Baldwin
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11 Only MPs were invited to speak or vote in the meeting although some peers attended, including Birkenhead, whose late arrival during Austen Chamberlain’s speech was greeted by a cry of ‘traitor’, which Chamberlain mistakenly thought was intended for him.
12 He was asked, as a disinterested elder statesman and former Conservative Prime Minister, to come to London and see the King on the afternoon of Whit Monday (22 May). When he returned to the house at Sheringham in Norfolk where he was staying he was asked by old mutual friends, ‘And will dear George [Curzon] be chosen?’ ‘No,’ he replied with feline Balfourian satisfaction, ‘dear George will not.’ (K. Rose, Superior Person, page 383.)
13 A late sixteenth-century house beyond Yeovil, Somerset, which Curzon could not resist acquiring on a long lease despite the fact that he was already renting Hackwood, near Basingstoke, and, after the death of his father in 1916, owned Kedleston in Derbyshire. He was a great improver of all his properties, even removing a small hill at Hackwood so that the view should be less impeded.
14 Since first drafting this passage I have read Kenneth Rose’s excellent 1983 biography of King George V. I think he would contest at least the emphasis of what I have written. Such at any rate would seem to follow from his summing-up sentence: ‘The King had preferred Baldwin to Curzon for one reason alone: that he sat in the House of Commons’ (page 273). But I am not convinced that there is necessarily a conflict. The King knew Curzon much better than he knew Baldwin, and no doubt did not wish to wound him unnecessarily. It therefore suited well to fasten firmly on the objective House of Commons point. It might have been regarded as much less conclusive had the peer under consideration been preferred on merits by the King and by the generality of Conservative opinion. And indeed the King went out of his way to make it clear that he was not laying down a rule against a House of Lords Prime Minister for the future: ‘What I said was that there were circumstances in which it was very undesirable that a peer should be Prime Minister and in my view this was such a case’ (Rose, pages 272-3). One of the circumstances was perhaps the fact that the Government was already very strongly represented in the House of Lords. Another, in my view probably more important, was the personality and character of the two contenders. Seventeen years later, when a similar issue arose between Churchill and Halifax (except that Halifax was not a contender), the latter was certainly not automatically excluded because of his membership of the House of Lords, although once again it was a fortunate contributory factor.
1 I recall being told how, in my father’s first few months as a Labour member in 1935, Baldwin stopped him beside the open fire which then burned in the ‘no’ division lobby and talked for a quarter of an hour or more about his own experiences as a young man on visits to the tinplate mills of my father’s Monmouthshire constituency.
2 He described his method of approaching a speech in a letter to Davidson written a couple of years later: ‘I just want a quiet morning to think … it is just getting that two or three hours undisturbed, walking about the room and sitting in an armchair, that restores my equilibrium. It is by turning over things in my mind that the precipitate [an oddly chemical use of the word] is formed out of which the speeches come, and if I don’t go through that curious preparatory cud-chewing, then the work suffers’ (Robert Rhodes James, Memoirs of a Conservative, page 197).
3 Offers of the Washington Embassy, made by Conservative leaders to their predecessors, do not have a happy history. Mr Heath was not pleased by such a proposal from Mrs Thatcher in 1979.
4 With Lloyd George, of whom he was frightened, he did it behind his back. ‘Girlie, I am getting very tired of working or trying to work with that man,’ he wrote to his wife in 1921. ‘He wants his Forn. Sec. to be a valet almost a drudge and he has no regard for the convenances or civilities of official life.’ With Baldwin, of whom he was not frightened, he did it to his face: ‘I must confess,’ he wrote in the autumn of 1923, ‘I am almost in despair as to the way in which foreign policy is carried on in this Cabinet. Any member may make any suggestion he pleases and and the discussion wanders off into hopeless irrelevancies… No decision is arrived at and no policy prepared. Do please let us revert to the time-honoured procedure … we must act together and the P.M. must see his F.S. through.’ It is not clear what was the ‘time-honoured procedure’ to which Curzon referred with such nostalgia. He had served in no Cabinet before that of Lloyd George.
5 Page 58 supra.
6 This passage, unlike most of Jones’s recordings of Baldwin’s views, signally fails to catch his rhythm and style. It reads more like a snatch of Attlee’s conversation.
7 Sir Archibald Salvidge (1863-1928) was principal Conservative Party organizer in Liverpool; an extremely effective mobilizer, with some brewery assistance, of the working class Protestant Tory vote; and partly because of a special relationship with Derby, probably the most nationally influential local agent of any party during this century.
8 J. R. Campbell (1894-1969), holder of the Military Medal for gallantry in the First World War and much later editor of the Daily Worker, was at that time temporarily acting as editor of the Workers’ Weekly. As a result of an article urging soldiers to let it be known that neither in the class war nor in a military war should they turn their guns upon their fellow workers, the Director of Public Prosecutions recommended that he be prosecuted for sedition. The Attorney-General (Sir Patrick Hastings) concurred and Campbell was arrested. This led to a storm on the left of the Labour Party. Hastings consulted the Cabinet and withdrew the prosecution, claiming that he reached the decision on his own and not as a result of the Cabinet discussion. This led to a slowly mounting storm on the right, culminating in a major debate on 8 October, a Conservative censure motion and a Liberal amendment to refer the matter to a Select Committee. MacDonald resisted both. At the end the Conservatives voted for the Liberal amendment to their own motion and the Government was defeated by 364 to 198. MacDonald asked for and was granted an immediate dissolution, which nobody greatly wanted as it was the third within twenty-four months.
