ABSTRACT
In accepting the Department of National Service, Chamberlain had been genuinely distressed at having to leave Birmingham only six weeks after the commencement of his second term as Lord Mayor. His apprehension was all the greater because he sensed that it signalled the effective end of his municipal career.1 As he reflected on the imminent prospect of resignation or dismissal during the summer of 1917, he was thus inevitably oppressed by the difficulties in picking up the threads of his former business and civic life.2 To ease the pain of his transition back to life in Birmingham, immediately after his resignation Chamberlain retired to Rowfant near Crawley, a magnificent Elizabethan house which the two Chamberlain brothers and their families had taken for the summer. Given Austen’s own resignation after criticism in the Mesopotamia Commission’s report in mid-July, it proved ‘very handy as a retreat for two ministers out of a job’.3 Despite efforts to lose himself in the pleasures of the garden, the Sussex countryside and later shooting in Scotland, Chamberlain felt a burning sense of injustice at his public humiliation in a job he never wanted. ‘Although you have not dwelt upon it I see that you have perceived the intense bitterness of a failure which is not my fault but with which I must inevitably be associated’, he wrote to his step-mother a few days after his resignation. ‘I feel I ought to have a gold stripe as one wounded in the war, but seriously it is only by thinking of those who have had their causes broken by wounds that I can reduce my own misfortunes to their proper proportions.’ Despite these efforts at stoicism, however, the intensity of the stigma was so great that he regularly confessed a
desire ‘to flee away and hide … in a South Sea Island. Of course people naturally don’t suspect how sensitive one is – in fact I do my best to prevent their seeing it & the consequence is that they unintentionally tread unmercifully on one’s corns. Even the sympathy which is freely & generally expressed hurts like the devil.’4 Some private malicious consolation was derived from the difficulties of his successor and the eventual vindication of his own policy. Three days after his resignation, General Auckland Geddes, the War Office Director of Recruiting, became the new civilian Minister of National Service. The transformation was far more fundamental than simply a change in personnel and departmental title. Determined to avoid Chamberlain’s errors, Geddes obtained a seat in the Commons, a ministerial title, precise written instructions and a place on the newly-established War Priority Committee. Nevertheless, as Chamberlain rightly anticipated, Geddes had ‘cut a stick for his own back and … will be black and blue before he has done’.5 Despite the institutional reforms, the underlying problems of departmental friction and inefficiency remained as stubbornly intractable as ever. In the event, the Military Service (No 1) Act in February 1918 finally introduced the bulk release from exemptions which Chamberlain had sought thirteen months earlier. When the German offensive broke through the British lines on 21 March 1918, the threat of imminent military disaster completed Chamberlain’s vindication when the Military Service (No 2) Act in April finally implemented his principle of the ‘clean cut’, by removing the exemption from men in the 18-50 age groups. At one point, Chamberlain even contemplated the possibility that he would be called-up for military service with the grim satisfaction that at least he would have felt that he had ‘done his bit’. Despite the apparent triumph of his own manpower strategy and Geddes’ ‘sincere tribute of respect’ for all his predecessor’s efforts,6 little could assuage Chamberlain’s bitterness. In public he gave vent to his private feelings only once, at a meeting of the Grand Committee of the Birmingham Liberal Unionist Association on 18 December 1917. Although the meeting was ‘scantily attended’ and Chamberlain’s remarks were not reported in the London press, his 40minute speech offered a carefully prepared defence of his record at National Service, while at Annie’s insistence, his rousing peroration declared that the Unionists had new sympathies and progressive new ideas on social issues. According to Austen, his half-brother spoke ‘very easily and fluently with perfect command of his voice’. He was ‘above all impressed by the skill and force with which he stated his case … Such a speech delivered in the House of Commons would have put the Government on their trial and I think they would have found it hard to answer it.’7 The effort of unburdening himself was undoubtedly cathartic, but the ‘stigma of failure’ remained indelibly etched upon Chamberlain’s consciousness.8 At the end of the same month further satisfaction was derived from the opportunity to reject Lloyd George’s characteristically ungracious offer of a knighthood.9 In September 1918 Chamberlain then set about preventing Lloyd George from receiving the Freedom of the City of
