Political historians love diaries and old-fashioned letters. They are not at all keen on telephones and emails. The real truth about past politics lies in the private papers of the politicians themselves and their families.
Over the generations politicians of all parties have discussed their plans in correspondence with their colleagues and relatives, and poured out their feelings in their private journals. Today a few of them keep diaries, but the full and frank exchange of views in letters has virtually ceased.
No one will ever be able to write a book about a political family today-say the Milibands-based on the full truth which only private records can reveal: such papers will not exist. For them there will never be anything comparable to the marvellous study of the Chamberlain family, Britain’s greatest urban political dynasty, written by Peter Marsh, an American academic who has dedicated his career to helping us understand our modern history better.
Marsh is best known for his immensely detailed biography of Joe Chamberlain, the powerful founder of the dynasty, who made a fortune out of screw manufacturing in Birmingham— a fortune which sustained the political careers of his sons, Austen and Neville, though the latter made a good deal of money of his own as a successful businessman in early life. ‘The Chamberlains’, Marsh writes in his new, first-rate book, ‘ thus produced three leading statesmen within two generations, an achievement unrivalled in British history’.
The book is based on no fewer than ten thousand letters which passed between members of this remarkable family over a period of sixty-five years between 1875, when Joe began to transform Birmingham into a model for local government world-wide, and 1940 which saw Neville’s brilliant career end in sudden death amid controversy which still haunts his memory, overshadowing his huge achievements as a radical social reformer in the 1920s and 1930s. The very able, strong-minded women in the family contributed just as powerfully as the men to the massive correspondence which, with Peter Marsh as our guide, enables us to follow the triumphs and tragedies of the Chamberlains in intimate and fascinating detail.
Having sorted out Birmingham, they moved on to the world stage, passionately convinced that Britain could only retain its greatness at the head of its empire which should be made permanent on the basis of economic unity. Joe took his family and his substantial political following out of the Liberal Party in 1886 and into coalition with the Conservatives in the hope of making his vision a reality. The history of the Conservative Party in the first three decades of the twentieth century is dominated by the Chamberlains’ ultimately unsuccessful campaign to keep Britain’s destiny an imperial one. Almost as important was the family’s commitment to social reform. That legacy lives on in David Cameron’s modern, progressive Conservative Party.
The Chamberlain Litany: Letters within a Governing Family from Empire to Appeasement by Peter T.Marsh is published by Haus Books at £25.
Alistair Cooke, the official Conservative historian, is one of the Party’s new working peers. He will take his seat in the Lords on 10 January as Lord Lexden.
( 1 comments ) Tags: Austen, Birmingham, Chamberlain, Joseph, Neville, Peter Marsh
Comment by Jeremy Thomass on December 15, 2010 at 3:39 pm
It’s really good to see these papers, which have been a vital source for historians of this period for decades (see Kenneth Morgan’s ‘Consensus and Disunity’, on Lloyd George’s Lib-Con Coalition, to cite but one example), brought together in one study. It emphasises once more how much what can rightly be termed ‘the conservative liberal tradition’ has contributed to British life in the past and, by implication, might hopefully do in the future as well