Afterwords

Abstract

British foreign policy in the age of appeasement is a deep and broad subject of inquiry, and historians have certainly not shirked their duty in explaining it to their readers. For years after the beginning of war in 1939, the view of Baldwin, Chamberlain and the major appeasers was defined by what is frequently called the ‘Guilty Men’ school, which took its lead from the popular book of the same title published pseudonymously in 1940 by three young journalists: Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen, writing under the name ‘Cato.’ This was powerfully reinforced by the dramatic interpretation of the Second World War by Winston Churchill and by the earliest academic histories of the period, particularly those by Sir Lewis Namier and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett. There was general agreement: the leaders of Britain in this dangerous period were ‘guilty’ of being blind to their duty, of failing to rearm sufficiently, of refusing to hear — in fact of stifling — other voices which spoke the truth. While all the appeasers were guilty men, there was disagreement among the accusers whether Baldwin, in his indolent disinterest in the growing European crisis, or Chamberlain, in his rigid determination to solve it through generosity, was the greater villain. That school remains vital and continues to recruit adherents.