The death of Neville Chamberlain

On Saturday 9 November 1940 Neville Chamberlain died at Highfield Park, a country house at Heckfield in Hampshire. He was 71. The cause of death was bowel cancer, diagnosed that summer. Barely six months had passed since his resignation as prime minister, and only a little over five weeks since he had left the government and the leadership of the Conservative Party, which passed to Winston Churchill. The man who had become prime minister in May 1937, signed the Munich Agreement and in September 1939 declared war on Germany died at a moment when his country, without allies on the Continent, was fighting off German air raids and was still far from the victory he had longed for.

The last weeks

At the end of July 1940 Chamberlain underwent an operation during which the surgeons found an incurable tumour. He went back to work as Lord President of the Council, but the pain and the nights spent in shelters during air raids sapped his strength. On 19 September he left London for the last time, on 22 September he tendered his resignation, and on 9 October the Conservatives elected Churchill party leader. Chamberlain kept only his seat as member for Edgbaston in Birmingham. He declined the Order of the Garter and a peerage, saying that he preferred to die plain “Mr Chamberlain”, like his father Joseph.

He spent his last weeks at Highfield Park, cared for by his wife, Anne. On 14 October King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited him there. At Churchill’s request the King agreed that cabinet papers should be sent to the invalid, and according to the prime minister Chamberlain followed the course of the war with close attention and interest to his last days. He received hundreds of letters from friends, MPs and complete strangers. In one letter to Sir John Simon, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, he wrote that what had drawn him into politics in middle age was the hope of improving the lot of the poorest, that he regretted nothing he had done, and that he could see nothing he ought to have done and had left undone.

A few days before his death he also wrote that he was not worried about his reputation. The letters he received said with one voice that without Munich the war would have been lost in 1938 and the Empire destroyed. He believed that the opposite view had no chance of surviving and that he did not fear the verdict of historians. That confidence proved to be an illusion.

Forty-eight hours before his death, probably on 7 November, Chamberlain asked Lord Halifax, his Foreign Secretary in the Munich years, to visit him. Halifax later related that he found his friend very weak. The sick man spoke of how moved he had been by letters from MPs telling him how much his example had taught them; he could not understand it, since he had only tried to do what he thought right. Halifax left convinced that this had been a farewell.

Churchill’s speech

The House of Commons, which because of the air raids was then sitting by day, paid tribute to Chamberlain on Tuesday 12 November. The Speaker announced the death of “the member for Edgbaston”, and then Churchill rose. His speech is among the most famous tributes in the history of the British Parliament. The prime minister began by saying that the fierce controversies that had surrounded the dead man in recent times had died down at the news of his illness and were now silenced by his death. No one, he said, was obliged to alter the opinions he had expressed on matters that now belonged to history, but at such a moment everyone might subject his own conduct and judgements to stern review.

Then came the words that are still quoted today: history, with its flickering lamp, stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes. “The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions.” It had fallen to Chamberlain, Churchill said, in one of the supreme crises of world history, to see events contradict his calculations, to be disappointed in his hopes and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. Yet his hopes had been among the noblest instincts of the human heart: the love of peace and the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and at the cost of unpopularity. Whatever history might say about those terrible years, Chamberlain had acted “with perfect sincerity according to his lights” and had striven with all his strength to save the world from war.

Churchill also turned the charge of appeasement against the enemy. Thanks to Chamberlain’s efforts, he said, no future generation would doubt that Britain, even at the cost of being less well prepared militarily, bore no guilt for the bloodshed that had engulfed so many countries. Hitler might protest that he had wanted only peace, but what were his words worth against the silence of Chamberlain’s grave? Finally the prime minister recalled his own path: in September 1939 he had passed overnight from being one of Chamberlain’s chief critics to being one of his most important ministers, and after the Norway debate the two had changed places, with Chamberlain serving loyally in his government. He concluded that members of all parties were paying tribute to one whom Disraeli would have called an “English worthy”.

After Churchill came Clement Attlee, for the Labour Party, and the Air Minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair, for the Liberals. Both stressed that their parties had for years fiercely opposed Chamberlain’s policies but had never doubted his integrity or his devotion to the cause of peace. In the House of Lords Halifax defended the dead man outright, arguing that Chamberlain had known better than anyone how ill-prepared for war Britain had been in 1938 and how precious every moment gained had been, and that when war finally came it had found the country united. One voice was missing: that of David Lloyd George, the only living former prime minister sitting in the Commons, who had been expected to speak but did not appear in the chamber.

To some of Chamberlain’s supporters Churchill’s speech seemed a rather restrained tribute. In private the prime minister spoke with greater regret: “What shall I do without poor Neville? I was counting on him to look after the home front for me.”

