Writing in his diary on 13 November 1940, Viscount Mersey, historian, author and long-serving Liberal Whip in the House of Lords, noted the death of Neville Chamberlain, which had occurred four days earlier. He praised Chamberlain as “a good man whose merits will be better appreciated in the future.”
Mersey misjudged his fellow countrymen. Over 80 years on, they have still not come to appreciate Chamberlain’s many merits in and beyond politics, even though they can be readily identified in his long, uninterrupted years of public service which began in Birmingham in 1911 and took him to Westminster seven years later. They are not found because they are not sought.
Chamberlain’s career before he became prime minister in 1937 is virtually unknown, even though by that time he had been at the forefront of the Conservative Party for nearly twenty years, a period during which he had introduced the most ambitious social reforms that Britain had yet seen and, as Chancellor of the Exchequer after 1931, created the conditions that produced unparalleled prosperity in large parts of the country.
All the attention is concentrated on the three years of his premiership—and on just one aspect of these years, his conduct of foreign affairs in response to severe threats on three fronts: the continent of Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa, and the Far East(with the first of the three attracting most of the comment). Who remembers that in 1938 several million working people became entitled to paid holidays for the first time, thanks to Neville Chamberlain?
Too many historians have reinforced the public obsession with Chamberlain’s foreign policy, and in particular with Munich. His foreign policy has been examined from almost every conceivable angle. A bibliography at the end of one book on the subject runs to six and a half closely printed pages. Some of the numerous studies have reached conclusions favourable to Chamberlain, but little notice has been taken of them outside academic circles.
The hero of Munich, as he was seen at the height of his premiership, continued to enjoy widespread support until the spring of 1940 when it suddenly collapsed, the abrupt reversal of view coinciding with Hitler’s triumphs in Western Europe and being greatly assisted by the wide distribution of a scurrilous, but immensely influential publication, Guilty Men, whose vicious attacks on him became firmly lodged in the public mind.
The recent past was reinterpreted. In the late 1930s Chamberlain, acutely conscious of the national mood, had feared widespread public opposition, and damage to the economy (which he had so recently brought out of recession)by a sudden switch of resources , if the massive rearmament that was needed had proceeded very quickly, at a time when the Labour Party was resolutely against it, and public scepticism about the case for it was so extensive.
He avoided that peril, but when the mood changed abruptly in 1940 he was denounced for not ensuring that Britain was armed to the teeth by 1938. Such is the way of democracy, turning heroes into scapegoats by changing its collective mind. Chamberlain is one of the most conspicuous examples of the phenomenon, but posterity has yet to recognise it, accepting too readily the view of him after the 1940 U-turn as the only one that should be entertained.
Chamberlain dwells in the national memory as a weak, spineless figure, always ready to defer to Hitler and anxious to arrange for him to be granted the territorial concessions he demanded.
In reality, Chamberlain was one of the strongest and most formidable British politicians of the twentieth century. He ruled the Conservative Party with a rod of iron, exacting obedience from all but a small group of dissidents in Parliament until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940; indeed, his dominance was only slightly lessened by his resignation, for Tories failed to warm to Churchill in his early days in power (some of them never did).
For Hitler, Chamberlain felt an overwhelmingly strong, personal distaste (“the commonest little dog he had ever seen”, he said), going to meet him in September 1938 not in order to submit tamely to him, but to try and prepare the way for an overall European settlement that would avert the war that, like the majority of his contemporaries, he believed would destroy civilisation.
War had a new, terrible element: aircraft, particularly the bomber. Chamberlain’s generation regarded the prospect of aerial attack with much the same horror as a later generation would regard nuclear attack. In truth, aerial attack could be utterly devastating, as Allied carpet bombing of German cities, like Hamburg and Dresden, showed during the war Chamberlain worked so hard to prevent.
From the start of his quest for a lasting peace, Chamberlain was clear that boundaries agreed for new central and eastern European states, created by the Versailles Treaty of 1919 but unable to provide stability in the region, could not be regarded as inviolable . Virtually everyone agreed with him.
