Politics From Inside : An Epistolary Chronicle 1906-1914
(Roestvlekjes / Foxing / Taches de rouille / Rostfleckig /...)
Roestvlekjes / Foxing / Taches de rouille / Rostfleckig / / Political history / Engels / English / Anglais / Englisch / hard cover / 17 x 24 cm / 676 .pp /
Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain was a British foreign secretary from 1924 to 1929, statesman and co-winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize for peace.
Background
Austen Chamberlain was born on October 16, 1863, in Birmingham. He was the second child and eldest son of Joseph Chamberlain, then a rising industrialist and political radical, later Mayor of Birmingham and a dominant figure in Liberal and Unionist politics at the end of the 19th century. His mother, the former Harriet Kenrick, died in childbirth, leaving his father so shaken that for almost 25 years he maintained a distance from his first-born son. In 1868, his father married Harriet's cousin, Florence, and had further children.
Education
After attending Rugby School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he studied in Paris and Berlin and became his father's private secretary.
Career
In the ministries of Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour, Chamberlain was successively civil lord of the admiralty (1895 - 1900), financial secretary to the treasury (1900 - 1902), postmaster general (1902), and chancellor of the exchequer (1903 - 1905). As chancellor, and in opposition after the Conservative defeat in 1905, he inherited his father's role as principal advocate of protective tariffs. In 1911 Arthur Balfour resigned the party leadership and Chamberlain was one of the two principal claimants to the succession, the other being Walter Long, an old-fashioned Tory squire. Deadlock ensued, and both withdrew in favor of Bonar Law. In 1915 Chamberlain entered H. H. Asquith's first coalition government as secretary for India, resigning two years later because of an adverse report on his department by a paliamentary committee, although no personal blame was imputed. In April 1918 he entered the war cabinet and in 1919 became chancellor of the exchequer in David Lloyd George's coalition government, continuing a policy of reestablishing British finances after the disruptions of the war. On Bonar Law's temporary retirement in 1921, Chamberlain became leader of the Conservative Party and the premiership seemed within his grasp. However, he found party opposition to his faith in the coalition government, especially over the Anglo-Irish treaty of December 1921, and at the Carlton House meeting of October 19, 1922, the Conservatives decided to withdraw from the coalition. Chamberlain thereupon resigned his leadership. He remained outside the governments of Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin but returned to office as foreign secretary in Baldwin's second government from 1924 to 1929. Here he reached the climax of his career. His principal achievement was the Locarno pact of October 1925 in which Germany's western frontiers were guaranteed by Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany, and the way was cleared for Germany's entry into the League of Nations. In 1928 he published Peace in Our Time. The "Locarno spirit" which Chamberlain tried to engender had as its aim the reconciliation of Germany to the Versailles Treaty of 1918 by frequent meetings with Gustav Stresemann and Aristide Briand, the German and French foreign ministers, as well as with Mussolini. During this period Chamberlain was instrumental in helping the League of Nations to a period of apparent efficacy, but later events proved that the "Locarno spirit" had never dealt with the genuine differences between the signatories of the pact. After 1929 Chamberlain held office again only for a short period during the "national government" of Ramsay MacDonald in 1931. He died on March 16, 1937, in London.
Achievements
As Foreign Secretary, he negotiated the Locarno Pact (1925), aimed at preventing war between France and Germany. He was one of the few MPs supporting Winston Churchill's appeals for rearmament against the German threat in the 1930s.
He was awarded the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize in conjunction with Charles G. Dawes, U. S. vice-president, and was made a Knight of the Garter.
(Roestvlekjes / Foxing / Taches de rouille / Rostfleckig /...)
Politics
He stood for the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged with the Conservatives in 1912, and led the Conservatives in the Commons in 1921–22.
Membership
He entered Parliament in 1892 and remained a member for the rest of his life, serving first as a Liberal Unionist and after 1895 as a Conservative. He was a leader of the Conservative Party.
Personality
Able, popular, and loyal, he lacked the ruthlessness which was sometimes needed to gain his ends.
Quotes from others about the person
It was truly said of him by a friendly colleague: "He always played the game and he always lost it. "
Interests
He had an interest in rock gardening.
Connections
In 1906, Chamberlain married Ivy Muriel Dundas, daughter of Colonel Henry Dundas. They had two sons, Joseph and Lawrence, and a daughter, Diane.
