Neville Chamberlain: Prime Minister and Amateur Entomologist

Arthur Neville Chamberlain
by Walter Stoneman in 1921
NPG x166506
©National Portrait Gallery

In the aftermath of last week’s General Election I was reminded of the degree of ignorance of the natural world displayed by the politicians of my lifetime. Not that any dare display such a knowledge since the half-educated ignoramuses employed by the news media would soon have them labelled as nerds unsuitable for public office.

I did learn though that one British Prime Minister who was derided for other reasons was a very keen amateur entomologist and a member of the Royal Entomological Society. That was Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940), PM from May 1937 until May 1940. In the April 1940 issue of Animal & Zoo Magazine, published shortly before he resigned in the fallout from the disastrous Norwegian Campaign and was replaced by Winston Churchill, Chamberlain was said to have collected ‘one of the finest series of moths in the country’. The article continued:

Young Mr. Chamberlain was an authority on the groups of little moths known as pugs. He had selected them for his special branch of investigation, and he used to collect specimens exhibiting a very wide range of colour-form in order to camouflage with their surroundings.

The biographies of Chamberlain also note that his interest in insects began at Rugby School. He continued to study and collect insects when he was sent by his father to set up a sisal plantation in the Bahamas. After six years and failure of the business he returned to Birmingham where he had success in business, local and then national politics.

During his time in business and in government Chamberlain was a keen birdwatcher, contributing to the annual reports on birds in London’s Royal Parks. He was of course catching the tail-end of the huge interest in natural history, with a plethora of local natural history societies catering for all aspects, that gripped mid and late Victorian Britain.

But Chamberlain will never be remembered for his interest in natural history. His holding the ill-fated Munich Agreement aloft on his return from the meeting with Hitler in September 1938 and uttering ‘Peace In Our Time’ will forever be in the national psyche even though that delay to armed conflict with Germany allowed Britain to rebuild its forces and replace its biplane fighters with Hawker’s Hurricane and Supermarine’s Spitfire, the sound of which—to those of us born to the resonance of, and Doppler effect on, the Merlin engines overhead—is imprinted in our brains.