Churchill and the Lion City

5. An Imperial Defeat? The Presentation and Reception of the Fall of Singapore

108 Richard Toye 108 CHAPTER 5 An Imperial Defeat? The Presentation and Reception of the Fall of Singapore 1 Richard Toye In his memoirs, Churchill described the loss of Singapore as “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”.2 The future Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, apparently discerned at the time that the battle foretold “the end of the British Empire”.3 The defeat resonated around the world, giving a field day to German propagandists such as William Joyce (“Lord Haw-Haw”), who spoke of “Winston Churchill, the undertaker of the British Empire”.4 According to Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, “The fall of Singapore on 15 February [1942] stupefied the Prime Minister”. Churchill was both incredulous to learn of the inadequate state of the island’s defences and self-reproachful for having failed to find out the true position himself earlier. According to Moran’s account: There was another more crucial question, to which the Prime Minister could find no answer. How came 100,000 men (half of them of our own race) to hold up their hands to an inferior number of Japanese? Though his mind had been gradually prepared for its fall, the surrender of the fortress stunned him. It left a scar on his mind. One evening, months later, when he was sitting in his bathroom enveloped in a towel, he stopped drying himself and gloomily surveyed the floor: ‘I cannot get over Singapore,’ he said sadly.5 Churchill’s involvement in, and the degree of his responsibility for, the catastrophe (and associated military errors) has received much discussion An Imperial Defeat? 109 from historians, as has the way he dealt with the issue when he came to write The Second World War.6 The purpose of this chapter, by contrast, is to consider the symbolism of the loss of Singapore. Its focus is less on high policy and military strategy than on the imperial language of Churchill and others, and its reception in Britain and elsewhere. Ronald Hyam has suggested that Churchill “was not all that interested in the empire, apart from its rhetorical potentialities, and as distinct from what he regarded as the larger and more portentous issues of international relations”.7 Yet if we want to understand fully how he and his contemporaries attempted to promote their views in Britain and abroad, then the “rhetorical potentialities” of Empire are exactly what we need to consider. Historians of empire discuss the language of imperialism a great deal, although they do not tend to distinguish between (written) “discourse” and (spoken) “rhetoric”.8 Meanwhile — in contrast to the thriving state of rhetorical studies in the United States9 — scholars of modern Britain have paid comparatively little explicit attention to political rhetoric. There are signs that this may be changing, with some recent work considering the imperial and post-imperial dimensions of British political rhetoric.10 Churchill is one of the few British figures whose rhetoric has been examined at length, although the focus has generally been on his great wartime and Cold War speeches; the imperial dimension has not received sustained analysis.11 If it is to be fruitful, such an analysis must do more than examine the particular rhetorical effects that Churchill sought; his language must be put in the context not only of his own career and ideology, but also of the norms and ideological expectations of the society that surrounded him. That is to say, without an understanding of “the context of refutation” — that is, the arguments a speaker is attacking and seeking to rebut — a narrow focus on a series of “great speeches” will not take us very far.12 We must also remember that Churchill was not just a political actor in the story of Empire and its decline, but also a symbol of it. His reputation was subject to manipulation and contestation in the rhetoric of others — and it was also, of course, a resource upon which he could draw himself. In recent years, there has been much historical debate about the degree to which the British people were informed about, or cared about, their Empire. Bernard Porter has argued, controversially, that they were largely indifferent to it; and though he takes the story only up to the interwar years, he suggests that “the lack of imperial commitment that characterised the majority of the British people from the 1940s onwards was simply a continuation of what had gone before”.13 For this period, there...