On 19 June, Alistair Lexden spoke at a large meeting organised by the Bewdley Civic Society in Worcestershire to mark the centenary of Baldwin’s first premiership, which began in May 1923. He discussed Baldwin’s early life and the events of 1923 in the first part of his address, which follows. ( He went on to consider the overall significance of Baldwin’s career, reusing material from previous lectures and addresses.)
Stanley Baldwin was a very unexpected prime minister. He was far from being one of those figures, common enough in politics , for whom great things are predicted in public life from an early age.
There were certainly many among his large and loving family, and among those who knew him well in early life in his beloved Worcestershire, who were confident that he would achieve great success. But the sphere in which they expected him to leave a powerful mark was industry, not politics.
These perceptive observers were not wrong. Like his father Alfred, a far-sighted, innovating businessman, he was always more than just a diligent Worcestershire ironmaster, though that is how he has tended to be remembered.
In the Edwardian age and beyond, he was a very successful industrialist and on a large scale in both England and Wales, famed for his deep concern for those he employed, some 4,000 in total, in his iron and steel works, and in his coal mines, which all formed part of Baldwins Ltd., a company that remained very profitable until economic depression after the First World War plunged it into difficulty .
What no one foresaw was that industry would provide him with the first of two careers, and that he would have a second at the very top of British politics for fourteen years between 1923 and 1937.
For a long time after his election in 1908 when he took his father’s place as MP for Bewdley after the latter’s death, It seemed almost inconceivable that he would rise to the highest political office.
A well-known veteran journalist, A.G. Gardiner, surveying his career in 1926, wrote: “If on the memorable afternoon of August 3, 1914 [ the day the First World War broke out], anyone, looking down on the crowded benches of the House of Commons, had sought to pick out the man who would be at the helm when the storm that was about to engulf Europe was over he would not have given a thought to the member for Bewdley.”
Gardiner continued: “Mr Baldwin had been in the House six years without creating a ripple on the surface of the waters. A plain, undemonstrative Englishman, prosperous and unambitious, with a pleasant, humorous face, bright and rather bucolic colouring, walking with a quick, long stride that suggested one accustomed to tramping much over ploughed fields with gun under his arm, and smoking a pipe with unremitting enjoyment.”
The picture of Baldwin as the devoted countryman drawn here( with all reference to his career in industry excluded) was one that after 1923 would swiftly become familiar to the nation as a whole. But few in the country at large had formed a clear impression of him , even as late as 1922, just a few months before the start of his first premiership.
By 1922 he had reached the cabinet, after four years as a junior minister. He had been President of Board of Trade for just a year, the least conspicuous member of Lloyd George’s star-studded coalition government of Liberals and Conservatives, who were known at this time as Unionists.
The coalition, which had been in power since 1916 and had won a great election victory in 1918 after the end of the First World War, seemed destined to last for several more years, despite rumblings of Unionist discontent.
In his 1926 profile, Gardiner captured the dramatic moment in Baldwin’s career when everything changed. “One astonishing afternoon in October 1922, he went to the Carlton Club and sprang a mine that blew the most powerful combination of politicians to fragments. There had not been anything like it since David went out with his sling and pebble and slew the Philistine.”
Baldwin shattered the coalition and brought down Lloyd George . His pebble took the form of a short, deadly, eight-minute speech at this famous meeting of Unionist MPs held at the Carlton Club. At the start of the meeting it had been expected that the parties that made up the coalition would fight an imminent general election together on a common platform.
Baldwin helped ensure that the Unionists would fight it as an independent party. And they were victorious, winning a majority of 74. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new, exclusively Unionist Government formed by Andrew Bonar Law, a man whose health was precarious and was not expected to remain in office for long.
Most of the Unionist cabinet ministers who had served under Lloyd George, of whom Austen Chamberlain and F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, were the most prominent, shunned Bonar Law. They were therefore out of the running when a new Unionist prime minister was suddenly needed in May 1923. Baldwin, then aged 55, profited greatly from their temporary political exile.
