Portrait of Neville Chamberlain

Birthday profile

Neville Chamberlain

Neville Chamberlain, English businessman and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (died 1940)

Born
March 18, 1869
Died
November 9, 1940
Zodiac sign
Pisces
Birth year
1869

About Neville Chamberlain

Arthur Neville Chamberlain (; 18 March 1869 – 9 November 1940) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940 and Leader of the Conservative Party from May 1937 to October 1940. He is known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, ceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940. After working in business and local government, and after a short spell as Director of National Service in 1916 and 1917, Chamberlain followed his father Joseph Chamberlain and elder half-brother Austen Chamberlain in becoming a member of Parliament at the 1918 general election for the new Birmingham Ladywood division at the age of 49. He declined a junior ministerial position, remaining a backbencher until 1922. He was rapidly promoted in 1923 to Minister of Health and then Chancellor of the Exchequer. After a short-lived Labour-led government, he returned as Minister of Health, introducing a range of reform measures from 1924 to 1929. He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in the National Government in 1931. Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as prime minister on 28 May 1937. His premiership was dominated by the question of policy towards an increasingly aggressive Germany, and his actions at Munich were widely popular among the British at the time.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Career and life highlights

The world when Neville Chamberlain was born

Neville Chamberlain was born in 1869. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1869

  • Best-selling bookWar and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Headlines and milestones

  • Top headlineTranscontinental Railroad completed at Promontory Summit
  • Technology milestoneSuez Canal opens
  • World population~1.49B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderUlysses S. Grant
  • U.S. population35.6M

1869 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Neville Chamberlain's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure18692026
Population35.6M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.