If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again

If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again is the childhood maxim Neville Chamberlain uses to frame his renewed diplomatic effort. Spoken to a cheering crowd before he boards his plane, it turns persistence into a public promise: he is trying again, and hopes to return with danger transformed into safety.

A Childhood Maxim Recalled

At the airport, Chamberlain begins by recalling that, as a little boy, he used to repeat the saying. Its plain, repetitive instruction gives his departure speech a personal point of entry before he moves to the larger stakes of his mission. A small piece of paper in his hand holds the lines he has prepared; he glances down briefly, then looks up to deliver them.

The expression is more than a retrospective childhood detail. Chamberlain immediately identifies himself with its lesson, explaining that his present effort is another attempt after earlier efforts have not succeeded. The repeated injunction to try again makes persistence the speech’s organizing idea, while its simple cadence helps turn a complicated diplomatic undertaking into a readily understood public appeal.

Public Promise and Intended Return

The crowd listening includes reporters, airport workers, local people, schoolboys, and a mother holding a baby. After Chamberlain invokes the maxim, he looks ahead to his return and cites Hotspur in Henry IV, hoping to be able to speak of plucking safety from danger. The allusion gives the speech a desired outcome; the childhood saying supplies the resolve to pursue it. The crowd cheers, and Chamberlain smiles and waves his hat before turning toward the plane.

The phrase therefore works both as an expression of personal persistence and as public rhetoric. Chamberlain presents the journey not as a guarantee of success but as another attempt whose hoped-for result remains to be seen. His later boarding, amid the crowd’s acclaim, gives the maxim an immediate practical setting: the words accompany a departure into uncertainty, while his stated hope fixes attention on what he might bring back.