by Andrew Marr
This all sits uneasily with the well-remembered image of Edward VIII as a natural social reformer, at odds with the stuffy conservatism of Baldwin’s Britain. It is true that he had a lively conscience when directly confronted with poverty or other forms of misery. Before becoming king, as patron of the National Council for Social Service, he travelled widely through the most depressed parts of Britain, raising funds and recruiting volunteers to help. Unemployed families were given land in Wales to grow their food and try to become self-sufficient. He was also good at visiting maimed ex-servicemen. Yet the most famous of his industrial visits, when he went as king to south Wales to tour the depressed coalfields and a closed steel works and declared, with much feeling, that ‘something must be done to find them work’, was almost entirely meaningless. He promised he would do all he could for the men, and that unemployment would be dealt with. He did so knowing not only that he had no power, but also that he would soon be out of the country for ever: he had already told his family and Baldwin that he was abdicating.
More significant than these brief excursions into social policy, though, was Edward’s apparent enthusiasm for Nazi Germany. Was it real? Berlin certainly thought so. Leopold von Hoesch, the German ambassador to London in the mid-thirties, not himself a Nazi, nonetheless assured his employers that Edward felt ‘warm sympathy for Germany’ and that, at the very least, ‘we should be able to rely on having on the British throne a ruler who is not lacking in understanding for Germany’. As Prince of Wales, Edward had much disliked the anti-Nazi line of the Foreign Office. (Meanwhile, partly because it was worried about the way official papers were left lying about at Fort Belvedere, the Foreign Office screened, and thus censored, the red boxes of official documents they sent to him as King, the first and last time this has ever happened.) The Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha went further than Hoesch. He was a first cousin once removed of Edward’s who had been sent in Victoria’s time to Germany from Eton when there was a princeling shortage and who had become an extreme right-winger after the Great War. He met the King in 1936 and sent Hitler a memorandum about conversations with him, including Edward’s enthusiasm for a British–German alliance and the following assertion: ‘To my question whether a discussion between Baldwin and Hitler would be desirable, he replied in the following words: “Who is King here? Baldwin or I? I myself wish to talk to Hitler and will do so either here or in Germany. Tell him that, please.”’128 These could be dismissed as the oily protestations of diplomats to a dictator, though there are other similar reports from the Italian ambassador and Hitler’s foreign minister. But even some of the King’s supporters such as the socialite Tory MP and diarist Sir Henry (‘Chips’) Channon thought Edward ‘is going the dictator way and is pro-German . . . against too much slipshod democracy. I shouldn’t be surprised if he aimed at making himself a mild dictator.’ And later, shortly after he had abdicated, he visited Nazi Germany as Duke of Windsor with his new wife, meeting all the Nazi dignitaries, including Herr Hitler.
Many believed, and they included the Nazi hierarchy, that Edward had been forced to abdicate by Baldwin and an anti-German cabal because of his political views. It is true that in the summer of 1940, as Hitler planned his invasion of Britain, his agents were working in Portugal to lure, or snatch, the Duke of Windsor and keep him as a potential figurehead ruler. Churchill was clearly concerned and eventually had the couple hustled off to the Bahamas, where Edward sat out the war as governor-general. But there is no reason to think he had been forced to abdicate for being an appeaser or semi-Nazi himself. Every stage of the move to abdication was described at the time or later by the key participants. Baldwin struggled hard to persuade the King to give up Mrs Simpson and remain on the throne: he regarded the alternative as a profoundly sad and damaging outcome. Others tried to persuade Edward to send Wallis away for a year abroad, while he was crowned and the country grew used to him, after which time they might be reunited. As already described, many of his friends argued for a morganatic marriage settlement. So Edward had plenty of opportunities to find a way of remaining on the throne. It was his determination to marry as soon as Mrs Simpson’s second divorce made it possible that made abdication inevitable.