9 A letter purporting to be from Grigori Zinoviev, the President of the Communist International, to the British Communist Party giving them instructions for military infiltration and other measures ‘to develop the ideas of Leninism in England’. It started life in the offices of the Daily Mail but was widely accepted as authentic by other newspapers, by the Foreign Office and indeed by MacDonald, who was Foreign Secretary as well as Prime Minister. Trying to deal with the matter in the interstices of a punishing speaking tour, MacDonald handled it with great maladroitness.
10 The Ministry of Health had thirty years of somewhat misnamed life, beginning in 1919. Its responsibilities covered local government, housing and all social welfare schemes.
1 The first parliament of the Attlee Government, from July 1945 to February 1950, was the longest.
2 There was of course money involved. He changed it again in 1935 to Lord Swinton. He was made an earl twenty years after that but, surprisingly, missed the opportunity for a third change. Born in 1884, he lived until 1972.
3 This is exemplified (although not much to Chamberlain’s credit) by a 1925 incident. ‘I had noticed,’ Chamberlain wrote in his diary after a Cabinet at which he had been expounding a departmental problem, ‘that S.B. didn’t seem to be attending to me, and presently he passed an open note across the table to Winston, who was sitting beside me. On the note was written:
MATCHES
Lent at 10.30 a.m.
Returned?
This triviality, while a very grave question was being discussed under S.B.’s chairmanship, made the most deplorable impression on me’ (David Dilks, Neville Chamberlain, vol. 1 1869-1929, pages 448-9).
4 This, as stated, was certainly unfair. Apart from anything else, Chamberlain served with Baldwin for only a little more than a third of the period. It could be the only occasion on which Baldwin imposed a policy of his own upon the Cabinet, but there were many other occasions,
including some of considerable importance to Chamberlain’s conduct of the Foreign Office, when he steered skilfully towards one course rather than another.
5 David Kirkwood (1872-1955), MP for Dumbarton Burghs (1922-51). A Clydeside firebrand in his early days, a peer in 1951.
6 The Triple Alliance, between the miners, the railwaymen and the transport workers, had been formed in 1919 and secured some partial success in October 1920 when a threatened rail strike in support of the miners produced a compromise wage offer from Lloyd George. In April 1921, in the second stage of this continuing dispute the Alliance collapsed, not so much in betrayal (although it was so portrayed by many) as in confusion. In the mythology of the Labour movement, Friday, 15 April became ‘Black Friday’.
7 The Roosevelt surname alone still meant Theodore rather than Franklin. Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt had used the phrase at the 1912 Republican Convention in Chicago when he announced that he was running against President Taft, his own choice as his successor in 1908, either on or against the Republican ticket. ‘Until then’, a chronicler of that conflict wrote, ‘a bull moose had simply been the huge-antlered male member of the largest deer family, of the genus Alces Americana but TR’s simile made it the symbol of a fighting cause’ (William Manners, TR and Will, pages 237-8). In the event, Roosevelt ran against the Republican ticket, as the champion of the Progressive or ‘Bull Moose’ Party, and put Woodrow Wilson in the White House by default. I think that Baldwin merely wished to say that he felt very well, and not to arouse these memories.
8 Baldwin’s principal private secretary got the King’s secretary out of bed at Windsor to tell him the dread news. ‘The Daily Mail has ceased to function,’ he announced, at once portentously and ambiguously. ‘Tell His Majesty so that he should not go off the deep end.’ At Windsor there was a greater sense of proportion. ‘We don’t take the Daily Mail, or the Daily Express, Sir Clive Wigram said sleepily, and rang off. (Tom Jones, A Diary with Letters, page 133.)
9 He sounds like an opera character, got up for the part: ‘On his arrival at No 10 [Waterhouse] briefed him fully as to the P.M.’s symptoms and as to what we Secretaries wished should be done. S.B. himself had no idea who or what sort of specialist the doctor was. The doctor played up splendidly …’ (Jones, A Diary with Letters, page 64).
10 As against approximately £300 billion in 1986.
1 Its only memorable passage was when he took up a previous reference to the loss of the American Colonies and said that ‘If George III had been endowed with the tongue of Edmund Burke for only an hour, he might have made such a speech [as Churchill]’ (Hansard, vol. 247, col. 744, 26 Jan. 1931).
2 ‘I have been overwhelmed with congratulations from all quarters’, he wrote about this to his wife, ‘(except S.B. who can’t bear the thought of making it up with the press lords and doesn’t see how it has helped his own position)’ (quoted in Iain Macleod, Neville Chamberlain, page 145).