Birmingham and although he succeeded only in delaying it until February 1921, he conspicuously absented himself from the ceremony. Beyond engendering a lifelong animus towards Lloyd George, the experience at National Service convinced Chamberlain that his future career must lie in the House of Commons. As a Councillor, there was always the vague public expectation that he would automatically succeed to his father’s old seat of West Birmingham after the war, but while he remained Lord Mayor the prospect of Parliament exercised little real appeal. ‘I confess I see little use or profit in the H. of C.’ he told a friend in May 1916, ‘you won’t readily get me to leave my job while I feel I can be of use, for the sake of beating my head against a wall in London.’10 After his experiences at National Service, however, Chamberlain resolved that he would never accept government office again without having first served his apprenticeship in the Commons. He also recognised that for all the bitterness at his recent treatment, he could not settle down to business and the selfish pursuit of money when one cousin had already been killed at the Front and another was still in danger in France. Encouragement from his siblings brushed aside all remaining doubts, for as he told his sisters, ‘although I know that half of what you say is exaggerated and three-quarters of what Annie says is exaggerated … if I didn’t try people would always think I could have done something if I had tried’.11 By 22 August Chamberlain was sufficiently resolved to write a revealingly ruminative letter to Charles Vince, the veteran Secretary of the Birmingham Liberal Unionist Association. Explaining ‘the impossibility of my taking up life again where I left it’, Chamberlain stated bluntly that his only options were to give up public life altogether or to enter Parliament. Although conceding that he was now perhaps too old, he requested Vince to make discreet enquiries about likely Birmingham vacancies as he could never represent anywhere else.12 While the speed of the decision was not perhaps surprising, what is remarkable about this letter is its implicit assumption that he would again hold ministerial office – probably under this own half-brother; a confident tone and language which runs directly counter to the repeated expressions of melancholy self-doubt and uncertainty he employed within the family circle for much of the next year. But as Hilda shrewdly concluded only two days later, ‘I feel pretty sure that you do mean to go into Parliament in your inner mind, and have known it for some time, however much the outward man protesteth’; a verdict Chamberlain conceded was ‘abominably clear sighted & brutal in pulling off all the clothes under which I had crawled’.13 The Chamberlain sisters were less accurate in their prediction that once Neville’s intentions were known one of the sitting Members would soon cheerfully make way for him. Despite a public hint in early September that he did not want to wait for a general election before entering the Commons, none of the incumbent Birmingham Members were prepared to stand aside.14 The possibility of succeeding the 74-year-old John Middlemore in Birmingham North was ruled out by the prior claim of Eldred Hallas, Chamberlain’s old ally in the campaign to launch the Savings Bank and a candidate for the British
Workers’ League with whom he hoped to collaborate in attracting working class votes to the anti-socialist cause. Even the frail 86-year-old Jesse Collings, who had worked closely with Joseph Chamberlain for 30 years and who had previously declared his willingness to stand down for Neville, now had a prospective candidate at Bordesley. While Vince’s soundings prompted local assurances that it had been ‘the dream of Bordesley for years that you should follow Mr Collings’, the constituency association warned that the difficulty would be with John Dennis, who as Collings’ adopted successor, was rumoured to be more eager than ever to enter the Commons in order to satisfy an ambitious wife.15 Despite tactful efforts by both Chamberlain brothers to encourage Dennis to stand aside, he attempted to play ‘rather a deep game’ in the hope of placing the local and national party machine under such an obligation that he could obtain a more attractive agricultural constituency in return.16 At the same time, efforts to circumvent Dennis by direct overtures to the ailing Collings were obstructed by his son-in-law who equivocated until Collings health had deteriorated to such a state that a personal approach was impossible. The resulting frustrations provoked Chamberlain to further outpourings of bitter self-doubt about his chosen path:
My career is broken. How can a man of nearly 50, entering the House with this stigma upon him, hope to achieve anything? The fate I foresee is that after mooning about for a year or two I shall find myself making no progress … I shall perhaps be defeated in an election, or else shall retire, and that will be the end. I would not attempt to re-enter public life if it were not war-time. But I can’t be satisfied with a purely selfish attention to business for the rest of my life.
