So let’s have a look at the responses to Chamberlain’s response to Noel-Baker’s parliamentary motion of 21 June 1938. First up was Sir Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberal party. He was mainly concerned with foreign policy more generally, asking whether the recent Anglo-Italian agreement was not intended as part of an effort by Mussolini […]
After Philip Noel-Baker’s opening speech on 21 June 1938, the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, replied for the government. He began by touching briefly on the Japanese invasion of China, in a way which interestingly foreshadowed something he said just over three months later: if it were not that China is so far away and the
Der Spiegel has a lengthy article based upon a new book by historians Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer called Soldaten (no English version yet, unfortunately). It’s based on the transcripts of secret recordings made of the conversations of German POWs captured by British and American forces in the Second World War. They would have talked
On 21 June 1938, Philip Noel-Baker MP moved a reduction of £100 in an amount being voted for Foreign Office salaries. This is a time-honoured way of starting an argument in the House of Commons (well, technically they are called debates): it allows the mover to get into the agenda an issue they consider to
As indicated when he returned from Munich last week, Chamberlain is to fly back to Germany to meet with Hitler a second time. (Above headlines are from The Times, p. 10.) This time, they are meeting at Godesberg, a spa town in the Rhineland. Chamberlain will take the Anglo-French plan to Hitler, which may be
It’s the 75th anniversary of Stanley Baldwin’s famous ‘the bomber will always get through’ speech. It’s an important text which is widely quoted, both in my primary and my secondary sources, as a testament to the fear of bombing in the 1930s. But I’ve never actually read it very closely, and I think I’m in
