Historically Speaking

18 Historically Speaking · May/June 2007 Neville Chamberlain's Reputation—Time for Reassessment Robert Self U Poor Neville will come badly out of history," Winston Churchill is once supposed to have quipped, "I know, I will write that history." This classically Churchillian observation has proved to be one of his shrewdest predictions. In his extremely influential , but highly colored account of the Gathering Storm published in 1948, Churchill characterized Chamberlain as "an upright, competent , well meaning man," possessed of "a narrow , sharp edged efficiency within the limits of the policy in which he believed" but fatally handicapped by a lack of vision, inexperience of the European scene, and a deluded confidence in his own omniscience.1 For many years, this version of events held the field unchallenged and unchallengeable , its seductive assumptions and counterfactual scenarios conveniendy untested by events. More to the point, Churchill's caricature of the 1 930s, painted in the simplistic but compelling monochromatic shades of black and white, good versus evil, courage in "standing up to Hitler" versus craven appeasement, still continues to hold sway in popular memory, television dramas, and historical texts even to this day. Indeed, if anything , this sort of characterization of Chamberlain as a vain, self-opinionated, and deluded mediocrity has actually enjoyed something of an academic resurgence on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years with the emergence of a postor counter-revisionist school that (in its most extreme expressions) brings the historiography of appeasement back to its point of departure with the withering indictment contained in Guilty Men, published in the aftermath of the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. Ultimately, there can be no more depressing commentary on Chamberlain's exile to the margins of popular and historical attention than the fact that in surveys of academic and other informed commentators Chamberlain is invariably ranked in nineteenth place out of the twenty who served as British prime minister in the 20th century—located above only Anthony Eden, whose reputation remains even more indelibly tainted by his role in the Suez fiasco of 1956.^ The most obvious explanation for this low regard is that perceptions of Chamberlain's long and varied career have been fundamentally blighted by the ultimate failure of his very personal brand of diplomacy during the last three years of his life. As he confessed in the House of Commons at the outbreak of war: "Everything I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins." Unfortunately for Chamberlain's reputation, contemporaries and posterity have judged him accordingly . Despite half a century of revisionist Neville Chamberlain. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-ggbain-23679]. scholarship emphasizing the impact of impersonal forces and structural constraints upon British foreign policy makers, the abiding popular image of a man whose public career spanned a momentous quarter of a century between two world wars remains that of a naive tragicomic figure standing at Heston aerodrome with a ridiculous rolled umbrella and a worthless piece of paper inscribed with the legend "Peace for Our Time." As such, Chamberlain continues to be misunderstood, underrated, and dismissed too easily with Lloyd George's malicious jibe that he was "a good Lord Mayor of Birmingham in a lean year." Despite the immense potency of this defining image of tragic failure, there was far more to Chamberlain 's career than his ultimately unsuccessful quest for peace during the final three years of his life. After a remarkably constructive term as Lord Mayor of Birmingham in 1915-16 and a much less successful period as director-general of National Service in 1917, Chamberlain entered the House of Commons in 1918 at the age of almost 50. Having swiftly established a formidable claim to advancement, the fall of the Lloyd George coalition in October 1922 provided him with a golden opportunity for a meteoric rise from postmaster general via the Ministry of Health to the Treasury and the second place within the government in the space of only ten months. Thereafter, Chamberlain occupied a pivotal position in national and later international politics until his death. The principal architect of a...