A History of Britain, Volume 3 (66 page)

After the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, unopposed, it seemed that Churchill’s views were steadily gaining more momentum, even if (as Baldwin rightly surmised) the country was not yet ready to batten down the hatches and crank up the air-raid sirens. A great rearmament rally was planned in the Albert Hall that autumn. Chamberlain, Sir Samuel Hoare and Anthony Eden, respectively chancellor of the exchequer, home secretary and foreign secretary, were on the defensive. But on the point of this crusading moment Churchill inflicted an extraordinary, almost unforgivable act of sabotage. George V had died earlier that year, and Winston now threw his support flamboyantly behind Edward VIII’s campaign to marry Mrs Simpson and still remain king. For Winston’s anti-appeasement friends and allies this was more than a bizarre distraction from the main event – it was an excruciating embarrassment. But Churchill was all of a piece and his sense of romantic attachment to the monarchy, as well as a long acquaintance with Edward VIII, impelled him to ride to the rescue. He was, of course, half-American himself and, though mostly bemused by the philanderings of the rich and famous, he may also have had little time for the stuffiness that looked on a king married to a divorcee (who, however, had not been divorced at the beginning of their liaison) as a contradiction in terms. In the end Churchill was more ardent for the king’s cause than Edward was himself. The crisis gave Baldwin a chance to recoup all his fortunes; he leaped at it with gratitude, appearing as the calm statesman in the midst of a constitutional crisis, carefully managing the painful passage of sovereignty from one king to another. In contrast, Churchill seemed all absurd and incoherent bluster. When he got up to criticize Baldwin’s clear alternative to the king of, essentially, dropping Mrs Simpson or abdicating, he was howled down for the first time in decades.

In May 1937 Neville Chamberlain replaced the worn-out ‘dear vicar’ as prime minister; Churchill, sensing correctly that Chamberlain was a much more ardent, principled appeaser than Baldwin, got a second wind. Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax all personified, in different ways, a Toryism, or for that matter a Britishness, that Churchill knew very well and was even fond of (although with Chamberlain that would be stretching it a bit). Baldwin had been the embodiment of slightly sleepy village
virtues:
solid, intelligent, tolerant and generous, not just slow, but almost impossible, to anger. Like many in his generation, he continued to bleed inwardly for the sufferings inflicted by the war of 1914–18, and had promised himself and his country that those evils would never be repeated. ‘Its memory’, he said, ‘sickens us.’ It was just because the soil of Britain was not fertile for the growth of extremes such as fascism and communism that it had to be protected from their onslaught, so that the British Difference, the national ‘estate’, might be passed on to generations of children and grandchildren.

Halifax, tall, gaunt, Anglo-Catholic, intensely loyal to Yorkshire, the master of the Lyttelton hunt and a famous rider despite having a withered arm, was, both his friends and enemies readily acknowledged, very shrewd. He had spent a lifetime in public office of one sort or another, and prided himself on taking no nonsense; seeing behind the guff of rhetoric; knowing exactly when and how the wheels of power were to be oiled. In India he thought of himself, rightly, as a realist, determined not to have his head turned by the staggering splendour of Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House, which he was the first to occupy; and he was prepared, always, to do what it took to keep the imperial, or as modern men called it, the Commonwealth, connection. Chamberlain, on the other hand, represented the empire of middle-class business and municipal virtue, even though his father’s mansion, Highbury, was a long way from both screw manufacturing and the gas and water municipal radicalism that had first brought the Chamberlains to power. It had been his more patrician stepbrother, Austen, who seemed for many years the more likely of the two to lead the Conservatives, especially since foreign and imperial business had been his speciality. Neville, on the other hand, remained, as he thought, true to his roots: committed above all to the improvement of local government, especially education, possessed of a strong instinct for what the man in the high street, the solicitor or the bank manager, would wish from a properly Conservative prime minister. And that something for Chamberlain, as for Baldwin, was the preservation of peace.