The application of the principle of self-determination at Versailles by the idealistic Woodrow Wilson was meant to produce new, relatively cohesive countries, each of them forging a sense of common identity. It actually brought into being states riven by centuries-old racial and ethnic hatreds, which had previously been held in check by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a ramshackle, relatively benign regional power, of which they had all been component parts, enjoying considerable autonomy.
The regimes in the new states had little compunction about using violence against each other, and against groups within their own borders that displeased them. Vicious antisemitism flourished everywhere in this wide region.
Aggrieved Germans were in plentiful supply, as Chamberlain’s bitter political opponent, David Lloyd George, had pointed out as early as 1924. “I cannot conceive any greater cause of future war”, he said, “than that the German people, who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races of the world, should be surrounded by a number of small states, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamouring for reunification with their native land”.
He himself was of course one of the architects of this state of affairs at Versailles; others were left to try and sort it out, as the Treaty became ever more deeply discredited. It was to these complexities that Chamberlain had to address himself.
Over the bitter, endemic rivalries of Eastern Europe fell the dark shadow of the Soviet Union, as unpredictable as it was brutal in upholding the interests of Communism, whose progress British Tories were always anxious to forestall .In these circumstances there was a clear case for strengthening German power: it could help contain age-old sources of communal discord in central and eastern Europe, and serve British interests by providing a bulwark against Communism while removing the grievances associated with Versailles.
Chamberlain saw merit in such a course. It carried with it profound dangers, but so did all the alternatives. There were moments when Churchill referred favourably to some form of German “overlordship” of this vast area, of which Britain knew so little.
For any British politician—as Churchill was to find out—the region’s almost limitless capacity for cruelty could at any point cause grave domestic embarrassment. Atrocities might occur almost anywhere, stirring widespread public condemnation in Britain and evoking vociferous demands for action against the evil-doers.
And as ill luck would have it, the worst horrors were perpetrated by the very state on which so much depended if a new European settlement was to be successfully established in the late 1930s. Could Britain lay aside Christian morality to reach any sort of lasting accord with barbaric Nazi Germany? The same question would asked in the next decade in relation to the Soviet Union .Churchill answered it by following the path of appeasement during his war-time government.
It is widely thought that Chamberlain was just about the worst person to be asked to grapple with such tremendous difficulties. He was ridiculed by many, including Churchill, as a narrow-minded, insular figure, hopelessly ill-fitted to participate in international affairs. The patronising words of his elder half-brother, Austen, are frequently quoted: “Neville, you must remember you know nothing about foreign affairs”.
In fact he knew more about them than most senior politicians of his time. He had visited places in North Africa and the Far East that were mere names to his colleagues, as well as travelling extensively in Europe, adding North America in his later years. From the moment that Britain began to rearm in 1934 when Chamberlain was Chancellor of the Exchequer, following the collapse of a big international conference called to eliminate the most destructive weapons, foreign affairs were never far from the centre of his mind.
It was at this point, before the start of his premiership, that he first formulated his dual approach to foreign affairs, by which he stood up until 1939: serious diplomatic engagement with the countries—Germany, Italy and Japan— which were the cause of international tension, coupled with rearmament on an unprecedented scale both to strengthen his hand in negotiation and to equip the country for war if diplomacy failed.
His most conspicuous commitment to rearmament was the money he poured into a succession of 13 RAF expansion programmes, picking the winners of the future such as fighter aircraft and radar which saved us in 1940. The other services were not neglected. The navy, over three times larger than Germany’s, was re-equipped with careful regard to the balance between battleships and aircraft carriers; submarines had a secure place in the plans; new technologies were more fully developed than by the navies of other powers.
A determined attempt was made to modernise the army’s notoriously antiquated ways, and its swift expansion was set in hand as the threats to Britain increased. Chamberlain wrote in February 1937 that “the Regular Army is to be armed cap `a pie[d] with the most modern equipment and is to be ready to go anywhere any time.” Early retirement awaited a number of generals. “The obstinacy of some of the Army heads in sticking to obsolete methods is incredible”, he added a few months later.
