The Munich Agreement, and the British government’s ‘appeasement’ policy that led to it, has become a byword for spinelessness in international affairs. As with many things in history, it was perhaps more complicated than this narrative suggests, and a policy not without opposition at the time, including stridently from the HPT’s founder, Josiah C. Wedgwood, who we are commemorating this year.

By 1938 Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany was re-arming fast and beginning to expand. High on Hitler’s list of targets was the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia – a strategically important region with a high proportion of ethnic Germans in the population. The small state knew that it would be unable to stand up to German pressure on its own, so looked to Britain and France for support. As pressure mounted in early September, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to Germany to try to resolve the crisis.

Chamberlain’s solution was to extract concessions from the Czechoslovakian government to give Hitler what he wanted – concessions that the Czechoslovaks had little choice but to accept. Returning once again to Germany on 22 September, Chamberlain was horrified when Hitler demanded even more. This was too much for both the Czechoslovak government and the British cabinet, who refused to concede any more to Hitler. All sides prepared for war.

At this moment, however, Hitler changed his mind – historians believe this was in part due to his attendance at a military parade in Berlin where the crowds were subdued, not cheering for war as he expected. A further conference was arranged – at Munich on 29 September 1938 – and Hitler accepted a deal. It was a deal that handed over large areas of Czechoslovakian territory to Germany without a shot being fired. In hindsight it appears strange that Hitler was unenthusiastic, whereas Chamberlain was greeted by cheering crowds, treated as a hero for averting the war that seemed imminent just a few days before.

Despite perhaps a more complicated historical narrative than we are used to, history proved to be a hard judge on Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement. Within months the Munich agreement was in tatters and Nazi armies marched in to what remained of Czechoslovakia. Historians continue to argue whether the extra year before war broke out was crucial to British and French rearmament efforts, leaving them better prepared to fight in 1939. Yet it seems likely that Chamberlain acted in good faith: he felt Hitler would stop when his – in some eyes – ‘legitimate’ demands had been met and Germany was restored to its pre-First World War position. In this Chamberlain made a serious error and his historical reputation has to live with that.

Chamberlain’s policy was criticised at the time, and for the very reason history judged him so harshly: that he did not correctly anticipate Hitler’s expansionist agenda or understand the threat of the Nazi regime. By Munich opposition to his policies was growing – from Winston Churchill, of course, Anthony Eden, many in the Labour movement – but also Josiah C. Wedgwood, then Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Wedgwood had been a long-standing opponent of fascism and Nazism, and was horrified by the treatment of Jews in Nazi territories in particular. He believed that liberal democracy was under real threat, and that the parliamentary tradition so long fought-for in Britain was being risked by a reluctance to fight this threat. He campaigned passionately for the rights of refugees, and in vain called for a relaxation of British immigration laws.

Munich horrified Wedgwood as another opportunity lost to stand up to fascism and defend liberal democracy. He spoke against the deal at Labour rallies across the country, and forcefully in Parliament. Although in many ways Wedgwood was an idiosyncratic and controversial figure, with some opinions (particularly towards the Catholic community) that do not stand up to modern scrutiny, in this instance history has proved considerably kinder to him and his judgement:

The important thing is that the British people should not think it wrong to fight for their rights, because we are getting to a time now when we have got to make up our minds whether or not there is something worth fighting for, and to my mind the freedom of this country, the democracy of the world, is something that is worth fighting for. I think we may turn over the page that has recently been written, and turn it over with some shame, with some fear, as to what history will say of the course taken by the British Government in the last three weeks. But let the past be past and let us look towards the future. The future sketched out by those who trust Hitler is the [Munich] Pact. The future as envisaged by those who do not trust him is the reconstruction of some form of league of the people who are opposed to Hitlerism in order to enforce the rule of law instead of the rule of force.  [Hansard, October 4 1938]

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This year we are commemorating our founder, Josiah C. Wedgwood, on the 75^th anniversary of his death with a HLF-funded project based in Staffordshire. This includes a touring exhibition on Wedgwood’s campaigns in the 1930s and a set of Key Stage 3 schools materials currently available to schools in the local area (and later to be added on the HPT website). For more information about our events or for schools materials please contact Sammy Sturgess at ssturgess@histparl.ac.uk.

In addition to my usual post at the Victorian Commons, I’ve been working with Professor Sir David Cannadine (until recently a member of the History of Parliament’s editorial board) on his new BBC Radio 4 series about Prime Ministers and their props.  Each episode examines how a Prime Minister became associated with a certain object or prop in the popular mind, and how that prop, inadvertently or otherwise, came to define the public image of the premier in question.  The series considers Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella, Stanley Baldwin and his iron gates, Anthony Eden’s Homburg hat, Alec Douglas-Home and his matchsticks and Harold Wilson’s pipe and Gannex coat.  Unsurprisingly, the occasionally peculiar public association of Prime Ministers with certain inanimate objects did not escape their contemporaries in parliament. Furthermore, parliamentarians have played a crucial role in disseminating the association of our political leaders with their props.

The subject of our first episode, Neville Chamberlain, became widely associated with his umbrella after signing the Munich agreement in September 1938, and returning to England, brolly aloft, to deliver his ill-fated ‘peace in our time’ speech.  For a few brief months, the umbrella and Chamberlain became widely lauded icons of world peace.  However, within a year, war had been declared, and Chamberlain and his umbrella were quickly transformed into symbols of weakness and misguided optimism over the threat posed by Nazi Germany.  Although Westminster was quick to disassociate itself with Chamberlain and his umbrella, many MPs were taken aback by how a prop had transformed a previously unknown politician into a household name.  Accordingly, when MPs were discussing propaganda strategies in October 1939, MP for Lancashire, Hamilton Kerr, saw the identification of a prop as a key media technique for familiarising the public with its war leaders.  Props such as Chamberlain’s umbrella, he informed the Commons, had the power to transform politicians and military chiefs ‘from aloof and little-known personalities to human beings of flesh and blood’, who might help to keep ‘alive our faith in the dark days’ of war – a call to props that was answered by a certain Mr Churchill and his cigar.

Debate in parliament and during elections also provided one of the key means through which Prime Ministers became associated with props in the public mind.  Alec Douglas-Home, who became known as the ‘matchsticks premier’, after he unwittingly informed a journalist in 1962 (a year before he became Conservative Prime Minister) that he required a ‘box of matches’ to ‘simplify and illustrate’ economic documents, is the subject of our fourth episode.  His popular association with matchsticks was thanks in part to the efforts of the Labour Party, who under the leadership of Harold Wilson were intent on establishing themselves as the modernising force in British politics during the long election year of 1964. Key to this strategy was establishing that the Conservative party offered an out-dated approach to government, and Douglas-Home’s matchsticks provided the perfect rhetorical means of establishing Labour as the only party that was not just willing, but able to embrace the ‘white heat’ of technology.  At various points during 1964, Labour MPs and peers castigated Conservative economic, education and housing policy as the outmoded and ill-judged products of the ‘monarch of the matchstick’, and during that year’s election, Harold Wilson informed electors that a vote for the Conservatives was a vote for ‘matchbox economics in a computer age’.

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You can catch the remaining episodes of this series on BBC Radio 4 at 9:30am Wednesdays. All episodes will be available through BBC iPlayer after their initial broadcast.