Ken Houston
While the downfall of Edward Heath is said to have been precipitated by the National Union of Mineworkers’ strike of 1973/74, in retrospect this administration was plagued by misfortune almost from the start.
In July 1970, just a month after the Conservatives’ unexpected general election victory, Iain Macleod, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, died in bed of a heart attack while apparently recovering well from an operation for appendicitis. Born in Yorkshire to parents from the Isle of Lewis, Fettes-educated Macleod was in several ways a contemporary of Heath – just three years older and, like the PM, a war veteran and a ‘one-nation’ Tory.
A decade earlier, Macleod himself was being talked about as potential leadership material but then blotted his copybook by producing a biography sympathetic to the controversial, early wartime prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. The book was by no means a whitewash but the name had been almost persona non grata in Conservative circles since 1945, by which time British advocates of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement had become as rare as a German who had ever supported Hitler and the Nazis.
Ironically, had he not attained the keys of 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain would undoubtedly have gone down in history as the greatest premier of the 20th century that Britain never had. He showed reformist zeal as minister for health and his tenure as chancellor from 1931 until 1937 is recognised (even by critics of his foreign policy) as a masterful balancing act during the most difficult economic period in modern history.
Chamberlain might be described as a ‘compassionate monetarist’ – Mrs Thatcher without the rough edges. While keeping a tight rein on fiscal policy he nevertheless encouraged useful capital schemes in areas badly affected by the depression. One example of this was sea defences at places like Ayr and Kirkcaldy, built by unemployed miners.
So when Chamberlain acceded to the premiership in May 1937 his emphasis remained very much on domestic issues although he was not (nor had he been) as blind to the Hitler threat as his critics have alleged. Although an appeaser, Chamberlain was by no means a pacifist. In the early 1930s he advocated that Britain build up a huge bomber fleet on the basis that no potential enemy would dare attack for fear of massive retaliation – much the same principle as the ‘nuclear deterrent’ which has been the cornerstone of the defence policies of successive Conservative and Labour governments since the early 1960s. His enthusiasm cooled only when defence chiefs pointed out that a bomber aircraft would cost the equivalent of at least three fighters and that spending on the army and navy would also have to be cut back.
In balancing how much could be spent on defence, Chamberlain also had to listen to public opinion, much of which – even as the Hitlerian threat grew – demanded money be spent on welfare and promoting (peaceful) economic growth, rather than rearmament. By contrast, the leaders of Nazi Germany were not troubled by inconveniencies such as a parliamentary opposition, a free press and independent trade unions.
In March 1938 Chamberlain faced his first big foreign affairs test with the German incorporation of Austria – forbidden by the Versailles Treaty after world war one but excused on the basis that it simply joined together people of the same tongue and ethnicity. The Sudeten crisis, in September that year, was a different matter because it involved taking territory from an unwilling neighbour (Czechoslovakia), even if Hitler claimed to want only the German-speaking part. Although Chamberlain has forever been condemned for failing to support Czechoslovakia, a military alliance did not exist between that country and Britain, which was obliged to fight only if France honoured its alliance with the Czechs – and this was something the French government had no intention of doing.
Franco/British resolve might have been stronger were it not for disharmony among potential allies on Germany’s eastern frontier. No doubt because of her subsequent suffering during world war two, the rather messy part played by Poland during the 1938 crisis has been almost airbrushed from history. Poles and Czechs had fallen out two decades earlier when the latter annexed the disputed border mining region of Teschen while, in the view of the Poles, their backs were turned fighting the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw. Consequently Poland joined the Germans in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 by taking back what they believed to be theirs. Even with the benefit of hindsight, it seems hardly credible that these two countries could not have set aside this relatively minor difference in the face of a much bigger (and brutal) mutual threat from Nazi Germany.
Equally significant was the lack of enthusiasm for war among the British and French populations, understandable given the slaughter of the previous generation on the Western Front. When Chamberlain returned from the last of three summits with Hitler and announced that conflict (which just days earlier seemed inevitable) had been averted ‘a great wave of relief’ swept across a packed House of Commons. Earlier the prime minister had been enthusiastically applauded along the nine-mile route from Heston Aerodrome to Central London and large crowds turned out to cheer him at 10 Downing Street and at Buckingham Palace. Members of the public showered his office with gifts, the most popular being the umbrella, that accessory for which Chamberlain later became so derided.