The Carlton Club meeting of October 1922 was then the pivotal moment in the political career of Stanley Baldwin. One of his colleagues, Lord Swinton, wrote later that “ by his speech at the Carlton Club S.B. stood out as the man of the future…We all recognised that this was a new force being released in the Tory Party, someone with a new style of eloquence more effective because of its simplicity and control.”
But although in October 1922 Baldwin suddenly shot to prominence within his Party, he still remained little-known to the public at large . Within seven months he was their prime minister, enjoying all the attention that the position brought, and quickly stamping his distinct, attractive and formidable personality on the nation that he was to serve so well.
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10 Downing Street, then a rather bleak and cheerless place which did not impress Mrs Baldwin, became his official residence on Tuesday, 22 May 1923.
Baldwin’s arrival there was the result of an unexpected crisis, which arose suddenly and unfolded rapidly.
It was only three days earlier, on 19 May, that it had become clear that Bonar Law, who until then had been in firm control of the Government, would have to retire. At the age of 64, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, which was already in its later stages when it was detected.
Bonar Law, who was to die six months later, was not told the full truth about his condition, but grave physical weakness made it obvious to him and those around him that he could not carry on any longer.
A letter of resignation was delivered to the King, the popular and experienced George V, on 20 May, the Sunday of a Whitsun bank holiday weekend. The King was in Aldershot for a military review with politics far from his mind.
Bonar Law said he was too ill to give the monarch the customary advice to assist the choice of his successor.
The King had to manage as best he could, with the help of his astute private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, who happened to be a strong Tory. No one came forward with the helpful suggestion that the Unionists should swiftly select a new leader, who could then take over as prime minister. Another 40 years would pass before that idea began to take hold.
With many talented ex- cabinet Unionists in exile, one man stood out as the obvious successor on grounds of ability and experience.
George Nathaniel Curzon, the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, aged 64 (like the departing Bonar Law), had first made his mark years earlier as one of the finest Indian viceroys. In 1923, after four years as Foreign Secretary, he was regarded throughout Europe as a masterly diplomat. A few months earlier he had negotiated the Treaty of Lausanne, which brought peace to the Near East where war had continued long after its cessation in Europe, and protected British interests in the oil-rich Gulf region.
Somehow Curzon also found the time to be leader of the House of Lords and deputy prime minister.
He was brilliant, but unloved. He was nicknamed the All Highest by his cabinet colleagues because of his grand lifestyle and insufferable arrogance in domestic politics.
No one looked forward to him becoming prime minister, but his appointment was widely seen for a time as inevitable. Bonar Law would not recommend him to the King, and yet he felt “he would on the whole be disinclined to pass over Curzon.” On the morning of 22 May, most newspapers predicted that Curzon would be appointed.
As for Curzon himself, “it never occurred to him that any alternative could exist”, as his former cabinet colleague, Lord Crawford, noted in his diary.
It was inconceivable to Curzon that Baldwin could be a serious rival. When he was told that what he believed to be impossible was about to come to pass, he was outraged. “Not even a public figure”, he wailed. “A man of no experience. And of the utmost insignificance.”
The comments revealed more about Curzon’s wounded vanity than Baldwin’s actual political capacity.
Baldwin, whose political experience was so much less impressive than Curzon’s, went to No 10 a century ago above all because he was in the Commons. Almost everyone consulted by the King over that Whitsun weekend told him that peers were not acceptable as prime ministers in modern Britain, which now had for the first time a mass electorate created in 1918 when the size of the electorate trebled from seven to twenty-one million. The Labour Party, now the official opposition, had no members in the Lords.
At 3.15pm on 22 May 1923 at Buckingham Palace, the King made Stanley Baldwin his new prime minister. The Times reported that “ the action of His Majesty in sending for a House of Commons man was generally applauded in political circles.”
Resplendent in frock coat and tall silk hat, Baldwin told the large crowd which cheered him in Downing Street that “I need your prayers rather than your congratulations.” It was a characteristic comment by a deeply Christian man.
The formidable Mrs Lucy Baldwin was far from delighted with their new home. The curtains had been installed years before by Mrs Gladstone. As they had been repeatedly washed instead of being cleaned, they had shrunk and were too short for the long Georgian windows of the house, jeopardising the privacy of the family.
