sinecure position of Lord Privy Seal, an offer Runciman declined. In June 1937 he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Runciman of Doxford, of Doxford in the County of Northumberland. Four years earlier his father had been created Baron Runciman and "of Doxford" was consequently used to differentiate from his father's title. This was a rare case of a father and son sitting in the House of Lords at the same time, with the son holding a superior title. A few months later his father died, and he inherited both the barony and his father's shipping business. Mission to Czechoslovakia Runciman returned to public life when, at the beginning of August 1938, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, sent him on a mission to Czechoslovakia to mediate in a dispute between the Government of Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten German Party (SdP), representing the ethnic German population of the border regions, known as the Sudetenland. Unknown to Runciman, the SdP, although ostensibly calling for autonomy for the Sudetenland, had instructions from Nazi Germany not to reach any agreement on the matter, and thus attempts at mediation failed. With international tension rising in Central and Eastern Europe, Runciman was recalled to London on 16 September 1938. The published outcome of the mission - known as the Runciman Report - was issued by the mediator on 21 September 1938 in the form of letters addressed to Neville Chamberlain and Edvard Beneš, the President of Czechoslovakia. The report held the SdP responsible for breaking off the negotiations with the Czechoslovak government despite the fact that revised government proposals met "almost all the requirements" of the SdP. Runciman considered the actions of the Czechoslovak authorities to be "not actively oppressive, and certainly not 'terroristic'" but "marked by tactlessness, lack of understanding, petty intolerance and discrimination". The multiple complaints of economic and political discrimination voiced by the Sudeten Germans were, he believed, "in the main justified" and gave rise to a feeling of "hopelessness" – but "the rise of Nazi Germany gave them new hope". Runciman, therefore, considered "their turning for help towards their kinsmen and their eventual desire to join the Reich as a natural development in the circumstances". This led him to conclude "that these frontier districts should at once be transferred from Czechoslovakia to Germany". Neville Chamberlain agreed to the transfer of the border regions of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany at the Munich