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The Twilight War and the Fall of France: Chamberlain and Churchill in 1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

David Dilks
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Extract

One evening early in the war, the First Lord of the Admiralty and Mrs Churchill invited the Prime Minister and Mrs Chamberlain to dine. By a happy chance the conversation turned to Chamberlain's early life in the Bahamas. He told the story of the struggle to recruit the family's fortunes by growing sisal on a remote and windswept island in the Bahamas, ‘living nearly naked, struggling with labour difficulties and every other kind of obstacle, and with the town of Nassau as the only gleam of civilization’. Chamberlain described how, for all his exertions, the scheme had failed. In the Chamberlain family, it appeared, it was felt that though they loved him dearly they were sorry to have lost £50,000. ‘I was fascinated’, Churchill recorded after the war, ‘by the way Mr. Chamberlain warmed as he talked, and by the tale itself, which was one of gallant endeavour. I thought to myself, “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!” ‘

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 28 , December 1978 , pp. 61 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1978

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References

1 Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 15 July 1939. These letters, and Chamberlain's diaries, are held by the University of Birmingham, to which I am obliged for permission to print extracts.

2 Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 5 August 1939.

3 Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 8 October 1939.

4 Churchill, W. S., The Second World War, vol. I, p. 338Google Scholar (Reprint Society edition, 1948).

5 Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 26 November 1939.

6 Churchill to Chamberlain, 15 September 1939, N.C. 7/9/49; this correspondence is preserved in the Chamberlain papers.

7 Chamberlain to Churchill, 16 September 1939, N.C. 7/9/50.

8 Churchill to Chamberlain, 18 September 1939, N.C. 7/9/51.

9 Churchill to Chamberlain, 22 September 1939, N.C. 7/9/53; Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 23 September 1939.

10 Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 7 September 1939.

11 Memorandum by Sir Horace Wilson, 3 October 1939, N.G. 7/9/63; Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 8 October, 1939.

12 The War Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, vol. I, (London 1952), p. 119Google Scholar.

13 Churchill to Halifax, 15 January 1940 (P.R.O., F.O. 800/328).

14 The War Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, vol. I, p. 137; Churchill, W. S., The Second World War, vol. II, p. 436Google Scholar.

15 Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 27 January 1940.

16 P.R.O.W.M. (55) 40, Cab. 65/5; Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 16 March 1940.

17 Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 16 March 1940.

18 Churchill to Halifax, 14 March, 1940 (P.R.O., F.O. 800/338).

19 The War Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, vol. I, p. 155; Churchill, W. S., The Second World War, vol. I, p. 467Google Scholar.

20 Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 10 March 1940, and to Ida Chamberlain, 30 March 1940.

21 Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 13 April 1940.

22 Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 20 April 1940.

23 Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 27 April 1940.

24 Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 4 May 1940.

25 Churchill, W. S., The Second World War, vol. I, p. 527Google Scholar.

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27 Neville Chamberlain to Hilda Chamberlain, 17 May 1940.

28 The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, ed. Dilks, D. N. (London 1971), p. 284Google Scholar; Churchill, W. S., The Second World War, vol. II (1949), p. 59Google Scholar; Wilson, S. S., The Cabinet office to 1945 (H.M.S.O., 1975), p. 104Google Scholar.

29 Chamberlain's diary, 21 and 26 May 1940.

30 Ibid., 28 May 1940.

31 Churchill to Lloyd George, 29 May 1940, G/4/5/48, Lloyd George papers (now in the Library of the House of Lords).

32 Chamberlain's diary, 5 June 1940.

33 The War Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, vol. I, p. 199Google Scholar.

34 Chamberlain's diary, 18 June 1940, and his letter to Ida Chamberlain, 21 June 1940.

35 George, Frances Lloyd, The years that are Past (London 1967), p. 264Google Scholar; Neville Chamberlain to Ida Chamberlain, 21 June 1940.

36 Churchill to Chamberlain, 1 July 1940, N.C. 7/9/89.

37 Chamberlain's diary, 9 September, 1940.

38 James, R. Rhodes, Victor Cazalet (1976), p. 278Google Scholar.