21. As late as April 1939 “Halifax was deluged with letters from a number of the nation’s grandest aristocrats imploring him to return to appeasement. Althought they differed over details, their general line was that Germany bore no ill will towards Britain per se and ought to be allowed a free path eastwards to fight Russia. To these people the Polish guarantee was a disastrous error. Another constantly recurring feature in the letters was the belief that war with Germany would be ruinous to Britain’s place in the world and only Jews and Communists would benefit. Halifax, who had himself roughly subscribed to almost these views as recently as 1937-38, wrote back long and polite letters, courteously explaining and defending his policy. He knew these correspondents socially; indeed, he had been the Marquis of Londonderry’s fag at Eton. [Some of them] still implored him, well after the war had begun, to review friendship with Germany” (Roberts, The Holy Fox, 151-52).

22. The evidences of this are not easy to reconstruct, since they are scattered and of course incomplete. (There is much interesting material in Roberts, Eminent Churchillians.) Chamberlain did not weed his papers and correspondence (in Birmingham University Library), or at least not much. Halifax (in the Borthwick Institute Library of the University of York) did so more considerably, as did Lady Halifax. In the Churchill Archives, Cambridge, the diaries of Sir Maurice Hankey have been culled: there is either nothing or very little for each year of the period 1939-44, though some of his correspondence is there. In the papers of David Margesson, the chief whip of the Conservatives (deposited in the Churchill Archives by his daughter), the years 1939-46 are missing. Weeded, too, are the Butler Papers in Trinity College, Cambridge: the “Guide” to these papers states, for example, “Four items appear to be of continuing sensitivity and should not be made available until that sensitivity can be said to have evaporated.” (These items are in E 3/60, a batch of letters to and from Sir Samuel Hoare and Wing Commander Archie James, MP, at the British Embassy in Madrid.)