Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  With no one to provide for Valerie, the Chamberlains extricated de Vere Cole’s teenage daughter from a French convent and brought her to stay in Downing Street. Valerie helped her aunt to decorate the upstairs quarters, and acted as a hostess when she was away, causing Chamberlain to note with amusement that the presence of his very attractive and vivacious niece had a powerfully concentrating effect upon some of his other guests. Right up to her death in 2011, Valerie spoke of Uncle Neville almost as though he had been the victim of one of her father’s crueller tricks. ‘He had a reputation for being cold. He wasn’t at all cold. He was amusing and he was interesting and he was kind. What more can you have?’

  Neville Chamberlain once wrote to his sister Hilda: ‘I often think to myself that it’s not I but someone else who is P.M.’ Cold.13 Aloof. Weak. Vain. Stubborn. A dupe. A radio-set tuned to Midland Regional. Above all, a failure. This is the Chamberlain that persists. During a dinner at Geoffrey Shakespeare’s house in 1933, Lloyd George’s son Gwilym described Chamberlain as ‘the sort of man who would make an efficient Mayor of Birmingham in a lean year’.14 Yet these attributes were not always encountered in the flesh, and they did not describe the whole man.

  On a wet moonless night in the second week of October 1939, Churchill invited the Chamberlains to dinner in his private apartment at Admiralty House. Incredibly, this was the first occasion on which the two men and their wives had dined together socially, despite having known each other politically since 1900, when Chamberlain’s statesman father, the famous ‘Joe’, had canvassed for Churchill in Oldham. Joseph Chamberlain had driven with Churchill in an open carriage to a meeting where he had spoken for over an hour, and so helped secure Churchill’s first election victory by a margin of 230 votes.

  An appreciative Churchill had come to view Joseph Chamberlain, ‘this extraordinary man’ – perhaps the only man Churchill was frightened of – as a paternal figure.15 ‘I must have had a great many more real talks with him than I ever had with my own father.’ No comparable warm fraternal feelings had developed between himself and Joe’s youngest son. Neville Chamberlain was speaking for both of them when he wrote of Churchill, who was five years younger: ‘There is too deep a difference between our natures for me to feel at home with him or to regard him with affection.’16 Quoted in the Birmingham Daily Post in January 1907, Chamberlain suggested that the sooner the bumptious Churchill ‘was sent as Ambassador to Timbuctoo, the better it would be for the country and the Empire’.17

  Within No. 10 Downing Street, Churchill was known as ‘the wild man’.18 In her diary entry for the evening of the dinner party, Churchill’s seventeen-year-old daughter Mary revealed the pet name by which their guests were known in the Churchill household. ‘Hectic preparations all p.m. for Les “J’aimeberlins”.19 I wish Mummie wouldn’t fuss so hectically over everything. The dinner went off quite satisfactorily … I think Mrs Chamberlain is lovely & v. sweet, but she asks “cuckoo” questions … Mr Chamberlain seems very nice.’

  The Churchills had telephoned the Chamberlains beforehand to ask if they liked oysters and champagne. Anne wrote in her account of the evening: ‘I said no oysters as we were rather afraid of them in view of the fish regulations.20 No champagne, as we were rather humble and as Neville never liked it. At dinner, however, there was champagne, upon which I remarked, and Winston said he drank a pint of champagne every night of his life and had done so for years. I said “How awkward, because then if you want to feel a little extra happy as I hope to do tonight …” He replied: “I take a little more.”’

  The evening was an eye-opener for Churchill. Perhaps because of the champagne, Chamberlain unwound at the small round table in what his wife thought was a ‘very dingy’ dining room converted from the day nursery. The Prime Minister talked not about the war or politics or Birmingham. Instead, he spoke of his life as a young man struggling to survive in the Bahamas. Mary Churchill observed that ‘my father was gripped’.21

  Churchill, amazingly, had no knowledge of this aspect of Chamberlain’s past, but from then on he formed a more substantial opinion of his ‘chief’, even if he did not communicate this in The Gathering Storm, other than to say: ‘What a pity Hitler did not know when he met this sober English politician with his umbrella at Berchtesgaden, Godesberg and Munich that he was actually talking to a hard-bitten pioneer from the outer marches of the British Empire!’22

  In what Churchill later described as ‘really the only intimate social conversation that I can remember with Neville Chamberlain amid all the business we did together over nearly twenty years’, the Prime Minister spoke of the six years that he had lived on his own on the island of Andros, endeavouring to grow sisal for his father.23 As Churchill had done, but two years before him, Chamberlain had visited Cuba, riding through thick forests where sunlight never penetrated. On a sugar plantation in Guantanamo Bay, Chamberlain had discovered ‘the finest cigars in the world’.24 The cigars were a defence against the horseflies known as ‘hard to dead’. Chamberlain smoked them from sunup to dusk.

