Books

The impeccable Neville

J. Enoch Powell

Neville Chamberlain David Dilks (Cambridge University Press £20)

After the lapse of 44 years since Neville Chamberlain's death and 20 years since the last biography of him appeared, one approached the substantial first volume of a new two-volume life with an earnest desire to discover, if possible, that the general judgment and one's own had been unjust to a man who occupied so large a space in British politics and govern- ment between the two wars. If that judg- ment is to be revised, Professor Dilks has afforded every opportunity for doing so. His treatment is thorough without being tedious, and he has been patently deter- mined to ensure for his client a fair, if not a lenient, trial.

I tried hard to be persuaded; but it was no good. The cold, impersonal, dispassion- ate, unlikeable figure remained intact, despite all attempts to do a Dorian Grey in reverse. Why, one wonders, can that be so? There is ample evidence of an affec- tionate and even generous nature towards brother, sisters and children: Neville's family life was impeccably happy. Nor can one make the charge stick that outside his family circle he was unfeeling. Relations with staff, high and low, with employees and with equals alike were humane and honourable. A wider benevolence was also not absent. When that the poor, especially the Birmingham poor whom he knew, cried, the Birmingham Caesar could be close to weeping.

Doubtless his personality was one that screened emotion and tried to suppress it — that does not necessarily leave an impression of coldness, it can even have the opposite effect — and on paper, which remains when spoken words and gestures have vanished, he allowed emotion a freer rein. He was unmistakably a man capable of strong feeling. Coming late to the Commons in his 50th year, with the worst possible introduction to politics through that brief tenure of the impossible office of Director of National Service in 1916-17 and with the added handicap of already posses- sing a place and a name for himself outside Parliament through the mayoralty of Birm- ingham, Neville Chamberlain 'got the feel' of the House and acquired a mastery of it with extraordinary rapidity. After no more than five years there, he was an arbitral force in the Conservative Party and the confidant of Baldwin as well as the shrewd counsellor of his elder half-brother Au- sten. Not for nothing does a man become Chancellor of the Exchequer in less than five years from his first election; and there is ample evidence that the House of Com- mons, that political and human x-ray machine, took to him almost from the start.

He was not humourless. On the contrary, he could banter with the best across the Commons' chamber, and in correspond- ence and personal intercourse he showed a genuine vein of almost boyish fun, capable of descending, on demand, to harmless horseplay. Lest the catalogue of qualities be thought exhausted by all this, he was physically tough, handsome and resilient, working hard and taking hard exercise, never ill for any length of time before his terminal illness in 1940. Music he 'loved with passion', and he studied Beethoven with the same methodical thoroughness as he brought to his observation of moths, birds and flowers or the cultivation, after his father's example, of orchids, in which branch of gardening he was an acknow- ledged expert.

Was there deficiency of judgment then? No, his judgment, always superior to Au- sten's, remained sure and steady through the switchback politics of the 1920s. He could perceive without self-delusion what could and what could not be expected of the Conservative Party, of the British electorate or of the House of Commons. No man carries through Parliament the mass of difficult and contentious legislation which he did as Minister of Health from 1924 to 1929 without possessing a sound and shrewd judgment in dealing with those three incompatibles: the civil service, the House and the outside interests.

'Impeccable' is the recurrent, all too recurrent, word that occurs to the mind in describing him. When almost 600 pages, studded with direct quotations and above suspicion of biographical censorship, yield not a gleaning of evidence on which the most vigilant malevolence could claim to argue defects of intellect or character, one is in the presence of a daunting phen- omenon, which the biographer himself scarcely helps us to understand — I sus- pect, because he too does not understand it.

'It is his coldness which kills,' Austen Chamberlain wrote to his wife about Nevil- le, 'I had not realised how it had affected

his people. How can I help Neville? It is so difficult to say and so difficult for him to alter, for it is changing his nature. You know how he almost resents the expression even of my love for him. He hates any sign of feeling at all, I think, because he feels deeply and is afraid of letting himself fall to pieces.' After that quotation, the Professor proceeds: 'This cannot easily be matched with Neville's own account of his work in Ladywood over a span of six years, visits to constituents, meetings at street-corners, parties and discussion at Westbourne, and all the rest. . . . All the same, Austen' view was expressed in no point-scoring manner and will have contained at least an element of truth.'

Much more, surely, than 'an element'? It comes near to the heart of the paradox and the eventual tragedy of Neville Chamber- lain. This first volume of the biographY runs to 1929, to the exit from office of Baldwin's second administration. In the following volume we shall see the impecc- able and irreproachable, competent and commanding Admirable Crichton brought face to face with the terrible and impas- sioned drama of Europe's agony. The force and fatality of that collision were prepared in the halcyon years before. Like the classic hero of Greek tragedy, Neville in his first volume is agathos (good) and, as if in reward, eudaimon (happy). 'General scepticism formed no part of Chamberlain s mental habits; still less did cynicism, in the sense of believing nothing wholly worthY and admirable. He believed in improve- ment, identifiable progress, well-directed activity, on condition that the facts were ascertained, the precedents scrutinised, the mechanisms put on the anvil.' It is tempting but probably unfruitful .to look in Neville Chamberlain's earlier life for clues to the psychological puzzle pre' sented by the elderly cabinet minister wh.° went out of office without much regret in 1929. Dilks presents in greater detail than has been done hitherto the story of Nev11„" le's six lonely and futile years between 189u and 1896 on the island of Andros in the Bahamas, in the foredoomed attempt t° restore the diminished fortunes of the Chamberlain family by growing sisal. The, hardships he endured and the fortitude art" assurance with which he accepted theta were remarkable in one with so little experience of the world thitherto. The episode must have been in his life what war service was for so many in other genera' tions; but it would be fanciful to attribute more to it than to have possibly stren8- thened a natural disposition to self- reliance .

On the other hand, like Austen, an,

d perhaps even more than Austen, fits father's protégé and favourite, Neville was dominated by the memory of his father. Joseph, against whose standards a.a° achievements he constantly measured hull: self and with whom he seems to have had more of character in common than did his elder half-brother. When Neville Char" berlain became Chancellor of the Excite" quer 20 years after Austen and Austen's' household were drinking Neville's health,' 'Austen remarked that Neville had better brains than his and would excel him if given the chance'. No doubt the advance- ment of the second son owed much to the memory and position of the father, which Opened doors to him first in Birmingham and afterwards at Westminster. The con- tribution of Austen's position too cannot,

have been negligible.

Perhaps the tragic drama was not a single play after all but a trilogy — Joseph, Austen, Neville — wherein the hubris of the father moved through the shallows and delays of part two, to its predestined outcome in the third. Which reminds me, by the way, that we are due about now for a new biography of Austen Chamberlain — by Professor Dilks, perhaps?