Neville Chamberlain

Biography

Neville Chamberlain was born in Birmingham in 1869, the son of Joseph Chamberlain. After Rugby School and Mason College he spent six unsuccessful years running a family sisal plantation in the Bahamas, then managed the Birmingham manufacturer Hoskins & Company for 17 years and became prominent in city affairs, serving as lord mayor of Birmingham from 1915. Lloyd George's appointment of him as Director of National Service in 1916 ended in his resignation in 1917.

Elected MP for Birmingham Ladywood in 1918, he rose quickly in the 1920s as postmaster general, minister of health and briefly chancellor of the exchequer, and pursued an extensive programme of health and local government reform from 1924 to 1929. He returned to the Treasury in the National Government in 1931 and held it until 1937.

Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as prime minister in May 1937. He sought to avoid war by negotiating with Hitler and in September 1938 signed the Munich Agreement, which handed the Sudetenland to Germany. After Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia he guaranteed Poland, and he declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939.

Criticism of the failed Norwegian campaign in the Norway Debate of May 1940 led to his resignation as prime minister in favour of Winston Churchill. He stayed in the war cabinet as Lord President of the Council until illness forced him out, and died of cancer in November 1940.