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Jeffrey Lewis

The Chamberlain Litany

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The Chamberlain Litany
Letters within a Governing Family from Empire to Appeasement

RRP: Price: £25
Haus Price: £20.00 Friends of Haus: £18.75

Publication Date:
2010-05-03

ISBN:
9781906598631

Format:
Hardback

Territory:
World

Category:
New Titles

Pages:
399

Recommended
Books

Letters within a Governing Family from Empire to Appeasement
By Peter T. Marsh

The story of Britain's greatest political dynasty in their own words.

The Chamberlains were the most controversial dynasty in British public life for more than sixty years. They were a close-knit family, and they treasured that solidarity throughout their lives. Bereft of a mother and with a largely absent father, the children of Joseph Chamberlain clung to each other as they grew up and kept up a lifelong correspondance by letter.

Based on those family letters, this book explores the account that the Chamberlain children gave each other about what they were doing. The two sons, Austen and Neville, followed their father into the highest echelons of British public life; and Neville eclipse his father in fame. Their story is told here as the sisters saw it. Hilda, the youngest of the surviving children, discovered that a pattern was repeated in the lives of all three men, a pattern which she recited in a kind of litany echoed by the family. Hilda's account spoke of the way in which the Chamberlain men secured victory for each other over their adversaries. Her song reached its climax when Neville met Hitler at Munich on the brink of war and managed to preserve peace.

But Hilda had reckoned without the last and greatest adversary of the Chamberlains: Churchill. His achievement first in winning the war that Neville had failed to avert and then in writing a history of that war which damned Neville for its outbreak, forced Hilda to change her interpretation of the Chamberlains' story from a hymn of praise to a lament.

Sunday Times article on 'The Chamberlain Litany', 7th March 2010:

'NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN read and annotated Hitler’s Mein Kampf in its original German before he embarked on his policy of appeasement, says a new biography.

The former prime minister, who acquired a 1933 copy of the book, highlighted sections that he thought revealing of the German dictator’s mindset, and even added exclamation marks alongside some passages.

Chamberlain was struck by sections that underlined Hitler’s anti-Semitism, his faith in Aryan superiority and his sense of racial affinity with the British.

In one highlighted passage about Anglo-German relations, Hitler states: “The bond of kindred blood and the main features of a common civilisation united us.”

The discovery is contained in a biography called The Chamberlain Litany by Peter Marsh, a professor of history at Birmingham University. It is not known just when Chamberlain read the book, but Marsh believes it was before he met Hitler in 1938, which throws new light on the appeasement policy.'

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article7052510.ece

A great article and author interview in the Wall Street Journal:

Click here to see the full article from Javier Espinoza on 24 May 2010.

Review in the Telegraph, 24th May 2010:

Click here to read the full review.

'A fascinating story...' - Miranda Carter, the Telegraph