Rise of Neville Chamberlain a half years as Chancellor, directing Britain's financial policies as the nation emerged from the Depression. When Baldwin (who had replaced MacDonald as Prime Minister in 1935) retired in 1937, Chamberlain succeeded him. Chamberlain was born in a house called Southbourne, in the Edgbaston district of Birmingham, England, as the only son of the second marriage of Joseph Chamberlain, who later became Mayor of Birmingham, and who also served as a Cabinet minister. Joseph Chamberlain had fathered two children by his first marriage, Beatrice and Austen. Joseph's first wife, Harriet, died giving birth to Austen; Neville's mother, the former Florence
Neville Chamberlain seat in the small War Cabinet. The new First Lord proved to be a difficult Cabinet colleague, deluging the Prime Minister with a sea of lengthy memos. Chamberlain castigated Churchill for sending so many memos, as the two met in War Cabinet every day. Chamberlain suspected, correctly as it proved after the war, that "these letters are for the purpose of quotation in the Book that he will write hereafter". Chamberlain was also able to deter some of Churchill's more extreme plans, such as Operation Catherine, which would have sent three heavily armoured battleships into the Baltic Sea with an