Madeline Slade, the daughter of a Royal Navy Admiral, became a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi.

She moved to his ashram in 1925, where she became known as Mirabin.

In September 1934, she met with Winston Churchill in England to discuss India.

Churchill was pleased to meet her and they exchanged their views.

Afterward, one remark of Churchill's always stuck in her mind.

I believe in truth, he had said.

It stuck with her, she said, because it sounded exactly like something

the Mahatma would say. Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music Episode 294, The Year of the Three Kings

Following the 1931 general election, the national government in Britain, though preoccupied with economic concerns,

pushed forward on the question of revising and reforming the government of India.

The 1919 Government of India Act had called for review in 10 years, that is 1929.

We already talked about the Simon Commission and the Roundtable conferences.

Those meetings had taken place, but no decision had yet been taken.

In 1933, the national government presented a white paper on India, which led to the formation

of a parliamentary committee to draft a new

Government of India bill. This process took a further year and a half, during which there was much

debate between the government and its own backbench Tories in the House of Commons,

led by Winston Churchill, whose role in British politics

these days was almost entirely defined by trenchant opposition to the government for not

taking a strong enough stand against the Nazis in Germany, and trenchant opposition to the

government for not taking a strong enough stand against the nationalists in India.

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