People From Birmingham

"The UK managed to kick the Tories out after fourteen years, France narrowly managed to keep the far-right out of power, and Kendrick Lamar released a music video for the spectacularly hostile "Not Like Us" on the Fourth of July, and that is the end of the good things that happened."

"[National Socialism] has survived the flames of war and the tempest of vilification because, when war has done its worst and vilification has run its entire gamut, National Socialism remains, in the final analysis, synonymous with higher man's will to survive, his instinct for health and strength, and his desire for beauty in life; and, as long as that will, that instinct, and that desire remain on this earth, the creed of National Socialism will remain, indestructible."

"During the Leyton by-election, in which Patrick Gordon Walker tried vainly to get back into Parliament after losing his seat in the general election, I was speaking for him at a noisy meeting attended by a strong contingent of the National Front. At a given signal, all the Fascists in the audience launched flour bombs at the platform. Suddenly their leader, a repulsive brute called Colin Jordan, emerged from behind the curtains where he had been hiding, and began to harangue the mob. I knocked him off the stage, on to an inoffensive reporter who took years to forgive me for his broken spectacles."

"But at the time praise was showered on Chamberlain for brokering the deal. On his return from Locarno, he received a special welcome at Victoria Station and, in further similarity to Disraeli in 1878, was immediately made a Knight of the Garter. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin praised him for resolving an issue that had “so far defied the efforts of every statesman since the war.” One of Baldwin’s predecessors, Lord Arthur Balfour, said that Chamberlain’s name would be “indissolubly associated” with this probable “turning point in civilisation.” A few months later Chamberlain was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. For a politician who had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, “Radical Joe,” it was an intoxicating apotheosis. “I am astonished and a little frightened by the completeness of my success and by its immediate recognition everywhere,” Chamberlain told his sister On October 22, 1925, he dined alone with his younger half-brother Neville, who noted in his diary that Austen "talked almost without stopping from 8 till 11.00 on Locarno. Very naturally, perhaps, the rest of the world does not exist for him . . . Looking back he felt that no mistake had been made from beginning to end." Neville found it hard to conceal his envy at Austen’s success. Nor, as we shall see, did he forget it."

"His was rather the excellence of character than of capacity."

"It was cruelly said of Austen Chamberlain that he always played the game and always lost it. But that is really a tribute to his deep sense of honour and loyalty."

"Chamberlain is a Liberal."

"Austen Chamberlain did not seem to me to be a man of first-rate mind, but he obviously possessed high character and the sort of disinterested goodness and amateur methods that now and then have enabled British statesmen to play notable roles in negotiations with foreign diplomats, even when the latter have been armed with subtler minds and the traditional techniques."

"I wonder how many members can realise what [the remilitarisation of the Rhineland] means not merely to the excited politicians in Paris, but to the French peasant in his hovel, to the mother who feels that once again the...peril has come near and that once again her children will be mowed down by the scythe of war."

"The most famous and significant conference of the 1920s took place at Locarno, on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, in October 1925. The principals were the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany—Austen Chamberlain, Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann. Their great achievements were to guarantee the Rhineland borders of France and Germany and to bring Germany into the League of Nations. The so-called spirit of Locarno became a benchmark for diplomacy. In retrospect, however, Locarno looks more ambiguous. Stresemann had succeeded in bringing Germany in from the cold without abandoning any of its demands for lost territory in the east. These demands, particularly over Poland, were to prove the fuel for the next war."

"Warm-hearted, considerate and generous...incapable of a mean action and conscientious to a fault."

"Revision is a dangerous word. Revision should never appear, I venture to think, in the mouth of a statesman or in the policy of a Government until they are prepared to define very closely the limits within which they think revision should take place. The long history of this country has in one sense been a history of the revision of Treaties. We have revised and revised and what have we got for it? What concession once made has any longer kept the value it had before it was revised? Of which of these concessions can it be said at this present moment that it has tempered feeling in Germany, that it has produced that friendly spirit that those who made it desired to promote? What is passing in Germany seems to me to render this a singularly inopportune moment to talk about the revision of Treaties."