Churchill did indeed understand, though not exactly from personal experience, this England, this Britain of the gymkhana, the village institute, the small town chapel, the brass band. But he differed from them by insisting that it would never survive by humouring a hegemony and hoping that it would leave Britain alone. That would be, as his disciple, the Conservative MP Duff Cooper, said, to depart from 250 years of British opposition to one-power dominance in Europe. Churchill himself put it even more vividly in a BBC broadcast in November 1934: ‘There are those who say, “Let us ignore the continent of Europe. Let us leave it with
its
own hatreds and its armaments, to stew in its own juices, to fight out its own quarrels, and decree its own doom. …” There would be very much to this plan if only we could unfasten the British islands from their rock foundations, and could tow them three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean …’

But then Chamberlain did not think of himself as an isolationist; rather as someone who would engage actively with Hitler and make him see reason by promoting the peaceful ‘rearrangement’ of Europe. Halifax had already been to Germany at the end of 1937, in his capacity as the government’s fox-hunter, on the occasion of Goering’s enormous game and hunting exhibition in Berlin. The fact that Britain won the prize for overseas trophies – all those kudu and eland – must have heartened Halifax in his belief, already indicated by von Ribbentrop, that a deal by which Germany was left to do what it wanted in Europe and Britain left alone in the empire could indeed be struck. After the annexation of Austria in March 1938, when German tanks rolled through Vienna to the delight of rapturous crowds, this engagement seemed to become more urgent, especially as Hitler was making noises about the plight of some 3 million ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland region of northern Czechoslovakia. When those noises turned into demands for the Sudetenland to be annexed to Germany, on pain of military action, Chamberlain launched a series of flying visits in an attempt to defuse the crisis. This meant, essentially, persuading the Czechs that, despite the violation of their sovereignty, they had no option but to yield up the territories; persuading the French, who had been co-guarantors of that sovereignty, which had been granted when Czechoslovakia became an independent republic after the First World War, to go along with this plan, and persuading Hitler himself that he could obtain what he wanted without recourse to military action – the last not exactly a hard sell.

At Berchtesgaden in September 1938, after a meaningless exchange of pleasantries, both Chamberlain and Hitler seemed to have got what they wanted. But at a second meeting, at Bad Godesberg in the Rhineland, Hitler suddenly started making further territorial demands, in particular that areas of Czechoslovakia with Hungarian and Polish populations should also be hived off from the republic. Distressed, quite cross in fact, Chamberlain was still prepared to humour Hitler, especially as the arch-appeasing new ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, who dreaded getting the rough end of Hitler’s tongue, cautioned against anything that might provoke, upset or enrage the hair-trigger Führer. But in a moment of incautious courage and common sense Halifax decided that enough was enough and led a cabinet revolt against Chamberlain, insisting
that
Hitler should be made to honour the substance of the Berchtesgaden agreement and that, in the event of a military attack, Britain and France would consider an attack on Czechoslovakia as an attack on themselves.

For a week at the end of September 1938, with Hitler’s sabre-rattling undiminished, it looked very much as though there would indeed be a war. Provisional plans for mass evacuations were accelerated. On the 27th Chamberlain made a broadcast to the nation that did little to cheer the nervous. Nor did it exactly suggest a leader buckling on his broadsword for the commencement of hostilities: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible’, he helpfully intoned, ‘it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.’ Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, a sometime Labour MP and militant anti-appeaser, commented that Chamberlain was just trying to terrify old ladies so that he could be greeted as the strong silent hero when he came back from doing business with the Devil. ‘Will there be a war, dear?’ Celia Johnson asks Noël Coward, the destroyer captain in the film
In Which We Serve
(1942). ‘I rather think there will,’ he replies. ‘No point worrying about it until it comes, and no point worrying then, really.’

