An obscure happening, ignored by headline writers 22 months ago, kicked open the throttle of a roaring train of events that has carried Rt. Hon. Arthur Neville Chamberlain to first political rank in Great Britain and marked him as Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald's probable successor. Last week tall, husky-voiced, smoldering-eyed Chancellor Chamberlain of Britain's Exchequer read to a hushed House of Commons the Empire's first sky-high-tariff budget. That speech was sufficiently historic. The obscure happening 22 months ago was Mr. Chamberlain's discreet success in getting himself appointed chairman of the Conservative Party by bumbling Party Leader Stanley Baldwin.
Mr. Baldwin, commercially inept, has bumbled away his large inherited fortune until he is today a man of merely comfortable means. He was bumbling the Conservative Party down the same hill 22 months ago, his most spectacular mistakes being to have no tariff policy, either for or against, and to have bitterly antagonized Britain's two potent press lords, Baron Beaverbrook and Viscount Rothermere, men of fierce patriotism but as easily enraged as small, spoiled boys. What the Conservative Party needed and what it has had increasingly in recent months has been the cold, hard, managing head of a CHAMBERLAIN—that mighty name from Birmingham.
Old J., Sir A. & Neville. Without his name and inherited political prestige, able but scarcely likeable Neville Chamberlain could most certainly not have overhauled the whole Conservative Party machine, oiling grievances and rubbing off bumblerust. His husky voice would scarcely have had the authority to bring those bad boys, the Press Peers, to their basically Conservative senses. Finally, without his family's name and prestigeous relations with Birmingham Mr. Chamberlain could not have applied the pressure necessary to make Mother Free Trade Britain change her middle name to High Tariff.
CHAMBERLAIN stands first for Birmingham's late, great "Old Joe," a hawk-nosed, bemonocled power in and behind several Victorian cabinets (though never Prime Minister). This elegant Parliamentarian whose daily orchid fascinated the House, lost the first two of his three wives after they bore him respectively:
Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain, today 68, who retired with the Garter after winning the Nobel Peace Prize as British Foreign Secretary (TIME, Dec. 20, 1926).
Arthur Neville Chamberlain, today 63, whom nobody expected to become the Chamberlain of today—which he is.
Sent by his father to Rugby, to Mason College, Birmingham and to a sweaty job of plantation management in the Bahamas, worthy Neville seemed to have about fulfilled his Chamberlain destiny when he returned to Birmingham and after five years of local political plodding became its Lord Mayor during the War.
Free-Trader David Lloyd George, then Prime Minister, plucked Lord Mayor Chamberlain from Birmingham and brought him on the national scene as Director of National Service (1916-17). At the last British election (TIME, Nov. 9), the Conservative machine which Neville Chamberlain had overhauled obliterated Mr. Lloyd George— and rolled up for the Conservative Party the largest majority ever won by any British party: 472 seats out of the House total of 615.