Speeches that Changed the World

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN

Born 18 March 1869 in Birmingham, England.

His father, Joseph, was a prominent 19th-century radical Liberal (and then Liberal Unionist), and his half-brother Austen was foreign secretary in 1924–7. After education at Rugby School, and an early career in industry, he became Birmingham’s lord mayor in 1915 (as his father had been), and the next year briefly served Lloyd George’s wartime coalition government as Director General of National Service. His Parliamentary career began in 1918, as a Conservative MP. In the 1920s he rose through successive government appointments as paymaster general, a competent minister for health, and on the formation of a coalition government in 1931 he became chancellor of the exchequer until 1937. He succeeded Stanley Baldwin as prime minister in May 1937 and, faced with the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and the Spanish Civil War, spent much of the time absorbed by foreign crises. His two years of negotiations – the policy of ‘appeasement’, intended to preserve peace – was bankrupt by March 1939. As war commenced, British military failures, notably the campaign to protect Norway, lost him the confidence of Parliament, forcing his resignation in May 1940. He remained for a while in Winston Churchill’s Cabinet as Lord President of the Council of War.

Died 9 November 1940 in London.

Rarely have so few words decided a historical reputation as happened in the case of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The short statement he delivered as he stepped off a plane on 30 September 1938 would become a monument to his failure. He was returning from the summit in Munich, where, along with France’s Prime Minister Edouard Daladier and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini, he sought to address Hitler’s demand to annexe Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, with its ethnically German population. Hitler had already made clear that his ‘patience was at an end’, a threat of military action should his demands be rebuffed.

For Chamberlain, the prize was peace in Europe, which he announced on 30 September as ‘peace for our time’. For him, as for many politicians of the era, the memories of the sheer terribleness of the First Word War remained vivid, and the task of a British statesman, facing a resurgent and nationalistic Germany, was to avoid such a disaster again. It was a widely shared goal, and one reinforced by Britain’s military unpreparedness. But it became known, pejoratively, as the policy of ‘appeasement’. The tangible results were that an ever-bolder Hitler was encouraged in his ambitions. These included remilitarizing the Rhineland area and massively building up the German armed forces (including, secretly, creating a new air force, the Luftwaffe) – all in contravention of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles – as well as annexing Austria in March 1938.

Chamberlain genuinely had misgivings about the Treaty of Versailles and regarded some of the terms imposed on Germany as over-harsh, so there was a reservoir of sympathy for German aspirations in general. Chamberlain also felt, with regard to the Sudetenland, that Hitler had a point. Czechoslovakia, as an independent republic, was created in 1918 out of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the presence of such a large ethnically German minority within its borders did raise questions. On 24 March 1938, Britain declared that it would not guarantee the security of Czecho-slovakia, and Britain and France then put pressure on the Czech government to come to terms with Hitler, but successive plans foundered.

At Munich, on 27–29 September, an invasion of Czechoslovakia – and the prospect of any wider war – was averted by an agreement that Germany could have the Sudetenland but not other parts of the country. (The Czechs were not represented at the conference.) The agreement sacrificed Czech security for the larger goal of Anglo-French peace with Germany. On his return to Britain, Chamberlain sought to represent the conference as a diplomatic success in his brief statement, casting an optimistic spin on Anglo-German relations. But even he privately thought Hitler was ‘half-mad’ by this time, and British rearmament stepped up a pace.

The Munich Agreement was appeasement’s last gasp, patently so when, on 15 March 1939, Germany simply ignored it and sent troops into the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia. The fatal flaw of appeasement’s logic was that it depended on Hitler being a man who honoured agreements and who told the truth about his ambitions. By the end of March, Britain drew a line in the sand and promised Poland – Hitler’s next likely target – that any attack by Germany would prompt a British declaration of war. In April 1939, peacetime military conscription took place for the first time in British history. By August, war was all but inevitable, and in September that inevitability came to pass.

Perhaps surprisingly, Chamberlain, his reputation battered, continued as prime minister until May 1940, until the chorus of Members of Parliament demanding his resignation became too loud. Although efforts to rehabilitate his reputation have been made, he remains the apostle of the failed policy of appeasement.

WE, THE GERMAN FÜHRER and chancellor, and the British prime minister, have had a further meeting today and are agreed in recognizing that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for our two countries and for Europe.

We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.

We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.

MY GOOD FRIENDS, for the second time in our history, a British prime minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.

‘Peace for our time’