Sure enough, on the 28th, while delivering an account of the situation to the Commons, Chamberlain received a note from Samuel Hoare and interrupted his own speech (or purported to) to announce that he had accepted an invitation from Herr Hitler to go to Munich. Someone shouted, ‘Thank God for the prime minister!’ from the back-benches. There was much cheering and waving of order papers. The house, Labour as well as Conservative, got on its feet to give Chamberlain an ovation, with the conspicuous exceptions of Churchill, his friend Leo Amery and Anthony Eden, who, after months of sniping at his own colleagues, had resigned from the government. Churchill did, however, go over to Chamberlain later to wish him luck. Off went Chamberlain to Germany where, not surprisingly, he managed to persuade Hitler that he could have everything he wanted without the need to do anything unpleasant. Although greeted as an extraordinary dipomatic accomplishment, this was not like pulling teeth. On 1 October the Czechs would be told that they must bow to the inevitable and withdraw their border forces from the Sudetenland, at which point German armour would be free to move in. Of course, he added, should the Czechs be ‘mad enough’ to resist he understood perfectly that the Führer would have no option but to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia; but would he take care not to bomb Prague? Oh, said Hitler, I always do my best to spare civilians – and added that he
just
hated the thought of little babies being killed by gas bombs. Quite so, quite so. Chamberlain then produced a paper of unforgettable sanctimoniousness and futility, the holy scrip of appeasement, which declared Britain and Germany’s desire never to go to war with each other again, and pledged to resolve any and all future difficulties by consultation. Hitler probably could not believe his eyes as he reached for the pen.

Chamberlain came home as the saviour of European peace, to a chorus of hosannas. He was cheered at Heston aerodrome, where he waved what the Labour politician Hugh Dalton was to call that ‘scrap of paper torn from
Mein Kampf
. On the balcony of Buckingham Palace, flanked by the king and queen, he faced a huge crowd singing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. Outside Number 10 Downing Street it was just the same. Appearing at an opened upstairs window, and smiling his for once less than wintry smile, Chamberlain asked one of his staff what he should say to the cheering throng and got the advice to tell them what Disraeli had said when he came back from Berlin in 1878. ‘My good friends, for the second time in our history’, Chamberlain declared, ‘a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.’ He then told the crowd to go home ‘and get a nice quiet sleep’. In France, where the majority of public opinion was equally happy about the reprieve, the newspaper
Paris-Soir
offered him a stretch of French trout stream as a token of its gratitude for sparing the country the horrors of war. In the
Sunday Graphic
, Beverly Baxter wrote that ‘because of Neville Chamberlain the world my son will live in will be a vastly different place. In our time we shall not see again the armed forces of Europe gathering to strike like savage bears.’

There were lonely exceptions to all this euphoria, especially outside London: C. P. Scott’s
Manchester Guardian
, and
The Glasgow Herald
, which called Munich a ‘diktat’. Duff Cooper resigned as first lord of the admiralty, where his demands for rearmament were being opposed, and wrote that, while Chamberlain believed Hitler should be spoken to in the language of sweet reason, he thought a mailed fist might be the better tactic. The historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote to thank Cooper for proving that ‘in this hour of national humiliation there still has been found one Englishman not faithless to honour and principle and to the tradition of our once great name’. G. M. Trevelyan, on the other hand, who had been an admirer of Baldwin (especially Baldwin’s rural passions), now threw his wholehearted support behind Chamberlain and Munich, deploring the ‘war whoop’ and believing it madness to sacrifice England for ‘Bohemia’.

On the last day of the debate in the Commons, 5 October, with Czechoslovakia already reduced to a defenceless rump state, Churchill
made
a speech of enduring, tragic power; the most deeply felt, to date, of his career. Ridiculing the claim that Chamberlain had got Hitler to ‘retract’ claims made at Bad Godesberg, Churchill said sardonically, ‘One pound was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given, two pounds were demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally the dictator consented to take one pound seventeen and sixpence and the rest in promises of goodwill for the future.’ He quoted (of course) the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
’s lament for the attempts of Ethelred the Unready to buy off the Danes and then spelled out the unpalatable truth: ‘We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude.’ The system of alliances in eastern Europe on which France relied had been swept away. Chamberlain wanted peace between the British and German peoples and no fault could be found with that aim,