I.

Introduction

Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940), British businessman and politician, British Prime Minister (1937-1940), known for his appeasement policy in the immediate pre-World War II period. The son of Joseph Chamberlain and half-brother of Austen, he was born in Birmingham and educated at Rugby School and Mason College, Birmingham University. From 1890 to 1897 he managed his father’s plantation in the Bahamas before returning to Birmingham where he launched a successful business career in metallurgy. Turning to politics, Chamberlain was elected a local councillor in 1911 and he became lord mayor of the city in 1915. He resigned from the post during his second annual term to take up the post of director-general of National Service in 1917, but was dismissed in the same year by David Lloyd George.

II.

National Reforms

Chamberlain was elected to Parliament in 1918 as Conservative MP for Birmingham Ladywood, a seat he represented until 1929 when he was returned for Birmingham Edgbaston. He refused to serve in Lloyd George’s coalition government but in 1922 he served as postmaster general under Bonar Law and in 1924 Stanley Baldwin appointed him minister of health. An efficient administrator, he was responsible for the abolition of the Poor Law, promoted the building of council housing, and passed the Local Government Act of 1929, which rationalized local government finance. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the National government headed by Ramsay MacDonald from 1931, he maintained the orthodox economic policies of low interest rates and easy credit that began to allow the British economy to recover during the Great Depression, and he reorganized unemployment assistance.

III.

The Descent to War

Stanley Baldwin retained Chamberlain as Chancellor and in 1937 he succeeded Baldwin as prime minister. In that office his major aim was to avoid a European war at all costs. His policy of appeasement towards both Adolf Hitler's Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy was hugely popular at the time, although Chamberlain’s opponents later attacked it. It was pursued simultaneously with a policy of rearmament, the cost of which prevented Chamberlain from pursuing any further social reform, and in 1939 peacetime conscription was introduced for the first time in Britain.

The accommodation of German expansion culminated in three meetings with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Bad Godesberg, and finally Munich. At the final meeting, Chamberlain and French prime minister Édouard Daladier agreed to recognize German demands over the Sudeten in the Munich Pact of September 1938, after which Chamberlain returned home proclaiming “peace for our time”. When Hitler invaded Prague in March 1939, Chamberlain recognized the failure of his policy and vowed to provide support for Poland, along with Romania and Greece. When Germany invaded Poland, Chamberlain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. After the British setback of the Norwegian campaign, Chamberlain was forced to resign in May 1940 after the Labour Party refused to serve in a National government under his leadership, and he was succeeded by Winston Churchill. He served in Churchill's Cabinet as Lord President of the Council until October 1940, when illness forced his resignation. He died the following month.