Far from being a bully, Baldwin was slow and patient with the younger man. The most obvious reason for discounting an establishment plot to oust Edward for pro-Nazi sympathies is that so many of the strongest enemies of Nazi Germany were on the King’s side – Churchill himself, of course, but also the Tory minister and diarist Duff Cooper, and the press magnate Beaverbrook. The appeasers were, in general, rather hostile to Edward, though it must be emphasized again that even his enemies acted as if they hoped that he would remain King – old habits of deference and custom die hard. The abdication was Britain’s good fortune. Edward went and his dutiful younger brother became King in his place, another George (whose young daughter Elizabeth initially loathed the transition from a quiet, comfortable family life to the chill formality of Buckingham Palace). Baldwin stayed on as prime minister just long enough to see George VI crowned and then resigned, passing power to his chancellor and long-term colleague Neville Chamberlain. George would be a good king. The abdication crisis, by removing a politically naïve, vain and petulant man from the British throne in the late thirties was, far from being a blow, the most fantastic stroke of national luck. Roosevelt was not the only American to do Britain a favour.
The Appeasers
The editor of the Field, that glossy bible of the fox-hunting and estate-buying classes, rarely features on the national stage. But in October 1937 he had a walk-on role. He picked up a pen and wrote to Lord Halifax, the number two minister at the Foreign Office, inviting him to an international hunting exhibition. There was nothing terribly surprising about that. Halifax, the former Lord Irwin who had negotiated with Gandhi when he was Viceroy of India, was also a keen and expert master of foxhounds. But this invitation came on behalf of Prince Lowenstein, who ran the German hunting organization, and was to Berlin. It was the first quiet move in the game of diplomatic chess which Britain played during 1937–9, known ever since simply as ‘appeasement’, a word which once had the gentle meaning of bring peace and now is loaded with shame and embarrassment. It was a game played out by British politicians and diplomats, and sometimes others, with skill, determination and even nerve. The only problem was that Hitler was not playing the game in the first place.
Because of what followed, where political leaders stood in relation to appeasement affected British politics well into the fifties and even sixties – a Tory prime minister in 1964 was still tainted by his marginal role in the policy. Conveniently, we now scapegoat a few politicians as being ‘guilty men’ who encouraged Hitler by their cowardice and foolishness. We forget that appeasement was hugely popular. It brought hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic people onto the streets of London to cheer Chamberlain. It was lauded in the City, in the newspapers, in private letters and diaries. Chamberlain enjoyed an almost unanimous standing ovation in the Commons for it. He was showered with letters and personal gifts – of fishing rods, gold watches, tweed for suits – by deliriously grateful voters. It is one of the stories of the thirties that is hardest to achieve perspective about, but which cannot be left as a dirty national secret.
Halifax, who, along with Chamberlain, is most often blamed for appeasing Hitler, was no lover of Germany. He came from a wealthy High Anglican family. Isolated by the death of his elder brothers and born with only one hand, he had been to Eton and Oxford, become an MP and served in the Great War, after which he expressed disappointment that it was not possible to burn down German towns to teach them a lesson, but at all events said they must be properly humiliated. Immensely tall, dry and grand, on first arriving at Berchtesgaden he mistook Hitler for a footman and tried to hand him his overcoat. Yet Halifax was not a man of inflexible views. As we have seen, he was far more open to the appeal of Gandhi than was Churchill, and by the mid-thirties he had completely rethought his 1918 enthusiasm for
keeping Germany down and humiliated. He thought the Versailles settlement had proved unfair and that the League of Nations system of trying to keep peace by international diplomacy was clearly failing. If the Germans left inside the spatchcocked state of Czechoslovakia, remnants of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, wanted to join Hitler’s Reich, why not? If the Germans of Danzig felt the same, why not? If Germany wanted the return of some of her old colonies, again – why not?
An imperialist, Halifax was unenthusiastic about interfering in the internal affairs of other European countries. Once it was known that he was going to Germany to see the Nazi leadership, for the cover of the hunting exhibition was soon blown, Halifax was urged by friends to raise the subject of the repression that was already well underway in Germany. He barely bothered. In a chilling throwaway sentence he said only that there was much in the system which offended British opinion – ‘treatment of the Church; to perhaps a lesser extent, the treatment of the Jews; treatment of the Trade Unions’.129 Among his other views was that racialism, while ‘powerful’, was not immoral, and that the Nazis were at least ‘genuine haters of Communism’, something he and Chamberlain both regarded as the greater threat. He was, in short, a catastrophic messenger to send to Hitler. He was also armed with a memorandum of May 1937 from the diplomat Sir Nevile Henderson arguing that it was not against British interests to allow Hitler his way over Czechoslovakia, union with Austria, expansion into eastern Europe and the return of the colonies. This would all restrain Russia and, anyway, the choice of war would be far worse. Calm Hitler, said Henderson; don’t treat him like a mad dog or you will turn him into one. In a twist worthy of Shakespeare it should be added that it was Henderson who, as ambassador to Berlin in 1939, formally issued Britain’s declaration of war, acknowledging the utter failure of his policy.