The funeral in Westminster Abbey

Chamberlain’s body was cremated at Golders Green crematorium in London, according to some accounts on 13 November and with only a very few present. The funeral service was held on Thursday 14 November in Westminster Abbey. Because of the danger of air raids its date and time were not widely announced, though members of the government, MPs and the dead man’s former colleagues gathered in the church. The pall-bearers included Churchill and Halifax, and the role of usher fell to John Colville, once Chamberlain’s secretary and now Churchill’s. The ashes were laid in the nave of the Abbey next to those of Andrew Bonar Law, Conservative prime minister in 1922–1923. The grave was marked with a simple stone.

That same day, on his return from the Abbey, Churchill turned to intelligence reports warning of a great night raid. That evening the Luftwaffe took off to attack Coventry.

Judgements in life and after death

Chamberlain died when his reputation stood at its lowest. In July 1940, a few weeks after Dunkirk, the pamphlet Guilty Men appeared under the pseudonym “Cato”. It had been written by three journalists from Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers: the future Labour leader Michael Foot, the former Liberal MP Frank Owen and the Conservative Peter Howard. They accused Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, Halifax, Simon and other ministers of the 1930s of bringing the country to the brink of defeat through concessions to Hitler and neglect of rearmament, and demanded their removal from the government. Some of the big booksellers refused to stock it, yet within a few months the little book had gone through 27 editions and sold more than 200,000 copies, many of which passed from hand to hand. Chamberlain also complained of the “short, cold and mostly depreciatory” press comment on his departure from the government.

The obituaries and speeches of November 1940 were kinder, but they did not halt this process. During the war further polemics appeared in the same vein, among them Aneurin Bevan’s Why Not Trust the Tories? (1944), and by the end of the war there was a widespread conviction in Britain that Chamberlain’s government had made mistakes that had nearly brought the country to defeat. A blow from the other side was struck in 1948 by Churchill himself, in The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his war memoirs. In it he portrayed Chamberlain as an honest man, but weak and blind to the danger, and the year between Munich and the war as a time that had worsened Britain’s position. In private he admitted that this was not history but his own case for the defence.

The official biography, which the family had commissioned from the historian Keith Feiling during the war, appeared in 1946; it was a solid work, but it did not reverse the picture. Change came in the 1960s. In 1961 the Conservative politician Iain Macleod published a biography defending Chamberlain, and A. J. P. Taylor, in The Origins of the Second World War, judged that Chamberlain had rearmed the country sufficiently for defence. When in 1967 Britain adopted the thirty-year rule for government papers, historians saw the reports of the Chiefs of Staff warning that Czechoslovakia could not be defended, the signals from the dominions that they would not support a war over Central Europe, and evidence that the prime minister had not disregarded the advice of either the Foreign Office or the cabinet. A revisionist school emerged that explained appeasement by the constraints within which the government had acted: military weakness, the vastness of the Empire, public opinion, and the need to buy time to build the fighters and radar that defended the islands in 1940.

Since the 1990s post-revisionist historians, notably the Oxford scholar R. A. C. Parker, have argued in turn that Chamberlain did have a choice. After the Anschluss of Austria he could have concluded a close alliance with France, sought an understanding with the Soviet Union and built a policy of deterrence; he chose concessions out of his own obstinacy and his faith in personal diplomacy. In rankings of British prime ministers Chamberlain is placed low. The historian David Dutton observed that however the rest of his life is judged, Chamberlain’s reputation will always depend on the verdict on Munich, and that to expect anything else is like hoping that Pontius Pilate will one day be remembered as an efficient administrator of a Roman province.

Place in the war

Chamberlain’s death did not change the course of the war: since May it was Churchill who had led the government, and since October the Conservative Party as well. It did, however, close an era. Halifax, Chamberlain’s closest associate in the Munich period, was appointed ambassador in Washington at the end of December 1940, and Anthony Eden took over the Foreign Office. Churchill lost a loyal deputy for domestic affairs, but with him also vanished the last figure around whom Conservatives distrustful of the new prime minister might have rallied. The speech of 12 November was also a deft political act: by honouring his predecessor, Churchill reconciled Chamberlain’s supporters to himself and emphasised that the country had entered the war united and “with clean hearts”.

For Poland Chamberlain remained an ambiguous figure. It was his government that in March 1939 gave Poland the guarantee by virtue of which Britain went to war on 3 September, and the same government gave it no real military help in September. By November 1940 the Polish government-in-exile was already working in London, and its soldiers and airmen were fighting alongside the British – to whom Chamberlain had left an army and an air force expanded in the last years of peace, but also the memory of Munich. The debate over whether his policy gave Britain the time it needed to survive 1940, or encouraged Hitler to go to war, continues to this day.