Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Like an air-raid warden, Chamberlain worked hard to ensure that no chink of light escaped his windows. Harold Nicolson wrote: ‘His intimates assure me that never has there been a man who so successfully conceals his charm.’54 Within No. 10, his favourite topic was the weather. He had no time for gossip. When Dunglass went into his room for a general talk to convey the Party’s feeling, Chamberlain looked up, pen poised. ‘What do you want?’ His abrupt manner was not rudeness, Dunglass decided, but what Chamberlain acknowledged to be his ‘accursed shyness’, which made him reticent to the point of being secretive, and was easily misinterpreted.55, 56 The Conservative MP George Harvie-Watt considered Chamberlain the shyest man he had ever met. ‘I never knew it to be so hard to converse with any man.’57 The only time that he sparkled was when some Member knew something about fishing. ‘A gleam would come to Chamberlain’s eye …’ He had fished for salmon and trout since the First World War, on the Dee, on Loch Rannoch, on the Test, and at Chequers by moonlight in Silver Spring, and he wrote in 1931: ‘I can’t really consent to die until they arrange some fishing in the next world.’58 Some fishing is what he looked forward to after the Norway Debate.

  Most MPs who failed to penetrate the Prime Minister’s reserve gave up. To Members like Nicolson, Chamberlain had ‘the mind and manner of a clothes-brush’.59 In public, he came across as stiff and prickly like his sisal plants. A disappointed supporter in his Birmingham constituency complained that ‘if the b—— was cut in half, neither part would bleed’.60 Even Chamberlain’s half-brother Austen recognised the problem. ‘Boiled down, it all comes to this.61 N’s manner freezes people.’ But not all people. Margot Oxford adored him. ‘What a good, wise, misunderstood creature he is, though he can’t look a blind man straight in the face.’62 Her positive view was shared by those who worked for him like Dunglass, or who had regular dealings with him, like Alexander Cadogan. ‘Many people who did not know Chamberlain personally had the impression that he was a gullible and obstinate old man … I will say, from my observation of him, that nothing could be further from the truth.’63 When Ellen Wilkinson made a violent tirade against Chamberlain, Halifax corrected the Labour MP. ‘She had got him dead wrong and was just miles away from the truth.’64 Halifax worked ‘as closely with him as anyone’ and wrote that the kind of picture drawn of Chamberlain by his Labour opponents – ‘of a rigid bureaucrat in domestic administration, and in foreign affairs of a man too ready to be half-hearted in his condemnation of totalitarian governments’ – was a total misreading of character. Chamberlain himself was pleased to see how his former Labour adversaries changed their tune, as had Churchill, once they worked with him. He wrote to his sisters: ‘I have increasing evidence that my Labour colleagues like Greenwood & Alexander are finding that I am a very different person from what they supposed.’65

  Chamberlain’s niece Valerie never once altered her opinion that ‘his reputation is at odds with his personality’.66 The man beneath the painfully reserved exterior was funny, warm and interested, even if it required one to be in the same room to appreciate his qualities. His sister Hilda wrote to him on 2 May, after a Supreme War Council meeting with Chamberlain’s French allies: ‘You have a wonderful faculty for winning their confidence as well as that of your own people but it seems only to hold if you can have them with you in the flesh.’67

  ‘Why look at our boss, he never dress like dat for we to see.’68 Chamberlain’s misfortune is that he was unable to expose the appealing sides of his character to all except his workmen on Andros, one or two fly fishers, and his family. Family was everything to him, says his grandson Francis. ‘The Chamberlains were great family people. Our toast is “To the Clique” – meaning “To the family”.’69

  It was a family that had drawn together around a tragedy. His mother had died in childbirth when Chamberlain was seven. His sister Ida wrote: ‘Papa could not bear to have her mentioned and so no one ever spoke to us about her.’70 His mother’s place was filled by Chamberlain’s spinster sisters Ida and Hilda, who lived together in a large house in Odiham in Hampshire. For most of his adult life, he wrote to them every week.

