Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey by The Countess of Carnarvon

Author:The Countess of Carnarvon [Carnarvon, The Countess of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-34497-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

(Picture Acknowledgment 13.1)

13

The Coming Disaster

On 30 September 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to rapturous crowds of relieved Britons who were desperate to believe the Prime Minister when he assured them that he had secured ‘peace for our time’, having signed the Munich Agreement with Germany, France and Italy. On hearing the news, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent Chamberlain a two-word telegram: ‘Good man’.

Those cheering crowds are a salient reminder that, though it seems extraordinary now, there were plenty besides Roosevelt who still believed that Hitler’s ambitions had been satisfied and that a cataclysmic war had therefore been avoided. The irony of the Western powers’ terrible misreading of the situation is inescapable for us, who know what happened next. But at the time, Alfred Duff Cooper, who resigned in protest the day after Chamberlain’s now notorious declaration that Germany and England had agreed ‘never to go to war again’, was in a tiny minority. And even Duff Cooper had believed, right up to Chamberlain’s return from Munich with what he saw as a disastrously conciliatory agreement, that the Prime Minister’s conference would indeed succeed in averting war. It was Britain and France’s failure to secure the means for holding Hitler to his pledge to go no further in Europe that drove Duff Cooper’s decision, and not, strictly speaking, the abandonment of Czechoslovakia to its fate. The anti-war mood was again rampant, and Duff Cooper and Churchill were isolated in their belief that the agreement had made war more likely, not less. In his famous resignation speech, Duff Cooper concluded that he might have been persuaded to accept war with honour or peace with dishonour, but war with dishonour was too much.

Reaction to Duff Cooper’s leaving was mixed, but MP Vyvyan Adams, who also opposed appeasement, described it as ‘the first step back to national sanity’. Porchey, like many others, was stung into action by the resignation of his old friend. In October 1938 he wrote to Chamberlain expressing deep concern about the Nazi domination of Europe and urging that a programme of rearmament be adopted immediately.

The post-Munich relief lasted just a few short months. In November 1938, SA Nazi paramilitaries went on an anti-Jewish rampage across Germany and Austria in which thousands of civilians also participated. The pogrom claimed ninety-one lives, destroyed countless homes and businesses, displaced 30,000 people, and signalled to the world that Hitler’s aggression was directed not just towards his neighbours, but also towards the resident Jewish population.

In March 1939, amid a mood of sickened realisation that all the concessions had seemingly been in vain, Britain pledged to support Poland in the event of invasion by Germany. On 27 April, Duff Cooper had the satisfaction of seeing that conscription had finally been introduced, as he had been urging for more than two years, though only for men aged twenty and twenty-one. Still, something had shifted. Britain was now gearing up to a war footing. Churchill was no longer the rebel, crying wolf on the sidelines; he

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