Neville Chamberlain’s National Government

On 16 March 1937 the seventy-three-year-old Austen Chamberlain died of a heart attack. Ten weeks later his sixty-eight-year-old half-brother Neville became prime minister, without, as he put it, ‘my raising a finger … and perhaps because I have not made enemies by looking after myself rather than the common cause’.1 He was the oldest man this century, save Henry Campbell-Bannerman, to accede for the first time to the highest office of state. It had been a long and at times frustrating wait. At Caxton Hall on 31 May the Conservative party, representing as Channon thought, ‘all the wealth and grandeur of England’,2 met to elect him as their leader, and did so with noted enthusiasm. There were some rather laboured jokes about entering on the duties and responsibilities of the premiership ‘at an age when most people were thinking of retiring from active work’. But, as Chamberlain said of himself, he was ‘sound of wind and limb’ due to having led ‘a sober and temperate life’.3