2.21.2025 – you might think we had

you might think we had
won a major victory
instead … betraying

While the returning Prime Minister’s car was surging through hysterical crowds, a French window opened beside me and the Deputy Under Secretary, Sir Orme Sargent, stepped on to the balcony. He surveyed the scene below with dislike and disdain. “You might think’, he said to me, ‘that we had won a major victory instead of betraying a minor country’. Then, after a pause, as the window opposite opened and it was clear that Chamberlain was expected to say a few words, Sargent added: ‘I can bear almost anything provided he doesn’t say it is Peace with Honour’.

Meanwhile, as I subsequently learned, Chamberlain was greeted by his loyal and elated staff at the end of the long red-carpeted passage which runs from the front door of No. 10 to the Cabinet Room, and he said that in response to the clamour outside he must go up to the first floor window — Dizzy’s bedroom — and say a few words. It was then that Mrs. Chamberlain put the words into his mouth : ‘Tell them’, she said, ‘that you have brought back peace, but not just peace — peace with honour’. Tell them he did, and as the crowd roared in applause Sir Orme Sargent turned on his heel, closed the French window behind him and left me alone on the balcony.

Two years passed and I was myself a Private Secretary at No. 10. Disliking the unfresh air of the Central War Room, where a bedroom deep under ground was available to me, I contrived to have a bed provided in the large and now empty room from which first Disraeli and then Neville Chamberlain had sent their words echoing round the country and the world. Honour we still had, in abundance ; but Peace was only a memory and night after night the bombs in their hundreds devastated London. Early in 1941 the blast from one of them shattered the famous window as I pushed my head under the bed clothes to avoid the shower of glass.