Neville Chamberlain

"Chamberlain was not a favourite of the House, and he never obtained that attention from the Opposition which it is necessary for a leading Minister to secure. This was a defect partly of manner and partly of feeling. He had a certain intellectual contempt for people whose views he thought ridiculous; and most of the Labour Party he put into that category. But he was not able to conceal this, and his tone revealed a degree of sarcasm and even rudeness towards his opponents, which is contrary to the true House of Commons tradition, at least at the top. Hard blows can be taken and given in our Parliamentary system. They are not long remembered. But superciliousness and arrogance are much more wounding. Nevertheless, he was a commanding personality. His speeches were admirably prepared and argued. If his voice was rasping and often weak, his Parliamentary style was good. He marshalled facts and statistics with ease. His slim figure, conventionally dressed (he usually wore a tail coat and stiff wing-collar), his well-groomed appearance, his corvine physiognomy, his perfect self-control: all these made him an outstanding Parliamentarian. I can still see him standing at the box, erect and confident. But he was respected and feared, rather than loved, except by the few who were his intimates and knew the kindliness that lay behind his bleak exterior."

"Although one of the Opposition, I feel I must say how much your presence in the House is missed by me. However profoundly I may have felt disagreement with you over foreign policy at times, I could not take less account of several splendid things you did during the short time it has been my privilege to share the same historic floor with you. I recall how you stood firm over Members' pensions, your moving tribute to George Lansbury, your greatness in making room for Winston Churchill and then facing the same House by his side. I would like to have understood you better; public criticism can be so unfair to a sincere man. I can only assure you of my deep respect, and continuous thought for you in such a disappointing moment as this."

"These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire."

"That, too, was what Neville Chamberlain was clearly doing in London from 1937 until the gray morning of 1941 when his cancer finally killed him. During those fateful years he too was "sparring with the situation," seeking an easy way out. He has been accused round the world of being a foolish old man who did not understand what it would take to defend his country against the Nazis. That, I am sure, is a fundamental error. He knew full well the number of planes and tanks it would take, but he could not bring himself to the hard decision of ordering the industrial and economic revolution that was necessary to produce them."

"We, like the the British and French, improvised and compromised, and these two words, I am convinced, are the patents of "too little and too late." All this is relevant to our present situation because once a nation or the leaders of a nation get into the habit of substituting palliatives for cures, once they refuse to face the facts and deal with them directly and courageously, their capacity for self-deception is unlimited. Neville Chamberlain was tragic proof of this point. When he came back from Munich, waving Adolf Hitler's signature on a no-war scrap of paper and announcing "peace in our time," he gradually convinced himself that what he wanted to believe was true, and so he became so convinced of it that on March 9, 1939, he sent a note up to the press gallery in the House of Commons telling the reporters that he would like to see them that afternoon at four o'clock. When the reporters arrived for this unexpected conference, they found him beaming, which was unusual. He said he had called this meeting because he was convinced at last that there was now real hope of a European settlement. He explained his feeling at full length and finished by talking not only of better Anglo-German relations but of European disarmament. Now, Neville Chamberlain may have been a misguided statesman, but he was an honest man, and while the Foreign Office was visibly astounded by his remarks, we sent them out to the world that same afternoon. Six days later, the German Army marched into Prague."

"Afterward Strang, like many in the Foreign Office, described Munich frankly as a “débâcle.” And there is no doubt that Chamberlain’s personal diplomacy looks profoundly amateurish by the standards of later summits. No psychological profiles of his opponent had been prepared; there was no sign of what would now be called “position papers” or “briefing books.” The prime minister kept professional diplomats at arm’s length, including his foreign secretary, and went to Berchtesgaden without even his own interpreter and record keeper. He did not think through his bottom line and tended to throw away bargaining chips without gaining anything in return. But Chamberlain’s basic problem was not one of method but of assumptions. He flew to Berchtesgaden because he feared that the fate of Europe was in the hands of a madman; he came back with the illusion that he was forging a personal relationship with Hitler and that this would bear fruit because, at root, the Führer was a man of his word. More dangerous still was the idealism (and hubris) of a politician who believed he could bring peace to Europe and, perhaps, the ambition of a marginalized younger son determined to outdo his father and his brother. But none of this would have mattered if Chamberlain and most of his colleagues had not convinced themselves that war over Czechoslovakia would mean the devastation of much of London. Not for the last time a British prime minister got it profoundly wrong about weapons of mass destruction."

