William Strang

William Strang is a senior Foreign Office official whose work at the height of the Sudeten crisis places him between the language of diplomacy and the danger it is meant to contain. As Head of the Central Department, he has already accompanied Neville Chamberlain on two visits to Adolf Hitler. At Munich he serves as both an interpreter and a drafter, but his sharpest contribution is a warning: agreement over the Sudetenland and Hitler’s separate promise of future peace are not the same thing.

Position and background

Strang has taken over the Central Department from Ralph Wigram. He is a tall, almost painfully spare figure, described as dehydrated and broomstick-like; though in his mid-forties, he looks sixty. His manner retains the habits of a man who went through the First World War: when he checks on Hugh Legat, he addresses his subordinate as if inspecting him in a trench. The comparison lends his authority a distinctly military cast, though his work is diplomatic.

He has met Hitler twice while accompanying Chamberlain, making him more experienced in the Prime Minister’s personal diplomacy than a newly assigned official would be. His position also puts him close to the practical machinery of the crisis. He is among the Foreign Office officials assembled for the Munich mission, alongside Sir William Malkin and Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, and is one of the officials Legat sees preparing to leave London with the Prime Minister’s party.

The journey and the language of crisis

On the flight to Munich, Strang points out to Legat that he is the only person aboard who speaks German. Legat had not considered the fact; Strang’s observation makes plain that language will be an operational necessity, not an incidental skill. Strang also recalls the party’s previous difficult landing in Munich, when rain had made visibility so poor that the aircraft was thrown about. The recollection places the delegation’s official journey against a recent, concrete experience of physical uncertainty.

At Munich, Strang’s German ability brings him into the small talk between General Wilhelm Keitel and the British party. Paul von Hartmann interprets their exchange, and Strang describes the storms Keitel encountered on a flight back to Berlin after the Bad Godesberg meeting: the aircraft had detoured around dozens of lightning storms, which Keitel had seen as a remarkable spectacle from three thousand metres. This exchange is polite and apparently routine, but it unfolds as Hartmann watches the room, the entrances, and the movement of the leaders around them. Strang’s official conversation thus takes place within a gathering that is also being scrutinized for signs of anxiety and control.

Negotiation and judgment

During the officials’ briefing on the Munich talks, Strang asks whether Hitler will accept an international commission to determine which areas should become German. The answer is that Hitler considers there to be no time for one and wants each district to decide by simple majority in a plebiscite. Strang’s follow-up asks what will happen to the minority. His questions bring the proposed procedure’s consequences into view: the dispute is not only over territory, but over how a decision is made and what becomes of those who lose it.

At dinner, Strang is present when Ivone Kirkpatrick cautions that the party should assume every word is being overheard. Chamberlain says he will not conceal from Hitler anything he would not say to his face. The exchange establishes the constrained atmosphere in which the British officials operate: even a private meal in Munich cannot be treated as securely private. Strang’s role in the delegation is not confined to drafting or interpretation; he works within a diplomatic setting where speech itself may carry risk.

Drafting and the warning about Hitler

After Chamberlain decides that Hitler’s public words about permanent peace should be recast as a joint statement on future Anglo-German relations, he sends Legat to ask Strang to draft it. Legat finds him asleep, dressed only in a vest and long cotton underpants, and wakes him with the request. The interruption moves Strang directly from rest into the work of turning a public declaration into a document the two governments might sign. Later, he sits at his desk writing on Regina Palast notepaper, surrounded by discarded drafts; Malkin studies the text over his shoulder while Sir Horace Wilson consults Hitler’s speech and Legat pours coffee.

Wilson identifies Hitler’s reference to the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as a crucial passage. That 1935 agreement had limited the German fleet to 35 per cent of the Royal Navy’s size, and the Foreign Office had come to regard it as a mistake. Strang objects to returning to it in the new statement. The concern is specific: a declaration intended to express peaceful relations could reopen the record of a previous agreement that British officials already judged unfavourably. Strang’s drafting therefore involves not only finding acceptable language, but deciding which historical commitments should not be made the centre of a fresh pledge.

On the return flight, Strang makes his most direct intervention. He urges Chamberlain to treat any undertaking from Hitler with the utmost caution, distinguishing the agreement over the Sudetenland—which, he acknowledges, most people will understand—from the additional document on future relations. Chamberlain answers that his government is rearming and that, in his view, Hitler may keep his word; the two men thus expose a central division within the delegation. Strang gives voice to the Foreign Office’s reservations about the declaration even as the Prime Minister hopes it can avert war. His function in the story is not to decide policy, but to articulate the difference between securing a territorial settlement and trusting a promise that extends beyond it.