Neville Chamberlain might
have been an excellent peacetime Prime Minister, but unfortunately he did not
get the opportunity. Instead, he is remembered as the Prime minister who made
the mistake of trusting Hitler to keep his word and ended up having to take
Great Britain to war in 1939.
Arthur Neville Chamberlain was born on 18th March 1869 in Birmingham, being the only son of the industrialist Joseph Chamberlain, who had served as a minister under Gladstone and Salisbury, and his second wife Florence Kenrick. Austen Chamberlain, who also had a distinguished government career, was Neville’s half-brother, and there were also four sisters from the two marriages.
Early life
Neville’s mother died in childbirth when he was only six years old. He was brought up to have a strong social conscience and he always retained his Liberal leanings despite becoming leader of the Conservative Party in later life.
Neville followed his brother to Rugby School but not to Cambridge University as his father had marked him out for a career in business. Neville therefore went to Mason College (now Birmingham University) to study science, metallurgy and engineering, but was not greatly interested in the latter two subjects.
On leaving college he joined a firm of accountants, but in 1890 he was sent by his father to the Bahamas with a view to establishing a sisal-growing business. However, this proved to be a failure and by 1896 the venture had to be abandoned at a huge loss.
Neville Chamberlain did however make a success of his next foray into business, which was with the Elliot’s Metal Company, followed by his purchase in 1897 of Hoskins and Son, a Birmingham firm that made ship’s berths. He took a keen interest in all aspects of the business, including the welfare of the workforce and encouragement of active trade unions.
By the time of the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Chamberlain was one of the leading lights of Birmingham’s commerce and industry and he also took an active role in local affairs, chairing the management board of Birmingham General Hospital and raising funds for the new University of Birmingham.
Politics in Birmingham
In January 1911 he married Anne Vere, who became a huge support to him during his political career. In November that year he was elected to Birmingham City Council. His rise in local politics was rapid and he became Lord Mayor of Birmingham in 1915. His many achievements in this role included the establishment of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Birmingham Municipal Bank, as well as many improvements to help the poorest members of society.
It was not long before his efforts became noticed on the national stage and he was invited in 1916 to become Director General of National Service, responsible for recruiting volunteers for the war effort. However, he found this job to be impossible to do, partly due to a clash of personalities with the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. Chamberlain resigned from his post in August 1917.
Parliamentary career
Chamberlain realised that he needed a seat in Parliament in order to be able to achieve anything worthwhile and he was elected for Birmingham Ladywood in 1918 as a Conservative and Liberal Unionist, supporting Lloyd George’s coalition government while still being a political radical. He immediately became active in formulating plans for a post-war welfare state that included proper pensions and state-aided housebuilding.
However, it was only when the Lloyd George government fell in 1922 that Chamberlain became a minister, serving in Andrew Bonar Law’s Conservative administration, firstly as Postmaster General and then as Minister of Health, in which role he sponsored the 1923 Housing Act that provided for slum clearance and new building.
When Bonar Law resigned on health grounds in May 1923 Chamberlain served under Stanley Baldwin, becoming the Prime Minister’s right-hand man as Chancellor of the Exchequer. However, the Baldwin government fell in October 1923 and was only re-elected in October 1924, when the post of Chancellor was offered to Winston Churchill.
Instead, Chamberlain
served as Minister of Health for nearly five years, during which time he worked
hard for social reform and placed 21 new acts on the statute book, including
the Widows, Orphans, and
Old Age Pensions Act of 1925 that was an important foundation of the
post-1945 welfare state.
The Baldwin government fell at the general election of May 1929, at which Chamberlain switched seats to the much safer Birmingham Edgbaston. In 1930 he became chairman of the Conservative Party and was urged by many to replace Baldwin as party leader, but remained loyal.
Chamberlain served as Chancellor in the National Government, led by Labour’s Ramsay Macdonald, from 1931 to 1937. He increasingly became the real power in Government, acting as Prime Minister in all but name.
The National Government, now led by Baldwin, won the general election of May 1935 with Conservative MPs having a large majority of seats. Baldwin was faced with the Abdication Crisis of 1936 and this had a marked effect on his health. He therefore resigned in May 1937 and Chamberlain was his obvious successor.
Chamberlain as Prime Minister
Chamberlain was faced almost immediately with the issue of what to do about the ambitions of Nazi Germany. The policy of appeasement had been developed throughout the 1930s and Chamberlain was keen to maintain it. The thinking was that Hitler would be satisfied with a revised Versailles Treaty that did not punish German so severely for its defeat in World War I. It was a policy that sought to bring about genuine peace in Europe by removing all sources of grievance in a Europe-wide agreement to which Germany would also make appropriate contributions, although it has popularly been regarded as a cowardly policy of surrender to the Nazis.
At the same time as seeking to negotiate peace in Europe, Chamberlain was conscious that Britain was ill-prepared for war and took steps to re-arm, including increasing income tax to pay for a programme of arms and munitions manufacture.
The name of Neville Chamberlain is always associated with the “piece of paper” that he waved as he stepped from an aeroplane at Heston Airport having returned from meeting Adolf Hitler in Munich in September 1938. By this time the Germans had already annexed Austria and seized control of the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s signature on the Munich Agreement was, Chamberlain fervently hoped, a guarantee of peace in Europe, although personally he had his doubts as to whether Hitler could be trusted.
The British people certainly believed that the Munich Agreement marked the end of the German threat, and, had Chamberlain called an immediate general election, he would have had an overwhelming victory.
However, Hitler’s actions in the spring and summer of 1939 made it very clear that he had no intention of sticking to his side of the Munich Agreement and that the independence of Czechoslovakia could not be assured.
Things got worse when Germany started to threaten Poland, in March 1939, prompting the British government to offer a guarantee of support to Poland and other European nations. It was these guarantees that forced Chamberlain to declare war on 3rd September.
Resignation
As a war leader Chamberlain was clearly out of his depth and it was the right move for him to resign in May 1940 and for Winston Churchill to take his place. There was no personal animosity between the two men and both had every respect for the other, although Chamberlain’s first choice for the post had been Lord Halifax.
Chamberlain continued to serve in the War Cabinet as Lord President of the Council and offered loyal support to Churchill, in effect co-ordinating internal policy and leaving Churchill free to concentrate on the war effort.
However, Chamberlain was not destined to continue in this role for long. On 24th July 1940 he learned that he had terminal bowel cancer, from which he died on 9th November, at the age of 71.
His reputation
Had Adolf Hitler not come to power and dominated much of Europe, it is possible that Neville Chamberlain’s reputation as a reforming Chancellor and Prime Minister might have been much higher than it was. Unfortunately, much of the good work that he did to set Great Britain’s finances straight after the Depression years and his tireless efforts on behalf of the poorest people in society have been subsumed by the image of that “piece of paper” and the stigma of Appeasement.
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