Baldwin

by Roy Jenkins

  Yet the appearance of perfect shape is almost wholly illusory. In fact his career lacked balance. The long years of his party leadership exist almost in limbo. They grew out of little. Ministerially his experience was minimal: four years in junior office, nineteen months as a notably silent President of the Board of Trade, seven difficult and chastening months as Chancellor, and then an effort-free but unexpected arrival in 10 Downing Street. A year before there had been at least six members of the Conservative Party better known than himself. Once there, he held on to power for a long time, easily in successive periods of government, with unusual difficulty in opposition. Luckily for him, his opposition years were few, only three of the fourteen spanned by his leadership. He prided himself, with high justification, on being a great House of Commons man, but it was only from the Treasury bench that he could lead with ease and pleasure. The quintessential House of Commons rôle of leader of the opposition he never mastered. He reserved his deadliness for dealing with opponents in his own party, and had little to spare for use against the MacDonald governments. But in office he exercised a full but lazy authority. Churchill said quite simply: ‘He was the most formidable politician I have ever known in public life.’1

  There was however a complete and unsatisfactory finality about the end of his premiership. There was no continuing momentum of influence. Not only was the curtain rung down but the opera house was dismantled. Few consulted him. Fewer still quoted him with approval. He had handled many issues with skill and public spirit and good feeling, but he had no publicly recognized parcel of achievement which he could open from time to time and contemplate with satisfaction. As Prime Minister he had mostly been popular and happy, although bearing heavily even the limited press of public work which his economy of effort prescribed. He resented principally the returns to London after his long holidays in France and cherished periods at his house in Worcestershire. In retirement these resentments were removed. But much worse ones took their place. He was lonely, sad, even a little bitter. The eclipse, partly by his own desire, partly because of the overturning of the world in which he had governed, was too abrupt. Within a few months of his resignation he was politically dead; and the repose lost its savour as soon as it was uninterrupted by forced returns to the grindstone.

  Thus the two and a half years between his resignation and the outbreak of the Second World War brought Baldwin, the epitome of a man looking forward to retirement, disappointment and anticlimax rather than satisfactory afterglow. They were however years of pleasure compared with the five which were to follow, when, with his successor Neville Chamberlain first out of 10, Downing Street and then dead in six months, Baldwin became a target of resentment for the perils to which the nation found itself exposed.

  These were only a few of the paradoxes of Baldwin’s life and character. Others found expression in his provenance and education. He was the most self-conscious countryman amongst British Prime Ministers of the past hundred years or more. The unchanging nature of English rural life was one of his more effective and frequently recurring oratorical themes. It reached its apogee in a 1924 speech to the Royal Society of St George. He spoke of:

  The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function. For centuries, the one eternal sight of England.2

  This, like many of his other speeches, was prose of a high evocative quality. Its prophecy was inaccurate in both the letter and the spirit. Now, little more than sixty years later, with the Empire admittedly gone and only too many ‘works’ closed down, but with little of eternity used up, the brow of every hill in England may be searched in vain for the sight of a plough team. And the destruction of traditional rural life probably proceeded more rapidly during his premierships than during any other span of fifteen years. When he began, Hardy’s England was little touched. When he ended, it had been deeply invaded by suburbia and the motor car. The change was not his fault, although he was guilty of the self-deception or hypocrisy of pretending that it was not taking place. In 1935 he was still talking of ‘the ploughman “with his team on the world’s rim …”’. His romantic nostalgia was wholly genuine, although his dislike of change from the countryside of his boyhood was probably more acute than that of those whose origins and lives were more deeply rooted in it.

  Stanley Baldwin was not an English country squire. In the first place, although he habitually used the words England and English rather than Great Britain and British, he was doubtfully English, both in blood and temperament. From his mother he inherited a strong Celtic streak, half Welsh and half Highland. She was the daughter of a Wesleyan minister who never earned more than £160 a year, but who brought up five daughters (as well as two sons), and saw one of the daughters married to Rudyard Kipling’s father, another to Edward Burne-Jones, a third to another painter, Edward Poynter, later president of the Royal Academy, and a fourth to Alfred Baldwin.

  Alfred Baldwin was born in 1841 and died in 1908. He was an ironmaster—of the third generation—and not a landowner. He was born prosperous and died rich, but he never owned more than a few acres around his house. At first he lived in the town of Bewdley and then at Wilden, a moderate-sized semi-country house of the 1840s, but within sight and sound of the forge which was the old centre of the family business. He largely reshaped this family business, rescuing it from near bankruptcy in the 1860s, extending it into tinplate in Monmouthshire, carrying through several amalgamations, and turning it into a public company in 1902. He was also chairman of the Great Western Railway and Member of Parliament for the Bewdley division of Worcestershire from 1892 until his death. Yet he was far from being a conventional man of business. He abandoned Methodism early in life and became an extreme High Churchman. He was a scholar of neurotic temperament.