"I beg the right hon. Gentleman to beware of what he is doing. After all, we stand for something in this country. Our traditions count, for our own people, for Europe and for the world. Europe is menaced and Germany is afflicted by this narrow, exclusive, aggressive spirit, by which it is a crime to be in favour of peace and a crime to be a Jew. That is not a Germany to which we can afford to make concessions. That is not a Germany to which Europe can afford to give the equality of which the Prime Minister spoke."

"Scratch me and you will find the Nonconformist."

"No country is more exposed to danger than ours. We will all do our best, wherever we sit in this House, according to our lights, to preserve peace, but we can none of us guarantee it by fine phrases; we can none of us guarantee that the whole of the nations will combine in case of aggression. If war breaks out, if we become the victims of aggression or become involved in a struggle, and if the hon. Member for Limehouse (Mr. Attlee) and his friends be sitting on the Government bench while London is bombed, do you think he will hold the language that he held to-day? Do you think that that is the defence he will make? If he does, he will be one of the first victims of the war, for he will be strung up by an angry, and a justifiably angry, populace to the nearest lamp-post."

"The affairs of the world do not stand still...I could not go, as the representative of His Majesty's Government, to meeting after meeting of the League of Nations, to conference after conference with the representatives of foreign countries, and say, "Great Britain is without a policy. We have not yet been able to meet all the Governments of the Empire, and we can do nothing." That might be possible for an Empire wholly removed from Europe, which existed in a different hemisphere. It was not possible for an Empire the heart of which lies in Europe and next door to the Continent of Europe, and where every peril to the peace of Europe jeopardised the peace of this country."

"No British Government ever will and ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier."

"It is all very well for the hon. Member for Limehouse and the right hon. Member for Darwen to paint the horrors of war, or, rather, for the right hon. Member for Darwen—the hon. Member for Limehouse did not descend to that—to draw pictures of what you might do with the money that you could save if only you kept your Army in barracks in their present inadequate condition, if only you left your Air Force insufficient for the protection even of this capital, if only you left your Navy without any sort of protection against aircraft bombing. It is all very well to do that, but the country will not accept those excuses or those picas if the day of trial comes. It is the business of this House, of men of courage in it, to tell the country the truth, to call upon them to bear these sacrifices, to tell them that they are necessary for our own defence, and that our membership of the League of Nations, our promises to contribute to collective security, and our guarantees under Locarno, are worthless unless we put our forces in a proper condition and maintain a strength comparable to the dangers which we may have to meet."

"We have a peculiar interest because the true defence of our country, owing to scientific development, is now no longer the Channel...but upon the Rhine."

"The combination of the Liberal and Labour Parties is much stronger than the Liberal Party would be if there were no third Party in existence. Many men who would in that case have voted for us voted on this occasion as the Labour Party told them i.e. for the Liberals. The Labour Party has "come to stay"...the existence of the third Party deprives us of the full benefits of the 'swing of the pendulum', introduces a new element into politics and confronts us with a new difficulty."

"[I believe in] the throne...parliamentary institutions...private enterprise and individual opinion against the socialization of the state...equity in the distribution of public burdens and strict maintenance of public faith with the creditors of the state [and] a fresh guarantee of peace by an alliance with France and...Belgium for the defence of our common interests against unprovoked attack."

"The danger which threatens us comes from Labour... Those who think that the Conservative or Unionist Party, standing as such and disavowing its Liberal allies, could return with a working majority are living in a fools paradise and, if they persist, may easily involve themselves and the country in dangers the outcome of which it is hard to predict."

"The first thoughts of an Englishman on appointment to the office of Foreign Secretary must be that he speaks in the name, not of Great Britain only, but of the British Dominions beyond the seas, and that it is his imperative duty to preserve in word and act the diplomatic unity of the British Empire. Our interests are one. Our intercourse must be intimate and constant, and we must speak with one voice in the Councils of the world."

"Gentlemen do not behave in such a way."

"Neville Chamberlain's bark was as bad as his bite, and often gave the impression of harshness greater than he intended. He riled the more because he seldom slipped; he had command of himself and exercised it sharply. The beaten Opposition snapped back. With all that he was a good man, unlucky in appeasement's sudden change of meaning from virtuous endeavour to craven immorality. The second sense never occurred to him, nor to most Britons as yet."

