Prisms of British Appeasement – Revisionist Reputations of John Simon, Samuel Hoare, Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax and Alfred Duff Cooper

John Simon, Samuel Hoare, Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax, and Alfred Duff Cooper were five major UK political figures from the National Governments of the 1930s. Three of these men were condemned in a famous 1940 pamphlet as major 'Guilty Men,' as appeasers responsible for Britain's failure to contain Hitler and Mussolini. Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper were excused since they had resigned from office in 1938. All of these men wrote memoirs to give their version of the events of the 1930s. Their actions and evolving reputations centered around their different international perspectives and governmental experience with respect to the collective policies advocating appeasement. Each man's career acts as a prism, reflecting different national and international perspectives (or viewpoints) of the time. As such, all five therefore deserve to be judged on their own separate relationships with Neville Chamberlain, along with his and their attitudes to appeasement, foreign policy, and rearmament. An important theme of this book is that the totality of their experiences, political positions, and actions gives the historian a much wider perception of the policy options available to Britain, in contrast to concentrating on just the issues and policies of one participant, or of Chamberlain himself. The comparison of their careers, opinions, and actions provides a very different slant on the appeasement issue. Prisms of British Appeasement tackles one of the most perplexing and divisive periods in modern British history, utilizing both recent and classic monographs on the period prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, along with the memoirs and biographies of the five subjects, and numerous other biographies, memoirs, and sources.