  The First Lord, it turned out, was not the only member of the War Cabinet who enjoyed Havana cigars, possessed a nose for Chateau Montbrun, had not been to university, had a relative whom he revered and an American mother (Chamberlain’s stepmother was the daughter of a US Secretary of War), and built walls with his bare hands. On a rise near Mastic Point, the twenty-two-year-old Chamberlain had constructed a five-foot stone wall and a thatched dwelling with a wine cellar. The Umbrella Man in pince-nez and wing collar, who had arrived back from Munich fluttering a barren sheet of paper, had dived for conches in nine feet of water. He had caught native octopuses from the deck of his schooner Pride, and an eleven-foot shark that took six men to haul onto the beach. He had grown whiskers and a beard, and worn dirty cotton trousers, which he tied around the leg with string when he walked. ‘Then he ain’t look heah nor dah, but he go right off,’ his labourers muttered, unable to catch up.25 ‘It want one horse to follow him.’

  On the 100-mile-long island, there was a white population of three. Days passed, ten at a time, when Chamberlain did not set eyes on another white face. His closest companions were a pet iguana, five foot long, that he fed on bread; a praying mantis which he housed in a glass-topped box; and a Cuban bloodhound, Don Juan.

  It was on Andros that his biographers first detected a trait: how every dog ‘spontaneously attached itself’ to him.26

  Followed at heel by Don Juan, Chamberlain strode out at five each morning to oversee a workforce of 250 black Bahamians, labouring alongside them with a machete while they sang, ‘Work away boys, work away,’ and the chorus, ‘Oh Mr Chimblin lumbah!’ With a gift for mimicry that he had succeeded in hiding from Churchill for forty years, Chamberlain recalled his men’s patois.

  In his six years on Andros, ‘Mr Chimblin’ cleared 7,000 acres to grow sisal for rope. He planted cotton between the sisal rows to choke the weeds. He built a railway – and almost blew himself to smithereens when blasting a two-mile track through the coral. At night, he sat round the campfire with his workers, some of whom baptised their sons after him.

  Chamberlain was an enthusiastic amateur naturalist. On Andros, he studied the local birds and learned their calls. He shot and messily skinned the rarer species, scraping away the flesh and hanging them to dry from the rafters out of the reach of rats. Then, following the example of W. H. Hudson who from the Argentine pampas had sent the skins of 500 shot birds to the Smithsonian Institution, Chamberlain presented his Bahamian skins to the British Museum, including a Northrop’s Oriole that had not been found anywhere else.

  For six years, Chamberlain stuck it out, obedient to the family motto, Je Tiens Ferme, as his father enjoined him. But what he had assured his father was ‘the best site available in the Bahamas’ turned out to be ‘seven thousand acres of worthless land’.27, 28 The shed burnt down, with a loss of thirty-two bales. The price of sisal collapsed – a result of Neville growing it so successfully, joked his sisters. In
fact, American buyers had rejected his first plants as too stiff. His mature plants turned yellow and shrivelled, the thin layer of soil an exhausted rehearsal for his policy with Hitler. In 1897, he put down his machete and wrote to his family:

  I’m goin’ ’ome! I’m goin’ ’ome.29

  My ship is at the shore

  I’m goin’ to pack my ’aversack

  I ain’t goin’ back anymore!

