In September 2018, Alistair Lexden spoke about the significance of Stanley Baldwin’s career after the unveiling of a statue of the three- times prime minister in Bewdley, Worcestershire. His address was printed in a booklet recording the great occasion, Stanley Baldwin: A Statesman in Bronze.
Five years on, he has slightly revised and significantly expanded that address to mark the centenary of Baldwin’s first term as prime minister in 1923.
Stanley Baldwin loved his native county of Worcestershire, a constant source of inspiration to him, and he loved his country. Large numbers of his contemporaries, sensing his profound, yet gentle patriotism, which threatened no other nation, came quite quickly to regard him with affection and deep respect after his sudden emergence at the forefront of public life in the early 1920s.
Politicians have to expect mocking or derogatory nicknames. Baldwin escaped them: he was known kindly, and accurately, as Honest Stan.
People thought of him almost as a personal friend: for he spoke to them frequently in clear, straightforward language in their homes, through the newly established BBC. He was a brilliant broadcaster, far surpassing all his fellow politicians. It was the start of a new era of mass communications: and he dominated it.
The ranks of his admirers extended far beyond those who belonged to, or voted for, the Conservative Party, which he led to the three greatest election victories in its history (1924,1931 and 1935) during his fourteen years at its head .
He had the ability, given to few political leaders, especially in peace-time, to address the nation in language—some of the most moving and beautiful language it had ever heard—that avoided partisan rancour and bitterness.
He had friends in places where most Tory leaders attract only opponents. He enjoyed the company of trade union leaders and gained their trust, which helped bring the General Strike of 1926, one of the most formidable challenges he faced, to a swift conclusion in ten days, and minimised the damage to industrial relations and the economy. He went out of his way to make the Labour Party, now suddenly the second party in the state, feel welcome at Westminster.
The editor of The Times wrote that ‘Toryism, as expounded by him, lost many of its repellent features.’
One Nation
His objective, from which he never wavered, was to diminish the class divisions, which scarred his country so deeply, and draw people together irrespective of their backgrounds in the service—one of his favourite words—of their country.
Addressing a great election victory rally at the Royal Albert Hall in December 1924, he said that Conservatives must dedicate themselves to creating ‘ the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago: union among our own people to make one nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world.’
In this way he introduced into political life that famous phrase, one nation, which has been heard again and again over the years, even on the lips of some Labour, as well as of Tory, politicians.
Few have worked as hard as he did to make it a reality. Yet he is too frequently denied the credit for devising it; it is widely believed to have come from Disraeli, but he never used it. Whenever I come across its misattribution in the media, I write in to correct it.
In the interests of one nation, Baldwin was clear that the rich must set an example , as he himself had done by giving a fifth of his wealth anonymously to the state after the First World War.
The rich must also be prepared to accept higher taxation, which became a feature of the inter-war period.
Tory policy was reshaped to advance the cause of one nation. Social reform became an ever-present major preoccupation for the first time in the Party’s history. ‘The Conservative Party’, Baldwin declared at the 1929 election, ‘regards the prosperity of trade and industry, not as an end in itself, but as a means to improve the condition of the people.’
Baldwin found in Neville Chamberlain, his most outstanding minister, the perfect agent for that demanding task.
The system of local government was transformed, large swathes of slum housing were cleared and some three million new homes built, contributory pensions were introduced and the first national health services were provided as a result of the initiatives of Neville Chamberlain, the inspired social reformer who gave practical expression to Baldwin’s vision of one nation.
Greater welfare provision than ever before would not kill freedom and choice. Baldwin insisted on the need to ‘ preserve that individualistic self-reliance which has been the great attribute of our people’ while developing ‘a more communal sense to keep in comfort the people of our island.’
Votes for Women
It was Stanley Baldwin who made Britain a fully democratic state. In 1928 he brought all women over 21 within it by giving them the vote, finishing what had been begun ten years earlier when the franchise had been conferred on women with property over the age of 30.
He said in 1927 that ‘a democracy is incomplete and lop-sided until it is representative of the whole people, and the responsibility rests alike on men and women’. Churchill totally disagreed, believing that women should remain on the outer fringes of political life, but Baldwin prevailed. Fittingly, he was asked to unveil the lovely statue of Mrs Pankhurst erected beside Parliament in 1930.
