Baldwin

by Roy Jenkins

  What he did not know was that the Government, by the next day, would be anxious to retreat from the formula, and that the miners’ executive, having dispersed itself from London, would give them all day in which to do so. Baldwin slept badly and briefly, uncertain about the wisdom or precision of his nocturnal negotiations. When he emerged the next morning he found not uncertainty but widespread consternation. His own staff were dismayed. The Chief Whip thought the party would revolt. Steel-Maitland regretted his share in the discussions. When the Cabinet met at noon, Baldwin found himself sharing a defensive corner with Birkenhead. Hankey told Tom Jones that he had never before witnessed a Cabinet scene like it. ‘All who were not present when [the formula] was agreed reacted in the same way against it, and felt that it would be read by the whole country as a capitulation on the part of the Government to the threat of a General Strike.’10

  The Cabinet met twice again before dinner time, and on each occasion moved themselves into a harder position. By the time that Baldwin again met the TUC representatives, at 9 p.m., he was, by the will of the Cabinet, a long way back from the position of the previous night, and embarrassed by the movement. To extricate himself he had to fasten on the strike notices which the TUC had sent out and demand their unconditional withdrawal as a prelude to further negotiations. By the time the miners arrived at 11.30, there was nothing urgent to discuss with them. Then came the news that the Daily Mail compositors had refused to set an offending leading article. Joynson-Hicks announced this to the Cabinet as though it were the end of constitutional government. The Cabinet in turn chose to treat it as the beginning of the General Strike.8 At 1.15 a.m. (becoming a favourite time) Baldwin again saw the TUC and ‘with great regret’ in effect dismissed them.

  The next day there were only perfunctory contacts. Baldwin spoke in the House of Commons in the afternoon, conciliatory in form, firm in substance. The strike was a challenge to constitutional government. As such it must be resolutely resisted. It began on Tuesday morning, 4 May. The Prime Minister greeted the day in a much calmer mood than he had forty-eight hours before. He had got himself into a difficult position and had escaped with more luck than dignity. He had not avoided a strike, which was half his inclination, but he had preserved a reasonably favourable position, both for himself and for resistance.

  The General Strike lasted eight days. Baldwin’s main rôle was to keep his colleagues and the country as calm as possible. Churchill was the principal firebrand. Baldwin shunted him to the editorship of the official British Gazette, ’to stop him doing worse things’, but at the same time kept control over what was published by the remarkable feat of giving Davidson, a junior minister at the Admiralty, some real power of censorship over what the Chancellor of the Exchequer wrote. He declined to take the Home Secretary’s advice to close down the Daily Herald, and declined also to allow Churchill to take over the BBC. This was an act of the most palpable commonsense, for John Reith,• the Manager, was willing to give the cloak of independence to everything that the Government wanted. He even postponed, on his own responsibility, a proposal for a mediatory broadcast by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Randall Davidson), which the Government itself would have found very difficult to forbid. On at least one issue, however, Baldwin failed to give any firm moderate lead. This was the proposal to rush punitive trade union legislation through Parliament while the strike was in progress. The Cabinet came very near to such a decision. Jones, although supported by most official opinion, failed for once to influence Baldwin directly. Eventually, a combination of the King and Conservative backbench opinion, both more cautious than the Prime Minister, secured a deflection. The legislation was postponed for nearly a year.

  In his own direct wireless appeal to the public Baldwin applied more characteristic tactics. He did not broadcast himself until the Saturday evening (8 May), and then used much less provocative language than most of his colleagues would have chosen. The end even reads rather plaintively, but was no doubt saved by his resonant broadcasting voice:

  I am a man of peace. I am longing, and looking and praying for peace. But I will not surrender the safety and the security of the British Constitution. It placed me in power eighteen months ago by the largest majority accorded to any party for many, many years. Have I done anything to forfeit that confidence? Cannot you trust me to ensure a square deal and to ensure even justice between man and man?