  Not surprisingly, Chamberlain’s closest friend was a cousin – after whom he would name an Andros butterfly, the Terias Chamberlainii. He could have been describing himself when he wrote of Norman Chamberlain, a fervent educationalist killed by German machine-gun fire outside the village of Fontaine in December 1917: ‘Naturally reserved, shut and sensitive, he did not wear his heart upon his sleeves and it was only to his intimates that he showed all that there was in him.’71

  Chamberlain had felt Norman’s death terribly. ‘I was counting and depending on him more than I realised and he was in fact the most intimate friend I had.’72 Anxious for future generations to realise ‘how greatly Norman had contributed to the family fame’, Chamberlain wrote his one and only book about him, a memoir published in 1923, and today almost impossible to get hold of, in which Chamberlain revealed his commitment to continue where Norman had abruptly left off – above all, to be ‘the statesman in him’.73, 74 Norman’s powerful posthumous influence can be traced in Neville’s ideas on tariff reform, education and political economy; and in his reluctance to see repeated the carnage in which his cousin had been slaughtered.

  Chamberlain was too old to fight in the trenches, but in editing Norman’s letters he gained a paralysing insight. ‘The terror I suffered can’t be imagined,’ Norman wrote.75 ‘I know now what fear – naked and absolute – means, and it isn’t pleasant …’ He continued: ‘Everything is mud, sticky mud … I can’t reconcile myself to such waste, and such blind striking down right and left … and it’s going on in hundreds and thousands of families throughout the world … Nothing but immeasurable improvements will ever justify all the damnable waste and unfairness of this war – I only hope those who are left will never never forget at what sacrifice those improvements have been won.’76 Chamberlain made it his duty not to forget. Before Norman was killed, he had written a message to be given to his mother in case he fell, expressing his conviction that a new and better England would arise after the war. Chamberlain would take these farewell words, and he would do everything in his power to secure that new England.

  No one came to admire Neville Chamberlain’s strengths more than his son. Francis Chamberlain shows me the last letter that his father Frank wrote to Chamberlain, in October 1940. ‘I do want to say this, Papa.77 I shall always see you, and always have seen you, as far away above any other person I’ve ever known or read about in all the qualities which are worth while and all the principles which are worth striving for. I shall always try to be like you … I know that is the feeling of all decent people and it’s some pride to me to think that it was my father who saved England and that so many people love and admire him. You have been a marvellous Papa and it is a shame that you should be ill now and have to hand on all your plans and ideas to those small-minded men who are out for their names. But it does all come out in the end and it’s really what you know you’ve done that matters.’

  To his last breath, Neville Chamberlain never doubted the rightness of what he had done, yet outside the Clique, he remains largely unrehabilitated, his good qualities unsuspected as his years on Andros.

  Everyone knows what he looks like, how he sounded. His dry voice announcing that we were at war reminded Peter Fleming of ‘stale digestive biscuits’.78 With his piercing dark eyes, hooked nose, and awkwardly angled small head, he resembled one of his Bahamian marlins. ‘Look at his head,’ jeered his unforgiving enemy Lloyd George, who prided himself on his ability to judge skull shapes.79 ‘The worst thing Neville Chamberlain ever did was to meet Hitler and let Hitler see him.’ Umbrella thin, unsmiling, wearing the same business suit every day – black swallow-tailed coat, striped trousers, laced boots – Neville Chamberlain advanced towards other Members in the Lobbies like a provincial undertaker, his face set in a kind of permanent wariness, never looking at them.80

  Brendan Bracken
called him the Coroner.

  But this appearance was deceptive, too. His grandson says: ‘He looked like what he was not.’

  At seventy-one, he was young for his years, with plenty of hair and very little grey around the temples. ‘He looks well and does not trouble, as he might, to invest himself with a faded air,’ observed Peter Fleming, who had been shooting with him in December.81 (‘He is slow and tends to let birds past him before he fires …’) Celebrating Chamberlain’s birthday in March, The Times reported that his ‘whole appearance and manner refuted any suggestion of staleness in himself’.82, 83 Chamberlain had taken an eye test in January, and boasted to his sisters that his sight would enable him to pass into Churchill’s navy, and was better than that of eleven out of twelve schoolchildren. ‘Not unsatisfactory for an old ’un.’84

  The oldest member of his government, his only ailment was gout, which had flared up since September, and required him to wear a ‘snowshoe’ over a thick sock. That and nettle rash. ‘Every night I have to anoint my hands with Vaseline and cover them with linen gloves which makes them itch and tingle very uncomfortably.’85 Otherwise, according his doctor, Thomas Horder, Chamberlain had the constitution of a man at least thirty years younger.

