Becoming a Victorian

Winston Churchill was a racist. He said things like ‘I hate people with slit eyes and pig-tails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them’.

Winston Churchill was a racist. He said things like ‘I hate people with slit eyes and pig-tails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them’. In 1931 he described Gandhi as a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, a half-naked fakir and a ‘malignant subversive fanatic’ and in 1954 he told the white Kenyan settler Michael Blundell that he ‘did not really think that black people were as capable or as efficient as white people’, although he said that ‘if I meet a black man and he’s a civilised educated fellow I have no feelings about him at all’.

Anachronistic moral judgement? Not so. Even in his day, Churchill had some pretty old-fashioned views about race and empire. ‘He is alas very anti-black’, remembered his friend Violet Bonham-Carter.