Neville Chamberlain

Prime minister of the United Kingdom (1937-1940)

• Born: March 18, 1869
• Birthplace: Birmingham, Warwickshire (now in West Midlands), England
• Died: November 9, 1940
• Place of death: Highfield Park, Heckfield, England

Chamberlain was a major voice in the Conservative Party for two decades, seeking modest and solid social reforms to improve the housing and health of the common people of the United Kingdom. As prime minister, he sought in vain to avert World War II by appeasing Adolf Hitler.

Early Life

Neville Chamberlain was born into a well-to-do and politically prominent family in the rising industrial city of Birmingham. His father, Joseph Chamberlain, made a fortune manufacturing screws and went into politics, first locally and then in Parliament; eventually he became colonial secretary under Arthur Balfour. Neville’s elder half brother, Austen Chamberlain, was educated for a political career and went into Parliament at the age of twenty-eight. Young Neville was expected to go into business and broaden the family fortune. He attended Rugby, but rather than going to Cambridge like his brother, studied engineering at Mason College in Birmingham and finished his formal education with an apprenticeship in an accounting firm.

At the age of twenty-one, Neville was sent off to manage a family estate in the Bahamas, which promised large profits growing sisal for rope on hitherto undeveloped land. For six years Neville toiled in an attempt to create a prosperous plantation, but the venture was risky at best and doomed to failure at worst. Heavy capital investment was necessary to clear and to develop the land, the plants grew poorly on the thin soil, the labor supply was unreliable, and the world price of sisal fell just at the time the harvests began. The investment was a sorry one, but Neville worked doggedly to try to make it pay, earning the respect of the local people in the Bahamas and of his family at home.

The Chamberlains belonged to the Victorian upper-middle class of Unitarian persuasion, which believed that hard work and dedication to duty would ultimately triumph in spite of adversity. The Bahamas experience did not shatter this ideal in Neville. Indeed, it tended to reinforce his penchant toward tenacity and even stubbornness under pressure. He developed a fine eye for detail, as his letters and diaries from the period testify, and a vigorous constitution. When he returned to England after the failure of the plantation, he possessed a toughness of mind, character, and body that was to remain with him throughout his life.

Back in Birmingham, Neville took over a small firm that made ships’ berths. It prospered under his leadership, and he soon was recognized as a valuable entrepreneur throughout the business community. He diversified his commercial interests, and his financial future, and that of the family, was reasonably secure. Though never possessing great wealth, the family thereafter was comfortable in the lifestyle of the Victorian upper-middle class, and Neville could devote his administrative talents to charitable and political concerns. The extended family was closely knit. Neville discussed political matters regularly not only with his father, Joseph, and his brother, Austen, but also with two of his sisters, Ida and Hilda. Physically he was relatively tall five feet ten inches and slim. He enjoyed the rigors of nature well into his later years, taking particular pleasure in unusual plants and in salmon fishing. In 1911, at the age of forty-one, he married Annie Vere, the daughter of a military officer, and eventually they had a son and a daughter. She remained a loyal helpmate throughout his career.

Life’s Work

In 1911, Chamberlain entered the Birmingham city council, and in 1915 he was elected lord mayor. He wished to use his office to improve city planning, clear slums, build new housing for the working classes, and provide for broadly based health services. World War I, however, required a different set of priorities, and social and economic reforms had to wait. Chamberlain was too old to serve in the military himself, but several members of his extended family did so, and he was particularly depressed by the death of his cousin, Norman Chamberlain, who had been almost like a brother to him. He served a brief and frustrating tenure as director general of the national civilian labor service under David Lloyd George, an experience that permanently estranged him from the Liberal leader and convinced him that if he were to become active in national affairs he would first have to develop a solid political base.

In December, 1918, Neville won a seat in Parliament from Birmingham and served in the House until his death. As middle-class members of a dissenting religious group, the Chamberlain family had traditionally been liberal rather than conservative, but political shifts early in the twentieth century split the Liberal Party, and the Chamberlains became leading members of the “Liberal Unionists,” who cooperated with the Conservative Party. By the time Neville entered Parliament, cooperation had become amalgamation, and he always served as a Conservative, yet he retained some of the social ideals of the Nonconformist middle class and saw himself as a social reformer bent on bringing about steady improvements in the life and health of the British people through positive governmental programs. Peaceful social change, rather than revolutionary upheaval, was his goal. After serving briefly in other cabinet posts, he was minister of health in 1923 and then again, from 1924 to 1929, under Prime MinisterStanley Baldwin. He worked hard to improve conditions in hospitals and clinics, and to bring about better housing for the lower classes through cooperation between local government and the private sector under a national policy. His efforts were strongly criticized by the Liberals and the rising Labour Party as inadequate, but his ability to put any positive program through under the Conservative regime was praised by many.

