The Bewdley part
He was the only child of Alfred Baldwin, an industrialist and Member of Parliament, and Louisa Macdonald. He came into Parliament at a by-election on 29 February 1908, on his father’s death, for the seat his father had held, and he kept it until 1937. His maiden speech, on 22 June 1908, was on a Bill concerning coal miners, and he made it from the point of view of an employer, which is what he was. Hansard records 10,460 contributions from him in all, the first on 10 May 1909 and the last on 4 October 1938, by which time he was in the Lords.
He lived at Astley Hall, near Stourport, from 1902 until his death there on 14 December 1947, aged eighty. Bewdley’s parliamentary seat was abolished in 1950, three years after he died, so the constituency he represented for a generation no longer exists.
The family, and a window at Ribbesford
His mother was one of the Macdonald sisters, and that connection runs further than most people expect. His uncles by marriage were Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, and Rudyard Kipling was his first cousin and a lifelong friend. A summer the two boys spent together at Loughton in Essex in 1877 is described as formative for both of them.
The thread comes back to the parish. The Burne-Jones west window in St Leonard’s at Ribbesford, made in Morris’s workshop in 1875, is dedicated to Hannah Macdonald, who was Burne-Jones’s mother-in-law and grandmother to both Baldwin and Kipling. It is a direct family memorial to a Prime Minister’s grandmother, sitting in a hamlet church a mile outside the town, and hardly anybody makes anything of it.
Lucy Baldwin, who deserves her own article
He married Lucy Ridsdale on 12 September 1892 and she died in June 1945. She was a keen sportswoman in her youth and went on to a substantial public career of her own, campaigning for better maternity care. She was a leading figure in the National Birthday Trust Fund and founded the Anaesthetics Fund, set up to reduce the danger and the pain of childbirth, and her lobbying contributed to the establishment of a national midwifery service.
That is from the official Downing Street biography, not from a family memoir, and it is a great deal more than a Prime Minister’s wife is usually credited with.
Three sovereigns in one year
Baldwin was Prime Minister three times, and in 1936 he was Prime Minister to three sovereigns inside a single year, seeing out George V, taking Edward VIII through the abdication, and continuing under George VI. In 1923 he held the Chancellorship of the Exchequer at the same time as the premiership, the last Prime Minister to do so.
Giving away a fifth of his fortune
The best story about him is one almost nobody knows. As Financial Secretary to the Treasury after the First World War he pressed the wealthy to give voluntarily towards paying down the war debt, and he wrote to The Times making the case under the pseudonym “FST”, the initials of his own office.
Then he did it himself. In 1919 he gave away roughly a fifth of his own fortune, £120,000 of War Loan stock out of an estimate of £580,000. The letter, the pseudonym and the proportion are all on the government’s own record of past Prime Ministers.
Nearly twenty years later, on 8 December 1938, he launched an appeal by BBC broadcast for refugees from Nazi Europe. It raised £522,000 in eight months and helped to fund the Kindertransport.
The reputation, and a misquotation
He left office in 1937 admired, and by 1940 he had been comprehensively destroyed as one of the “guilty men” who had failed to rearm Britain in time. Modern scholarship has largely restored him. Both of those things are true and neither should be simply repeated, so here is the substance of it.
The most damaging charge came from Churchill, who represented Baldwin as having admitted putting party before country. What Baldwin actually said, in the Commons on 12 November 1936, was that in 1933 and 1934 no government could have won an election on a platform of rearmament, and he was talking about the Fulham by-election of 1933 and the public mood at that time. He then went on to say of the general election of 1935: “We got from the country, a mandate for doing a thing that no one, twelve months before, would have believed possible.”
Churchill quoted the first part and left out the second. An index entry in The Gathering Storm has Baldwin “admitting to putting party before country”. The historian Reginald Bassett set out the misquotation in an essay of 1948, “Telling the truth to the people: the myth of the Baldwin ‘confession'”, and the correction has been available ever since to anybody who wanted it.
What can fairly be held against him is separate and should be said. Campaigning in 1935 he told the country, “I give you my word that there will be no great armaments.” He did not make rearmament the central issue of that election despite Neville Chamberlain advising him to. And on 22 May 1935 he told the Commons plainly: “I was wrong in my estimate of the future. There I was completely wrong.” Andrew Thorpe judges him neglectful of foreign affairs and too easily depressed, and notes the nervous breakdown in 1936 that took him out of action for three months.
The gates
Nothing captures the collapse of his standing better than a row about ironwork. In 1941 Lord Beaverbrook had local authorities survey iron gates and railings for the war effort. Baldwin applied to have the gates of his country home exempted on artistic grounds, and the council’s own architect agreed with him. In February 1942 the Ministry of Supply overruled it.
The Daily Mirror‘s columnist Cassandra tore into him for it. In the Commons, Captain Alan Graham asked whether it was “very necessary to leave Lord Baldwin his gates in order to protect him from the just indignation of the mob”. All but the main entrance gates were taken away, months before other collections in the area had even begun.
“Are they booing me?”
His last public appearance was in London in October 1947, at the unveiling of a statue of George V. The crowd recognised him and cheered. He had gone deaf by then, and turned to ask whether they were booing him.
Where he is remembered
He was cremated at Birmingham and his ashes were buried in Worcester Cathedral, with a memorial service at Wilden Church near Stourport. In the nave of Westminster Abbey there is a memorial stone, unveiled on 18 December 1997 by Tony Blair, designed by Donald Buttress and carved by I. Rees, lying just east of Attlee’s. It reads: “STANLEY BALDWIN 1867-1947 THREE TIMES PRIME MINISTER”.
Bewdley took rather longer. The bronze statue in the town, sculpted by Martin Jennings, was unveiled on 27 September 2018 by HRH The Duke of Gloucester, after a long fundraising campaign led by Bewdley Civic Society. Jennings describes the figure as being “in tweed suit and with his pipe in hand, the image of the stable leader that he wanted to project”. The plaque inside the Guildhall records the sculptor, the date and the unveiling.
Seventy-one years passed between his death and his statue. He was born at Lower Park and died at Astley Hall, about eight miles apart, and was three times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in between.