Sir Austen Chamberlain

Sir Austen Chamberlain
(1863-1937)


British foreign secretary from 1924 to 1929, who helped bring about the Locarno Pact (1925), a group of treaties intended to secure peace in western Europe by eliminating the possibility of border disputes involving Germany. The pact gained for Chamberlain a share (with Vice President Charles G. Dawes of the United States) of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1925.
The eldest son of the statesman Joseph Chamberlain, Austen was half-brother to the future prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Entering the House of Commons in 1892, he rose to be postmaster general (1902) and chancellor of the Exchequer (1903-05). He was a strong candidate to succeed former prime minister Arthur James Balfour as Conservative Party leader (1911) but withdrew in favour of Bonar Law. During World War I, Chamberlain was secretary of state for India (1915-17) and a member of the war Cabinet (1918-19). After the war, he became chancellor of the Exchequer once more (1919-21) and lord privy seal (1921-22). From March 1921 until October 1922 he was Conservative Party leader. He then remained outside the government during the ministries of Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin (1922-24) but returned to office as foreign secretary in Baldwin's second government (1924-29).

The Locarno Pact, concluded on Chamberlain's 62nd birthday (Oct. 16, 1925) by Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany, was the high point of his foreign secretaryship; he lost popularity after the failure of the Geneva Conference on naval limitations (August 1927) and the abortive and needlessly secret Anglo-French disarmament negotiations (July 1928). He left office with Stanley Baldwin's second ministry in June 1929, returned briefly (August-October 1931) as first lord of the admiralty, and then passed the rest of his life as an elder statesman.