Neville Chamberlain

According to the historian of Birmingham’s Municipal Bank, the idea came to the Lord Mayor as he was crossing Chamberlain Square. It was wartime, and the government needed the nation’s savings for its war loans. Neville Chamberlain asked himself a simple question: why should the city not run a savings bank of its own?

Nobody else in Britain had one. Chamberlain put his scheme to the city council on 4 April 1916, and it was approved. Within weeks it was in trouble. The joint-stock banks opposed the first Bill in Parliament, and it was dropped. A narrower version became law and received the royal assent on 23 August 1916. It hedged the idea about with limits: only towns of more than 250,000 people could use it, savings were capped at £200, and the bank was to be wound up three months after the war ended. The Victoria County History records that Birmingham alone went ahead.

The Birmingham Corporation Savings Bank opened on 29 September 1916, in a semi-basement of the city’s Water Department. The plan rested on the wage packet. Small sums were deducted from workers’ pay; they were given coupons, at first for a shilling, to stick on a card, and when the card reached £1 they took it to the bank and paid it in. The trade unions were consulted and backed it.

Ships’ berths in Bordesley

Chamberlain was a businessman before he was anything else. He was born on 18 March 1869 at Southbourne, a house in Edgbaston, the son of Joseph Chamberlain and his second wife, Florence Kenrick. His mother died in 1875, when he was six. He was sent to Rugby School and then to Mason College in Birmingham, where he studied metallurgy and engineering without much enthusiasm, and in 1889 he was put to work in a firm of accountants.

Then came the Bahamas. His father, short of money, sent him to grow sisal on the island of Andros. Neville took out a lease on about 26,000 acres in 1891 and spent most of the next six years there. The soil proved unsuitable, the venture failed, and Joseph Chamberlain lost about £50,000. Neville came home in 1897.

He threw himself into Birmingham industry. He became a director of Elliott’s Metal Company at Selly Oak, makers of copper and brass sheet, tube and wire, and later a director of the Birmingham Small Arms Company. In November 1897, with help from his family, he bought Hoskins, a Bordesley firm that made metal berths for ships’ cabins. He ran it for seventeen years. His biographers credit him with a profit-sharing scheme and a medical clinic for the workforce. In the census of 1911 he gave his occupation simply as “Ship’s Berth Manufacturer”.

Planning the city

Politics came late. In 1910 Chamberlain gave evidence to Parliament in favour of the Bill that merged Birmingham with its suburbs and tripled its size. In November 1911 he was elected to the council for All Saints’ ward. That same year he married Anne Cole and set up home at Westbourne in Edgbaston, which would be his Birmingham home until he died.

The council gave him the new Town Planning Committee. Under the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909, Birmingham prepared four planning schemes before 1914, and the Victoria County History says the one for Quinton became a model for other councils. The war stopped them being carried out. He also led an inquiry into the city’s housing in 1913, a forerunner of the national Unhealthy Areas Committee that he chaired from 1919 to 1921.

Lord Mayor in wartime

He became Lord Mayor in 1915, a year after his father’s death. He cut the Lord Mayor’s expense allowance in half, set up crèches for workers and stockpiled coal to sell to the poor at cost. He was among the leading campaigners for a permanent orchestra paid for by the city. In 1919 the council agreed to a grant of £1,250 a year for an experimental five years, and the City of Birmingham Orchestra gave its first concert on 5 September 1920.

He was re-elected Lord Mayor in 1916 but did not finish the term. In December Lloyd George made him Director of National Service in London. He had little support from the Prime Minister, and after eight months he resigned, in August 1917. The experience, he wrote, “reminds me of the Bahamas when the plants didn’t grow”. The bank he had left behind did rather better. A new Act of 1919 made it permanent as the Birmingham Municipal Bank, and on 1 September 1919 it opened with a head office and seventeen branches. Chamberlain was the first chairman of its committee and stayed on it, even as an MP, until he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1923.

Birmingham’s man at Westminster

In 1918 he was elected MP for Birmingham Ladywood. He was 49. A year later the city’s Liberal Unionists and Conservatives merged, and he wrote: “The decision to unite practically places the direction of Unionist politics in Birmingham in my hands. I am not quite sure whether all those present perceived this; I did not mention it.” He moved to the safer Edgbaston seat in 1929.

As Minister of Health he passed his own Housing Act in 1923, though Birmingham built only 3,433 council homes under it. Most of the city’s great inter-war estates, including the new streets of Kingstanding on land taken into the city in 1928, went up under later Acts. But it was Chamberlain who came home in October 1933 to open Birmingham’s 40,000th council house, praising, as The Times reported on 24 October, “an achievement on the part of Birmingham which has no parallel in this or any other country”.

His bank had grown with the estates. Kingstanding got an evening branch at 595 Kingstanding Road on 1 January 1932, open on Mondays and Fridays from six to eight, and a new building of its own in 1937. On 22 October 1932 Chamberlain, by then Chancellor, laid the foundation stone of a new head office on Broad Street. Prince George opened it on 27 November 1933, with Chamberlain among the guests.

Munich, and a speech at home

He became Prime Minister in May 1937. On 30 September 1938 he signed the Munich Agreement, which handed the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, and came home saying, “I believe it is peace for our time.” In March 1939 German troops marched into Prague. Two days later, on 17 March, the eve of his seventieth birthday, Chamberlain spoke in Birmingham and changed his tone: “there is hardly anything I would not sacrifice for peace. But there is one thing that I must except, and that is the liberty that we have enjoyed for hundreds of years, and which we will never surrender.”

Britain declared war on 3 September 1939. After the failure of the Norway campaign Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister in May 1940 and served in Churchill’s government until illness forced him out that autumn. He died at Heckfield in Hampshire on 9 November 1940. His ashes were buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey, next to those of Andrew Bonar Law.