  The failure of the Andros Fibre Company lost his father £50,000 (£6 million in today’s prices), but ‘in spite of all the disappointments it was a great experience, and I know that I am much the better and stronger for it’.30 It had taught Chamberlain the politician’s virtues of independence, resilience and self-sufficiency, and planted in him the same ‘very tough fibre’, as Churchill said approvingly and accurately, that Chamberlain had struggled to bring forth in his agave rigida sisalana leaves, and made him refuse to admit defeat.31 He told his sisters more than thirty years later: ‘All the time there was a hard core in me that only appeared when circumstance for the time cut away the covering.’32 But he hated to be ‘in a position that reminds me of the Bahamas when the plants didn’t grow’.33

  In 1921, Chamberlain had sold his 7,000 acres to his agent’s son Neville for £200, and bought an antique French cabinet. All that survives of the Andros Fibre Company are some chimney remains and the foundations of a shed. Plus the skins of forty-nine birds that he donated to the Natural History Museum ‘which had but a poor collection from the Bahamas Islands’.34

  Neville Chamberlain’s bird collection is today stored in Tring. It has received only one enquiry in the last twenty-five years, for a species of loggerhead shrike hitherto unrecorded in the Bahamas. The Dutch curator in charge, Hein van Grouw, admits: ‘I’d never heard of Chamberlain.’35 From a cardboard box, he takes out and examines a black-and-white merlin, and is unimpressed by its taxidermist’s skills. ‘The head is not supported, the beak should point straight forward,’ and demonstrates how Chamberlain would have had to tie the twine over the depressed beak, make an incision in the throat with a scalpel, and peel off the skin like an orange; then rub the insides with arsenical soap to stop moths from eating the feathers. ‘He knew how to skin, but not how to stuff.’ Chamberlain had filled the merlin’s eye-sockets with white cotton gathered from his cotton plants, and padded out the belly with a curious brown woolly material. Van Grouw flips open the unstitched skin, pokes a finger inside.

  ‘That looks like sisal,’ he says.

  It takes a moment to absorb what we are staring at – the fruit of six years’ hard labour in the Caribbean. A few bales were sold for a mixture to make straw hats. Otherwise, the only use of Chamberlain’s sisal was to stuff forty-nine dead birds which have never been put on display.

  Messily dissected and hidden away, Chamberlain has suffered the fate of his bird collection. A yellow-and-mauve dahlia named for him in September 1939 was never registered. There is a blue plaque outside his house at 37 Eaton Square, which Chamberlain rented for a while to the Nazi Ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, but he has no public statue in London, nor in Birmingham, the city identified with his name; or anywhere else in Britain. A Lord Mayor with an outstanding record of public service, one of our most successful Chancellors and Ministers of Health, Prime Minister for three of the most vital years in our history, and leader of the Conservative Party – Neville Chamberlain has been erased from the picture like the Russian Ambassador Ivan Maisky on his return to Moscow.

  Only in Lisbon was a large monument to him commissioned, to stand in front of the Palácio das Necessidades and to be entitled ‘To Chamberlain, from Thankful Mothers’. By December 1938, the project had raised the considerable sum of £13,420 (worth £830,000 in today’s money), and a local sculptor, Diogo de Macedo, was appointed to commemorate in lasting stone that brief but still-astonishing moment when Chamberlain was regarded as ‘the world’s life-buoy’.36 Chamberlain’s niece remembered how he became, then, an international hero. ‘The house was full of presents from all over the world, including a television, one of the world’s first.’37 After Munich, which Quintin Hogg hailed as ‘the greatest miracle of modern times performed by a single man’, Sunday Express columnist Godfrey Winn did not consider it blasphemous to mention Chamberlain in the same breath as the Almighty.38 ‘Praise be to God and to Mr. Chamberlain. I find no sacrilege, no bathos, in coupling those two names.’ Even President Roosevelt was impressed, saying to Halifax: ‘Did you ever see the telegram I sent to Chamberlain at the time of Munich? … The shortest telegram I ever sent.39 Two words: “Good man.”’

  Yet the same event which had inspired grateful Portuguese mothers to pay for his marble effigy, a million readers of Paris-Soir to subscribe to buy him a house in France near a fishing resort ‘since he loves to fish’, and roused the Poet Laureate John Masefield to liken a ‘divinely led’ Chamberlain to the Greek hero Priam, soon became the source of his vilification.40, 41 On the evening that he resigned, Chamberlain told Herbert Asquith’s widow, Margot Oxford: ‘The day may come when my much cursed visit to Munich will be understood.’42

  That moment has been excruciatingly slow to arrive. When, nine years after Chamberlain’s death, Geoffrey Shakespeare wrote about ‘the precious breathing space’ which he believed that the Munich Agreement had earned for Britain, he feared that ‘my defence of Neville Chamberlain will no doubt bring a hornet’s nest around my ears’.fn2 43 Lord Maugham, Lord Chancellor at the time, was stung by the reviews of a short book that he wrote about the Munich Agreement, and ‘appalled’ by the letters he received. The certainty of his correspondents that Britain should have gone to war in 1938 against the advice of her military chiefs represented a ‘species of insanity which precludes a sane judgement’.44 So fatal was it to express sympathy for Chamberlain, even as late as 1961, that Iain Macleod believed he wrecked his chances of becoming Prime Minister by publishing a favourable study.