Baldwin’s Humour
By 1930 many had come to regard Baldwin as the third most famous person in the realm, after their revered monarch, King George V, and the charming Prince of Wales with his gift for impromptu speech-making and his extensive travels in the Empire which helped reinforce the monarchy’s popularity.
The gruff, good-hearted sovereign occasionally found it necessary to chide his longest-serving prime minister, who spent nearly eight years in all at Number 10.
In a letter to the King in 1925, Baldwin described an all-night sitting in the Commons as resembling ‘St James’s Park at midday with members lying about the benches in recumbent positions.’ Royal displeasure was communicated to him. ‘Members of Parliament now include ladies and such a state of things as you describe seems to His Majesty hardly decorous’.
It was fortunate that other less than decorous remarks made by Baldwin did not reach the royal ears. ‘Never stand between a dog and a lamp-post’, he once advised his Downing Street staff-- sensibly enough.
He invented proverbs. One, which he said was of Afghan origin, would certainly have bemused the sovereign, and many others besides: ‘He who lies in the bosom of the goat, spends his remaining days plucking out the fleas’. He was deluged with letters from retired colonial officials authenticating this bogus proverb, insisting that it originated in Burma, or Malaya, or Singapore, or some other place where they had served. (Baldwin was in fact having a little fun at the expense of Lloyd George, nicknamed ‘the goat’.)
In 1934 news of a Tory by-election defeat in Rotherham was brought to him on the government front bench in the Commons. He had once changed trains there and used the lavatory which had square seats. For several minutes he muttered away, repeating words which had been chalked up on the lavatory wall. ‘ If square seats don’t bother ’em/They’ve got rum bums in Rotherham.’
Monarchy, Empire and Constitution
On the great issues, however, Baldwin was always serious. He saw the monarchy as the utterly indispensable constitutional linchpin of the nation whose unity and cohesion he sought throughout his career to strengthen. The monarchy was crucial also to the unity of the Empire.
Through bold, controversial reform to recast the government of India on more democratic lines (over which Churchill fought him tooth and nail without success), coupled with the maintenance of close ties with the self-governing dominions, Baldwin preserved the Empire as a vital force for world peace.
He had no more faith in the League of Nations than we have in the United Nations. The Empire would continue to evolve. He sometimes referred to it as the British Commonwealth. Whatever the name, Baldwin believed that Britain would remain firmly at its head, and ensure its beneficent influence on international affairs.
Of the straitlaced King and Emperor, George V, he said: ‘we are fortunate indeed to have as our King a man with such a sense of duty’.
He looked in vain for similar virtue in his successor, Edward VIII. He believed that the interests of the country compelled him to ask the King to choose between the throne and a hard, greedy woman, uninterested in public service, with two former husbands living.
Rather to her credit, she was quite willing to give up the idea of marriage, but he utterly refused to agree .It was Edward VIII’s singular misfortune to need a wife who would dominate him, a talent that Mrs Simpson possessed.
Baldwin had no truck with the expedient of a morganatic marriage ( hitherto unknown in British law) to keep a monarch whom he believed to be unworthy of his calling. It was inconsistent with the standards which he upheld. ‘Is this the sort of thing I’ve stood for in public life?’, he asked.
His masterly handling of the abdication crisis in 1936, saving the Crown from any lasting damage, brought his career to a triumphant conclusion. His detailed explanation of the crisis in the House of Commons was described by Harold Nicolson as ‘the best speech we will ever hear in our lives’.
He retired a few months later. Hensley Henson, the highly regarded Bishop of Durham, said: he is ‘really a very great man, and a genuine member of the “goodly fellowship of the prophets”’.
Not all the country’s historic institutions gained his full-hearted praise. He went reluctantly to the House of Lords on his retirement in 1937, saying disarmingly ‘there is perhaps a certain retributive justice in it as I have sent so many others there, hoping I should never see their faces again’.
Baldwin’s Sense of History—and his Modesty
How frequently in the hundreds of speeches he delivered outside Parliament— more than any other modern prime minister and many of them to non-political audiences —he referred to vivid memories of his beloved Worcestershire ,which abided with him and to which he gave eloquent expression.