His controversial premiership has been misunderstood because proper weight has not been given to both parts of his double policy. It is time that the balance was redressed. A fine recent work of fiction can assist this process. Robert Harris’s novel, Munich, published in 2017 and recently the basis for first-rate film, reconstructs in vivid detail the fateful conference which Chamberlain hoped would secure peace in his time. It depicts a dignified, respected man of calm authority who had no illusions about the people with whom he was dealing, but who retained hope that the catastrophe of world war could be averted. Towards the end of the novel, a senior Foreign Office official asks Chamberlain about the possibility that Hitler would break his word. Chamberlain replies: “If he breaks it—well, then the world will see him for what is. No one then can be in any doubt. He will unite the country and rally the Dominions in a way they simply are not at present.”
That is exactly how Chamberlain saw things after Munich, swiftly setting aside the belief that peace was assured which overcame him briefly on his return to a tumultuous acclamation in London. On 15 October 1938, he wrote to his sisters, “We have avoided the greatest catastrophe, it is true, but we are very little nearer to the time when we can put all thoughts of war out of our minds & settle down to make the world a better place.” Rearmament had to proceed, and the ties that bound us to the Dominions had to be strengthened, even as gifts from peace-lovers around the world poured into Downing Street, including “lucky horseshoes, tweed for sporting suits & socks.” His double policy was reinforced.
Today, the significance of the great Dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa—is all too often forgotten. Our sense of their importance to this country in the past has become sadly attenuated. In the Europe of the 1930s, we had a single, faltering ally, France (in September 1938 it had only 21 aeroplanes capable of taking on the Luftwaffe’s finest). Further afield, the United States, which Chamberlain would dearly have liked to have had as an ally particularly in the Far East, was resolutely isolationist. Chamberlain’s view, based on wide experience of economic as well as diplomatic negotiations, was that it was “always best and safest to count on nothing from the Americans except words”.
It was vital, as Chamberlain recognised, that in any war we had the support of our allies beyond the seas. In the eyes of the Dominions, the Czech crisis of 1938 did not justify war. A year later, all doubts had been removed. The Dominions, and the wider Empire, were crucial to our survival in the early years of the war. Only the Irish Free State remained aloof.
At no time during the war did Britain stand alone, thanks to Chamberlain. Nor were its defences in a pitiable state when it began. As George Peden states in his book, British Rearmament and the Treasury, published in 1979, “Britain was able to contribute to the Allied cause the world’s largest navy, an aircraft industry which out-produced Germany’s in 1940, and an army which was just large enough to deny the German army any decisive advantage in men or quantity of equipment.”
There is much in the best-known portion of Chamberlain’s career that has been too readily disparaged; almost everything that he did before it has been forgotten.
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(Arthur) Neville Chamberlain was born on 18 March 1869 into Birmingham’s first family, over which his powerful father Joe Chamberlain, who had made a fortune as a screw manufacturer by his forties, presided with complete and unquestioned authority.
Many regarded the great “radical Joe” with his youthful republican sympathies— a politician famously described by Churchill, who was in awe of him, as “the man who made the weather”—as a profound danger to the existing social order, but within his family circle he was a stern upholder of prevailing middle-class Victorian attitudes. He decided what each of his six children (by two marriages, both of which were ended by the deaths of his wives) should do with their lives. Austen, his eldest son, would become prime minister; Neville would make a great deal of money to replenish the family’s coffers, which had become alarmingly depleted ; his four daughters would form a support group, fetching and carrying as required to advance the family’s interests.
The masterplan miscarried. Austen reached the cabinet quite easily at the beginning of the twentieth century with the help of his father, now in alliance with the Tories, but then stalled. He failed to secure the Tory leadership in 1911; when he did finally get it ten years later, he retained it for only nineteen months. It was said of him that “he always played the game and always lost it”, a cruel summary of his career but not an inaccurate one.