Certainly, Chamberlain was much more pleased with the outcome of the Sudeten crisis than Hitler, despite the latter having got everything he demanded without firing a shot. According to an exhaustive biography of the top-ranking Nazi, Von Ribbentrop, the first week of October found the fuhrer in a foul mood. He was not interested in diplomatic victories; he had wanted to play with his new tanks and planes but had been ‘tricked’ out of his war by that despised old man with an umbrella; so much for the popular theory that Chamberlain was the one taken for a mug.
Although Chamberlain certainly hoped Hitler would keep his word, it seems unlikely that he took the latter’s assurances unconditionally. Indeed, the prime minister’s much-criticised insistence that the two leaders sign a joint agreement pledging peaceful co-existence may in fact be evidence of Chamberlain keeping his options open rather than swallowing the Hitler line.
Unfortunately on his return to England Chamberlain cockily waved the piece of paper in front of the newsreel cameras and – given the later turn of events – this was one of those significant moments, recorded for posterity, that came to damn his memory.
Chamberlain was certainly enjoying the widespread public support for his ‘achievement’ – he was a politician after all – and this may have gone to his head. Later, addressing the cheering crowd outside 10 Downing Street, he fancifully (and wrongfully) declared that he had achieved ‘peace with honour’ – paraphrasing Disraeli 60 years earlier after a diplomatic triumph over Tsarist Russia. As an aide later revealed, almost immediately afterward the prime minister turned to him and muttered: ‘I really shouldn’t have said that, should I?’.
It is gaffes such as these that have helped make the rehabilitation of Neville Chamberlain so difficult even if the past 25 years have seen some academic revisionism in his favour. However, as the media was marking the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of world war two in 2009, support came from a somewhat unexpected source – a 48-year-old businesswoman from Devon called Mary de Vere Taylor. She is, surprisingly, Neville Chamberlain’s grand-daughter, a consequence of the tendency among the patriarchal side of the family to marry late. Chamberlain was almost 42 when, in 1911, he wed Mary’s grandmother (who was 15 years his junior). Their son also married in his 40s and Mary did not arrive until 1962.
Mary’s doughty defence of her grandfather no doubt was at least partly connected to family loyalty but her message was reasonable enough: that in 1938 Britain was not prepared for war, neither militarily nor psychologically, and that the most sensible option was to try and avoid armed conflict – preferably altogether but if not, to delay it for as long as practically possible. This Chamberlain achieved.
Such sentiments were iterated by the Scotsman, which on his death (from bowel cancer) in November 1940, commented:
History, we are convinced, will vindicate Mr Chamberlain’s policy in striving to maintain peace in Europe and will proclaim his wisdom in postponing the clash until we were better prepared to endure it. Appeasement and rearmament were the twin aims of his policy. The cautious policy of Mr Chamberlain served this country better than the war-mongering of his critics – euphemistically the ‘firm stand’ – would have done.
In contrast to the popular image, Chamberlain showed great personal courage in the last six months of life, following his removal from office in May 1940. He could have recuperated from an operation intended to save his life at his Hampshire country estate but chose instead to remain in London with other members of the Cabinet and dodge German bombs. He was recorded as showing remarkable indifference to danger and workmen later spoke movingly of how they would set up impromptu curtains in packed air raid shelters to give the former prime minister some degree of privacy while he injected intimate parts of his body with essential pain relief.
Following his death, Chamberlain was given a state funeral service in Westminster Abbey, which was attended by the great and the good of the land, including Churchill who, acting as a pallbearer, wept openly. The wholesale scapegoating was to come later.
Criticism of Chamberlain’s policy seems perfectly valid coming from Churchill and other prescient advocates of rearmament, which is why it has stood the test of time. But the character assassinations by others, particularly those on the left who actively opposed increased defence spending, has always smacked of naked political opportunism. As for the majority who sat on the fence at the time, most seem to have become wise after the event.
Ken Houston is a former senior journalist on the Scotsman. He now runs KHMS Ltd, a press and PR agency based in Edinburgh. His spare time interests include history in general and ‘lost causes’ in particular
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web