  Stanley Baldwin was born in the house at Bewdley on 3 August 1867, within a year of the marriage of his parents. He was the only child. The house of his childhood was Wilden, where his mother gave him a literary upbringing. When he married he rented a rambling red-brick Georgian house two miles away and bicycled to work at the forge most days. After ten years he rented and moved to Astley Hall, near Stourport, a larger and older stone house with Dutch gables and a wide, soft view across the broken Worcestershire countryside. Later he bought this house, built a new wing, greatly improved the garden, and extended the estate from twenty to one hundred acres, mostly farmed by tenants. In the years between his father’s death and the outbreak of the First War, this became quite a grand establishment. There were ten gardeners and about as many indoor servants. At that time he also maintained a large London house, at first in South Kensington, later in Eaton Square.

  Astley he retained until the end of his life, despite mounting worry about the expense, and spent nearly the whole of his retirement there. During his ministerial years, however, he had used it relatively little—ten days at Christmas, a week in early August, and perhaps a couple of other visits during the year. Apart from the ties of London, he liked and used Chequers a lot, and had established the almost unfailing rhythm of a long late summer holiday at Aix-les-Bains in the French Alps. But his feeling for the triangle bounded by the Black Country, the Cotswolds and the Welsh hills was intense. He loved wide landscape and changing light, and it is very good country for that. ‘It looked stormy but I risked it,’ he wrote of a 1931 Boxing Day expedition with his younger son,

  and we drove through Cleobury Mortimer on to the Clees. I never saw the views so wonderful. There was dark cloud to within a couple of yards of the southern horizon, below which a perfect golden background, and there was silhouetted every hill from Clent to the Sugar Loaf by Abergavenny and the Black Mountains. We drove down the Angel Bank skirting Ludlow, and then as we tu
rned into Corvedale the sun came out and it cleared …. We drove home round the Brown Clee ….2

  The next day he motored to four miles south of Hereford to lunch with an old cousin, and the day after that he attended two funerals, both of ‘old Worcestershire friends who died on Christmas Day’. His agricultural knowledge was very limited. He could not have milked a cow, and he poked pigs much more often in cartoons than in the farmyard. But he was a genuine West Worcestershire man, and the City of Worcester with its tall cathedral tower, its county cricket ground beside the steep-banked Severn, and its chocolate and cream Great Western trains arriving at Shrub Hill Station from Paddington,3 was the centre of some substantial part of his life.

  Baldwin was not educated in Worcestershire. He was the first member of his family to receive a conventional English upper-class education. His father had been to the Wesleyan Collegiate Institution at Taunton until the age of sixteen, when he had left and gone into the business. But Stanley Baldwin was sent to Hawtrey’s, near Slough, which was almost exclusively an Eton preparatory school, although there followed a not wholly explained change of plan and he went to Harrow in 1881. He started successfully there, as he had done at Hawtrey’s, winning academic prizes and achieving a fair success at games. Then at the end of his third year it all went wrong. He was caught writing pornography and—worse still-sending it to his cousin at Eton. Dr Montagu Butler, a notable headmaster, who was also his housemaster, treated the matter with a ridiculous portentousness. Alfred Baldwin was sent for. There was a flogging and the incident died down. But so did Stanley Baldwin’s enthusiasm for Harrow. He became lazy and somewhat withdrawn. He left a year earlier than he need have done.

  In later life there was some ambiguity about his attitude to the school. He was naturally nostalgic, even sentimental, and a respecter of established institutions with which he had been connected. He therefore never spoke ill of Harrow; and on one occasion he announced in a speech there that when he was first called upon to form a government he was determined to have the unprecedented number of six Harrovians in his Cabinet. But this was almost certainly an ex post joke, unless it was the only explanation he could offer for the remarkably undistinguished collection of ministers who governed with him in 1923, most of whom he had in any event inherited from Bonar Law. There is no evidence that memories of the school ever played much part in his life, or that he particularly enjoyed visiting it. He sent his own two sons to Eton, with unfortunate results in one case.4

  Nor was Baldwin in any way a notable Harrow figure. He was rather anonymous amongst his contemporaries, and the flavour of this anonymity is well captured by an anecdote, possibly apocryphal like most anecdotes, from much later in his life. During his second premiership he noticed during a train journey that another occupant of the compartment was looking at him with some puzzlement. After a time this gentleman leant forward and tapped Baldwin on the knee. ‘You are Baldwin, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘You were at Harrow in ‘84.’ Baldwin nodded assent to both propositions. His former school-fellow appeared satisfied. But after a few more minutes he again became puzzled and tapped once more. ‘Tell me’, he said, ‘what are you doing now?’5

  Baldwin carried both the anonymity and idleness of his last Harrow years with him to Trinity College, Cambridge. Also, by singular misfortune, he was followed by Dr Montagu Butler, who was translated to the Mastership of Trinity at the beginning of his second term. Whether or not because of the oppressive presence of the new Master, Baldwin, as he later saw things, largely wasted his time at Cambridge. He read history and achieved a steady deterioration in each year’s performance. He got a First at the end of his first year, a Second at the end of his second, and a Third at the end of his third. But more surprising than his lack of academic prowess was his failure to make any other sort of impact. He made few friends; he joined few clubs or societies, and after being elected to the college debating society was asked to resign because he never spoke; he did not even spend much money. He was interested in the Trinity Mission in Camberwell, and at one stage his thoughts turned towards being ordained. But then they turned away again. He did however enjoy the physical beauty of Cambridge, and retained a strong affection for the place on this ground at least. He was delighted by the somewhat undeserved honour of the Chancellorship of the University, which was bestowed upon him in 1930, and which he retained to the end of his life.