Here is an extract from one of them, recalling Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 when he was twenty years old:
‘I was walking slowly across a wide common in Worcestershire, waiting for the warning light of the great beacon on Malvern which was to give the signal for the chain of beacons running north to carry the glad news of the jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign. How often in our history had these same hills sent out their fiery message, to Briton and Roman, to Saxon and Dane. But this night it was a message of rejoicing and thanksgiving and pride…at the appointed hour the first flame shot up on Malvern, and one by one each hill took up the tale, until I stood in the middle of a vast illuminated circle, the nearer fires showing the people attending them, and the remoter dwindling in size until they merely blazed as stars on the horizon’.
Apart from the power of the language, note the historical resonance, which is a recurrent feature of his speeches. A country is impoverished when it lacks leaders with a sense of the past, as we do today.
Baldwin’s total lack of self-importance, that besetting sin of politicians, is well illustrated by a famous anecdote. On a train journey during the second of his three premierships, he noticed that another occupant of the compartment was looking at him with some puzzlement. After a time this man 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?’ I had long imagined thisstory to be apocryphal, but it is endorsed by his descendants today—and it can only have come from Baldwin himself.
Rearmament: Baldwin and Churchill
It is well-known that Baldwin’s reputation plunged precipitously from the astonishingly high point at which it stood when he retired in 1937. The cause is equally well-known: the charge that he failed to rearm Britain in the face of the growing menace of the fascist dictators.
What are the essential facts? Air rearmament was launched on a large scale in 1934; forty-one new RAF squadrons were approved. At the general election which took place the following year (when another thirty-nine squadrons were approved), Baldwin sought an explicit mandate for its continuation and expansion.
He said: ‘I will not be responsible for the conduct of any Government in this country at the present time, if I am not given power to remedy the deficiencies which have accrued in our defence services since the War.’ He got the mandate he sought with his third massive Conservative majority.
The myths that Churchill later fostered so assiduously about Baldwin’s neglect of Britain’s defences have now been demolished. In the best book yet written about him, entitled Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values, Professor Philip Williamson has provided a definitive correction: ‘Rearmament was a complicated matter, facing financial and physical constraints, requiring decisions on priorities, and depending upon uncertain information about the German position. Cabinet ministers chose to plan for a possible war in the medium term (1939 and later) and in the short term to build a deterrent air force, while seeking to tie Hitler down to negotiated agreements. It cannot be assumed that if Churchill had been in their position from 1934 to 1937 his actions—rather than his words—would, or could, have been much different, or have produced better results.’
Churchill himself gave Baldwin full credit for rearmament in 1935. He described Baldwin’s measures as ‘a most formidable and tremendous advance in British defence’. In November the following year he acknowledged that Baldwin had ‘ fought and largely won’ the 1935 election on rearmament. But a little later Churchill doctored the record. A book of his speeches omitted his praise for Baldwin in 1936 ,and contrived to give the impression that he had not called for rearmament in 1935.
In the first volume of his war memoirs, The Gathering Storm, Churchill turned his bowdlerised speeches into what came to be regarded as authoritative history, summarised by his indexer as Baldwin ‘denies’ the need for rearmament and ‘ confesses putting party before country’.
It was a disgraceful slur on a man who had confronted widespread public opposition to rearmament in the early 1930s and changed it fundamentally, as his election victory in 1935 demonstrated –and as Churchill himself had recognised at the time.
It was only by laying false charges at Baldwin’s door that Churchill managed to get the better of him for a time, and now historians have corrected the record. On all the other issues over which they differed—voting rights for women, tariffs on imported goods, reform in India, the abdication--Baldwin defeated Churchill soundly.
The long-serving Tory minister, Lord Swinton, recorded a conversation with Churchill in old age. ‘I said: “Winston, you fought him for years and years when he was P.M.and party leader, and you never won a round.” Winston grunted, but he did he did not dissent.’
Baldwin treated Churchill with a magnanimity that went unreciprocated. He declined to have him back in government in the 1930s after his ferocious attacks on Indian policy, but never denied his genius. In 1935 he said: ‘if there is going to be a war—and who can say there is not—we must keep him fresh to be our war prime minister.’
