To appease or fight?

To Appease or Fight?

In September 1938, the well-known newspaper and radio journalist Vernon Bartlett travelled to Porlock to launch his campaign to be elected MP for the Bridgwater constituency. It was to be a campaign of national and international significance.

Bartlett was standing as an Independent and both the Liberal and Labour candidates had stood down to clear the way for him to challenge the Conservatives who had held the seat for decades. For Bartlett, there was only one issue at stake - could Britain trust the deal that the Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had extracted from Adolf Hitler in Munich a month earlier? Under the Munich Agreement, Hitler assured the world that Germany had no further territorial ambitions in Europe, after his Nazi troops had earlier seized the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia.

Bartlett, along with many in the country, believed this agreement amounted to appeasement, that Hitler could not be trusted, and that the nation should instead prepare for war. That evening in September, a huge crowd packed into Porlock Village Hall to hear Bartlett’s first ever campaign speech. He described the Government as weak and vacillating.

”Time after time, we give way”, he said, “and every time we give way, war comes nearer home. I am absolutely sure that even at Munich, there would have been no war if Mr Chamberlain had stood up to Hitler.”

Having launched his campaign in Porlock, Bartlett took his message to the rest of the constituency, a campaign which was a vital test of public opinion. It was a campaign, and a result, that was watched closely in Westminster and in the Chancellery in Berlin. Which way would West Somerset vote, to appease Hitler or to prepare for war?

Polling Day was 17th November 1938 and a record 82% of the electorate turned out to vote. The following day, a huge crowd gathered outside Bridgwater Town Hall to hear the result. Bartlett had won by more than 2,000 votes, overturning a previous Conservative majority of more than 10,000. After a bruising campaign started in Porlock seven weeks earlier, West Somerset had spoken. They said that Hitler was not to be trusted; the nation should prepare for war.

Bartlett served his full term in Westminster, and won the seat again in the post war election in July 1945 that saw the nation reject Winston Churchill. Bartlett stood down in 1950 after his second term in Parliament.