At the outset, Neville also failed to realise his father’s hopes. After leaving Rugby(where he was profoundly unhappy) and studying engineering, maths and metallurgy at Mason College, the forerunner of Birmingham University, he spent six years in the 1890s on a bleak frontier outpost of Empire, Andros Island in the Bahamas, working round the clock with a devoted team recruited locally (whom he organised brilliantly) in the hope of making a fortune from the first large-scale British cultivation of sisal, thought to be ideal for making rope: but his 20,000 acres yielded nothing except substantial losses, though through no fault of his: the plants would not flourish in the conditions that prevailed there. (One lasting result of these years of trial was a love of large Havana cigars, one of several things he had in common with Churchill.)
After 1900, while Austen failed to make the most of his chances in politics, Neville at last flourished, running two Midlands businesses concerned with the production of metal goods and displaying for the first time that passionate desire to create a better society which was to become the dominating theme of his political life. His employees shared in the firms’ profits; pension schemes were established; effective health cover was provided. In all this, he was a man ahead of his time.
He acquired an extraordinarily wide range of interests, at all of which he excelled. Britain possessed no greater expert on the countryside: he studied bird life intently everywhere, including in St James’s Park and at Number 10 when he was prime minister (“I was delighted to see the blue tits going in and out of my box in the Downing St garden just exactly a month later than they did the same time last year”, he noted in April 1938); he knew the name of every tree and flower; he handled gun and fishing-rod with skill.
A promising pianist in youth , his love of classical music took him to the London concert halls when political commitments permitted ; Beethoven’s piano quartets, of which he knew every note by heart, were a particular passion. Only a handful of professionals, it was said by experts, knew more about Beethoven’s music than he did. His many friends among musicians included Sir Henry Wood and Fritz Kreisler.
He came to know Shakespeare so well that in later years he became a regular correspondent of one of the leading authorities on the works of the Bard. In a speech in London in March 1936, Churchill cited Shakespeare’s Henry VI as the source of a quotation—“the packhorse of the government”-- used not unkindly about Chamberlain; the latter pointed out at once that it actuallycame from Richard III. As he prepared to board his aeroplane for Munich, he quoted Hotspur’s words in Henry IV: “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.”
He was devoted to a number of the great novelists, placing Joseph Conrad first, with Dickens, Twain, Thackeray and George Eliot all close behind. In March 1927, he noted in his diary: “Last night I read Conrad’s Shadow Line and escaped from the poisonous world of politics, into that mysterious atmosphere of the Eastern seas, where he somehow contrives to hold you breathless for ages under the impending shadow of some unknown but steadily approaching disaster.”
His knowledge of art was deepened by regular visits to London exhibitions .In October 1936 he went “ to see the French pictures at Burlington galleries” where he found “ some delightful Corots, Renoirs, & Ingres”. Over the years, he built up a fine collection of good watercolours by a variety of artists.
Like so much of his political life, his great accomplishments in other spheres too remain practically unknown. He did not boast about them. An absurd myth that he was a highly efficient, but philistine and soulless, Birmingham businessman gained wide currency and grew with the years.
His deep personal contentment was, however, sustained principally by the love of his family. His attractive, vivacious wife Anne(known as Annie to family and friends), Birmingham’s foremost Tory canvasser in her time, exuded charm; Churchill was prominent among those who relished her company. She was the perfect hostess at Number 10. She put people at their ease, something her husband, gravely handicapped by shyness (as he himself recognised), rarely did. He always said that he could not have become prime minister without her.
His niece, Valerie, who lived with the Chamberlains at No 10, recalled: “He had a reputation for being cold. He wasn’t cold at all. He was amusing and he was interesting and he was kind. What more can you have?” Constant affection was also provided by two of his clever, unmarried sisters to whom he wrote long letters, revealing his innermost thoughts. Now published, this correspondence illustrates in rich detail his principal merits alongside less attractive qualities, most notably an unassailable confidence in his own omniscience, of which his critics have made much. Like Winston Churchill, Chamberlain was untroubled by self-doubt.
He was certain, above all, that the British people needed a welfare state.