There will always be questions about the pace of rearmament in the late 1930s; a pointless industry has grown up debating them. The tragic reality is that all British leaders who pressed for rearmament—Churchill as well as Baldwin—did so on what turned out to be false expectations: that Hitler would be deterred by the threat of bomber aircraft and that the French army could halt a German attack in the West, and prevent a world war.
What did Baldwin think about Nazi Germany? He detested it. Appalled by the Kristallnacht attack on Jews and their property towards the end of 1938, he launched The Lord Baldwin’s Fund for Refugees. In eight months it raised £522,000, slightly over £34 million in today’s values. It helped fund the Kindertransport, and is regarded as the most successful British public appeal of the inter-war years, as Baldwin’s great- grandson, Simon Russell, Lord Russell of Liverpool, told the House of Lords a few years ago.
Baldwin’s Legacy and Greatness
Baldwin made his last speech as Prime Minister on 18 May 1937 to a packed Albert Hall, filled with representatives of the youth of the Empire and Commonwealth. What, asked Baldwin, had made Britain so successful? His answer: ‘Freedom, ordered freedom within the law, with force in the background and not in the foreground; a society in which freedom and authority are blended in due proportion’. He told his young audience: ‘It may well be that you will have to save democracy’—as a number of them would indeed do a few years later. And he added: ‘live for the brotherhood of man’.
These were the ideals, straightforward Tory ideals, to which he urged his fellow countrymen to aspire. Ideals like these need to be enunciated once again today, with Baldwin’s eloquent persuasiveness, in our deeply troubled times when his great aim, ‘One Nation’, seems especially elusive.
Baldwin had a clear view about what Conservatives should do to win elections and exercise power well in inter-war Britain. Professor Williamson has summed it up: ‘ if Conservatives were to succeed, whether in resisting socialism or in winning elections, they had to display sensitivity and sympathy towards all sections of the national community. They should show that they cared as much as the Labour party and trade unions about social hardship; they should not just attack socialism, but recognise that the Labour movement expressed an attractive idealism that could only be defeated with alternative Conservative ideals. These consisted especially of the ethic of public service, and of appeals to solidarities other than those of class interest: to the local communities of city, town and county, to the value of family and home, and to national culture, constitutionalism and Christian faith.’
These things formed the basis on which he won the greatest Conservative election victories in modern British history. His successors today have done much less well in defining Conservative ideals that can inspire the nation in the greatly changed form in which it now exists.
As the indefatigable historian, Dominic Sandbrook, put it in a piece marking the centenary of Baldwin’s first premiership this year: ‘In almost every respect he was a walking rebuke to his modern-day successors. And what’s more, he was a far more interesting character than almost all of our current MPs put together.’ His eldest son, who sat for a time in the Commons as a Labour MP (an unprecedented source of strain on a Tory prime minister), lived openly with a gay partner. Baldwin’s devotion to him, and kindness to his partner, never faltered. How many other fathers in inter-war Britain behaved like that? His character does indeed hold much interest.
From all this, from all the above, stems one principal conclusion: that the bitter controversy which Churchill confected no longer obscures the greatness of Stanley Baldwin.
Looking back after he had left office, he summed up his guiding purpose in politics: ‘for fourteen years I preached up and down Great Britain, attempting to achieve a national unity of spirt and a high conception of what democracy may be, and calling for unselfish service to that ideal’. Who today in politics uses terms like these— ‘national unity’, ‘service’ and ‘ideals’?
Let the last words be some of the best-known of those spoken by this formidable figure, deeply imbued with Christian faith, who cared so strongly about the unity of his country. Tears stood in the eyes of MPs throughout the House of Commons as he concluded a famous speech on industrial relations on 6 March 1925: ‘There are many in all ranks and in all parties who will re-echo my prayer: “Give peace in our time, O Lord”’.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE—I have drawn heavily on the work of the leading Baldwin scholar, Professor Philip Williamson, which provides the key to understanding Stanley Baldwin. The best biography is Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: A Biography (1969). It is very detailed and rather buries its subject under a mass of information in the manner of Martin Gilbert’s multi-volume life of Churchill. H. Montgomery Hyde, Baldwin: The Unexpected Prime Minister (1973), written with charm and elegance, has much to commend it.
