Wise Chamberlain

SIR – Neville Chamberlain did not “sell out to Hitler”, as Arthur Scargill and so many others have been led to believe (Letters, September 27).

Chamberlain was no fool and was aware that he had to play for time. When I went back to school in September 1938, almost a full year before the outbreak of war, all the ground-floor classrooms had been reinforced with beams and the windows protected. A few weeks later, the government ordered over a million Anderson shelters.

Chamberlain had done an essential job, though of course it was right for him to go when he did. Tim Topps

Oxford