On the 20th of February 1938 Anthony Eden resigned as Foreign Secretary because of the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain’s government. As a writer I’m interested in what makes writing memorable. There is one page of writing that I have read once, and that must be around forty-seven years ago, but I feel sure that I can recite it quite accurately now. It is from The Gathering Storm by Winston Churchill, and it concerns that day when Anthony Eden resigned. As far as Churchill was concerned, Eden was the only man in Chamberlain’s government who was standing up to Hitler. So now I have to see how good my memory is. This is my recollection of what Churchill wrote.
Throughout the war, whatever time I retired to bed, whatever had happened, or whatever fateful decisions I had made, I would fall fast asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. But on the night that Anthony Eden resigned I tossed and turned all night long, and as dawn broke, all I could see in front of me was death. A poem I had read in Punch a few years beforehand, about a train crash, was going around and around in my head.
Who’s in change of the clattering train
The axles creak and the couplings strain
And the pace is hot, and the points are near
And sleep has deadened the driver’s ear
And the signals flash through the night in vain
For death is in charge of the clattering train
I think that is pretty close. As a book, I commend The Gathering Storm to you. It made quite an impression on me, as you can probably tell. To what extent Eden was right to resign, I cannot tell. Clearly, through the lens of history, the piece of paper Chamberlain so cheerfully brandished, with Hitler’s signature, was worthless. Whether it bought Britain time to rearm, is perhaps another matter. But if it weren’t for The Gathering Storm, the only memory I would have of Anthony Eden would be the Suez Crisis, and the end of his premiership.