  He stressed throughout the difference between the coal strike, which was industrial and could be negotiated, and the General Strike, which was aimed at the constitution and must be defeated unconditionally. But he interpreted defeat in a quiet way. ‘We must wait for the strike to wear itself out,’ was his private summary of his tactics.11 He did not have to wait very long. At midday on Wednesday, 12 May, the TUC surrendered. Baldwin said, ‘I thank God for your decision,’ and applied himself to mediating in the coal dispute which continued independently.

  At first he showed some energy, but as recalcitrance persisted on both sides this quickly exhausted itself. By the end of May he could see no way forward. Then he put through a bill to suspend for five years the Seven Hours Act, which had restricted maximum daily hours for the coal industry since 1919, following the Eight Hours Act of 1908. It was no solution (as well as being contrary to Samuel) and brought the miners no nearer to working any hours at all. But it gave the owners an unfortunate concession for the future. The Government, while proclaiming itself doctrinally reluctant to impose a settlement upon the industry, had caused Parliament to pronounce upon a major issue in the dispute. Although in return the Yorkshire owners were privately pushed off a proposal for a more grasping division of profits and wages, the Government refrained from balancing the bill by any enforcement of minimum wages or national arbitration.

  By the second week in July Baldwin felt able to say nothing more constructive about the ten-week-old lock-out than ‘Leave it alone–we are all so tired.’ On 10 August Neville Chamberlain noted: ‘S.B. has suffered most from the strike; he too is worn out and has no spirit left, but he remains the one with the greatest influence in the country.’12 On the latter point the King felt the same confidence, although less reluctantly, and reacted to it with some lack of consideration by more or less commanding Baldwin not to leave the country for his annual expedition to Aix. It was a pointless ‘command’, for Baldwin was on the edge of nervous collapse, irritable, complaining and, in the closer judgment of Jones, “entirely without resource”. The Downing Street secretaries circumvented the King by getting an haphazardly chosen doctor9 (they had previously tried fourteen others, all of whom were away) to come in and certify that the Prime Minister had to go. Baldwin left for Aix on 22 August, and stayed away until 15 September.

  During this period Churchill took over the coal negotiations and displayed a vigour for settlement which had been entirely lacking in the Prime Minister. Also, and in sharp contrast with his attitude during the General Strike, he exhibited considerable sympathy for the miners. As his series of meetings progressed, some at Chartwell, some in London, there was even fear on the part of Jones and Davidson that he might get a settlement in the absence of the Prime Minister and thus damage Baldwin’s position. The fear was misplaced. Obduracy was too great. The Cabinet was stubborn as well as the owners. They both felt, rightly, that the miners were close to being starved into submission and saw little reason to interfere with this elegant process. The last possible moment for a negotiated settlement was in the third week of September. Churchill then wanted to coerce the owners into a national agreement and statutory arbitration. Baldwin was half with him, but was ‘suffering from sciatica and obviously did not know which way to turn in the midst of his conflicting advisers’.13 The Cabinet turned them both down and decided to do nothing. Birkenhead said it was the most difficult decision since the evacuation of the Dardanelles, but that did not help much. The decision would probably have gone the other way had 100,000 men not already been back at work, mainly in the more prosperous East and West Midland
areas.

  The policy of inactivity had to be defended in the House of Commons in the following week. Baldwin did so flatly and uncomfortably. Churchill put a bolder and more sympathetic face upon his speech: ‘During the brilliant performance the P.M.’s face was turned towards the Official Gallery, and covered with one of his hands. He looked utterly wretched, much as Ramsay does when L.G. is on his legs.’14 Thus, according to Jones, did Baldwin both reap the harvest of inactivity and exhibit an unusual burst of jealousy.