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Chamberlain’s secure, affluent family background strengthened his determination to make life better for the mass of working people. Birmingham was the beneficiary of his crusading zeal before and during the First World War as he rose swiftly from Councillor to Lord Mayor. His ardent, lifelong interest in health questions of every kind sprang from his work for Birmingham General Hospital, of which he became chairman. He insisted on the kind of careful urban planning that only became standard practice throughout the land after 1945. The new Birmingham housing estates, which he oversaw, fostered community life through imaginative design, with plenty of open space for recreation. Integrated medical services, including specialist infant welfare centres, were brought within the reach of most working people. He created the first municipal savings bank, and the first city symphony orchestra.
He took his mission for social improvement to the national stage as a Birmingham MP in 1918, his fiftieth year: no one else elected at that age has gone on to become prime minister.
He carried much further the major extension of the welfare system, based on the national insurance model , that took place under Lloyd George’s coalition government after 1918; many more employees were brought within its scope in the mid-1930s. His work gave Britain some of the best welfare services in the world at that time. In his history of Britain in the 20th century, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, published in 2018, David Edgerton states: “The British welfare system of the interwar years was by international standards very comprehensive, the celebrated post-war welfare state much less so”.
Much that Chamberlain had pioneered in Birmingham was extended to the country as a whole. He wanted his fellow countrymen to live in decent houses. His 1923 Housing Act, known as the Chamberlain Act, made government subsidies available on the same terms to both local authorities (to stimulate the construction of good quality council housing for rent) and to private house-builders with strict limits on the size of properties that could benefit to ensure that help was concentrated on those who needed it most at a time of very severe housing shortage after the First World War. He was impatient to see more homes fit for the heroes of that terrible conflict.
He hoped that home-ownership would spread far and wide throughout society, giving people of all classes a stake in their country. Building societies expanded rapidly, to Chamberlain’s great satisfaction; this very significant inter-war phenomenon made possible the start of a property-owning democracy, a phrase he sometimes used which was to achieve post-war fame as a Tory watchword.
Some 4 million homes were built during his years in office between the wars, many replacing slums whose destruction became one of the central aims of his premiership, carrying forward work that he had begun more tentatively before 1929; a big programme of clearance, first set in hand in 1934, led to the rehousing of nearly 1.3 million families by 1939 . Edgerton writes: “Never had so many houses been built, and the total would only be exceeded in the very late 1960s.”
Chamberlain wanted everyone to have access to good health services. He spoke in 1934 of “the whole nation being brought under medical care and attention of some sort from birth upwards” assisted by the extension of health insurance to children(for whom nursery schools should be provided) and other measures.
Sustained progress was made towards a national system, whose final stages he began to plan in detail in 1938-9, having in 1936 introduced a national salaried midwifery service. His aim was achieved, though not in a form that he would have commended unreservedly, eight years after his death, with the creation of the NHS.
As his biographer, Professor David Dilks has written, “what marked Chamberlain out was his ability to take a broad view of physical and mental health, from the most advanced research to the most routine care, and his ability to communicate a passion for these subjects.” He made long speeches in the Commons on a wide range of complicated health issues without a note. Could any politician do that today?
He was the first government minister to make the improvement of public health an objective of policy. In July 1934 he began lengthy studies to prepare the way for “a scheme for raising the level of national health” which he regarded as “right in itself and attractive to the public.”
The centrepiece of his plan was state promotion of physical exercise through the provision of grants, administered by local authorities, to create playing fields and sports facilities (community centres and village halls were also eligible).This element of the Chamberlain scheme was introduced in 1937 through his Physical Training and Recreation Act. A National Fitness Council was established the following year with another set of grants for sporting initiatives, handing out £1.5 million in its first twelve months.
While encouraging healthier bodies and minds tended by doctors abreast of medical advances, it was no less important to him to provide the elderly with real security in retirement. The contributory pensions system he introduced in 1925 laid the basis for it, with 65 becoming the age at which pensions were paid to a retired man and his wife. Under Chamberlain’s system, they were provided “as a right, for which payment has been made, instead of as a dole or charity”, in the words of the 1924 Tory election manifesto which he drafted. Doles and hand-outs, he believed, destroyed self-respect.