"To such a character I seemed prejudiced, one-sided, fanciful, and I would not contradict him except about Germany. He had no idea what Germans were like, and hugged his illusions so tightly as to convey the impropriety of interventions. He was not made for coping with abnormal times or peoples. Most religions make their best souls tolerant and their worst cruel; bad ones make nearly all of one kind and nearly all cruel. That was the rising Germany, and Chamberlain's nature could not imagine such a thing. An earnest and opinionated provincial was bound to err if he plunged into diplomacy. Since no man can pack real knowledge of many lands into one life, the trade is compounded of imagination, and he was not. He had been gravely traduced by those who agreed with him."

"The Prime Minister then told us the story of his visit to Bechtesgaden. Looking back upon what he said, the curious thing seems to me now to have been that he recounted his experiences with some satisfaction. Although he said that at first sight Hitler struck him as "the commonest dog" he had ever seen, without one sign of distinction, nevertheless he was obviously pleased at the reports he had subsequently received of the good impression that he himself had made. He told us with obvious satisfaction how Hitler had said to someone that he had felt that he, Chamberlain, was "a man." But the bare facts of the interview were frightful... After ranting and raving at him, Hitler had talked about self-determination and asked the Prime Minister whether he accepted the principle. The Prime Minister had replied that he must consult his colleagues. From the beginning to end Hitler had not shown the slightest sign of yielding on a single point. The Prime Minister seemed to expect us all to accept that principle without further discussion because time was getting on."

"Personally I believe that Hitler has cast a spell over Neville. After all, Hitler's achievement is not due to his intellectual attainments nor to his oratorical powers, but to the extraordinary influence which he seems able to exercise over his fellow-creatures. I believe that Neville is under that influence at the present time. "It all depends," he said, "on whether we can trust Hitler." "Trust him for what?" I asked. "He has got everything he wants for the present and he has given no promises for the future." Neville also said that he had been told, and he believed, that he himself had made a very favourable impression on Hitler, and that he believed he might be able to exercise a useful influence over him."

"No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield has come home adorned with nobler laurels than MR CHAMBERLAIN from Munich yesterday, and KING and people alike have shown by the manner of their reception their sense of his achievement."

"I can never erase from my mind the thought of his struggle, in the later days of his life, against the depression resulting from his political misfortunes and knowing that he was suffering from an incurable illness. Knowing also that, despite his long public service, few of those who cheered him so loudly on his return from Munich really cared what happened to him."

"Chamberlain thought that Germany could be economically placated, and picked himself for mediator with the insatiable. He was always too sensible to see with A. N. Whitehead how "history exceeds all limitations of common sense". He was anti-Nazi right enough but not enough. He embodied too little and too late. His little however looked a lot to those who, unaware that we had jettisoned every safeguard devised after the war, supposed Hitler to be "a moderate patriot". They gasped when on the verge of catastrophe the Chancellor brought himself to spend on defence £1,500 extra millions financed mainly by income-tax. I still see our Minister in Paris, handsome Hugh Thomas, the finest rider of his day, bursting radiant into my room. "You've done it, Van." "I haven't. The money is spread over five years. There won't be time to spend it before the balloon goes up." Hugh's horse jumped into the bottom of a fence and killed him before he found out. Revelation killed Chamberlain more slowly."

"The mistake that the Führer made was to think that Chamberlain had accepted the Munich terms from weakness. Whatever may be said to the contrary, Chamberlain did not agree because of our military unpreparedness. On the contrary, he sincerely believed that it was necessary in the general interests of world peace to let the Sudeten Germans unite with the Germans of the Reich. The fact that we were military weak took a secondary place in his mind. Extremely obstinate by nature, he would never have submitted to a threat or surrendered through fear. He was prepared to make an agreement only because he felt that it was definitely wrong to plunge Europe into war to maintain what, even in the negotiations of the Versailles Treaty, was regarded as a precarious and vulnerable compromise. When he was told that the loss of the Sudetenland would destroy the balance of power in Europe, his answer was that a balance that depended on Czechoslovakia was no longer reliable when the defences had been turned by Hitler's occupation of Austria. Perhaps he underrated the strength of Czech nationalism. Whilst his mind was insular to the extent that he thought that foreigners thought like us, it was cosmopolitan in its indifference to nationalist movements. It was only after the occupation of Prague that he saw that his detached reasonableness was insufficient to stop Hitler. The result was our guarantee to Poland, Greece, and Roumania, the introduction of conscription, and the intensification of rearmament."

