Chamberlain, Neville

Chamberlain, Neville 1869-1940

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Although Arthur Neville Chamberlain entered Parliament in 1918 at the age of almost fifty, the election of a Conservative government in 1922 paved the way for his meteoric rise from postmaster-general, via the Ministry of Health to the Treasury and the second place in Stanley Baldwin’s government within only ten months. Thereafter, a dynamic period of social reform between 1924 and 1929 and his leading role during the Conservative Party and financial crises of 1930-1931 ensured that he emerged swiftly as Baldwin’s heir-apparent; claims powerfully reinforced by his success as chancellor of the exchequer between 1931 and 1937 when he presided over Britain’s spectacular recovery from the Great Depression. Although there is much debate about the reasons for Britain’s rapid return to prosperity, Chamberlain attributed it to a combination of a general tariff (introduced March 1932) and a “cheap money” policy designed to stimulate economic activity through low interest rates. Equally central to Chamberlain’s strategy was an ostensibly rigid commitment to balanced budgets. Although condemned by critics as proof of an unimaginative passivity in face of mass unemployment, Chamberlain staunchly defended the policy as crucial to the maintenance of investor confidence that there would be no departure from “sound finance” into the hazardous realms of loan-financed public works.

From 1934 onward, Chamberlain was deeply preoccupied with the problems of defending a vast and vulnerable global empire from the cumulative threats posed by Japan, Italy, and Germany at a time when Britain could not afford to rearm sufficiently ever to contemplate the possibility of fighting three major powers in widely separated areas. After his succession to the premiership in May 1937, Chamberlain’s response to this conundrum was to pursue with far greater vigor and determination his so-called double policy of rearmament and appeasement. The former was intended to repair defensive deficiencies at a pace the country could afford without jeopardizing long-term economic stability: Britain’s so-called fourth arm of defense. The latter policy simultaneously attempted to achieve better diplomatic relations with the dictators by redressing their legitimate grievances, and in so doing either to remove the underlying causes of tension or to expose Germany’s Adolf Hitler as an insatiable mentally unstable leader bent on world domination. Chamberlain thus described his strategy as one of hoping for the best while preparing for the worst.

In September 1938 this policy culminated in the Munich conference at which the largely German-speaking Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia was ignominiously ceded to Hitler. Although Chamberlain’s success in averting an imminent and probably unwinnable war was initially hailed as a great personal triumph, his ill-judged promise of “peace for our time” soon came back to haunt him when Hitler seized the remaining (non-German) part of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and then invaded Poland six months later. Despite continuing as prime minister throughout the so-called Phoney War, increasing discontent with Chamberlain’s leadership erupted in a parliamentary debate on May 7-8, 1940, when a substantial revolt of Members of Parliament inflicted a crushing moral (but not technical) defeat upon Chamberlain. He resigned as prime minister two days later but remained a key member of Winston Churchill’s all-party coalition until shortly before his death from cancer on November 9, 1940.

SEE ALSO Appeasement; Churchill, Winston; Conservative Party (Britain); Great Depression; Hitler, Adolf; Nazism; World War II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dutton, David. 2001. Neville Chamberlain. London: Arnold.

Self, Robert. 2006. Neville Chamberlain: A Biography. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate.

Robert Self