He insisted that provision must also be made for those widowed or left orphans; they were included in his ground-breaking 1925 scheme. His system was designed to provide for the essential needs of life, while encouraging individuals to make additional provision of their own, and employers to bring forward their own schemes.15 million people were covered at the start, rising to some 20 million by the time of his premiership.
He was convinced that family allowances should form part of Britain’s welfare arrangements, increasing in size according to the number of children. The opposition of the trade unions led him to postpone plans for their introduction. He told his sisters in January 1940 (war failing to drive welfare out of his mind) that “the chief obstacle has been the hostility of the trade unions. They fear, of course, that the granting of children’s allowances would mean the lowering of the standard wage for those who have no children.” At the end of his life the need for them was firmly in his mind (they came five years later).
At the heart of all that he did lay the principle of the helping hand. “Our policy”, he said in 1925, “is to use the great resources of the state, not for the distribution of an indiscriminate largesse, but to help those who have the will and desire to raise themselves to higher and better things.” Few in the 1930s believed that the Labour Party had a better alternative to Chamberlain’s plans for the continuing development of welfare services.
Deeply conscious in his last years of how much grinding poverty still remained (“the stories I hear about the evacuees [from bug-ridden homes]are awful” and “ I feel ashamed”, he wrote in September 1939), Chamberlain would have liked to have gone much further as a social reformer. He dreamed in 1940 of a further stint as premier after the war when his mission might be more fully accomplished. He spoke of the need for “a new era of social improvement” when generous resources could be found for it in a time of assured peace. Instead, the completion of the welfare state fell to the Labour Party.
Yet although the post-war Labour government preferred to forget him, it owed much to his relentless quest for ever higher standards of welfare. He would certainly not have approved of all that it, and its successors, did. As Professor David Dilks has written, “the bureaucracy, complications, cost and universality of the system established by governments since the war would have horrified him.”
What the Labour Party and his other critics never appreciated is that he was called on in the late 1930s to make vast sums available for defence—amounting eventually to nearly 50 per cent of GNP-- after having earlier with Baldwin made the social services the largest item of public expenditure for the first time, with so much scope for further increases.
Chamberlain, the great social reformer, could hardly contemplate this with equanimity, but he saw clearly what had to be done as he pursued his “double policy”, as he called it, of rebuilding armaments and of striving for peace with Hitler and Mussolini in a new European settlement (while, like everyone else, hoping against hope that a third cruel regime in Japan, busily committing atrocities in Manchuria, did not advance against us in the Far East). Speaking in Birmingham in April 1938, he said:
“To me the very idea that the hard-won savings of our people, which ought to be devoted to the alleviation of suffering, to the opening out of institutions and recreations, to the care of the old, to the development of the minds and the bodies of the young—the thought that these savings should have to be dissipated upon the construction of weapons of war is hateful and damnable. Yet I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that under the present conditions of the world we have no alternative but to go on with it, because it is the very breath of our British being, our freedom itself, that is at stake. Do not let us forget that this freedom has come down to us from the past, bought for us at a price. If we wish to keep it we must pay the interest on that price in each succeeding generation”.
How odd it is that that Chamberlain, who regularly attracted audiences of 10,000 or more and struck a note of compassion that Churchill never managed in these years, should have come to be regarded as a poor public speaker. How hopeless today’s politicians sound by comparison on the rare occasions when they attempt to speak seriously in the national interest.
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And so finally to his relations with the great titan of the 20th century.
Chamberlain’s many merits included a firm disposition to stand up to the man who was widely regarded—particularly before 1940-- as most difficult and unpredictable politician of his age, Winston Churchill. As leading members of Baldwin’s cabinet in the 1920s, the two men clashed over the reform of local government; compromise was eventually reached after heated argument.Their vigorous exchanges left Churchill with a high regard for his formidable colleague who always had a complete command of his brief. His promotion to the Foreign Office was considered. “He is one of our best men and he is a strong man. You want a big man in that Office”, Churchill told Baldwin in 1929.
