Foreign News: Up Beaverbrook, Out Chamberlain?

Back to London one night last week went Prime Minister Winston Churchill, after a surprise visit to the northeast coastal defenses. Again he had proved his tremendous popularity with the English people. With enthusiasm they cheered him as he drove slowly along the coast, solidly British in his pin-striped business suit, his high-crowned black hat. With easy friendliness he responded to the welcome, stopping often to chat and joke with the villagers and soldiers. Good-humoredly he posed for cameramen, tinkering with a U. S.-made tommy gun (see cut), chewing on a big cigar. Playfully he watched a brash eleven-year-old click his toy pistol at him, laughed, “You’ve got me, lad.”

No less popular than all this bon-hommousness was Mr. Churchill’s decision two days later to call the efficient little’ Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, into his inner War Cabinet. The official announcement said that “for the time being Lord Beaverbrook will continue to be Minister of Aircraft Production,” intimating clearly that other Cabinet changes would follow. Most Britons hoped that this meant that Lord Beaverbrook was being eased into ailing Neville Chamberlain’s vaguely defined position as Lord President of the Council.

Symbol first of appeasement and then of easygoing armament, the onetime Prime Minister has for weeks been under great popular pressure to get out. But Chamberlain is still head of the Conservative Party, controls the dominating Conservative bloc of 374 in the House of Commons. Last week, however, suffering aftereffects of an intestinal operation, he had an excellent explanation should he fail to return to his office.

Britons have also been anxious to get rid of prying Minister of Information Alfred Duff Cooper, and his house-to-house canvassers of public opinion, contemptuously nicknamed “Cooper’s Snoopers.” In that case Lord Beaverbrook was expected to assume the overlordship of the Ministry of Information.

Most eminent spokesman for the anti-Chamberlain camp last week was Novelist-Historian H. G. Wells. In the London News Chronicle he also urged the removal of Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax, proposed that the whole Foreign Office be reorganized into a small committee of foreign relations, including Churchill, Labor Minister Bevin, senior career diplomatist Sir Robert Vansittart, Air Secretary Sir Archibald Sinclair, Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton and old David Lloyd George. His Wellsian appeal to Chamberlain and followers: “Let us not recriminate. It is just because I believe that you are honorable and patriotic men that I implore you to have the magnanimity to acknowledge the error of your ways to make this sacrifice to our national duty and withdraw into positions where you can do no further harm.”

The New Statesman & Nation took up the same cudgel, laid it on with a different intent. It hoped by the removal of Lord Halifax to facilitate democratic “counterrevolution” against Hitlerism throughout the Continent (TIME, July 22). “Here is a moment of supreme psychological importance. . . . The peoples of Europe know far better than Lord Halifax that the French capitulation has closed an epoch of history and they ask themselves anxiously, ‘is the battle now between Hitler’s New European Order and the Old British Empire?’ Or is it, as they desire but hardly dare to hope, between the lords of the Third Reich and the protagonists of European revolution? On the answer to that question hangs the issue of the war and the fate of these islands.”

The answer to all these questions still remained in,.the hands of Neville Chamberlain. Since the failure of Munich he has considered the war a personal conflict between himself and the German war lord who blighted his efforts for peace. Short of a political Putsch, which would probably cause dangerous disharmony at this time, Britain could only wait for him to change his mind.