After the Labour Party won the 1929 election, Chamberlain became a staunch spokesperson for the opposition, but he rejoined the cabinet in 1931, when Ramsay MacDonald formed a “national government” under the pressure of the Great Depression, and became Chancellor of the Exchequer. In this important office, Chamberlain had an increasingly dominant voice in policy, as MacDonald’s and then Baldwin’s powers declined. In a private letter to his sister Hilda in 1935, Chamberlain referred to himself as “a sort of Acting P.M.” Thus he began to think seriously about international affairs. Since childhood he had been well aware of the wider world, particularly from the standpoint of the British Empire. Now he had to consider continental problems that might bring Great Britain again into a bloody war. When he spoke of Czechoslovakia as a “faraway country” and its population as “people of whom we know nothing,” he was demonstrating the insularity of his view of the world. He had no sympathy for the Nazi dictatorship and referred to Adolf Hitler privately as “the bully of Europe,” but he shared the isolationism that was widespread in both the United States and the United Kingdom at the time, denying the responsibility of his country for taking military action against Germany. His attitudes toward Italy were more ambivalent. He called Benito Mussolini’s Ethiopian venture of 1935 “barbarous” but nevertheless looked to Rome as a potential counterweight to Berlin if British influence in Italy could remain strong. With the rest of the British cabinet, he agreed that Great Britain could not go to war over Hitler’s violations of the Treaty of Versailles by rearmament in 1935 and remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936.

By the middle of 1936 it was clear that Chamberlain would become prime minister when Baldwin finally retired, and he in fact assumed the office in May of 1937. At the age of sixty-eight, Chamberlain had finally achieved the rank that had eluded his father and elder brother. Tall and gaunt, almost birdlike, habitually clad in the wing collar of a bygone era, and given to Shakespearean allusions in his oratory, he sometimes appears in retrospect as a weak and bumbling incompetent, naïvely trying to appease ruthless dictators who were clearly bent on aggressive conquest. Naïve he may have been, but he had great personal courage and fortitude, and he was a highly competent administrator, fully in command of the detail of the many issues that crossed his desk. His immense capacity for paperwork, plus his active correspondence with his sisters, is worthy of admiration. He remained a moderate reformer at heart, seeking to avoid violent revolutionary upheavals by advocating peaceful change. This principle he applied to foreign affairs as well as to domestic questions. It is notable that he had as his chief diplomatic adviser Sir Horace Wilson, a man who had made his reputation as a negotiator in labor disputes, rather than anyone from the Foreign Office.

Chamberlain was well aware of Hitler’s potential for violence, but also aware that the dictator put his demands in the familiar and even acceptable language of “self-determination” for the German people; moreover, Hitler had written in Mein Kampf (1925-1927) that he sought a peaceful settlement with England. There were vocal opponents of appeasement in Britain, chiefly Winston Churchill. Given the relative weakness of British land and air forces, however, and given the lack of stability in the French Third Republic, in which government followed government almost on a monthly basis, it seemed that Britain could do little to stop Hitler’s expansion to the east. The word “appeasement” at the time was not a term of opprobrium, but rather was understood as a policy of conciliation that seemed realistic if not inevitable. Defenders of Chamberlain point out that he accompanied his appeasement policy with one of British rearmament, especially in air defenses. Nevertheless, it seems clear from both the public and the private record that Chamberlain’s policy had as its goal not merely the postponement of war but its avoidance altogether.

Hitler’s Anschluss (annexation) of Austria in February, 1938, was his first act of aggression against another state. Chamberlain had hoped to maintain good relations with Mussolini so that Italy would oppose Hitler’s designs on Austria, as it had successfully done in 1934. Using private communications via his brother’s widow, as well as regular diplomacy, Chamberlain hoped to split the Rome-Berlin Axis. The only result, however, was British rejection of a private appeal from President Franklin D. Roosevelt for closer cooperation and the resignation of Anthony Eden. When Austria fell without a shot, neither Britain nor France took action; Chamberlain consoled himself with the idea of “self-determination” for the German-speaking Austrians. Privately, he wrote to his sister that “force is the only argument Germany understands,” but he also told her that should a military crisis arise, Britain did not have the means to help Czechoslovakia and would not do so.