Chamberlain did not repine when, after their protracted disputes in government, Churchill exiled himself from the Tory leadership after 1929 so that he could oppose Lord Halifax’s proposals for internal Indian self-government, voting against his Party time and time again in the mid-1930s on this issue. It was his long campaign against his party’s leadership to try and preserve an outdated Victorian creed of Empire that cost Churchill any realistic chance of a return to cabinet before the outbreak of war, a time when he would dearly have loved to have had office again.
David Margesson, the government chief whip, had dinner with Churchill in April 1939. The host told Chamberlain afterwards that Churchill had “informed him bluntly of his strong desire to join the Govt. In reply to enquiries he assured David of his confidence that he could work amicably under the P.M. who had many admirable qualities, some of which he did not possess himself… He would like the Admiralty but would be quite satisfied to succeed [Lord] Runciman as Lord President.”
Chamberlain was tempted, but asked himself: “Would he wear me out resisting rash suggestions?”, such as the seizure of Corfu by the navy which Churchill had recently urged on “ the telephone all day.”
In the late 1930s, the harshest words were exchanged between Chamberlain and Churchill in public over foreign policy, but without destroying the wary respect which they felt for each other. Not once did Churchill vote against Chamberlain’s foreign policy(over Munich he abstained).
After confidential discussions between them in Downing Street in March 1938 at a time of intense public disagreement, Chamberlain wrote: “I can’t help liking Winston although I think him nearly always wrong and impossible as a colleague…Everyone in the House enjoys listening to him and is ready to cheer and laugh at his sallies, but he has no following of any importance.” It was for that reason that Churchill’s objective, which he pursued alternately by blandishments and hostility, was to secure a place in Chamberlain’s government with its impregnable majority in the House of Commons.
One of the issues on which Chamberlain thought Churchill wrong was aerial warfare. Churchill pressed for more and more bombers; Chamberlain equipped the air force with the fighter aircraft which won the Battle of Britain. He was convinced that they would serve Britain well, having studied their merits with care. In May 1938 he spoke enthusiastically in the Commons about their record-breaking speeds, and their “engines of unprecedented efficiency” . Churchill’s contribution to the discussion of fighter aircraft was to call for a larger, heavier version. Some were made; they were a disaster during the war.
But past disagreements dissolved when war broke out ; the two men came together in happy alliance which continued during the four and a half months that Chamberlain served under Churchill as Lord President of the Council after May 1940 when the disastrous Norway campaign ended Chamberlain’s premiership, even though Churchill himself was deeply implicated in it. Chamberlain chaired the war cabinet in Churchill’s absence; he undertook a huge burden of work on domestic issues until the onset of death from cancer compelled him to resign at the end of September 1940.
Chamberlain wrote: “Winston has behaved with the most unimpeachable loyalty. Our relations are excellent and I know he finds my help of great value to him.” Churchill reciprocated: “I have received a great deal of help from Chamberlain. His kindness and courtesy in our new relations have touched me. I have joined hands with him and must act with perfect loyalty.” A senior civil servant was struck “most forcibly” at meetings of the war cabinet by “the courtesy and deference with which Churchill treated Neville Chamberlain.”
Chamberlain influenced the course of events decisively for the last time at the end of May 1940. Halifax, as Foreign Secretary, pressed for the opening of negotiations with Mussolini, then still neutral, in the hope that they would lead to a peace deal with Hitler who, in the circumstances that then existed, was bound to impose harsh terms on Britain. Opinion in the war cabinet was divided. Churchill carried the day against the advocates of negotiations only because Chamberlain supported him. Britain, Chamberlain said, must “continue to show the utmost resolution” in carrying on the war. It was a critical moment in Britain’s struggle to remain a free country. No wonder that when Chamberlain had to leave the government, Churchill wrote to express his “feelings of the deepest respect and regard for you”.
Churchill was distraught when Chamberlain died. “What shall I do without poor Neville?”, he said when he learned of Chamberlain’s death in November 1940. “I was relying on him to look after the Home Front for me.”