"In short, Hitler was a much more effective negotiator than Chamberlain, but he never wanted to negotiate, whereas Chamberlain, a less skilled tactician, got what he really wanted—peace not war. Yet it was a hollow victory, because Hitler never intended to honor the Munich agreements. He was soon kicking himself for losing his nerve at the end of September. In March 1939, when he seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, he was not only going beyond his professed aim of simply bringing Germans within the Reich, he had also torn up what had been signed at Munich. A disenchanted Chamberlain was forced into a complete U-turn, offering guarantees to Poland, Romania and other countries possibly on the Nazi hit-list in a belated and panicky effort to deter further German expansion. That summer Chamberlain still hoped for peace but Hitler was now bent on having a war over Poland, determined not back down a second time. He felt he had the measure of his opponents. “Our enemies are small worms,” he told his generals in August 1939. “I saw them in Munich.""

"[H]e was later one of the most successful Departmental Ministers of his time. The Ministry of Health probably regards him as the best Minister assigned to it since its creation; the Treasury as perhaps the most competent Chancellor for the current business of the Department, and within the limits of orthodox policy, since Gladstone. He has all the qualities that Whitehall most desires for its normal tasks: industry, order, precision, correctitude, decision. He is neither wayward, nor fickle, nor fanciful. He is a lucid expositor, a competent defender, of departmental policy."

"Spare, even ascetic, in figure, dark-haired and dark-eyed; with a profile rather corvine than aquiline; he carries his seventy years well and looks and seems less than his age. His voice has a quality of harshness, with an occasional rasp, and is without music or seductive charm, but it is clear and resonant and a serviceable instrument of his purpose. In debate and exposition his speech is lucid, competent, cogent, never rising to oratory, unadorned with fancy, and rarely touched by perceptible emotion. But it gives a sense of mastery of what it attempts, well reflects the orderly mind behind and, if something is lost, it derives strength from its disregard of all that is not directly relevant to the close-knit argument of his theme. In manner he is glacial rather than genial."

"If we wish to find the closest analogy, among statesmen of the first rank, we must turn to one of a different nation who pursued a very different, and in foreign affairs even a diametrically opposite, policy. Monsieur Poincaré, too, had a restricted range of habitual vision, and an unequalled clarity of vision within that range; what he saw, he saw precisely in all its detail; what he did not so see was altogether outside his consciousness; he had a complete mastery of all he knew, and a supreme disregard for what he did not. He was glacial and unresponsive. He had a coldly, frictionlessly functioning brain, which was a perfect instrument for his limited, inflexible purposes. The force of a strong nature, the determination of a strong will, the vigour of a robust physique, were all increased by this concentration of effort and interest. Mr. Chamberlain had all these characteristics, though all of them in a less extreme form; he is compact, cold, correct, concentrated, with both the limitations and the strength which these qualities involve. The analogy is confirmed by the similarity of the personal reactions of the Celt of genius to the Lorrainer and to the Midland Englishman."

"He cares more where he cares most, because he cares less where he cares least. His will is stronger for his central purpose, because he confines it to that purpose. His strength is the strength of concentration. And this must be the central note of any personal description. We may regret the limitation of vision, the inability to gather strength or support by setting policy on a wide and generous basis, the failure to conciliate and attract those of different outlook and ideas, the inconvenient clarity of his exposition of those features of his policy which most annoy his critics or his potential allies, the undisguised expression of his dislikes and prejudices, the inadequate comprehension of the mental attitude of many whose reactions to his declarations are of great importance. But the personal force remains, the greater for its direct purpose because it is concentrated, not dispersed. He has the defects of his qualities, but he has also the qualities of his defects."

"Being very efficient, Chamberlain had, as he said himself, "no capacity for looking on and seeing other people mismanaging things." Of his planning there is no better example than the programme that he made for the Cabinet in November 1924, for the reform of local government. It was a five-year plan to cover the whole field of health, housing, local taxation and rating, and to be carried out methodically by twenty-five Bills neatly spaced over each succeeding session of the five-year Parliament. No previous Minister of Health or President of the Local Government Board had ever contemplated so ambitious a task. Chamberlain not only convinced a doubtful Cabinet of its advantages, but passed the whole programme through Parliament in little more than four years. Without his remarkable grasp of detail, his achievement would have been impossible. From start to finish it involved an almost interminable series of administrative problems. The result was to display the remarkable talent for administration that had already made his reputation on the Birmingham City Council. The Ministry of Health and the Exchequer provided an unlimited opportunity for still further applying it. His critics sometimes thought that this grasp of detail made him undertake work that ought to have been left to his permanent staff. I am sure, however, that his reforms between 1924 and 1929 would never have been carried through if it had not been for his knowledge of detail and the use that he made of it."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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’."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Frieden für unsere Zeit!"

"Ein ziemlich fernes Land, über das man wenig weiß."