"[Neville Chamberlain] was a very honourable man ... I often thought he knew that in 1938 he must gain time to get us ready. I believe he gained more in that last year than Hitler ... it may be that we owe Chamberlain a great debt of gratitude for his judgment for what happened during those years. And it brought Winston forward that much more ... perhaps it has been one of the faults of British politicians that we look at other politicians through slightly rose-tinted spectacles thinking they are as we are."

"[In September 1938] I asked Chamberlain straight out, did he really believe that Hitler wanted a peaceful settlement? The Prime Minister paused before replying and then said reflectively: "If we accept the challenge now it means war. If we delay a decision something might happen. Hitler may die." Morrison, Dalton, and I looked at one another but said nothing."

"This was one of the frankest interviews I had attended, but my experience of Chamberlain had shown him to be far more forthcoming in private conversation than most of his predecessors. He was not liked by my colleagues, and my own first impressions were similar to theirs, with the major difference that I was considerably impressed by the incisiveness of his mind and the clarity of his speech. He always knew his case, but I felt that he showed little generosity in his attitude to anyone whom he felt was a political opponent. He was an adept at veiled sarcasm when he replied to trade union people ... I remember one occasion when he was tearing up some argument which we had presented, Ben Tillett interposing mildly: "Don't be sarcastic. You can put your case without that." Chamberlain seemed rather taken aback, and as far as I could judge, he tried to follow Ben's advice. He appeared at that time to be utterly devoid of human sentiment. Like Poo Bah in the Mikado, he seemed to have been born sneering."

"At 8 p.m. we listened to the Prime Minister's broadcast... It was a most depressing uterrance. There was no mention of France in it or a word of sympathy for Czecho-Slovakia. The only sympathy expressed was for Hitler, whose feeling about the Sudetens the Prime Minister said that he could well understand, and he never said a word about the mobilisation of the Fleet. I was furious. Winston rang me up. He was also most indignant and said that the tone of the speech showed plainly that we're preparing to scuttle."

"From 1936, and with reluctance, after it grew clear that Germany was rearming, the British government paid reluctant heed to expanding its armed forces. Local city and town officials were primed with providing a basic civil defence infrastructure, for it was clear that a new war would involve devastating aerial bombardment. However, many, especially those controlled by the broadly anti-war Labour Party, dragged their feet in imposing what was decried as a ‘militarization of everyday life’. The great majority of the British population did not favour war. Britain was no longer the almost limitlessly wealthy superpower it had been before 1914. The country’s continuing world-power status now relied on the maintenance of a rules-based international order, with its guarantees of the global status quo (and especially of Britain’s precious Empire). A world war would make British power vulnerable to Germany, and to Germany’s allies, Italy – in the Mediterranean and the Middle East – and Japan (in the Far East). This prompted much of the reasoning behind Neville Chamberlain’s so-called ‘policy of appeasement’."

"Neville Chamberlain, on the other hand, was alert, businesslike, opinionated, and self-confident in a very high degree. Unlike Baldwin, he conceived himsef to be able to comprehend the whole field of Europe, and indeed the world. Instead of a vague but none the less deep-seated intuition, we had now a narrow, sharp-edged efficiency within the limits of the policy in which he believed. Both as Chancellor of the Exchequer and as Prime Minister, he kept the tightest and most rigid control upon military expenditure. He was throughout this period the masterful opponent of all emergency measures. He had formed decided judgments about all the political figures of the day, both at home and abroad, and felt himself capable of dealing with them. His all-pervading hope was to go down to history as the Great Peacemaker; and for this he was prepared to strive continually in the teeth of facts, and face great risks for himself and his country. Unhappily, he ran into tides the force of which he could not measure, and met hurricanes from which he did not flinch, but with which he could not cope. In these closing years before the war, I should have found it easier to work with Baldwin, as I knew him, than with Chamberlain; but neither of them had any wish to work with me except in the last resort."

