ABSTRACT
By the mid-1920s, commentators spoke seriously of the Chamberlain triumvirate as a political dynasty.1 The extended Chamberlain family dominated Birmingham municipal politics as a personal fiefdom between the 1870s and the Second World War. Even more remarkable, with only two brief intervals of a few months, there was at least one Chamberlain in every Unionist Cabinet from 1892 to 1940. Moreover, while Joseph Chamberlain's elder son came close to the top of Disraeli's ‘greasy pole’ in 1921-22 as the only Conservative leader of the twentieth century not to become Prime Minister, his younger half-brother finally achieved their father's goal without ever leading his party to victory at a general election. Yet the supreme irony is that there was nothing about Neville Chamberlain's career before the age of fifty which suggested the idea of such a political dynasty. On the contrary, in a family devoted to public service and civic duty, the entry of the younger son into political life was belated, hesitant and entirely unplanned by his dominant and overbearing father.
