The Chamberlain Litany

Download or read book The Chamberlain Litany written by Peter T. Marsh and published by Haus Pub.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chamberlains were the most controversial dynasty in British public life for more than sixty years. They were a close-knit family, and they treasured that solidarity throughout their lives. Bereft of a mother and with a largely absent father, the children of Joseph Chamberlain clung to each other as they grew up, and they kept in lifelong touch by letter. Based on those family letters, this book explores the accounts that the Chamberlain children told each other about the events in their lives. The two sons, Austen and Neville, followed their father into the highest echelons of British public life, and Neville eclipsed his father in fame. Their story is told through the eyes of their sisters. Hilda, the youngest of the surviving children, discovered that a pattern was repeated in the lives of all three men, a pattern that she recited in a kind of litany echoed by the family. Hilda's litany spoke of the way in which the Chamberlain men secured victory for each other over theiradversaries. Her story reached its climax when Neville met Adolf Hitler in Munich on the brink of war and managed to preserve the peace. But Hilda had reckoned without the last and greatest adversary of the Chamberlains: Winston Churchill. Churchill's achievement, first in winning the war that Neville had failed to avert, and then in writing a history of that war that damned Neville for its outbreak, forced Hilda to change her interpretation of the Chamberlains' story from a hymn ofpraise to a lament.