"Let us say of the Munich Agreement that it was inescapable; that, faced with the lack of preparedness in Britain's armaments and defences, with the lack of unity at home and in the Commonwealth, with the collapse of French morale, and with the uncertainty of Russia's capacity to fight, Mr. Chamberlain had no alternative to do other than he did; let us pay tribute to his persistence in carrying out a policy which he honestly believed to be right. Let us accept and admit all these things, but in so doing let us not omit the shame and humiliation which were ours; let us not forget that, in order to save our own skins—that because we were too weak to protect ourselves—we were forced to sacrifice a small Power to slavery."

"Very shortly after his return from Munich Neville Chamberlain asked me to lunch quietly at No. 10. I put the question straight to him: "What really is your impression of Hitler?" He answered that he "believed that no man, much less the accepted leader of a great nation, could have sworn to me his will for peace unless he meant it. Hitler's words rang absolutely sincerely, never from anyone have I had assurances so emphatic." I immediately asked the Prime Minister: "Then why...did you start the very day after your return to do everything possible to speed armaments all round?" He answered, that although he believed Hitler he had felt that he was "in the presence of a man of intense cruelty and I was obsessed with the fact that if in a year or two he changed his mind he would be so ruthless that he would stop at nothing.""

"A mentality such as his was equally far apart from the easygoing quietism of Baldwin and the introspective hesitations of MacDonald. Although a man of great personal modesty, Chamberlain was not tolerant. His likes and dislikes were even stronger than Baldwin's, so strong, in fact, that they sometimes led him to mistaken decisions, and when he became Prime Minister, to some bad appointments to responsible posts. He had none of Baldwin's appeal to other men's feelings. "I like your old man Baldwin," Lloyd George once said to me. "I could work with him." He could never work with Chamberlain. Whilst it was the humanist's touch that made Labour hang on Baldwin's words, it was the analyst's accuracy that, reacting against Labour's reluctance to face unpleasant facts, made the Trade Union leaders regard Chamberlain as a bitter enemy, when in practice he was a pronounced radical reformer far to the left of many of them and most of his own party."

"During these long violent months of war we had come closer together than at any time in our twenty years of friendly relationship amid the ups and downs of politics. I greatly admired his fortitude and firmness of spirit. I felt when I served under him that he would never give in: and I knew when our positions were reversed that I could count upon the aid of a loyal and unflinching comrade."

"It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour."

"Neville Chamberlain was determined to go to extreme lengths in the cause of peace ... That was why he flew to Germany ... I may recall that after thirty years in Parliament I never saw a House of Commons so unanimous in its apparent goodwill to a national leader and never before did Socialist Members of Parliament open their hearts so fully to a traditional opponent such as myself. At least five of them told me spontaneously how fine they thought Chamberlain's action, and one of them, a famous extremist from the North, rushed up to me with tears streaming down his cheeks, put his hand on my shoulder and exclaimed, "Isn't it marvellous how God has found a man to save us from all the misery of war?""

"Appeasement did not mean surrender, nor was it a policy only to be used towards the dictators. To Chamberlain it meant the methodical removal of the principal causes of friction in the world. The policy seemed so reasonable that he could not believe even Hitler would repudiate it. Hitler at the time seemed genuinely anxious to live on good terms with the British Empire. He had obtained equality of status for his country, and needed a period of peace to consolidate his political power. When, therefore, at Munich, he signed the pledge of perpetual friendship with Great Britain, he appeared not only to be acting in good faith, but to be embarking on a policy equally advantageous to himself and Germany. These were the considerations that influenced him to think that the Führer was more likely to keep his word than to break it. Supposing, however, that Chamberlain was mistaken, for he never regarded his opinion as infallible, he felt that he could fall back on the re-insurance policy that he possessed in the programme of British rearmament. The ink, indeed, was scarcely dry on the agreement when...he met the Service Ministers and Chiefs of Staff and agreed with them on a series of measures for accelerating rearmament, particularly the air programme of Spitfires and Hurricanes. Although Hitler was enraged at this reaction, Chamberlain none the less persisted with his double programme of peace if possible, and arms for certain. If I described his mind in a sentence, I would say that at the time of Munich he was hopeful but by no means sure that Hitler would keep his word, but that after Prague he came to the conclusion that only a show of greater determination would prevent him from breaking it."