1 In Middlemas and Barnes, Baldwin, it is implied that MacDonald first did so, with an oddly jaunty and inappropriately phrased response to an intervention of Hoare’s: ‘Well, are you prepared to join the Board of Directors?’ (page 623)
2 The only difference, a surprising but typical example of the frailty of human memory, was that Davidson was convinced the discussion was in his own house, whereas Hoare believed it was at the Conservative Research Department in Old Queen Street.
3 Even had the Prime Minister been prepared to renounce it, the terms of the bequest would have given the second refusal to Neville Chamberlain as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Prime Minister can offer 11 Downing Street to any minister he likes. He is more restricted in the case of Chequers.
4 Its subsequent rival in this respect, the 1950s, was equally dominated by governments of one party, but they were throughout opposed by numerically strong Labour oppositions, which was not the case in the 1930s.
5 By rashly reflecting upon this view in a 1936 House of Commons speech (see pages 159-60 infra) he gave his reputation one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds of political history.
6 He did not in name occupy this position. Until Churchill no Prime Minister (unless in the Lords) delegated the title. Since Churchill, so rapidly can constitutional habits change, no Prime Minister has thought of not doing so.
7 It was also the last occasion on which he discharged this unwelcome duty. In 1936 the task was delegated to Neville Chamberlain.
8 The main difficulty came from the dropping of Londonderry (7th Marquess of, 1878-1949) whom Baldwin had moved in June from the Air Ministry to the leadership of the House of Lords. He was a heavy liability on a variety of grounds, and Baldwin was determined to be rid of him. He went with the worst of grace. Such was the lavishness of Londonderry House entertaining (particularly the great eve of the session receptions) that Birkenhead had described him as ‘catering his way into the Cabinet’. Once he was out he dropped some of the catering (there was no eve-of-the-session party in December 1935) and devoted himself to writing long letters of reproach to Baldwin.
9 It is very difficult for opposition leaders to strike the right note to entice Government supporters. Twenty years later, at the time of Suez, Gaitskell was held to have minimized the Conservative revolt, not by impugning Eden’s honour, but by offering too direct an appeal to the dissidents. The best parliamentary course, when Government revolts are simmering, might be for opposition spokesmen to say nothing, but that would hardly be compatible with their position in the country, or with their providing a lobby into which the dissidents might be enticed. The reality often is that those who have threatened to revolt are looking with considerable eagerness for an excuse to change their minds.
10 Hoare came back in June as First Lord of the Admiralty.
11 He went first to Gregynog, the Montgomeryshire house of the Davies family (see note on Tom Jones, infra), and then to Blickling, the Norfolk house of the 11th Marquess of Lothian (1882–1940), formerly as Philip Kerr a member of Milner’s South African ‘Kindergarten’ and then of Lloyd George’s ‘garden suburb’ secretariat, currently a close associate of Waldorf (2nd Viscount) and Nancy Astor, and hence a core member of the ‘Cliveden Set’. When he died at the end of 1940 (perhaps because Nancy Astor had converted him from Roman Catholicism to Christian Science and turned him against doctors) he was British Ambassador in Washington.
1 ‘You know what they are saying,’ Anthony Eden reported that he had said. ‘No more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris’ (Eden, Facing the Dictators, p. 317). Kenneth Rose’s King George V casts doubt on the authenticity of this remark.
2 Even without an unprecedented impending crisis, a month was an unusually long interval between Prime Ministerial audiences.
3 The point arose because of the latent powers of a legal luminary known as the King’s Proctor. Lady Donaldson’s Edward VIII contains the following neat explanation: ‘As the law stood at the time the fact that two people both wished to divorce each other was an absolute bar to their being able to do so. Thus if it could be proved that the divorce was arranged ‘collusively’ between the two parties, the application would fail’ (page 238). A decree nisi could also be set aside on the intervention of the King’s Proctor during the period before it became absolute. (See also page 153 infra.)
4 The King might perhaps at this point have paraphrased Baldwin’s own remark about successors to Neville Chamberlain six years earlier (see page 118 supra).
5 It was not that he had an inflated view of the assiduity of their consultations. ‘But how they do it I don’t know,’ he told G. M. Young. ‘I suppose they talk to the stationmaster’ (Young, Stanley Baldwin, page 242).
6 The King’s account is that he said: ‘I know that you and Mrs Baldwin do not approve of what I am doing, but I belong to a different generation;’ and that Baldwin replied: ‘Sir, it is quite true that there are no two people amongst your subjects who are more grieved at what has happened than we are, but you must always remember that there are no two p
eople who hope more sincerely that you may find happiness where you believe it to be found’ (A King’s Story, page 402).
7 Middlemas and Barnes, 1969, and Montgomery Hyde, 1973.
8 By announcing a National Defence Contribution which was a tax not on profits as such but on their increase. He united Keynes and Montagu Norman against him. His proposal was withdrawn on the day he kissed hands.
9 Despite this anti-climax the Baldwins went back to Aix in the summer of 1938 for what turned out to be the last of seventeen visits. They also spent a month at the old Riviera resort of Beaulieu in each of the two last winters of peacetime.
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