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By Root 913 0

leading member of the Labour Party, in May 1940 he refused a position in the Ministry for Food in the National Coalition Government but two years later became party chairman. In June 1941 both of these parliamentarians rounded upon Churchill for not having organized an Imperial War Cabinet.5 Two weeks later Granville was asking another question about the functioning of high commissioner meetings; the week after he was enquiring about methods of increasing the amount of information being supplied to the Dominions; six weeks later yet another question on the possibility of an Empire War Cabinet.6 Another in this category was Beverley Baxter, a Canadian-born journalist-turned-politician who held the suburban London seat of Wood Green for the Conservatives. In a May 1942 debate about the war situation he criticized Churchill and his parliamentary colleagues for their apparent lack of interest in the Empire. Many felt deeply about the subject but he wished that the prime minister, one who 'had done so much to bring the English-speaking people together', would appear more visibly interested and that in Britain as a whole there could be a far greater appreciation of what the Dominions were doing in the war.7

Inevitably the figure of Churchill loomed large over the debate. As he told a Party meeting on 9 October 1940, convened to discuss the question of Chamberlain's successor, he had always 'faithfully served two supreme causes—the maintenance of the enduring greatness of Britain and her Empire and the historic certainty of our Island life'.8 Indeed, an American correspondent in London wrote later that same year, Britain's wartime leader was undeniably 'the son of Jennie Jerome of New York City, American in his directness but otherwise British as bully beef' but while his 'blood is half American when it begins to boil, a chemistry of ancient loyalties makes it all British—exultant, proud, superior, unbeatable even in defeat'.9 Massey referred to him in often critical terms as the 'Headmaster' for this was how he sometimes appeared to deal with his errant pupils.10 Although a staunchly self-professed imperialist, his views continued to draw their basis from an era that was drawing to a close. Indeed to certain commentators in London, he was 'Eighteenth century in many respects' and even his undoubtedly closest Dominion confidante, Smuts, could only lament the degree to which Churchill remained 'obsessed with 1776'.11 Even the British leader's own trusted secretary thought that his boss was 'in the main oblivious to the growth of nationalism as a force in British imperial affairs'.12 As an exponent of Empire in nineteenth- rather than twentieth-century terms, he was determined that nothing should be surrendered.13 The Empire was 'an instrument that gave to Britain a world position that she would not otherwise have had'.14 Malcolm MacDonald, in his draft handwritten memoirs talking about Britain's wartime relations with Canada, detailed the 'certain difficulties' that arose 'now and then'. Sometimes this was because of the prime minister's 'old fashioned notions'. He was inclined to regard Canada and all the other Dominions as still a partly, if not wholly, dependent colony of Britain, whose Cabinet ministers should accept—and indeed obey—the British government's views on all problems at all times as 'the last word in wisdom'. He recognized their constitutional status but tended to view this as 'a matter of polite, and somewhat ridiculous theory rather than undeniable fact'.15 With this highly romanticized, but often conditional view of the Empire, he found it hard to view the Dominions as equals.

If Churchill loomed, Cranborne's was a much more munificent presence. He may no longer have been at the helm at the DO but he had only moved to the larger, sister CO department situated in the same building. From here he remained a key presence, a contender for the mantle of the Empire's most important wartime statesman. He saw the Commonwealth of Nations as a living organism in which the grown-up children were the self-governing Dominions