Arthur Neville Chamberlain was born in Birmingham, England, on March 18, 1869. After being educated at Rugby School he spent seven years managing his father’s plantation in the Bahamas. Chamberlain arrived back in England in 1897 where he went into the copper-brass business. He was active in local politics and in 1915 was elected Lord Mayor of Birmingham. In the 1918 General Election Chamberlain was elected as a Conservative in the House of Commons. He rose with speed and ease, and by 1923 Stanley Baldwin appointed him as Postmaster-General.
The following year he became the Minister of Health, in which he served for five years. He also achieved the title of Chancellor of the Exchequer in the National Government headed by Ramsay MacDonald from 1931 to 1939. He was an efficient administrator abolishing the Poor Law and reorganizing unemployment assistance. Chamberlain became Prime Minister when Stanley Baldwin resigned in 1937. The following year he travelled to Germany to meet Hitler in an attempt to avoid war between the two countries.
The result of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was the signing of the Munich Pact Chamberlain confronted the threat to peace posed by Germany and Italy. Seeking to appease Adolf HITLER and Benito MUSSOLINI, he first negotiated a treaty with Italy accepting the conquest of Ethiopia on condition that Italy withdraw from the Spanish Civil War. Turning to the Czech question, Chamberlain conferred with Hitler and Mussolini. The Munich pact was signed on September 29, 1938, by Chamberlain, along with Germany, Italy, France.
The agreement accepted Hitler’s territorial claims to predominantly German areas of Czechoslovakia. Though Chamberlain assured Britain that his concession had brought \”peace in our time, Hitler soon broke his agreement and marched into Czecho-Slovakia and subsequently made most of the country a German protectorate. In May 1939 Germany and Italy signed a pact pledging to support each other in war. ). To prevent this in a new war Hitler and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin signed a ten-year nonaggression pact on Aug. 23, 1939 (see Stalin).
On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. England and France demanded that Germany withdraw its troops; Hitler refused. Resulting in Britain and France declaring war on Germany. Under the pressure of Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, and India aligned themselves with Chamberlain. Ireland was the only member of the British Commonwealth to keep out of the war. Although his policies were discredited, he held on as prime minister until May 1940, when he resigned and was succeeded by Winston CHURCHILL.
He died in Heckfield on Nov. 9, 1940. David Dilks: The Twilight War and the Fall of France: Chamberlain and Churchill Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Fifth Series, Volume 28. 1978. pp. 61-86. The belief that Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill were always divided by irreconcilable differences of policy persists strongly, not least because of the stern strictures passed by Churchill himself upon his predecessor in The Gathering Storm.
Furthermore, during the decade which separated Churchills departure from the Exchequer from his return to the Admiralty. differences of policy between him and his former colleagues had cut deep: his adherence to free trade [N. B. : In fact he abandoned Free Trade early in the 1930s. Ed. ], his violent dissent over India, altercations about disarmament and the pace of German rearmament, the row over the Abdication, outright and unqualified condemnation of the Munich settlement.
But when Churchill joined Chamberlains Government in September, 1939, there was agreement between the two on a number of issues. They felt deeply affronted by Stalins decision to partition Poland and to supply raw materials vital to the Nazis war effort; they agreed to wage the struggle at sea with unremitting vigor from the start; they entrusted the holding of the western front to France; they expected a long war; they did not wish to provoke Italy or Japan; and they did not anticipate much assistance from the United States.
Churchill bombarded the P. M. with memoranda. There was some initial disagreement on priorities. Chamberlain drew a lesson from the Polish experience that air power was critical and directed resources to the R. A. F. Churchill doubted that the French would pay almost the whole of the blood tax on land and give the British the sea and the air. The Prime Minister seemed to believe that some of the paper which he received from Churchill were plainly written for the purpose of future quotation to prow foresight.
Indeed, as Chamberlain told his wife, his own memorandum on the efforts of air power in the Polish campaign was written because I thought I must get something on the record too, which would have to be quoted in the Book. \” Chamberlain was aware that Churchill wanted to be Minister of Defence, and in April he made him Chairman of the Military Co-ordination Committee – an experiment that did not work, because (in Chamberlains opinion) of Churchills dominating personality, refusal to delegate, and irregular work habits.
During the May crisis, it became clear that Lord Halifax had no stomach for power and that Churchill was clearly the choice of the opposition parties to head a national government. But the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, remained dependent on his successor for support within the Conservative Party. (\”… To a very large extent I am in your hands and I feel no fear of that. \”) It seems that both men felt that the right man was now P. M.! And the new Prime Minister grew in stature and character. As Baldwin said: \”the furnace of war smelted out all the base metal from him.
Chamberlain became Lord President of the Council with primary responsibility for domestic problems. When Churchill was required to go to France, he said, \”Neville, please mind the shop! \” After Chamberlains death, Churchill delivered a memorable speech of tribute, but a private remark is perhaps even more revealing of his feelings: \”I shall never find such a colleague again. \” Character and Political Philosophy As befitted the son of the most famous Liberal Radical of the late 19th century, Neville Chamberlain was keenly interested in the amelioration of social conditions.
But unlike his father, he brought little passion or demagogy to his work. His political character was thus very different from that of most of his opponents in the Labour party, for whom the demonstration of public passion on behalf of the working classes was a political creed. To Labourites, Chamberlain’s concern with administrative minutiae, financial probity, and individual responsibility (which he feared the careless extension of state welfare might undermine) appeared as inhuman indifference to the poor.
Chamberlain was by temperament a businessman and a civil servant before he was a politician; although he did much to extend welfare services between the wars, his contribution was that of rationalization and was not based on a desire to change quickly and radically the existing qualities of social life. If to his domestic politics he brought little of the fervor of his Birmingham Radical upbringing, this quality was surprisingly present when he turned to foreign affairs. His \”appeasement has seldom been discussed in this light, and most of his critics have misrepresented his position.
The urgent desire to negotiate with Hitler and Mussolini did not, in Chamberlain’s case, spring from pacifism. He strongly supported sanctions against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and was a vocal supporter of rearmament after 1934. Nor was he ignorant of the menace of the dictators. Few people linked the need for rearmament more strongly with the ambitions of Germany. But the crucial characteristic of Chamberlain’s support of rearmament lay in his vision of such rearmament as a support for negotiations that would institute a general peace.
Chamberlain believed that a lasting peace would be possible when British rearmament had helped demonstrate to the dictators that the alternatives to negotiation were unthinkable. Chamberlain’s willingness to negotiate with Hitler was thus more than a result of a sense of military weakness and a refusal to regard the German minority in Czechoslovakia as worth fighting over–although these considerations were present. It sprang also from a passionate desire to avert the horror of war and a firm belief in the possibility of a lasting general peace. This policy of \”negotiation through strength was always potentially self-defeating.
The more Britain rearmed, the less sincere her desire for peace might appear; the more she spoke of peace, the less credible the deterrence of rearmament might become. When the British declared war on Germany, Chamberlain’s policy had failed. The deterrent was to be used, and he above all men was stricken by the catastrophe that he had striven to prevent. This repugnance to war made him appear to many to be unfitted for wartime politics; he resigned after the obvious discontent within his own party was combined with the refusal of the Labour party to join any government led by him.