File 031 - Neville Chamberlain

Arthur Neville Chamberlain was born on March 18, 1869, in Birmingham, England, son of politician Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914) and younger half-brother of British politician Joseph Austen Chamberlain (1863-1937).

He was a British Conservative politician. He was educated at Rugby School and Mason Science College. Not interested in his studies, his father apprenticed him to a firm of accountants in 1889. After spending six years trying to unsuccessfully establish a sisal plantation in the Bahamas, he returned to England. He purchased Hoskins & Company, a manufacturer of metal ship berths, and served as its managing director for 17 years. Chamberlain became a Member of Parliament in the 1918 general election for the new Birmingham Ladywood constituency. In 1923, he was promoted to Minister of Health and then Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1931. He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 until 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and, for his signing of the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938, ceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war. He resigned as Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, and was replaced with Winston Churchill. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (1938) and received numerous honorary doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham, Leeds, and Reading Universities.

In 1911, he married Anne de Vere Cole (1882–1967). He died on November 9, 1940, in Heckfield, England.