His grandson, the fifth Baron, served as a government whip from 1939 to 1940 in the government of Neville Chamberlain.
Salisbury was part of two parliamentary deputations which called on the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, in the autumn of 1936 to remonstrate with them about the slow pace of British rearmament in the face of the growing threat from Nazi Germany.
When Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister in May 1938 Stanhope was made President of the Board of Education, and in February 1938 he also succeeded Lord Halifax as Leader of the House of Lords.
Beesly was born at Bromsgrove, the son of Gerald Beesly and his wife Helen (née Chamberlain) who was a cousin of Neville Chamberlain.
He succeeded his father in the barony in 1932 and served as a Lord-in-Waiting (government whip in the House of Lords) under Neville Chamberlain from 1939 to 1940.
Viscount Bridport was Lieutenant-Commander in the Royal Navy and also held minor political office from 1939 to 1940 under Neville Chamberlain.
William's cousin, Archibald Kenrick, was grandfather of Harriet and Florence Kenrick (cousins), the first and second wives of the British politician Joseph Chamberlain, and therefore also ancestor of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Sir Austen Chamberlain.
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After the fall of the government of Neville Chamberlain, the new Prime Minister Winston Churchill appointed press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook as the Minister of Aircraft Production.
Lady Longford was a great-niece of the Tory radical Joseph Chamberlain and a first cousin once removed of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain.
The book shaped popular thinking about appeasement for 20 years and effectively destroyed the reputation of ex-prime ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and contributed to the defeat of the Conservative Party in the 1945 general election.
In a footnote in Hitler's War, Irving first introduced the thesis later popularized in the 1980s by Ernst Nolte that a letter written by Chaim Weizmann to Neville Chamberlain on 3 September 1939, pledging the support of the Jewish Agency to the Allied war effort, constituted a "Jewish declaration of war" against Germany, thus justifying German "internment" of European Jews.
During that time the Castle hosted many notable guests, including Adelina Patti, Neville Chamberlain, Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, and King Edward VIII and later on Jon and Carys Richards.
When the Second World War broke out, the new Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain formed a small War Cabinet, and it was expected that Chatfield would serve as a spokesperson for the three service ministers, the Secretary of State for War, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary of State for Air; however political considerations resulted in all three posts being included in the Cabinet, and Chatfield's role proved increasingly redundant.
In the late 1930s, the British Government's agricultural policy came in for heavy criticism from the NFU, Parliament and the Press and in January 1939 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain took the bold step of appointing Dorman-Smith as Minister of Agriculture.
In August, UK Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, sent Lord Runciman to Czechoslovakia in order to see if he could obtain a settlement between the Czechoslovak government and the Germans in the Sudetenland.
He was one of its main commentators during the 1930s, covering amongst many other events the opening ceremony of the 1936 Summer Olympics and Neville Chamberlain's return from Munich in 1938.
In 1938, Runciman returned to public life when the new Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, sent him to Czechoslovakia to see if he could obtain a settlement between the Czechoslovak government and the Sudeten Germans in the Sudetenland.