Abstract
Winston Churchill rose slowly from the green leather benches of the House of Commons to place his hands lightly on the dispatch box. It was more than six years since he last stood in the chamber as prime minister and now he faced a distinctly different crowd. Rather than a national coalition government with Clement Attlee sitting at his right hand as deputy prime minister and Socialists as well as Liberals and Conservatives placed solidly behind him, he stared across the aisle at a hostile and partisan Labour Party, many of whom had never served under him or with him through the shared experience of World War. They were thus more concerned with what Churchill believed to be cheap party tricks than with the national interest. More than anything else, this new parliamentary intake demonstrated that the political landscape of postwar Britain had changed forever.
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Notes
For the most readable biography of Churchill’s life, see Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
Winston S. Churchill, Speech to the House of Commons, November 6, 1951, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963: Volume VIII, 1950–1963 (New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), 8289–8297.
Oliver Lyttelton, Viscount Chandos, The Memoirs of Lord Chandos: An Unexpected View from the Summit (New York: New American Library, 1963), 328.
Ibid., 348.
Henry Pelling, Churchill’s Peacetime Ministry, 1951–55 (New York and Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1997), 28.
Quoted in Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, “Securing the Colonies for the Commonwealth: Counterinsurgency, Decolonization, and the Development of British Imperial Strategy in the Postwar Empire,” British Scholar, Volume II, Issue 1 (September 2009), 31. It should be noted that Templer was the first to coin this oft-repeated phrase.
Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MIS (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 449–450.
David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 47.
T. C. McCaskie, “Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” in Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins, eds. Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 175–177.
Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya: Volume One, 1870–1914 (London: Chatto and Whindus, 1953), 3.
See John S. Galbraith, Mackinnon and East Africa, 1878–1895: A Study in the ‘New Imperialism’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
See G. H. Mungeam, British Rule in Kenya, 1895–1912: The Establishment of Administration in the East Africa Protectorate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), chapter 1.
Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 1–12.
Carl G. Rosberg, Jr and John Nottingham, The Myth of “Mau Mau”: Nationalism in Kenya (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1966), 7–13.
See Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya: Volume Two, 1914–1931 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1953), chapters 16 and 17.
David Throup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, 1945–53 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1988), 91–100.
Denis Judd, Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 350.
Anthony Clayton, “Baring, (Charles) Evelyn, first Baron Howiek of Glendale (1903–1973),” in Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
F. D. Corfield, Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau: Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Colonies by Command of Her Majesty (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1960), 159.
Peter Hewitt, Kenya Cowboy: A Police Officer’s Account of the Mau Mau Emergency, 3rd edn (Johannesburg, South Africa: 30 Degrees South Publishers, 2008), 134–6.
Huw Bennett, “Erskine, Sir George Watkin Eben James,” in Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Brian Lapping, End of Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 427.
Anthony Clayton, Counter-Insurgency in Kenya: A Study of Military Operations Against Mau Mau (Nairobi, Kenya: Transafrica Publishers, 1976), 25.
Henry Swanzy, “Quarterly Notes,” African Affairs, Volume 53, Number 212 (July 1954), 200.
Quoted in John Cloake, Templer: Tiger of Malaya: The Life of Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer (London: Harrap, 1985), 317.
Ibid., 319.
Quoted in ibid., 260.
Ibid.
Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 91.
Philippa Levine, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2007), 90.
R.F. Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5.
Ibid., 7–8.
Ibid., 1–5.
Ibid., 9–13.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 15–16.
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© 2011 Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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Grob-Fitzgibbon, B. (2011). The Churchill Years: October 26, 1951, to April 7, 1955. In: Imperial Endgame. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30038-5_3
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