One evening early in the war, the First Lord of the Admiralty and Mrs Churchill invited the Prime Minister and Mrs Chamberlain to dine. By a happy chance the conversation turned to Chamberlain's early life in the Bahamas. He told the story of the struggle to recruit the family's fortunes by growing sisal on a remote and windswept island in the Bahamas, ‘living nearly naked, struggling with labour difficulties and every other kind of obstacle, and with the town of Nassau as the only gleam of civilization’. Chamberlain described how, for all his exertions, the scheme had failed. In the Chamberlain family, it appeared, it was felt that though they loved him dearly they were sorry to have lost £50,000. ‘I was fascinated’, Churchill recorded after the war, ‘by the way Mr. Chamberlain warmed as he talked, and by the tale itself, which was one of gallant endeavour. I thought to myself, “What a pity Hitler did not know when he met this sober English politician with his umbrella at Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich that he was actually talking to a hard-bitten pioneer from the outer marches of the British Empire!” ‘