The third of September, nineteen thirty nine, was a Sunday, and by all accounts it was a lovely one. Warm. Blue sky. The sort of morning when people walk to church slowly because there is no reason to hurry.
At eleven fifteen in the morning, in houses all over Britain, families stopped what they were doing and gathered in front of a large wooden box.
Nobody sat behind anybody else. This is one of the odd little details that survivors remember. When something important came on the wireless, everybody arranged themselves so that they could see it, as though the box had a face.
What came out of it took about four minutes.
It is worth stopping for a moment on the box itself, because almost nothing about it is like the way we get news now.
A wireless set in nineteen thirty nine was a piece of furniture. It was made of polished wood, it stood on legs or on a sideboard, and it had a cloth grille across the front with a pattern cut into it. It was expensive. It was often the most expensive object in the house. It had to warm up before it would work, so you switched it on a minute early and waited while it hummed.
There was one channel that mattered, and it belonged to the British Broadcasting Corporation, and it spoke in a very particular voice: calm, clipped, unhurried, the same whether it was announcing a cricket score or the end of the world.
So there was no scrolling. There was no choosing. At a quarter past eleven on that Sunday, essentially one country was listening to one voice at one time, which is a thing that has almost never happened before or since.
The voice belonged to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and he was seventy years old, and he was about to say the thing he had spent his entire career trying to avoid.
One year earlier, almost exactly, Chamberlain had flown to Germany to meet Hitler. He was not a natural traveller. He had never been in an aeroplane before in his life, and he went three times in a fortnight. He came home from the last trip holding a piece of paper above his head at the airport, and he told the crowd that he believed it was peace for our time.
The crowds that met him were enormous. People threw flowers at his car. A woman climbed onto the running board to kiss him. For about six months, Neville Chamberlain was the most popular man in Britain, and letters arrived at Downing Street by the sack.
People cheered. They were not stupid and they were not cowards. Britain had lost close to a million men in the previous war, twenty years before, and there was hardly a village in the country without a stone monument listing the names. When a man came back from Germany saying he had prevented another one, people wanted very badly to believe him.
Within six months the agreement was in pieces. By the summer of nineteen thirty nine everyone could see what was coming, and on the first of September, German forces crossed into Poland.
Britain sent a message to Berlin. It said that unless German troops began withdrawing from Poland by eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, the two countries would be at war. Eleven o'clock came. Nothing arrived.
Chamberlain spoke from the Cabinet Room at Number Ten Downing Street, into a microphone that had been carried in and set on the table.
He said that the ambassador in Berlin had handed the German government a final note. He said that no undertaking had been received. And then he said the sentence that everyone who heard it could still repeat fifty years later: that consequently, this country was at war with Germany.
What people remember is not the words so much as the sound of him saying them. He did not sound stirring. He sounded like a man reading out a result he had already lost.
A moment later he said something that a Prime Minister would probably not say today, because it was entirely about himself. He said that everything he had worked for, everything he had hoped for, everything he had believed in during his public life, had crashed into ruins.
Then the national anthem played, and then the wireless gave out practical instructions about identity cards and blackout regulations, in exactly the same calm voice.
In a house in Yorkshire, a girl who was eleven at the time remembered that her mother stood up, went into the kitchen, and started peeling potatoes for Sunday lunch, and that nobody said anything at all. That is the other thing people remember about the broadcast. Not shouting, not weeping. A room where nobody could think of what to say next.
Eight minutes after the broadcast finished, the air raid sirens went off over London.
It is difficult now to imagine what that sounded like to people who had just heard the news. Everyone had spent years being told that the bombers would arrive immediately, and here, apparently, they were, eight minutes in. Families grabbed the gas masks they had been issued and went down into cellars and shelters.
It was a false alarm. An aircraft had crossed the Channel without filing the correct paperwork, and it turned out to be French.
Nothing else happened that day. Nothing much happened for months. The bombers did not come until the following autumn, which is a whole year later, and by then a great many of the evacuated children had already gone home.
France declared war the same afternoon. So did Australia and New Zealand, within hours, because at that time a declaration by Britain was taken to carry them along with it. Canada waited a week and declared separately, on purpose, to make the point that it was deciding for itself.
In London, the theatres and cinemas were ordered shut that evening. They reopened within a fortnight, because it turned out that a population with nothing to do in the dark is a worse problem than a population sitting in a cinema.
The trains carrying evacuated children were already running. They had started two days earlier, before any declaration, which tells you how little doubt there had been about what was coming.
And that night, in the Atlantic, a passenger liner called the Athenia was torpedoed on its way from Glasgow to Montreal. More than a hundred people died, and some of them were children being sent to Canada for safety. It happened about ten hours after the broadcast.
So the war that people had spent the whole day waiting for, and then decided had not really started, had in fact started before any of them went to bed.
The recording still exists, and you can listen to it. It is a strange experience, because it does not sound like history. It sounds like a tired man in a quiet room.
Chamberlain is often remembered as the man who got it wrong, and he did get it wrong, and he knew it. But it is worth being fair to him. He was buying time as much as he was buying peace, and Britain used the year after that piece of paper to build fighter aircraft and radar stations at a speed it could not have managed the year before. Whether he meant to buy that time or simply got lucky is still argued about.
He resigned eight months after this broadcast, and he was dead of cancer within the year. He never saw how any of it turned out.
Here is something to think about tonight. Chamberlain went to Germany because almost everybody in Britain wanted him to go, and he came back a hero, and a year later the same people thought he was a fool. Nothing about him had changed in between. Only what everyone knew had changed. How fair is it to judge somebody for a decision using information they did not have yet?