It had been a brief, but perfect partnership, with Churchill concentrating on grand strategy and negotiations with allies and the United States while Chamberlain, perhaps the greatest administrator of his age adored by civil servants, ran the country’s internal affairs. He remained a master of government business to the end. “The superior administrative capacity of Neville Chamberlain”, a leading economist wrote later recalling his last months, made him “the one Minister in this field from whom you could get clear and immediate directives.”
When the House of Commons met in Church House on 13 November 1940 to pay tribute to Chamberlain, Churchill was at his most eloquent:
“He had a precision of mind and an aptitude for business which raised him far above the ordinary levels of our generation. He had a firmness of spirit which was not often elated by success, seldom downcast by failure and never swayed by panic. When, contrary to all his hopes, beliefs and exertions, the war came upon him, and all that he had worked for was shattered, there was no man more resolved to pursue the unsought quarrel to the death… I had the singular experience of passing in a day from being one of his most prominent opponents to being one of his principal lieutenants, and on another day of passing from serving under him to become the head of a government of which, with perfect loyalty, he was content to be a member…Thereafter, he acted with that singleness of purpose and simplicity of conduct which at all times, and especially in great times, ought to be the model for us all… He met the approach of death with a steady eye. If he grieved at all, it was that he could not be a spectator to our victory, but I think he died with the comfort of knowing that his country had, at least, turned the corner.”
But all this was forgotten by Churchill when he came to write his hugely influential war memoirs five years later. In them he savaged Chamberlain’s reputation, and fostered myths which gained so strong a hold on posterity.
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Shortly before his death, Chamberlain received a letter of farewell from Sir John Simon, the cleverest of all his cabinet colleagues. Simon’s words brought him great comfort. “You have spent yourself in the country’s service”, Simon wrote, “and have done more than any man alive to improve the conditions of life of humble folk.”
Chamberlain replied: “It gave me particular pleasure that you remembered my efforts for social improvement. It was the hope of doing something to improve the conditions of life for the poorer people that brought me at past middle life into politics, and it is some satisfaction to me that I was able to carry out some part of my ambition.” That is what he would want to be brought out of the oblivion into which his work as a social reformer has been cast.
He had a clear example before him. Speaking at the Conservative Women’s Conference in May 1938, he described his father as “a great social reformer, and it was my observance of his deep sympathy with the working classes and his intense desire to better their lot which inspired me with an ambition to do something in my turn to afford better help to the working people”.
The far-reaching social reforms for which he was responsible had, he felt, completed “the circle of security for the workers.” His official biographer, Sir Keith Feiling, wrote: “These measures, he used to say privately, would make the ground ready for some great Act of consolidation, which in time to come would crown the purpose of his life’s work, the object of which was to set on unshakeable foundations a triple partnership between the state, the employer, and the worker, to ensure against all the giant ills that flesh is heir to.”
At the start, when Chamberlain embarked on his mission of social reform, he had no more enthusiastic supporter than Winston Churchill. “You are in the van, you can raise a monument, you can leave a name in history”, he told Chamberlain in November 1924.
Argument about his conduct of foreign affairs will go on for ever. He summed up what he called his double policy simply and clearly: “hope for peace and prepare for war.” Peace, based on a new European settlement, was made impossible by Hitler. The rearming of Britain in preparation for war proceeded at a pace the nation would support and the economy, newly emerged from recession, could sustain.
He took Britain to war in a spirit of unity, backed by significant allies, the Dominions, and with newly equipped, modernised armed forces. If his perfect war-time partnership with Churchill had not been cut short by his sudden, terminal illness in September 1940, his place in history would have been made secure. Jock Colville who worked as private secretary to both men, said: “ I have never known a mind as brilliant as Chamberlain’s. It was unbelievably quick, clear and incisive.”
After the war Churchill and others made sure that Neville Chamberlain would never lack critics. Much-- too much—has been heard from them. Lack of appreciation of his many merits has made him the most misunderstood statesman in modern British history. There were in Neville Chamberlain’s character elements of true greatness.
