Did he say “Peace in our time” or “Peace for our time”? I always learned it with the word “in”, and as recently as a few years ago I had never seen it the other way, but it seems that the “for” convention has taken over. People who cite the speech vary greatly in their usage.
I am the sort of person that, when a quote is used and can be definitively attributed to someone, prefers to get it right. So, is there any way that I can access the original recording, or is anyone 100% sure of the correct quotation? Further, if we can access the original recording, why is there so much variance? It can’t possibly be as ambiguous as Neil Armstrong’s alleged “a” mistake.
Yes, there are newsreel recordings of Chamberlain making the speech at a press conference after his return from Munich. There are numerous documentary uses of the speech that are available on VHS.
The following day’s report in The Times, quoted him as saying, ’ “I believe,” he went on, “it is peace for our time…”. He said this not when he got off the plane at Heston - that speech was recorded - but in impromptu comments later that evening when he arrived at No. 10, which I suspect probably weren’t recorded.
Then on 3 October, in the debate in the House of Commons, he said, ‘I am asked how I can reconcile an appeal to the country to support the continuance of this programme with the words which I used when I came back from Munich the other day and spoke of my belief that we might have peace in our time’.
I don’t think appealing to newsreel footage helps, since he made several statements during the course of the day and I don’t think all were necessarily filmed.
The familiar scene is of him arriving at Heston waving the bit of paper. The classic newsreel of that was taken by British Pathe and can be viewed on the ITN/Pathe Archive (free registration; search on Chamberlain and it’s then “Peace - Four Power Conference” from 3/10/38). But he doesn’t say either version of the phrase in that statement to the press.
Where the disputed phrase derives from is the address he made to the crowds in Downing Street later that evening. That isn’t featured in the Pathe newsreel. The report in the next day’s Manchester Guardian quotes the phrase as “peace for our time”.
This has been bugging me for the past couple of hours, as I was sure that the reason for the confusion was that he was alluding to the KJV. Thinking laterally however I now realise that it wasn’t the KJV, but the prayer, ‘Give peace in our time, O Lord’ from the Book of Common Prayer. In other words, he misquoted it the first time and then misquoted himself with the correct quote the second time.
It wasn’t easy for Chamberlain to leave the aircraft at “Heston,” as it didn’t land there, but at Hendon!
A few years ago, a British ephemera and book dealer whose catalogue I receive sold Chamberlain’s Imperial Airways ticket (or the “flimsy” receipts) for the famous Munich flight. IIRC they were something like 300 pounds sterling.
The aircraft he flew in, a Lockheed 14 Electra, registration G-GFGN, made a hard landing and burned, near Luxeuil, France, in 1939.
The speech was made from the window of Number Ten, quite impromptu, which is why there were no recordings of it. The next day’s Daily Herald quoted it as Peace For Our Time.
Noel Coward’s play *‘Peace In Our Time’[i/], one of the earliest ‘what if we had lost’ scenarios, was produced in 1947. It is possible that Coward, and Chamberlain, were thinking of the Book Of Common Prayer.
Actually, not only do all the secondary accounts agree that it was Heston, the contemporary Guardian article and the commentary on the Pathe newreel, as already linked to, both specifically state the same.
I have found this information about Heston Airport from a couple of web-sites:-
“Mr. Chamberlain (the PM of the day) would sort it out” he told us. Sure enough, the PM arrived back at Heston Airfield (it’s the field on the left when you leave the M4 just before the A4 roundabout on your way to Terminal 4), waving a bit of paper and saying that there would be “peace in our time!”
and
Second only to Croydon Airport in the late 1930s, Heston would have been developed into London’s primary gateway had not the Second World War intervened. During the war the RAF used the airfield as a fighter Operational Training Unit, but afterwards the site fell into disuse as nearby Heathrow grew into London Airport.
On the subject of Neville Chamberlain , I like Spike Milligan’s comment on him. “you remember Neville Chamberlain , he used to come on the radio and do Prime Minister impressions”