Neville Chamberlain

Neville Chamberlain led the British government from 1937 to 1940, the years in which Europe slid from uneasy peace into the Second World War. His name is tied above all to appeasement, the attempt to satisfy Nazi Germany through negotiation, and to the Munich settlement of 1938, which handed the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. He took the United Kingdom into war in September 1939 and resigned eight months later.

Arthur Neville Chamberlain was born on 18 March 1869 in Edgbaston, Birmingham, the son of the Liberal Unionist statesman Joseph Chamberlain and half-brother of Austen Chamberlain, later Foreign Secretary. After Rugby School and Mason College he trained with accountants, then spent six years running a family sisal plantation on Andros in the Bahamas, a venture that failed and cost his father £50,000. Back in England he ran Hoskins & Company, a maker of metal ship berths, for 17 years. He married Anne Cole in 1911.

He came to politics through the city. Elected to the council in 1911, he pushed one of Britain's earliest town-planning schemes and became Lord Mayor in 1915. An unhappy spell as Director of National Service under David Lloyd George in 1916–17 left the two men lasting enemies.

Chamberlain entered the Commons in 1918, aged 49, for Birmingham Ladywood. His rise was swift: within about ten months of first taking office in 1922 he had become Chancellor of the Exchequer. His most productive period was as Minister of Health from 1924 to 1929, when 21 of the 25 bills he set before the Cabinet became law, including the 1929 act abolishing the Poor Law boards of guardians. As Chancellor in the National Government from 1931 he introduced a general 10% tariff with preference for the empire, a policy his father had championed, and from 1935 argued for rearmament, especially of the air force.

He succeeded Stanley Baldwin on 28 May 1937, hoping to concentrate on domestic reform, and passed measures on factory conditions, paid holidays and housing. Foreign affairs soon took over. Chamberlain believed Germany and Italy could be drawn into a stable European settlement. After Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938 he turned to Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain flew to Germany three times that September. At the final meeting, with Benito Mussolini and the French premier Édouard Daladier, the Munich Agreement was signed on 30 September, without Czechoslovakia at the table. Chamberlain returned claiming "peace for our time" and was greeted by cheering crowds.

When Germany seized the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939, he changed course: Britain and France guaranteed Poland's independence, the Territorial Army was doubled and peacetime conscription introduced. Talks with the Soviet Union failed, and the Nazi-Soviet pact followed in August.

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and on 3 September Chamberlain announced by radio that Britain was at war. After the failed Allied campaign in Norway, the Norway Debate of 7–8 May 1940 saw his majority, normally over 200, fall to 81. With Labour refusing to serve under him, he resigned on 10 May and advised the King to send for Winston Churchill.

He stayed in the War Cabinet as Lord President of the Council and in late May 1940 helped persuade it not to pursue peace feelers through Italy. Bowel cancer forced him out on 22 September, and he died at Heckfield on 9 November 1940, aged 71.

His reputation fell quickly. The 1940 polemic Guilty Men and later Churchill's war memoirs blamed him for weakness and for leaving Britain unready for the Second World War. From the 1960s, revisionist historians using newly opened government papers argued that Britain had been in no position to fight in 1938. Later post-revisionists, notably R. A. C. Parker, replied that real alternatives such as alliances and containment had been available. He is still usually ranked low among British prime ministers.

Our 1938 map shows Europe in the year of Munich, with Nazi Germany at the centre of the crisis; the 1945 map shows the continent after the war he entered.