  He needed only five and a half hours of sleep, and still felt ‘surprisingly well’, with no outward signs of the cancer that had begun to invade his body.86

  From his diary, from notes made by his wife and sisters, and from a taped interview with Valerie recorded a year before her death, it is possible to visualise Chamberlain’s last weekend before the Norway Debate.

  He woke on Saturday 4 May to a glorious hot day and the sound of blackcaps – his favourite birdsong, which never failed to produce in him a sensation of ‘pure ecstasy’.87 He had not lost interest in ornithology, and kept a pair of binoculars beside his bed. As Churchill tossed worms to his carp, so Chamberlain fed bacon rind to blue tits. In Downing Street, to attract them, he opened up the dining-room window and left out pieces of toast. He knew the bird calls in Westminster, and claimed to have detected an impostor, though Peter Fleming was unpersuaded. ‘He told us of a starling in St James’s Park which by whistling like a kestrel scares the sparrows.88 I am inclined to disbelieve in this bird. Kestrels rarely whistle …’

  Chamberlain rose at eight and took a cold bath. He was spartan about cold, wrote Hilda. Nothing would induce him to have a hot-water bottle. Once, when he caught a bad cold, Hilda surreptitiously introduced one. ‘He gave a most humorous account next morning of the awful thing he found in his bed – a large soft body – and how he sprang onto the floor before he discovered what it was.’89

  At 8.30 a.m., he sat down to a ‘good cooked breakfast’ prepared by Anne.90 Colville always found her breakfasts inedible at No. 10. The coffee tasted of ‘strong burnt chicory’, even though the Chamberlains believed it to be ‘unique in its excellence’.91

  He was at his desk early. Churchill said of himself that long as he worked, Chamberlain worked longer, ‘his years in the Bahamas having made him a “tough buccaneer”’.92 Yet the war never succeeded in consuming his whole day. ‘I have occasionally times, perhaps an hour or even more, when there has been nothing for me to do.’93 If he stayed in London, after finishing his correspondence, he walked with Anne around the lake in St James’s Park (followed by a single detective twenty yards behind), and wearing an old summer coat that his wife complained was ‘green and shapeless’ – Chamberlain’s retort: Lord Halifax’s coat was ‘much worse than mine’.94 Sundays were for taking Valerie to Kew Gardens; or to London Zoo, to look at the tropical fish and the gorillas Mock and Maina, while doing his best to acknowledge passers-by. Plagued by autograph hunters, he disguised himself by putting on a grey hat instead of a black one. ‘Even walking near Chequers in plus fours doesn’t save me from recognition.’95

  He no longer walked as fast as on Andros, but at Chequers he managed up to twenty miles a day. He frequently took Valerie with him, always his sheepdog Spot. He liked to climb to the top of Coombe Hill and sit in the sun by the Boer War memorial, gazing down on the Vale of Aylesbury. His favourite path was through the woods which he had arranged to hand over to the Forestry Commission – ‘I must remain P.M. a little longer to see the scheme well under way.’96 He had planted twenty-six new trees in November, and was impatient to see how they were doing. This Saturday morning, it relieved him to discover ‘no young trees lost this year’.97 Stalin’s chief recreation was playing the pianola; Churchill’s bricklaying. Chamberlain’s was planting trees. The wood from his trees, until September used for clarinets and tennis rackets, had become a source for rifle butts.

  Leaving the woods behind him, he checked on the white peach tree in the orchard. Out of habit, he inspected the unsatisfactory squirrel trap that he had copied from Lord Halifax – as soon as the trap had appeared, the squirrels had vanished. Counting rook’s nests, he strode back through the gardens.

  Chamberlain was not a clubbable man. The Royal Horticultural Society was one of few organisations to which he belonged. Punctiliously in pencil, he recorded its Tuesday meetings in his diary, noting down simply ‘RHS’. On this hot cloudless Saturday morning, it was the flowers that dazzled. Not only the cherry blossom. The path all the way to the gate was bordered by a mass of poet’s narcissus. The first bloom of German iris had opened, and the tulip tree which he had planted in the east forecourt was fully out.

