ABSTRACT
When Austen Chamberlain died in the spring of 1937, his colleagues in the House of Commons honoured their late colleague with a glowing set of tributes.1 Stanley Baldwin told the House that ‘I have had nothing but kindness and consideration from him through all the changes and chances of political life’. The Prime Minister went on to praise Chamberlain as ‘a great Parliamentarian who never said ‘anything derogatory about a man’. Clement Attlee, speaking in his capacity as Leader of the Labour Party, agreed that the Commons had lost ‘one of its most distinguished members’, who had been inspired throughout his life by a ‘single-minded devotion to what he thought was right’. Lloyd George recalled that Chamberlain was one of ‘the fairest and most chivalrous as well as one of the most effective of Parliamentary antagonists’, who had ‘never once delivered a foul blow’. Even James Maxton of the Independent Labour Party, a man who by his own admission usually delighted in dissenting from the views of his Parliamentary colleagues, noted that he was happy on this occasion to endorse everything that had been said in the Chamber.
