Neville Chamberlain becomes prime minister

On 28 May 1937 Stanley Baldwin tendered his resignation at Buckingham Palace, and that same day King George VI entrusted the office of prime minister to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain. The change took place without an election, without a crisis and without surprise: it had been known for months that Baldwin would step down after the new king’s coronation, and Chamberlain had long been his obvious successor. On 31 May, at a meeting in Caxton Hall in Westminster, the Conservative Party elected him its leader. The new prime minister was 68 and was regarded as an efficient administrator rather than a statesman of high policy. Over the next three years, however, his name became the symbol of an entire era: of the policy of appeasement, of the Munich Agreement and of Britain’s entry into the war with Germany.

Baldwin’s departure

Baldwin, prime minister for the third time since June 1935, was tired and in poor health. Throughout 1936 his government had struggled with one crisis after another: after the election of November 1935 it discredited itself with the Hoare–Laval Pact; in March 1936 it accepted the remilitarisation of the Rhineland without acting; in July it abandoned the sanctions against Italy, which had conquered Ethiopia; and from the summer, together with France, it pursued the policy of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War. In the autumn of 1936, however, Baldwin managed to bring the crisis over the abdication of Edward VIII to a calm resolution, which restored his authority. He announced at that point that he would step down after the coronation of George VI.

The coronation took place on 12 May 1937 in Westminster Abbey. Two days later an Imperial Conference attended by the prime ministers of the Dominions opened in London. On 27 May Baldwin announced that he would leave the following day. The last decision of his government was to raise MPs’ salaries from £400 to £600 a year and to introduce a salary for the Leader of the Opposition, a change felt most keenly by Labour members of modest means. On 28 May Baldwin was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter, and in June he received the title of Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. He left amid widespread goodwill, which after the defeats of 1940 turned into equally widespread condemnation.

Who the new prime minister was

Arthur Neville Chamberlain was the son of Joseph Chamberlain, one of the most important politicians of the Victorian era, and the half-brother of Austen Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary at the time of the Locarno Treaties. Austen did not live to see his brother’s promotion: he died on 16 March 1937. For a long time Neville was the less political member of the family. He ran businesses in Birmingham and was Lord Mayor of the city, and he entered the House of Commons only in 1918, at the age of 49. After that, however, his career moved quickly. In the 1920s, as Minister of Health, he carried through a series of social reforms, and from November 1931, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the National Government, he directed the economy of a country emerging from the Great Depression. He introduced protective tariffs, lowered the interest on the public debt and by the mid-1930s had balanced the budget.

His position on defence also dates from this period. As Chancellor he long held down military spending, but from 1934 he was among the members of the Cabinet who saw the German threat most clearly. He argued for priority for the Royal Air Force, believing that in the age of the bomber the English Channel no longer protected the British Isles, and for a limited role for the army on the Continent. Before the 1935 election he advised Baldwin to make rearmament an open issue. In the summer of 1936 he called the continuation of sanctions against Italy “the very midsummer of madness”, which hastened their lifting.

Chamberlain was hard-working, self-assured and unsociable. Unlike Baldwin, who liked to let matters take their course, he wanted to run the government personally; he set his ministers tasks and expected them to produce concrete programmes for years ahead. The opposition disliked him. The future prime minister Clement Attlee complained that Chamberlain always treated Labour like dirt.

The new government

Chamberlain did not change the formula of the National Government, but he reshuffled the Cabinet. The National Liberal John Simon, previously Home Secretary, became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his post went to Samuel Hoare. Anthony Eden remained Foreign Secretary. Viscount Halifax, who was to play a great role in foreign policy, became Lord President of the Council. Duff Cooper took over the Admiralty, the energetic Leslie Hore-Belisha the War Office, and Thomas Inskip remained Minister for Co-ordination of Defence. Ramsay MacDonald, who died a few months later, left the government. Chamberlain also dropped from the Cabinet Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade, whom he considered sluggish. He considered an early election, but with three and a half years of the Parliament still to run, he decided against it.