  In October the Nottinghamshire miners formed a breakaway union and went back to work. In November the strike finally collapsed. In December the majority of the men were back at work, with lower wages, an eight-hour day, and with a substantial minority condemned to permanent unemployment. They were cowed and bitter, with the Miners’ Federation weakened for a decade. The national cost had been heavy. At a time when the national income was little more than £2 billion10 a coal production loss of nearly £100 million and a total loss of nearly £250 million had been incurred. Whole communities were alienated and impoverished; a large part of the nation was left with a feeling halfway between guilt and unease; and Baldwin’s reputation as a statesman of sagacious moderation was badly dented. The General Strike was one thing. That he was widely felt to have handled well. He had calmly upheld the supremacy of the state. The coal strike was another. In dealing with that he failed to show sustained energy, or to make effective and impartial use of the authority of the state, the importance of which he had so insistently proclaimed in May.

  On the other hand, at a heavy price, he had secured a substantial victory for the conservative forces in British life. He had decisively taken the edge off trade union power. The days lost in strikes rapidly fell to a much lower level than at any time since 1918. At the 1928 Trades Union Congress Cook and the other left-wing members were defeated by a majority of more than two to one. The so-called Mond-Turner talks, leading to little in themselves, but symbolizing a more cooperative approach, became possible. The transition to the trades unionism of the 1930s, to the Bevin-Citrine era of involvement in the processes of government, had begun. The trouble was that Baldwin did it by the methods he had foresworn and that his words and his style of appeal had become alienated from his actions. He went on talking of peace, but he had become a man who had allowed Britain’s major industry to be decimated and embittered.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Defeat of ‘Safety First’

  Nineteen twenty-nine was necessarily an election year. The Cabinet had a full discussion of the date as early as October 1928, but left unresolved the issue of summer or autumn. Baldwin inclined to the earlier date, mainly because he always sustained himself throughout the wearisomeness of the political year by looking forward to a relaxed August and September. ‘We should be campaigning all through the holidays after a hard session,’ he commented gloomily on the October proposal.1 The winter and early spring brought bad by-election results from the Conservatives, but the earlier date was nevertheless decided upon. Polling day was 30 May.

  Baldwin firmly believed that he would win. He realized that he was short on programme, but thought that his reputation as a moderate statesman, calmly if slowly steering the country in the right direction, would overcome that. The Liberals were strongest on policy. The Keynesian Yellow Book, fortified by a sharp and confident pamphlet, We Can Conquer Unemployment, gave them that. The Labour Party had Ramsay MacDonald’s voice and presence, the loyalty of much of the bunkered working class, and a manifesto which avoided both the advantages and disadvantages of precision. Baldwin had accepted the slogan of ‘Safety first’, made familiar by a Ministry of Transport motoring campaign and proposed to the Conservative Central Office by an advertising agency. With unemployment at 10 per cent it was hardly inspired. And he had to spend a good part of the campaign explaining that it meant caution and not complacency. Nevertheless the campaign strengthened his optimism. He was very well received in his speaking expeditions, particularly in Lancashire, and he returned confidently to Downing Street to await the results.

  In those days few ministers thought it necessary to attend their own counts, and Baldwin had his vigil in the No. 10 secretaries’ room enlivened by the presence of Churchill: ‘The P.M. [sat] with narrow slips of paper on which he inscribed the three lists as they arrived. At [another] desk sat Winston doing similar lists in red ink, sipping whisky and soda, getting redder and redder, rising and going out often to glare at the machine himself, hunching his shoulders, bowing his head like a bull about to charge.’ Baldwin took the defeat less aggressively: but ‘he found it hard to reconcile the results with the reception on tour.’2

  The result was not a disaster, but it was a severe setback for the Conservatives. They dropped 150 seats. The main effect of the strong Liberal campaign was to put Labour candidates in on minority votes. The Liberals themselves secured only 59 seats. The Labour Party won 287, the Government 261. Baldwin’s first problem was whether to resign at once, or, as in 1923, to wait and meet Parliament. The situation was different, because the Conservatives had then been the largest party, whereas they were now 26 seats behind the Labour Party. There was nevertheless strong pressure for hanging on. This was the view of the two Chamberlains, of the Chief Whip (Eyres-Monsell), and, at first, of Churchill. Baldwin retired to Chequers, hesitated, and then decided otherwise. He thought that to remain would look ‘unsporting’ and would count against him the next time. He resigned on 4 June, five days after the poll.

