Neville Chamberlain

• 1. Introduction

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  Neville Chamberlain stepped off a plane at Heston Aerodrome on the 30th of September 1938 and waved a single sheet of paper at the waiting crowd. He had just returned from Munich, where he had signed away a piece of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler. The streets from Heston to Buckingham Palace were so packed with cheering Londoners that the journey took an hour and a half to cover 9 miles. That evening, from a first-floor window at Downing Street, he quoted Benjamin Disraeli and promised his country peace for our time.

  Eleven months later, the United Kingdom was at war with Germany. Within eighteen months of that triumphant homecoming, Chamberlain was dead.

  Who was this man, and how did a career built on genuine domestic reform collapse so completely into the worst diplomatic failure in modern British history? The answers lie in a life that stretched from a sisal plantation in the Bahamas to the war cabinet of Winston Churchill, from factory reform to the drafting rooms of Munich. The questions worth carrying through this documentary are not simply whether Chamberlain was naive, but whether the choices he made were as unreasonable as history has since decided.

• 2. A Chamberlain in Birmingham

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  Arthur Neville Chamberlain was born on the 18th of March 1869 at a house called Southbourne in the Edgbaston district of Birmingham. He was the only son of Joseph Chamberlain's second marriage, to Florence Kenrick, who died while Neville was still a small boy. The Chamberlain family were Unitarian by tradition, though Joseph had lost personal religious faith by the time Neville was six. Neville himself described his position as that of a Unitarian with no stated faith and also a "reverent agnostic".

  His education moved from lessons taught by his elder sister Beatrice to Rugby School and then to Mason College, the institution now known as the University of Birmingham. He showed little academic appetite there, and in 1889 his father placed him with a firm of accountants. Within six months he had become a salaried employee. Joseph Chamberlain then sent Neville on what proved a costly gamble: establishing a sisal plantation on Andros Island in the Bahamas. Six years on the island ended in failure, and Joseph Chamberlain absorbed a loss of £50,000.

  Back in England, Neville purchased, with family assistance, a manufacturer of metal ship berths called Hoskins and Company. He served as managing director for 17 years, during which the company prospered. He also involved himself in civic affairs, and in 1906 he became a founding member of the national United Hospitals Committee of the British Medical Association, alongside no more than fifteen other dignitaries.

  At forty, Chamberlain had expected to remain a bachelor. In 1910 he fell in love with Anne Cole, whom he had met through his Aunt Lilian, and married her the following year. Anne Cole proved to be a full partner in his public life, sharing his interests in housing and other social questions. Their partnership endured through everything that followed.

• 3. The Reluctant Politician

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  In 1911, Chamberlain stood successfully for Birmingham City Council in the All Saints' Ward, within his father's parliamentary constituency, as a Liberal Unionist. He was made chairman of the Town Planning Committee, and under his direction Birmingham adopted one of the first town planning schemes in Britain. The arrival of the First World War in 1914 halted the implementation of those plans before they could take root.

  By 1915 Chamberlain had become Lord Mayor of Birmingham. He cut the lord mayor's expense allowance in half and reduced the number of civic functions, insisting that his councillors and officials work as hard as he did. The same year he was appointed to the Central Control Board on liquor traffic. His family's civic imprint on the city ran deep: five of his uncles had also served as Lord Mayor of Birmingham, including Charles Beale, who had held the office four times.

  In December 1916, Prime Minister David Lloyd George offered Chamberlain the newly created post of Director of National Service, responsible for co-ordinating conscription and managing industrial labour during the war. The relationship never worked. Lloyd George gave him little support, and in August 1917 Chamberlain resigned. The animosity that resulted was mutual and permanent; the two men would spend the rest of their careers regarding each other with what Chamberlain privately described as "mutual hatred".

  When Chamberlain stood for Parliament in the 1918 general election in Birmingham Ladywood, his Liberal Party opponent was Margery Corbett Ashby, one of seventeen women who stood at the first election in which women were eligible to vote. Chamberlain responded by specifically targeting women voters, deploying his wife and issuing a special leaflet headed "A word to the Ladies." He won with almost 70% of the vote and a majority of 6,833, entering the Commons at 49 as the oldest person, at the time, to be elected an MP who would later become prime minister.