The Halifax visit, which set the tone for so much else that followed, faithfully carried these messages directly to Hitler. It was Halifax himself who raised the issues of the German-speaking Czechs, Danzig and Austria, giving the German dictator the clear impression that if these could be resolved without full-scale war, Britain would be content. It meant the end of the Versailles era. Hitler and Halifax then had a gloomy lunch, after which the Führer told the former Viceroy of India that Lives of a Bengal Lancer was shown to the SS because it demonstrated how a superior race should behave, and suggested that Gandhi should be shot. Halifax was appalled. But why should he have been? He was the representative of an empire which had not long before practised the barbarity of air-bombardment against defenceless tribesmen, and which still officially regarded Indians and Africans as incapable of self-government. He defended racialism. He was, like Chamberlain, not keen on Jews. It seems that the real gap between Halifax (and men like him) and Hitler (and men like him) was not that the former thought racialist theories and the rule of the higher race were wrong, or unnatural, or that he had a more advanced view of universal human rights. It was rather that the Germans overdid things, and were too rough – and perhaps that, in British thinking among the racial hierarchies, Jews and Slavs stood higher than Indians or Africans. Thus it was one thing to bomb tribesmen, another to seize Jewish shops. The Germans were a little crude. That seems to have been the impression left on Halifax by Goering when he finally met him at the hunting exhibition after his visit to Hitler. Goering, in leather breeches and jerkin, wearing a green hat and a dagger in a red sheath, all geniality and reassurance, struck Halifax as entertaining and, though a killer, ‘frankly attractive, like a great schoolboy . . . a composite personality – film star, great landowner interested in his estate, prime minister, party manager, head gamekeeper at Chatsworth’.130
It is impossible now to reach back and fully understand this thinking. What followed was too horrible, too big. Some have argued that appeasement was all along a clever and sensible strategy, forced on Chamberlain by the long years of under-investment in defence. Did it not allow Britain from 1935 (under Chamberlain’s rule in the Treasury) to start to build the planes and recreate the army she would need to fight Germany? Was it not Chamberlain and Halifax who, by buying time, really enabled Britain to survive in 1940? It is an ingenious argument which contains some truth and attractively overturns a settled consensus. But it depends upon appeasement being a sly tactic, trying to delay Hitler’s war on the West by throwing him pieces of middle Europe, while understanding all along that war was coming. This is simply unhistorical. Chamberlain was not lying when he said later he thought he had bought peace in his time, or that Hitler was honourable. Halifax was not dissimulating when he suggested that Hitler’s behaviour towards the Jews and internal dissent was not really Britain’s concern. Both men realized that war might not be avoidable and that, if so, Britain needed to be better prepared, particularly against air attack. But they also thought Hitler’s Germany had legitimate grievances and that Hitler might be permanently bought off; and this is what they were trying to achieve, though Halifax realized the truth about Nazi ambitions long before Chamberlain. Certainly, Britain did not go to war to help European Jewry or to defend the Versailles settlement, or even to save Poland.
Another argument used to explain appeasement is that the prime minister forever associated with it, Neville Chamberlain, was a provincial ignoramus who had not the first clue about international affairs. This too is wrong. Chamberlain, by almost all the accounts of his colleagues, was not an appealing man. He was sarcastic, cold and profoundly partisan in politics. He was, however, not ignorant. As a son of the great imperialist Joe Chamberlain he had a very clear notion of the importance of the Empire and tariffs. As chancellor under both Ramsay MacDonald and Baldwin he had a finger in almost every international issue from the early thirties onwards, overseeing both the early austerity measures and then the beginning of rearmament as well as various talks and pacts involving European and imperial colleagues. His problem was not lack of knowledge but conceit. A comparatively old man of sixty-eight by the time he finally became prime minister, he had spent the second half of his life in national politics, working hideously long hours and feeling himself the real worker who underpinned the lazy habits of prime ministers. He was not, properly, a Tory but an old-style Liberal whose reform measures on rent control, housing and unemployment assistance partly mitigated his iron-hard economic views. He knew he was right. So when he reached Number Ten, as neither his father nor his half-brother Austen had managed, he preened: ‘It has come to me without my raising a finger . . . because there is no-one else.’ Only his wisdom had kept Britain out of the Spanish Civil War, only he had been able to soothe Mussolini. As chancellor, he wrote, he could hardly move a pebble: ‘now I have only to raise a finger and the whole face of Europe is changed’. Yes, he was a vain old man.
