Peter Neville

Sir Alexander Cadogan and Lord Halifax's ‘Damascus road’ conversion over the Godesberg terms 1938

The article challenges the recent perception that Lord Halifax was the hero of the Czech crisis in 1938, when in fact the real credit for his revolt against the Godesberg terms belonged to Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under‐Secretary at the Foreign Office. It does on to argue that Halifax was ill suited by nature to be Foreign Secretary and that his subsequent record shows him to have been a natural appeaser, still loyal to Chamberlain, who argued for an accommodation with Hitler in the summer of 1940.

Rival Foreign Office perceptions of Germany, 1936-39

This article examines the charge that, especially during the period when Sir Robert Vansittart was Permanent Under-Secretary, the Foreign Office was anti-German in its orientation. It also analyzes the role played by three successive ambassadors, Sir Horace Rumbold, Sir Eric Phipps and Sir Nevile Henderson in influencing the Foreign Office perception of Germany, and examines the Foreign Offices attitude to the anti-Nazi Germany opposition. Finally, the article looks at the evidence for continuity between the Vansittart period, and that which followed under Sir Alexander Cadogan, before concluding that the latter was more inclined to accept the appeasement of Germany.

From the Anschluss to the ‘May Scare’, 1938

Writing to Lord Lothian some six weeks after the Anschluss, Nevile Henderson remained bleak about the prospects of Anglo-German accord.

From Nuremberg to Munich

The month of September 1938, when he made a significant contribution to British policy-making, was a crucial one in Henderson’s career. He was however left exhausted and pessimistic by the process of coercing the Czechs into ceding the Sudetenland at the Munich Conference.

From the May Crisis to the Nuremberg Rally, May–September 1938

The May Crisis of 1938 was clearly a very unsettling experience for Henderson. His despatches in the three months that followed it were full of references to the need to avoid such alarms and excursions; again (a lengthy telegram to Halifax on 12 August, for example, stated that ‘We cannot keep having May 21sts’).1

The Polish Crisis

Once Henderson returned to his duties on 24 April 1939, following his authorised absence in protest against the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, he was thrust into a situation of accelerating tension between Germany and Poland. Britain attempted, as it had done over Czechoslovakia in 1938, to play the role of mediator between the two parties.1

The Emergent Diplomat

Nevile Meyrick Henderson was born on 10 June 1882, the third child of Robert and Emma Henderson of Sedgwick Park, near Horsham, Sussex. Sedgwick was to play a central role in Nevile Henderson’s life thereafter, as he himself noted many years later while awaiting his own death from the cruel cancer that killed him. ‘Each time that I returned to England’, Henderson wrote, the white cliffs of Dover meant Sedgwick for me, and when my mother died in 1931 and my home was sold by my elder brother’s wife, something went out of my life that nothing can replace.1

A Man with a Mission

Nevile Henderson’s appointment to the Berlin Embassy came as a surprise. He had, after all, seemingly been cast out of the ‘charmed European Inner Circle’ of the Foreign Office and been ‘moved very much to the periphery in Buenos Aires’.1 At the time he recorded his reaction in his memoirs, recognising ‘a sense of my own inadequacy for what was obviously the most difficult and most important post in the whole of the diplomatic service’. Henderson also believed that he had been ‘specially selected by Providence for the definite mission of, as I trusted, helping to preserve the peace of the world’.2 In this messianic spirit Henderson came back to Britain, reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf in its original German on the way home. While awaiting his transfer to Berlin, Henderson had an interview with Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister designate, who outlined to me his views on general policy towards Germany, and I think I may honestly say that to the last and bitter end I followed the general line which he set me, all the more easily and faithfully since it corresponded so closely with my private conception of the service which I could best render in Germany to my own country.3

Interlude: October 1938–February 1939

Nevile Henderson was a very sick man by the autumn of 1938, with a cancer of the throat which needed immediate surgery, and necessitated a return to London. He left Berlin in the middle of October and only returned in February 1939. During this period, however, and despite his illness, Henderson remained in touch with Embassy colleagues like Ogilvie-Forbes, and corresponded with Halifax, Cadogan and influential figures like Lord Londonderry. He continued, from afar, to try and influence the course of Anglo-German relations.