History of England 1-6

Baldwin had emerged triumphant from the abdication episode. To the surprise of many, ‘Master Stanley’ had seen off a series of apparently insurmountable challenges – a constitutional crisis, an economic depression and confrontations with Lloyd George and Churchill, the greatest politicians of the age. People now hoped that he would succeed in calming the confrontation brewing on the Continent. Yet the prime minister decided, at the beginning of 1937, that it was time to bow out. While his decision to retire was prompted by exhaustion and increasing deafness, it ought to have alarmed political observers: the supreme political survivor may have sensed that he would be unable to steer the nation through what Churchill called ‘the gathering storm’ of continental diplomacy.

‘No man has ever left in such a blaze of affection,’ commented Harold Nicolson in his diary. Baldwin had presented himself as a Victorian paterfamilias to the nation – earnest, benevolent and stern. Unfortunately, however, he was forced to deal with post-Victorian problems – including economic depression and Hitler – that were beyond his capabilities. Because he viewed England as an imperial power, he had taken little interest in the continental affairs that would determine the destiny of his country. On retiring, Baldwin was made an earl for ‘services to the country’, another emblem of the marriage of convenience between the English plutocracy and the aristocracy.

The man to whom Baldwin passed the chalice of the premiership received it eagerly, showing no concern that it might contain poison. Neville Chamberlain had been in Baldwin’s shadow since the Twenties; his family had been waiting for Britain’s highest office for almost forty years. Neville’s father, Joseph, had been the most influential politician of his day, yet had never managed to climb to the summit in an age when aristocrats still dominated politics. Neville’s stepbrother Austen had led the Conservative party but not the country – an anomaly in an era of Tory hegemony.

Neville Chamberlain had a fair domestic record. He had been a diligent health minister and a conscientious, if unimaginative, chancellor. He would enhance his reputation during his time as prime minister by passing the Factories Act, the Coal Act, the Holidays with Pay Act and a Housing Act, all of which improved workingclass conditions without costing the Exchequer, or offending Tory sensibilities, too much. Only a skilful and determined politician, with a vast capacity for work and for mastering microscopic technical detail, could have formulated and passed such legislation. Chamberlain was also a consummate manager of all departments of government, who knew in detail what each of his ministers was doing. The contrast with his indolent predecessor could not have been more marked. Where Baldwin looked like John Bull in slippers, Chamberlain, as one contemporary put it, ‘was corvine, with piercing eyes and a curving beak of a nose’.

Yet along with his efficiency, earnestness and singlemindedness, Chamberlain had several character flaws that would come to impede him. He was shy and oversensitive; his introversion and self-reliance made him obstinate, arrogant and tactless. This charmless man was as rigid as the black umbrella he seemed to carry with him everywhere. Entirely deficient in imagination, emotion and intuition, he put his faith in common sense, rational self-interest and fair play. Since he was guided by these values and motivations, he assumed the same of everyone else. His personality represented the narrow, puritanical and thrifty side of the English mercantile, Nonconformist character. It had been revealed during the abdication crisis, when he had urged the king to make his mind up over the marriage before the end of 1936, lest his shilly-shallying ‘hurt the Christmas trade’.