The world in May 1937

The new prime minister took office at a troubled moment. Germany had been openly rearming since 1935; in March 1936 it had marched into the Rhineland, and in November it had concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan. Since the autumn of 1936 the Reich’s ambassador in London had been Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose behaviour alienated the British and who believed less and less in an understanding with them. Italy, victorious in Ethiopia, was drawing closer to Germany. In Spain a war was raging in which Germany and Italy openly supported General Francisco Franco and the Soviet Union supported the Republic, despite the ban on sending volunteers agreed on the Non-Intervention Committee. A month before the change of prime minister, German and Italian aircraft had bombed Guernica. In the weeks before 28 May nearly 4,000 Basque children evacuated from Bilbao arrived by ship at Southampton. In the Far East Japan controlled Manchuria and was pressing on northern China.

Britain was not ready for war with any one of these states, let alone with all of them at once. The Chiefs of Staff warned that the Empire could not fight Germany in Europe, Italy in the Mediterranean and Japan in the Far East simultaneously. The Dominions, with which Chamberlain had talks at the Imperial Conference, did not want to be drawn into a war over the affairs of Central Europe. France was weakened politically and economically, and the United States was bound by the Neutrality Acts. The rearmament programme, set in motion in 1936, was expected to bear fruit only in a few years’ time, and Chamberlain, like the Treasury officials, believed that rearming too quickly would ruin the public finances and that a strong economy was the country’s “fourth arm of defence”, alongside the navy, the army and the air force.

Appeasement as a programme

The policy of concessions to Germany did not begin with Chamberlain. It had been pursued, more or less consciously, by every British government since the mid-1920s, and one example was the naval agreement with Germany of 1935. The word “appeasement”, meaning pacification or the easing of disputes, did not then have negative connotations. What was new was that Chamberlain wanted to pursue this policy actively and personally. Instead of waiting for Hitler’s next moves, he intended to go out to meet them: to establish what Germany really wanted, to satisfy what he saw as its legitimate demands, for instance over its former colonies or the German minorities in Central Europe, and in return to obtain a general settlement, arms limitation and a lasting peace. He intended to take the same approach towards Italy, hoping to detach it from Germany.

Chamberlain was neither a pacifist nor a naive admirer of dictators. He had no sympathy for Nazism and its methods. He believed, however, that even a dictator like Hitler was a rational politician with whom it was possible to do business, and that war, which in his view would destroy European civilisation, was the worst possible outcome. At the same time he continued rearmament, above all of the air force and of air defence, treating it as insurance in case the talks failed.

First steps

In his very first months the prime minister began to conduct foreign policy alongside his Foreign Secretary. In the summer of 1937 he established private contact with Mussolini through the Italian ambassador in London, Dino Grandi. In September he told the Cabinet that a détente in relations with Italy would be a valuable contribution to the “pacification and appeasement of Europe” and would weaken the Rome–Berlin Axis. In November 1937 Halifax went to Germany and talked with Hitler. Eden, increasingly frustrated, resigned in February 1938 and was replaced by Halifax. The differences between the prime minister and Eden, however, concerned methods and pace rather than the goal itself.

Significance

Chamberlain’s assumption of power opened the best-known and most controversial chapter of British policy before the war. Over the next sixteen months the prime minister acquiesced in the Anschluss of Austria, went to Germany three times for talks with Hitler and in September 1938 signed the Munich Agreement, which handed the Sudetenland to the Reich. After Germany occupied Prague in March 1939, the same Chamberlain gave Poland a guarantee on 31 March, and on 3 September 1939 he announced on the radio that Britain was at war with Germany. He lost power in May 1940, when after the defeat in Norway part of his own party refused to support him.

Assessments of his policy have divided historians for decades. For a long time, under the influence of wartime pamphlets and Churchill’s memoirs, appeasement was seen as submissiveness and blindness that encouraged Hitler to make ever further demands. Revisionist historians drew attention to the constraints under which Chamberlain operated: the country’s military weakness, a scattered empire, the reluctance of the Dominions, pacifist sentiment and the need to buy time for rearmament. Whatever the verdict, 28 May 1937 was the day on which British policy towards Germany passed into the hands of a man convinced that by his own efforts he could save the peace of Europe.