ABSTRACT
There are few clues in Neville Chamberlain’s early life to suggest that he would embark upon a career in municipal politics at the age of 42 and that this would carry him to the Premiership within a quarter of a century. The shadow cast by a dominant father and over-privileged half-brother apparently deterred the shy, younger Chamberlain from a more active interest in politics during his youth. At Rugby he took no interest in debating and claimed to detest politics, while at home, ‘where politics always had pride of place’, his preference for Darwinism and natural science gained him ‘little sympathy from Papa’.1 Despite repeated rumours that he was about to enter Parliament for every Midland constituency that became vacant, such suggestions were always rejected with disdain. As he told an old friend from Andros during the election campaign of 1900:
The fact is, I was intended by nature to get through a lot of money. I should never be satisfied with a cottage, and having chucked away a competence – you know where – I am going to toil and moil till I grub it back again. Of course that doesn’t prevent my taking some part in a contest like this and speaking as often as my nervousness and laziness permits me (which is not much) but I haven’t begun to think of politics as a career.