The Munich crisis of September, 1938, was the high-water mark of appeasement and the moment in history at which Chamberlain played his most important role. He saw his personal approach to Hitler, first by quickly called summit conferences with the führer at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps and Bad Godesberg in the Rhineland, and then at Munich itself, as bold maneuvers to save the peace. Chamberlain forced Czechoslovakia to give up its frontier territories, with more than three million German-speaking people, to Hitler’s Reich, and he forced France to approve the arrangement. In return, he got Hitler’s public promise that he had no further territorial demands in Europe, and his signature on a piece of paper pledging that Germany and Great Britain would never go to war with each other again. Returning to London after the Munich conference, Chamberlain stated publicly on September 30, 1938, that he had brought back “peace with honour” and “peace for our time.”

Disillusionment was not long in coming. Hitler’s troops marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939. Chamberlain, along with the French government, gave guarantees to Poland a few days later, and the stage was set for World War II. He made some attempt to reach an understanding with Joseph Stalin, but the mutual suspicion between the Birmingham conservative capitalist and the Moscow dictatorial Communist was too great, and Stalin struck a deal with Hitler instead.

On September 3, 1939, Hitler’s attack on Poland became World War II when Chamberlain announced that Britain had no choice but to declare war. Until the last, Hitler believed that Chamberlain would revert to the appeasement policy rather than fight. The führer was wrong. Chamberlain had appeased the dictators not out of fear but because he believed that he could preserve the peace by diplomatic agreements; now the aging prime minister showed that he could be as tenacious in pursuing war as in pursuing peace. He formed a War Cabinet, bringing in Churchill and several other opposition figures, and finally relinquished the office of prime minister to Churchill after the fall of Norway in May, 1940. Chamberlain’s policy of peace had failed, and now his health was failing as well. He had a major operation for abdominal cancer in August, but died November 9, 1940, at Highfield Park, Heckfield, near Reading.

Significance

“War,” said Chamberlain, is “a senseless and cruel thing,” and he did all he could to avoid it. As a businessman and a politician, he sought to do business with, and reach political agreements with, Hitler. When he wished, Hitler could be very persuasive indeed. After returning to England from his first meeting with Hitler, Chamberlain wrote to his sisters, “I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied on when he had given his word.” His attitude was not based on any pro-German, let alone pro-Nazi, sentiments. Throughout his life he had had no special love for Germany, and he found Nazi ideology, especially its anti-Semitism, absurd and offensive. Chamberlain did not, however, believe that Britain had either the obligation or the power to force another major European country to make itself over in a British image. He believed that national self-determination, for the Germans as well as for other major nationalities, was more or less inevitable. Rather than defend the status quo of the Treaty of Versailles, he wanted to see whatever changes were unavoidable come about with a minimum of bloodshed. Thus, Britain could retain its leading position in the world without the burden of another massive war, and the resources of that enlightened country could be turned to such good works as housing, hospitals, and education rather than to the machines of destruction.

Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was a failure, and as a result he will never be regarded as a great prime minister. The most that can be said of him is that his motives were laudable and that he was strongly devoted to carrying out a policy that he believed to be both correct and righteous.

Bibliography

Caputi, Robert J. Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2000. Caputi examines Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, chronicling its beginnings in 1938 and describing how it has been reinterpreted through the years.

Churchill, Winston S. The Second World War. Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948. The first volume of the war memoirs of Chamberlain’s most gifted critic firmly states the case against the appeasement policy while giving insights into the major features of British politics from a particular point of view.

Dilks, David. Neville Chamberlain. Vol. 1, Pioneering and Reform, 1869-1929. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. The first of two massive and well-researched volumes on Chamberlain by a British professor. Should be the standard biography of Chamberlain for many decades to come.

Dutton, David. Neville Chamberlain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Focuses on the reputation and public perception of Chamberlain, explaining why the person who was once admired was later disdained.

Kleine-Ahlbrandt, W. Laird. Appeasement of the Dictators. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. An anthology of views on the diplomacy leading to World War II, which points out that appeasement was not always regarded as foolish.

Macleod, Iain. Neville Chamberlain. London: Frederick Muller, 1961. A sympathetic biography of Chamberlain the man, emphasizing his role as a reformer and arguing that, given the military weakness of Great Britain, appeasement served the purpose of buying valuable time for rearmament and demonstrated the peaceful nature of the British.

Self, Robert. Neville Chamberlain: A Biography. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. Based on exhaustive archival research, this biography presents a full and balanced portrait of Chamberlain.

Taylor, Telford. Munich: The Price of Peace. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. A solid, prizewinning history by an American law professor who was one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials. He considers Chamberlain as a man of courage, consistency, and logic, devoted to peace but unable to understand the nature of his enemies.

Wheeler-Bennett, John W. Munich: Prologue to Tragedy. New York: Viking Press, 1948. An older but well written history of the appeasement policy, critical of Chamberlain but balanced in tone.