"Hitler's open atrocities against the Jews in the autumn of 1938 certainly deeply impressed Chamberlain... And of course Halifax was certainly no less shocked. Many people who did not know Chamberlain personally had the impression that he was a gullible and obstinate old man. During all that ghastly time I saw almost as much of him as I did of Halifax and I will say, from my observation of him, that nothing could be further from the truth. He was haunted day and night by the prospect that he saw clearly enough, he gave everything of his strength to try to avert it. Many people thought he was a cynic. Cynicism was a virtue with which he was perhaps not sufficiently equipped, or he would not have been taken in by Hitler's rather transparent "piece of paper". On the other hand he had quite a streak of the sentimental and emotional in him, which betrayed him into uttering those unguarded words to the crowd in Downing Street after his return from Germany."

"I think one of the fascinating things about Chamberlain was that he tried to do the right thing by the country and all the way through these speeches [in The Struggle for Peace] actually, some of which I know, you can see how he is in a sense wrestling with the fact that however evil Hitler is the thought of war is just so horrific."

"The debate over appeasement – the attempt by Britain and France to avoid war by making "reasonable" concessions to German and Italian grievances during the 1930s – is as enduring as it is contentious. Condemned, on the one hand, as a "moral and material disaster", responsible for the deadliest conflict in history, it has also been described as "a noble idea, rooted in Christianity, courage and common-sense". Between these two polarities lies a mass of nuance, sub-arguments and historical skirmishes. History is rarely clear-cut, and yet the so-called lessons of the period have been invoked by politicians and pundits, particularly in Britain and the United States, to justify a range of foreign interventions – in Korea, Suez, Cuba, Vietnam, the Falklands, Kosovo and Iraq (twice) – while, conversely, any attempt to reach an accord with a former antagonist is invariably compared with the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement. When I began researching this book, in the spring of 2016, the spectre of Neville Chamberlain was being invoked by American conservatives as part of their campaign against President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, while today the concept of appeasement is gaining new currency as the West struggles to respond to Russian revanchism and aggression. A fresh consideration of this policy as it was originally conceived and executed feels, therefore, timely as well as justified."

"Neville Chamberlain’s government, like most of the British population, was still prepared to live with a rearmed and revived Germany. Many conservatives saw the Nazis as a bulwark against Bolshevism. Chamberlain, a former lord mayor of Birmingham of old-fashioned rectitude, made the great mistake of expecting other statesmen to share similar values and a horror of war. He had been a highly skilled minister and a very effective chancellor of the Exchequer, but he knew nothing of foreign policy or defence matters. With his wing-collar, Edwardian moustache and rolled umbrella, he proved to be totally out of his depth when confronted by the gleaming ruthlessness of the Nazi regime."

"The British and German accounts of the conversation agree that he walked warily, and knew that he was dealing with an abnormal fanatic. It may be that his self-confidence misled him into thinking that the Führer could be moved by arguments and explanations that seemed to us unanswerable. British Ministers, whether Grey, Asquith or Baldwin, have always been inclined to think and act as if foreigners thought and acted like themselves. Chamberlain evidently believed that there was at least a small corner of Hitler's mind that was sufficiently like his own to respond to British arguments. The belief was something more than wishful thinking. The plan of the blitzkrieg against Czechoslovakia, for instance, was dropped as the result of Chamberlain's insistence. The truth seems to be that each of them was influenced by the other, but that neither really understood the other's point of view. Chamberlain failed to realise that Hitler wanted the whole continent and not a few million more Germans. Hitler, when he talked of perpetual peace between Germany and Great Britain, always assumed that it would be based upon the division of the old world between them."