• 4. The Reforming Minister

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  Chamberlain threw himself into parliamentary work and begrudged time away from debates. He served as chairman of the national Unhealthy Areas Committee from 1919 to 1921 and visited the slums of London, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and Cardiff in that role. A dispute with Lloyd George meant he spent those years on the backbenches, but when the Unionist coalition collapsed in October 1922, Chamberlain's rise was swift. Over ten months he advanced from backbencher to Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  When he returned as Minister of Health following the brief Conservative defeat of 1923, Chamberlain presented the Cabinet with an agenda containing 25 pieces of legislation he hoped to enact. Before he left office in 1929-21 of those 25 bills had become law. Among the most significant was the Local Government Act 1929, which he introduced to abolish the elected Poor Law Boards of Guardians. He spoke for two and a half hours on its second reading and was applauded at the close by members of all parties.

  His 1926 approach to the General Strike was conciliatory in tone, but his private opinion of the Labour opposition was sharply negative. Future Labour prime minister Clement Attlee complained that Chamberlain "always treated us like dirt," and in April 1927 Chamberlain himself wrote, "More and more do I feel an utter contempt for their lamentable stupidity." These poor relations would matter greatly when his wartime government needed cross-party support.

  At the Treasury from 1931, Chamberlain inherited a budget expected to run £120 million in deficit. He proposed a 10% tariff on foreign goods with preferential rates for the colonies and Dominions, explicitly enacting a version of his father Joseph's long-cherished "Imperial Preference" policy. When Austen Chamberlain walked down from the backbenches to shake his brother's hand after that address, the scene carried the weight of a family project spanning generations. By 1934, Chamberlain was able to announce a budget surplus and tell the Commons: "We have now finished the story of Bleak House and are sitting down this afternoon to enjoy the first chapter of Great Expectations."

• 5. The Architecture of Appeasement

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  Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as prime minister on the 28th of May 1937, becoming, at 68, the second-oldest person in the twentieth century to take the office for the first time, after Henry Campbell-Bannerman. He was widely regarded as a caretaker who would hand over to a younger man, with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden considered a likely candidate. Chamberlain had other ideas.

  He saw the premiership as the culmination of a career as a domestic reformer and wanted to settle European tensions precisely so he could pursue social legislation at home. Among the acts passed under his government were the Factories Act 1937, which placed limits on the working hours of women and children; the Coal Act 1938; the Holidays with Pay Act 1938, which led to a great expansion of holiday camps for working-class families; and the Housing Act 1938, which subsidised slum clearance and maintained rent control.

  On the European question, Chamberlain believed Germany could be satisfied by the return of some of its colonies and that a stable partnership with the Nazi state was possible. He worked to establish direct contact with Benito Mussolini through the Italian Ambassador, Count Dino Grandi, hoping that an Anglo-Italian alignment would restrain Hitler. When Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden objected that Chamberlain was moving too quickly and offering too much to Italy, the Cabinet sided with the prime minister. Eden resigned in February 1938. Lord Halifax replaced him.

  Not all of Chamberlain's diplomacy was futile. In March 1938, he concluded the Anglo-Irish agreements, signing on the 25th of April 1938 a settlement that resolved the Anglo-Irish Trade War, returned the three Treaty Ports to Irish control, and secured £10 million from Ireland in return. Churchill attacked the surrender of the Treaty Ports in Parliament, calling them the "sentinel towers of the Western Approaches." When war came, de Valera denied Britain access under Irish neutrality, and Churchill's warning proved correct. Chamberlain, for his part, had believed the ports were unusable if Ireland remained hostile.

• 6. Munich and Its Meaning

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  On the 15th of September 1938, Chamberlain flew to Germany for the first time in his life, travelling by air to Munich and then by rail to Hitler's retreat at Berchtesgaden. He had devised this plan himself, in consultation with his close advisor Horace Wilson, and called it "Plan Z." The face-to-face meeting lasted about three hours.

  Hitler demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, home to roughly three million ethnic Germans. Chamberlain returned to London believing he had secured a breathing space. On the 22nd of September he flew back to meet Hitler at Bad Godesberg, only to be told that the earlier proposals were now insufficient. Hitler demanded immediate military occupation and that Polish and Hungarian territorial claims also be addressed. Chamberlain told Hitler that he had brought the French and the Czechoslovaks into line with Germany's demands and had been booed on his departure from London that morning. Hitler was unmoved.