  The transition was then less abrupt than has since become the habit. On 14 June Baldwin was still living in 10 Downing Street, MacDonald having helpfully retired for a post-election holiday at Lossiemouth. Baldwin had some considerable difficulty about finding another place to live. His relative impoverishment had proceeded rapidly during the twenties. Baldwins Ltd’s shares were only at 3/6. The loss of his Prime Minister’s salary was a serious matter, and he refused to take either to journalism or the City, as he had criticized Lloyd George for one and Sir Robert Horne for the other. He talked about selling Astley and although it was probably little more than talk, he was forced to run it extremely economically, and could not think of another London house on the scale of Eaton Square. Eventually he took a short lease on a much smaller house in Upper Brook Street.

  His main summer objective, as usual, was to get through to his holiday. This he accomplished satisfactorily. The defeat, as was natural, led to a good deal of rumbling, particularly against the Conservative Central Office, where Davidson, the Chairman since 1927, was far too much Baldwin’s own man to be a satisfactory lightning conductor. But at first these rumblings were mainly subterranean. A Central Council meeting on 2 July passed off with some display of enthusiasm, and gave Baldwin a unanimous vote of confidence. His own speech was skilful in detail, but highly defensive in concept. He was in France for six weeks in August and September and then had another two or three weeks staying with friends in the North of England and Scotland. He did not make a settled return to London until 20 October. Then, for the eighteen months until March 1931, he experienced one of the roughest passages which has been the lot of any party leader this century.

  The trouble was three-fold. First, he had no taste and little ability for the harrying of a government. He constantly ignored Bolingbroke’s maxim that Members of Parliament are like hounds that grow fond of the leader ‘who shows them game and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged.’3 Indeed, at Sheffield in May 1930 he almost erected the contrary view into a principle:

  I hold the view very strongly–and I know I have been criticised for it–that when a government has not got great experience, is a minority government, it is essential if you can possibly support it that it should be able to speak with a strong voice to the countries of the world.

  As a result the MacDonald Government, despite its many faults and vicissitudes, was left almost miraculously free from strong and sustained attack by its principal opponent. All Baldwin’s notable speeches of this perio
d, both in the House and in the country, were devoted to troubles within his own party. When occasionally he rather wearily turned on the Government, the reaction was one of surprise more than of dismay.

  Second, he was subjected to a sustained attack by the two principal popular newspaper proprietors of the day, Beaverbrook and Rothermere. The point nominally at issue was the one which had spasmodically rent the Conservative Party for the past three decades–the tariff question. The intricacies of this had almost defied analysis since the early years of the century when Balfour had deliberately muddied the waters. Safeguarding, retaliation, imperial preference, protection for industry but not for agriculture, all created a web of almost infinite complexity. It was very difficult to remember who had been for what at which particular period. Indeed it can be argued that none of this greatly mattered. The issue flared up when the party was doing badly for other reasons, and subsided when it was not.

  It was the classic recipe for embarrassing a leader. And the two press lords, and some others, certainly wished to embarrass Baldwin. Had the issue been treated seriously he ought to have been more than usually invulnerable upon it. No one had risked more for tariff reform than he had in 1923. But Rothermere and Beaverbrook were not principally interested in the issue for its own sake. Rothermere, indeed, hardly cared about it at all. He hated Baldwin and that was enough. Beaverbrook had some genuine concern, and was less consistently anti-Baldwin. But he loved mischief, and he rarely considered whether his schemes made sense. He committed himself to a singularly foolish plan for Empire Free Trade. It was singularly foolish because it obviously could not work without reciprocity, and no Dominion leader, not even his erstwhile friend Bennett of Canada, was willing to throw their markets open to British goods. Rothermere, a much bigger newspaper owner, supported Beaverbrook in uneasy alliance. The Empire Crusade was designed to cause the maximum trouble for the Conservative leadership. Its promoters took the extreme step of running independent Conservative candidates in by-elections. They won one, in South Paddington, and cost official Conservative candidates the seat in several more, often driving them into third place.