There was only one bath, which had been put in for Disraeli and had a lid on it. The new occupants found it “deep and narrow and dangerous.”
Unlike a much later prime minister, Baldwin was not interested in luxury. Dubious donors were not sought to pay for expensive redecoration.
They escaped every single weekend during the parliamentary session to Chequers, which they loved.
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That then is how Stanley Baldwin became prime minister a hundred years ago.
Eight months later, his first term in the highest office ended as unexpectedly as it had begun. It was one of the shortest premierships in British history, a point sometimes forgotten because of the long years that Baldwin would later spend as prime minister.
Baldwin inherited a large majority in the House of Commons in 1923. A general election was not due until 1927.
How could things possibly have gone so badly wrong?
Baldwin brought about his own downfall by proposing a fundamental change to economic policy, which was designed to serve the national interest . But the country was not willing to support it.
Britain had long prospered through free trade with the rest of the world. In October 1923, however, Baldwin came to the conclusion that tariffs needed to be widely imposed to prevent imports destroying British jobs.
Unemployment then stood at one and a half million, and was on an upward trend. Baldwin said that under free trade “we shall have grave unemployment with us to the end of time…[and] the only way of fighting this subject is by protecting the home market.”
At the general election of 1922, the Conservatives had given a commitment not to introduce tariffs without consulting the electorate. So Baldwin called another election, which was held on 6 December 1923. His manifesto stated that “the solution of the unemployment problem is the key to every necessary social reform”, with the extension of pensions and the improvement of national insurance schemes being singled out for specific mention.
Baldwin was assured by the experts in Conservative Central Office that he would be re-elected with a decisive majority. In fact he was left without any majority at all. 88 Tory seats were lost, leading to a hung parliament, in which if Labour and the Liberals combined they could vote Baldwin out of office.
That is exactly what they did on 21 January 1924 when the first ever Labour government was formed.
If there had been any generally acceptable alternative to Baldwin within the Tory Party, his political career might well have ended at this point. Though acting from the highest motives, he had committed the Party to a policy of economic protection, for which no substantial public demand existed.
He had overridden severe misgivings among his colleagues, and he had thrown away a substantial Commons majority.
He survived by promising to be more cautious and circumspect in future. At a Party meeting on 11 February 1924, which began with a rather half-hearted rendition of “For he’s a jolly good fellow”, he said that he would “not feel justified in advising the Party again to submit the proposal of a general tariff to the country except on the clear evidence that on this matter public opinion is disposed to reconsider its judgement of two months ago.”
A line was drawn under the matter. In the autumn of 1924, the minority Labour government ran into serious difficulty, and called another election, the third in three years.
Baldwin led his Party to a stunning victory, which brought it the largest Commons majority it has ever enjoyed without the support of coalition allies. His manifesto contained the Tories’ first ever major programme of social reform, embracing housing (“no less than 161,441 houses have been authorised”, the manifesto noted), pensions, education, and increased rights and opportunities for women, including more women police.
One of Baldwin’s close associates told him: “the wheel had come full circle much more swiftly than I had expected.”
The unexpected prime minister had now firmly established himself. The disaster of December 1923 had been reversed. Baldwin’s long period as the dominant figure in British politics had begun.
BIBLIOGRAPHY :Conservative General Election Manifestos 1900-1997, ed. Iain Dale with an introduction by Alistair B. Cooke, now Lord Lexden (Routledge,2000). The Crawford Papers: The journals of David Lindsay twenty-seventh Earl of Crawford and tenth Earl of Balcarres during the years 1892 to 1940, ed. John Vincent (Manchester University Press,1984). Ian Colvin, “ The New Prime Minister” in The Atlantic Monthly (August 1923). A.G. Gardiner, “ Mr Stanley Baldwin” in Certain People of Importance (Jonathan Cape, 1926). David Gilmour, Curzon (Papermac ed., 1995). H. Montgomery Hyde, Baldwin: The Unexpected Prime Minister ( Hart-Davis, MacGibbon. 1973). Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, Vol.1 1916-1925, ed. Keith Middlemas ( Oxford university Press, 1969). Harold Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase ( Constable,1934). Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values ( Cambridge University Press, 1999).
