Neville Chamberlain

Neville Chamberlain, 1869-1940), British prime minister, whose policies failed to avert the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939. The younger son of Joseph Chamberlain, Arthur Neville Chamberlain was born in Birmingham, England, on March 18, 1869. He was educated at Rugby and Mason College, Birmingham. He achieved mixed results in business ventures, turned to politics, and in 1911 was elected to the Birmingham city council. He was lord mayor of Birmingham in 1915 and 1916 and was elected to the Commons in 1918 as a Conservative from Birmingham.

Entering Parliament at age 49, Chamberlain rose rapidly. He was minister of health (1923-1924, 1924-1929, 1931), chancellor of the exchequer (1923-1924, 1931-1937), and prime minister (1937-1940), succeeding Baldwin.

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. In the Munich pact (1938), signed also by France, Chamberlain 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 occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.

After Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Chamberlain honored a pledge to stand by Poland and led Britain into war two days later. 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.

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.

On reflection, Chamberlain's apparent coldness is not easily distinguished from a strong sense of integrity and public service. If his self-confidence and rigidity of will were placed in policies now generally believed mistaken, they were policies supported by most of his contemporaries and ones that Chamberlain defended more intelligently than most.

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