonial Office” and on Churchill.28

Blunt may have been right. Churchill was enamored with the co-author of this Middle Eastern policy. According to Middle Eastern historian, Timothy Paris, their relationship was characterized by “deep mutual admiration and respect” and “Lawrence’s influence on Churchill was considerable,” resulting in “Churchill’s adherence to Lawrence’s recommendations even on issues on which the rest of the Middle East Department dissented.”29

Kathryn Tidrick described Lawrence as “Blunt’s most devoted…disciple” and little more than a “caricature” of Blunt.30 While this dismissal of Lawrence’s personality seems extreme, it does illustrate the extent to which Lawrence (and thus Churchill) was swayed by Blunt. For Blunt’s part, he was as fascinated with the young Lawrence as Churchill was. After meeting him in 1920, Blunt’s admiration for Lawrence was evident in his diary, in which he wrote that Lawrence’s service in the Middle East was “an adventure of the heroic kind, carrying out very exactly the old one I had dreamed of attempting myself in 1880.”31

Despite traces of Blunt’s political thought being evident in the Middle Eastern solution, there were major differences between his and Churchill’s designs for the Middle East. Churchill’s scheme did not transfer the caliphate from the defunct Ottoman sultanate to the Arab world as Blunt had wished. Instead the caliphate and, indeed, any pan-Islamic identity was lost. Consequently, rather than revolving around its own caliphate, Arab society orbited around the British Empire.

Originally Blunt would have abhorred the resulting exaggerated role of the British. As he began to see the post-war world unfolding, however, Blunt began to reconsider his views and realigned himself with the earlier, more imperial-friendly position he outlined in The Future of Islam. In 1919, Blunt recorded in his diary that future Muslim aspirations “are joined with that of the British Empire and on the whole I am inclined for their less harm the less it [sic.] is divided among other Christian empires… Any single control is better than joint control.”32

So while Blunt was certainly not endorsing British imperialism, he did conclude that it was probably the least harmful to Islamic aspirations by default. Prophetically, Blunt had written in 1884 that the government had already undermined his work in The Future of Islam by “adopting” it and “using it for its own purposes.”33 The great tragedy, then, of Blunt’s efforts may be that he indirectly helped engineer a British imperial legacy in the Middle East.

Blunt’s friendship with Winston Churchill considerably affected the future prime minister’s thinking. While their ideas were formed in a similar socio-political environment, Blunt’s notions were often vehemently anti-imperial and ultimately proved too radical for the essentially conservative Churchill. Despite this, the evidence suggests that Blunt’s influence did affect Churchill’s attitudes towards and the policies in the Middle East, decisions that continue to affect the world today.


Endnotes

1. Kathryn Tidrick, Heart Beguiling Araby: The English Romance with Arabia (London: Tauris 1981), pp. 126 and 181.

2. R. F. Foster, Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life (Oxford: Oxford University 1981), pp. 111 and 120.

3. Wilfrid S. Blunt, The Future of Islam (London: Kegan Paul Trench and Company 1882), p. 204; Tidrick, p. 126.

4. Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfred Scawen Blunt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1979), p. 194. See also Blunt MSS 380/1977, Blunt Papers, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

5. Warren Dockter, “The Influence of a Poet: Wilfrid S. Blunt and the Churchills,” Journal of Historical Biography 10 (autumn 2011), pp. 75–81.

6. Wilfrid Blunt, My Diaries (London: Martin Secker, 1919), pp. 321–22.

7. Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston Churchill: His Complete Speeches, vol. I, 1897–1908 (New York: Chelsea House, 1974), pp. 31–32.

8. Ibid.

9. Blunt, Diaries p. 683.

10. Ibid., pp. 488–89.

11. Ibid., pp. 684–85.

12. Ibid., p. 690.

13. Ibid., p. 693.

14. Ibid., p. 702.

15. Ibid., p. 698.

16. Ibid., pp. 736–37.

17. Ibid., p. 750.

18. Ibid., p. 781.

19. Ibid., p. 791.

20. Ibid., p. 803.

21. Ibid., p. 787.

22. CHAR 2/118/96, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.

23. Blunt’s Diary, 11 June 1919, MS 467–1975, Blunt papers.

24. Ibid., pp. 3100–01.

25. Churchill to Blunt, 15 September 1921, MS 244–1976.

26. Blunt’s diary, 11 March 1921, MS 465–1975.

27. Ibid., 5 June 1921, MS 467– 1975.

28. Ibid., 26 February 1921, MS 465–1975.

29. Timothy Paris, Britain, The Hashemites and Arab Rule, 1920–1925: The Sherifian Solution (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 130.

30. Tidrick, pp. 126 and 181. Also see Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary: 1917–1956 (London: Cresset Press, 1959), p. 33.

31. Blunt’s diary, 21 August 1920, MS 459–1975.

32. Blunt’s diary, 15 April 1919, MS 448–1975.

33. Wilfrid S. Blunt, India under Ripon (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909), p. 231.

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