MR CHAMBERLAIN

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 445, 29 May 1937, Page 5

MR CHAMBERLAIN

Mr Neville Chamberlain completes the trinity of Chamberlains. The

others were Joseph, his father, and the late Sir Austen, his half-brother. By the irony of fate Neville, to whom politics was but a secondary consideration, almost an accident, has achieved what his father and his halfbrother, to whom politics was the very breath of their life, failed: to achieve— the Prime Ministership. It was the ambition Of both.

Born on March 18, 1869, he was ' educated at Rugby and at Mason College, Birmingham. For seven years, 1890 to T 897, he managed an estate in the Bahamas. Then he returned to Birmingham to take control of the Chamberlain business interests. He entered the Birmingham City Council in 1911, became chairman of the town-plannjng committee, an aiderman in 1914 and Lord Mayor in 191516.

Mr Lloyd George made him Direc-tor-General of National Services in 1916, but he resigned this office in 1917 on account of objection to his schemes, which were deemed to amount to industrial compulsion. He became Postmaster-General in 1922-Paymaster-General in 1923, and Minister of Health the same year. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1923 and: 1924, but had no opportunity

of presenting a Budget. Having become deeply interested in housing, he was Minister of Health from 1924 to 1929, and on Mr Philip Snowden relinquishing the Chancellorship of the Exchequer in 1931 he was again appointed to the office. He has held it ever since. The bare facts of Mr Chamberlain’s career do hot illustrate his purposefulness. Mr Lloyd George, with that biting sneer he has so often adopted of late, once dubbed him as “fit to be Lord Mayor of Birmingham in a lean year.” The sneer had in it much of a compliment, and a large amount of truth. Through all his Budgets Mr Chamberiai|n has been, noted for the orthodoxy of his financing, and a complete independence sf “crack-brained schemes.”