Patriot
and
appeaser
John Keegan
MAKING FRIENDS WITH HITLER: LORD LONDONDERRY AND BRITAIN'S ROAD TO WAR by Ian Kershaw Allen Lane, £20, pp. 587, ISBN 0713997176 r £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Since appeasement is in the air again, this is a timely book. It tells the story of how Lord Londonderry, secretary of state for air in the National government of 1931-5, sought to avert what would be the second world war by befriending the Nazi leaders.
Londonderry, 7th Marquis and directly descended from Lord Castlereagh of the conference of Vienna, was one of the grandest and richest men in Britain. He owned several country houses, Londonderry House in Park Lane and 50,000 acres in Ireland and England, including large parts of the Durham coalfields. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst and commissioned into the Blues, which he commanded during the battle of Arras in 1917. In 1901 he had married Edie, daughter of Lord Chaplin, a beauty of commanding personality who become the mainstay of his life. Both were prodigious writers and hoarders of letters and it is the archive of their correspondence that Professor Sir Ian Kershaw has largely used to write the history of their relationship with Hitler, Goering, Ribbentrop and others in the Nazi high command in the years before 1939.
Londonderry took it for granted that his life would be spent in politics. He hoped to be prime minister, he tried to become viceroy of India, he declined the governorgeneralship of Canada as beneath him. In the end, having an interest in aviation, he settled for the air ministry, hoping it would be a doorstep to greater things. Unfortunately his assumption of office coincided with Hitler's accession to the German chancellorship and the onset of German rearmament.
Londonderry, a genuine patriot, was also a rearmer. He tried, at a time when both Baldwin and Chamberlain were struggling with the consequences of the Great Depression, to win money for expansion of the Royal Air Force, with some success. Much of his eventual embitterment stemmed from his belief that his efforts to enlarge Britain's airpower had been overlooked or misrepresented. He particularly resented the outcome of an argument he had with his cousin, Winston Churchill, over detailed figures of British and German air strength, about which Churchill was better informed.
Had Londonderry stuck to rearmament, he would probably now be remembered as an early opponent of the Nazis. His policy, however, was two-stranded, and by no means any the less defensible for that reason. He wanted Britain to rearm but he also wanted Britain's leadership to extend the hand of friendship to Germany's new leaders. His was a perfectly honourable position. It might also be seen as perfectly sensible. had Hitler and his gang had the same concern to maintain the general peace that Londonderry, Baldwin and Chamberlain had. What they all, but Londonderry in particular, failed to perceive was that Hitler wanted to preserve peace for as long only as it suited him to do so and that his real desire was for revenge and domination.
Appeasement from a position of strength, Londonderry's initial policy, might have worked. Unfortunately, as strength became weakness, Londonderry shifted to believing that offers of friendship would work of themselves. He began to court Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign policy expert who became London ambassador in October 1936. Goering and Hitler himself. He corresponded with Hitler, he corresponded at length with Goering and went to meet him in Germany, he invited Ribbentrop to lavish social functions at his Irish estate and Londonderry House. Eventually both he and his wife came to dislike Ribbentrop as much as everyone else, including his fellow Nazis, did, finding him rude, pompous and insufferably selfimportant. Even in their ungentlemanly circle, it was obvious to his fellow bullies that Ribbentrop was not a gentleman, having 'married his money and bought his title'. The trouble with Londonderry, quintessentially a gentleman, was that every rejection of his offers of friendship merely prompted him to persist. It was only after the annexation of Austria in 1938 and the final dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939 that Londonderry accepted the futility of appeasement from a position of weakness. By then he had lost all credibility, seen as vacuous by the Nazis and compromised by his fellow countrymen.
As Ian Kershaw is at pains to point out, however. Londonderry was not a conventional appeaser. He was not anti-Semitic, he was not pro-Nazi, he was certainly not a coward. He was not even an international idealist, as were such last-ditch believers in the power of woolly goodwill as Lord Noel-Buxton. He attracted the services of several dubious busybodies, H. Montgomery Hyde, Kenneth de Courcy and George Ward-Price. He did not share their views, if only because he had an aristocratic disdain of the presumption of the middle class — a category that for him included both Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain — to meddle in affairs of state. Londonderry really was, as he saw himself, Castlereagh reborn, a believer in the right of hereditary grandees to rule the world. In that light he was precisely the sort of man whom Hitler most wanted to eliminate.
He was also too slight a figure to dominate the dangerous post-Versailles Europe of overthrown empires and rancorous new republics. Given the enormous volume of Londonderry's papers, it is understandable that Kershaw should have chosen his life as a subject for a major book. Whether Londonderry deserves such treatment is doubtful. It is a familiar academic gibe that what might have worked as an article has grown into something unjustifiably larger. In this case, that judgment seems correct. Beautifully written, and supplied with nearly 100 pages of fascinating footnotes, Making Friends with Hitler has strayed from being a labour of love into becoming a personal obsession.
In 1960 my wife and I had our wedding reception in Londonderry House, then let out commercially for social events. Two years late it was knocked down, to make way for the London Hilton. I cannot guess which outcome Charley Londonderry would have found more humiliating. Today middle-class families put up a tent in the garden for wedding celebrations. Today's appeasers have shifted their concern far from Europe to the Middle East. The caravan moves on.
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