But in his views, as we have seen, he was hardly alone. There were millions of ordinary voters thoroughly hostile to rearmament, who regarded war with just as much incredulity and horror as Chamberlain did. Yet again we push the blame onto an easy scapegoat, this just nation, always wise and moral with hindsight. We infantilize the final choice – Adolf Hitler, deal or no deal? – forgetting that appeasement was a slow, five-year process, rarely clear or simple but popular at every stage. It had started in 1934–5 with Mussolini’s menaces against Abyssinia, at a time when Britain still admired the Italian dictator and hoped to use him as a counterweight or ally against Germany. Various deals and secret plots were hatched to hand over parts of Abyssinia to the Italians, resulting in the resignation of one foreign secretary, much useless hand-wringing at the League of Nations, and threats of an embargo. Baldwin knew that threats were useless against dictators unless backed up by a credible threat of force, yet declined to begin the massive rearmament that would be needed. Two years before, at the Fulham East by-election of 1933, with Hitler in power and the European menace clear, the National Government candidate had been trounced by a Labour candidate with pacifist views. It was not a one-issue by-election, but it put the wind up Baldwin sufficiently for him to quote it lat
er as a reason for not pushing ahead with rearmament.
The Fulham East by-election was not a one-off warning. Both the 1933 Oxford Union debate when students resolved not to fight for King and Country and the Scottish Nationalists’ anti-conscription views have already been mentioned. More important was the Peace Pledge Union, formed in 1934 after a letter to the Manchester Guardian by a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, Richard Sheppard: by 1937 it had over 100,000 members. Anti-war groups proliferated. In 1934, too, the Labour Party had opposed strengthening the RAF because it would encourage war, and the following year it opposed the Defence White Paper for higher spending on the same grounds. In that year, outside Parliament, there was a ‘peace ballot’ organized by a pro-League-of-Nations group, in which 11.6 million people had voted, with a heavy majority saying they backed sanctions and diplomacy at first if one country invaded another, and only a smaller majority favouring war even as a last resort. Baldwin had drawn a lesson, if hardly a moral, from this: he went into the 1935 election hiding plans to sharply increase arms spending. As he explained: ‘Supposing that I had gone to the country saying that Germany was rearming and we must rearm . . . I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.’ The loudest people, if not always the cleverest, were deeply hostile to war preparations. On the left the communists were following the Moscow line and on the right the BUF were campaigning against war with Germany or Italy. This was reinforced for the less political majority by the fear that, as Stanley Baldwin had put it, the bomber would always get through. Terror of aircraft attack was widespread in the mid-thirties. Both appeasers and anti-appeasers thought the Luftwaffe was much stronger than it really was: both the military chiefs and Churchill thought the first bombing attack would kill around 150,000 people – more than actually died from German raids in the whole Second World War. Later these fears would be fanned by film of the ruthless raid by German bombers on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. When Hitler marched his troops back into the Rhineland, Britain did not want to go to war. When Franco’s insurgency tore apart Republican Spain there was no appetite for intervention, except on the left. So by the time Halifax went to see Hitler, a clear pattern was established. The British people were against rearmament and favoured appeasement. The British government, which perhaps ought to have tried to lead the country in a different direction, was sufficiently cautious of public opinion to speak softly. To present this as the guilt of a few flabby mandarins is far too easy, a comforting democratic myth. It lets off the hook Labour, the Communist Party, the pacifist movements, those many business leaders who did not want to fund rearmament, and the many millions who thought Chamberlain had behaved superbly.