  To Maisky, Chequers was merely a collection of ‘dark halls, old paintings, strange staircases …’ But to Chamberlain, it was the place he loved most – the only spot, his sister recognised, ‘always there in the background … where you could get free even for a moment to breathe the fresh air & peace of the country’.98, 99 His wife felt the same pull. Chequers, Anne wrote, was a haven ‘where one can be oneself, and do things upside down if one likes all day long’.100

  Everywhere Chamberlain’s sharp eyes fell, he saw evidence of his handiwork. With Valerie, he had planted magnolias on the north lawn; propped up the laburnum trees, trimmed the elders in Crows Close with his wood-saw. Whenever he was missing, Anne wrote, she found him there with his saw. ‘It was his saw he wanted to fetch when we went down one evening to say goodbye to Chequers.’101

  He never smoked before lunch – a light meal consisting of fish and cheese (‘They never ate meat,’ Valerie said), with a glass of cider, or very occasionally Hock, such as the vintage he offered Kenneth Clark, saying with his curious defensive vanity: ‘It was given me by the wine growers of Germany for having saved the peace of the world.’102 He did not bother with afternoon tea. He had a pipe in the evening and a glass of claret at dinner, and smoked a large cigar over coffee. After dinner, he no longer played the piano as he used to – Mendelssohn and Beethoven mainly; Chamberlain could not be wicked, said a friend of Frances Partridge, because he had a passion for Beethoven’s last quartets – though he loved it when others played in his presence; especially when the pianist was his daughter Dorothy who reached professional standard. He personally knew Vaughan Williams and Bartók, and had helped to found the Birmingham Chamber Orchestra. He was a member of the National Art Collections Fund, and up until the war he liked to dash into the National Gallery in his lunch breaks to gaze for half an hour at Dutch masters. To Lord Salisbury, his artistic tastes were as ‘bourgeois’ as the Carl Spitzweg canvas which Hitler had presented to Chamberlain, after the two leaders discovered a shared interest in German romanticism. He had treated Hitler as President Obama was later said by critics to have treated the Iranian President, as ‘a logical actor’, never completely convinced of the Führer’s true feelings, which the British diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick was unable to resist jotting down: ‘If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella, I’ll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of photographers.’103

  He played patience until late to clear his mind, and usually read for twenty minutes, between midnight and 12.30 a.m., before going up to bed. ‘One must have some
thing to take one’s mind off these perpetual war problems.’104 Since September, he had worked his way through Shakespeare’s comedies, a biography of his half-brother Austen, and Derek Walker-Smith’s unauthorised biography of himself, Man of Peace. When he first began this, Chamberlain found it ‘full, as was to be expected, of grotesque inaccuracies culled from journalistic sources.105 Of course, the man had no business to write it. He has no qualifications for it, neither personal acquaintance with me nor knowledge of the political, industrial or social history of the period.’ But as Chamberlain read on, ‘I find it is a good deal better than I thought.106 There are mistakes … but there is a more adequate account of many things.’

  Chamberlain woke on Sunday to ‘one of the loveliest spring days I remember’.107 The sky was clear, almost too brilliant, with no sign of Luftwaffe formations or parachutes – the fear expressed in the weekend newspapers, and not without grounds: 5 May was the date fixed by Hitler for his most recent aborted plan to invade Britain. The German leader liked to attack his victims on Sundays, Stafford Cripps told Maisky. ‘It gives him a small advantage: the enemy is somewhat less prepared on Sundays than usual.’108

  The assault on Chamberlain came from the press. In the Sunday Pictorial, Chamberlain’s steadfast foe Lloyd George lambasted the government for their ‘feeble, fatuous and futile’ conduct of the war.109 At a barnstorming speech in Southampton, the Labour frontbencher Herbert Morrison expressed the widely reported hope that ‘a bad British Prime Minister’ would not remain in office.110 In Cambridge, another Labour frontbencher, big, bluff, hearty Hugh Dalton, demanded Chamberlain’s resignation. ‘Then an encouraging notice-board could be put up in Downing Street.111 “War Against Hitler; under New Management.”’