  The conference that resolved the crisis took place in Munich on the 29th of September. Mussolini distributed a proposal he presented as his own; it had in fact been drafted by German officials and transmitted to Rome the previous day. The Czechoslovaks were not present at the conference table. Chamberlain's advisor Horace Wilson met with the Czech representatives separately to inform them of the draft. At 1:30 in the morning of the 30th of September the Munich Agreement was signed.

  Before leaving, Chamberlain obtained a private meeting with Hitler and produced a paper headed "Anglo-German Agreement," containing a statement that both nations considered the Munich Agreement "symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war again." Hitler signed. When German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop remonstrated with Hitler afterward, Hitler replied: "Oh, don't take it so seriously. That piece of paper is of no further significance whatever."

  Public reaction in Britain was one of overwhelming relief. Chamberlain received thousands of gifts, from a silver dinner service to many of his trademark umbrellas. Between 20 and 30 Conservative MPs abstained in the Commons vote on the agreement, including Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper, and Harold Macmillan. Not one Conservative voted against.

• 7. From Peace to War

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  On the 15th of March 1939, German forces entered the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Within 48 hours Chamberlain had delivered a more forceful condemnation than his initial response, warning in a Birmingham speech on the 17th of March that Hitler was attempting to "dominate the world by force." Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald observed that whereas the prime minister had once been a strong advocate of peace, "he has now definitely swung around to the war point of view."

  On the 31st of March 1939, Chamberlain informed the Commons that Britain and France guaranteed they would lend Poland all possible aid if its independence were threatened. Churchill and Lloyd George both praised the guarantee. Chamberlain also doubled the Territorial Army, created a Ministry of Supply, and instituted peacetime conscription. On the 17th of June 1939, Handley Page received an order for 200 Hampden twin-engined medium bombers, and by the 3rd of September 1939 the chain of radar stations along the British coast was fully operational.

  Talks with the Soviet Union foundered on the 14th of August 1939 when Poland and Romania refused to allow Soviet troops to be stationed on their territories. A week later, the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Chamberlain dismissed the pact as not affecting British obligations toward Poland. On the 23rd of August he had his ambassador deliver a letter to Hitler declaring that Britain was fully prepared to honour those obligations. Hitler told his generals: "Our enemies are small worms. I saw them at Munich."

  Germany invaded Poland in the early morning of the 1st of September 1939. Chamberlain's address to the nation by radio on the 3rd of September carried the weight of a man who had spent years seeking to prevent exactly what was now happening: "I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany. You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed." That afternoon he addressed the House of Commons in its first Sunday session in over 120 years, saying: "Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed into ruins."

• 8. The Final Year

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  Chamberlain restored Churchill to the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty with a seat in the War Cabinet, while giving Eden the post of dominions secretary without a seat in the small inner cabinet. He was privately alert to Churchill's ambitions, suspecting that the lengthy memos Churchill sent were "for the purpose of quotation in the Book that he will write hereafter." Despite approval ratings as high as 68% and almost 60% in April 1940, the failure of Allied operations in Norway sealed his fate.

  The Norway Debate opened on the 7th of May 1940 and ran for two days. Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes, member for Portsmouth North, appeared in full uniform to deliver a withering attack on the conduct of the campaign. Leo Amery concluded his speech by quoting Oliver Cromwell's words on dissolving the Long Parliament: "You have sat here too long for any good you are doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" The government, which held a normal majority of over 200, prevailed in the division by only 81 votes, with 38 government supporters voting against and between 20 and 25 abstaining.

  Chamberlain favoured Halifax as his successor, but Halifax proved reluctant to press his claims, believing his position in the House of Lords would limit his effectiveness. Churchill emerged as the choice. On the 10th of May 1940, the same day Germany invaded the Low Countries, Chamberlain resigned and advised the King to send for Churchill. Churchill later expressed gratitude that Chamberlain had not recommended Halifax instead.

  Chamberlain remained in the War Cabinet as Lord President of the Council. His support for Churchill during the war cabinet crisis of May 1940 was described as vital. But he was already ill. He resigned on the 22nd of September 1940 as his health failed. He died on the 9th of November 1940, aged 71, of cancer, six months after leaving the premiership. His reputation was already being dismantled: Guilty Men, published in July 1940, had blamed Chamberlain and his associates for Munich and for allegedly failing to prepare the country for war. The book set the terms of debate for a generation. Later historians, examining government papers released under the thirty-year rule, have argued that going to war in 1938 would have been disastrous given Britain's state of readiness. The debate has not closed.