ABSTRACT

The events that took place in Europe during the eighteen months before the outbreak of the Second World War continue to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination, with the result that the Anschluss, the Munich agreement and the guarantee to Poland remain the stuff of countless television programmes and examination curricula. British foreign policy during the climactic years of appeasement has also attracted a huge amount of scholarly attention. For critics of appeasement, the period between the Anschluss and the German occupation of Prague in March 1939 was marked by the British government’s continued failure to take the kind of decisive measures that might yet have reined in Hitler’s long-signalled drang nach osten. For other scholars, by contrast, such a judgement ignores the constraints under which ministers laboured when dealing with the challenges posed by the dictator states during the final years of the ‘low dishonest decade’. The man who served as Foreign Secretary during this period-Edward Wood, 3rd Viscount Halifax-has perhaps surprisingly avoided the worst of the vitriol directed at ‘the guilty men’ of appeasement. He came out comparatively unscathed in Cato’s celebrated attack on the Guilty Men. Winston Churchill was also quite sparing in his criticism, despite claiming in The Gathering Storm that Halifax’s approach towards foreign affairs closely resembled that of Neville Chamberlain.1 Halifax’s manifest levelheadedness commanded widespread respect across the Conservative Party in the late 1930s, even though he had previously played a controversial role as Viceroy of India in setting the country on the path towards greater self-government. His emollient if austere manner also meant that he grated less on opposition politicians than the more acerbic Chamberlain, which perhaps explains why his name was often mentioned as a possible Prime Minister by those who believed that Britain required a genuinely national government to deal with the international crisis. Halifax was, in short, a living incarnation of the gravitas and common sense that were widely held by his contemporaries to be the hallmark of the ideal inter-war foreign secretary.