  In view of the lofty line taken by many of the Labour and Liberal leaders, and indeed by Churchill himself, there was always one cardinal point insufficiently stressed in most assessments of Chamberlain: that the programme of rearmament after the General Election of 1935 was carried through on an enormous scale. David Dilks says: ‘If you want to provoke reactions of incredulity, even among people generally well-informed, ask the question: “Did you know that while Chamberlain was still Prime Minister, Britain was spending between 40 and 50 per cent of GDP on defence?” You then have to explain that this isn’t a misprint; you really do mean 45 per cent or more, not 4.5 per cent.’ Whether measured as a proportion of GDP or as an absolute sum, it far exceeded anything that had ever been spent by any British government in peacetime.

  It is true that the effort was made late, and if it could have begun in earnest even twelve months before, this would have made a very significant difference. Whether that was possible, given the politics of the time, is an open question. Churchill after the war told Attlee ‘and his friends’ in the Commons that ‘the whole effort of their party was designed to make every preparation for defence of the country and resistance to Hitler so unpopular, that it was politically impossible’.45 The same became true of any defence of Chamberlain. As one reviewer commented of David Dilks’s admirable 1984 biography, the first part of a projected two-volume work which Dilks has still to complete: ‘The task of rehabilitating Chamberlain will inevitably be the work of Sisyphus.’46

  The Chamberlains, meantime, kept their heads low.

  Elias Canetti wrote in his notebooks how one family may imperil a name. ‘It can ingest the name completely, make so much use of it that for others it becomes empty and bloodless.’47 At prep school in the 1960s, Chamberlain’s great-nephew Arthur Chamberlain denied that he was related – ‘No, just the same name.’48 Married to my Latin master at Winchester, Anne Stow never talked about what it was like to be Chamberlain’s granddaughter, and she waited stoically for the tide of popular opinion to turn. The stigma against him continued on into the 197
0s, when Chamberlain’s only grandson was at Marlborough. ‘Neville’s my name.49 I found it awkward to use at school. I changed it to Francis.’ Francis had been the name of his father, Chamberlain’s only son. ‘My father was a great mimic, funny, charming, but I’ve never seen a Prime Minister’s son with a lower profile. Put his name on the Internet – there’s nothing there. Unlike Randolph.’

  As it turns out, Chamberlain does not even have a statue in Lisbon. The project was abandoned on his death, after which he was skinned for posterity – with Churchill’s assistance – as ‘the most disastrous Prime Minister in British history’.50 Another of his biographers, Keith Feiling, privately expressed what many professional historians have come to believe, but which the public imagination is reluctant to accept: Chamberlain was ‘a man ill-timed, who therefore went astray, but has since been made, unduly, the scapegoat for many peoples and individuals’.51

  In Put Out More Flags, Cedric Lyne’s wife was rarely spoken of by her friends without the epithet ‘Poor’ Angela Lyne. The same is true of Neville Chamberlain. On the eve of the Norway Debate, the journalist Collin Brooks wrote in his diary: ‘Poor Chamberlain has had more of “Hosanna today; crucify him tomorrow” than anybody since Christ I should imagine – not that he is a particularly Christ-like person.’52

  Opinions vary over what he was like. His Parliamentary Private Secretary Alec Dunglass was said to know his words and actions by heart, yet even Dunglass conceded: ‘He was by no means easy to get to know.’53 Dunglass found Chamberlain an essentially solitary figure, but fascinating when he did unbend. ‘This attractive and endearing side of his personality was almost deliberately concealed, and the public saw only the forbidding exterior, the dark clothes, the stick-up collar, and the black hat and umbrella of the Whitehall world.’ Violet Bonham Carter called him ‘Ombrello’.