  He came down from Cambridge in 1888, and without either great enthusiasm or great reluctance went into the family business. For twenty years he served as second-in-command to his father. He had no desire to take over the first place. He worked with reasonable diligence, getting to Wilden by eight o’clock most mornings, and also travelling a good deal—to South Wales, to Birmingham, to London and even on one occasion to the United States—on the firm’s affairs. He took long holidays, habitually spending a winter month in Switzerland and a summer month or more in France or Italy. Despite the persona which he subsequently cultivated, he was not an insular Englishman. He could read French easily, and could manage some German. He knew pre-1914 Europe very well.

  His energies were never enormous, but limited though they were, he used a large part of them outside the business. He accepted the semi-political duties of a man of substance in his county. He never had much enthusiasm for making money. He distrusted those who were too rapidly successful. He once shocked Bonar Law, who took a rather more respectful view of money matters, by saying that ‘a man who made a million quick ought to be not in the Lords but in gaol’.3 He liked a steady business, moving up rather than down, operating in not too competitive a climate, and able as a result to maintain a paternal relationship with the workpeople. This was almost exactly how Baldwins Ltd operated in the nineties.

  In 1892, at the age of twenty-five, Baldwin married Lucy Ridsdale. He had met her while staying with his Burne-Jones cousins at Rottingdean, a Sussex coastal village which had not then become a suburb of Brighton. She was the daughter of a scientist who was at one time Deputy Master of the Mint. During the years of Baldwin’s premierships she appeared a slightly ridiculous figure to the sophisticated young. This was due partly to her hats and partly to her remarkable prowess as a lady cricketer. Neither of these were fundamental criticisms. She was on the whole a very satisfactory wife. She did not share Baldwin’s intellectual or aesthetic tastes, and she did not accompany him on the long walks which were a staple part of his recreation in Worcestershire or at Aix. But she provided him with loyalty, sensible advice and a closely shared experience of life for over fifty years. And she allowed others, notably Mrs Davidson (later Lady Davidson, MP), to take the walks.

  The Baldwins had six children, two sons and four daughters, born between 1895 and 1904. The eldest son, who lived out his life as a bachelor of somewhat eccentric habits, became deeply estranged from his parents as a young man. He joined the Labour Party, and denounced Baldwin personally as well as politically at the 1923 election. The personal break, although not the political one, was later happily repaired. He was once acting vice-consul in Boulogne, served in the Armeno-Turkish war of 1920, was several times a Member of Parliament, and ended his public career as Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Leeward Islands. He died relatively young in 1958. The second son, Windham or ‘Bloggs’ Baldwin, the father of the present earl, lived a calmer life enlivened by some association with the fashionable literary world, and died in 1976. Three of the daughters married, all respectably, none ‘brilliantly’. One (Lady Lorna Howard) is still alive. The fourth (Lady Betty Baldwin) spent some time in a nunnery and wrote a mildly sensational book about her experiences.

  During his twenty years of more or less full-time business Stanley Baldwin became a Justice of the Peace, the chairman of a board of school managers and a member of the Worcestershire County Council. He made a few political speeches, mainly in his father’s constituency. In 1904, he became candidate for the neighbouring borough of Kidderminster. It was a Conservative-held seat, and the assumption was that the next e
lection would result in two Baldwins sitting for Worcestershire. This did not happen. The 1906 election produced a Liberal landslide, although it was much less strong in the West Midlands than in most other parts of the country. Alfred Baldwin held Bewdley, but Stanley was defeated at Kidderminster. He had not much enjoyed the campaign, and whether because of this or of the result, he had to go immediately on a two-day walk from Kingham to Oxford to purge himself of his ‘humours’.

  Neither the campaign nor the result purged him or his family of a settled if unenthusiastic feeling that he ought to go into the House of Commons. The member for Worcester City was on this occasion one of the dozen or so gentlemen who, after most late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century general elections, as a sort of ritual but somewhat haphazard sacrifice to virtue made by an easy-going society, were unseated on petition for allegedly corrupt electoral practices. Joseph Chamberlain, who had held Birmingham and much of the West Midlands firm for Unionism and Tariff Reform, suggested that Baldwin should step into the seat. The Baldwin family were strong for protection, which commended them to Chamberlain. But it was not enough to commend Stanley to the City of Worcester Conservative and Unionist Association. They preferred Edward Goulding,• whom Baldwin described as ‘an Irishman, whom I then thought and think still, to be vastly my inferior. So I was turned down in my own county town in favour of a stranger …’4 It was one of the few occasions in his life when he tried and failed. For some years to come, his parliamentary prospects seemed blocked. It did not occur to him to look for a seat outside Worcestershire, and even if it had there was little reason why he should have secured one.