History Today Vol. 2 - April 1952 - British Prime Ministers : X
By D.C. SOMERVELL - A Monthly Magazine Published From 72 Coleman Street London E.C. 2 -
STANLEY BALDWIN
From a day in the spring of 1923 when he became
prime minister to the day in the spring of 1937 when he resigned that office for the third time Stanley Baldwin
was the predominant figure in British politics, yet until a very few months before his accession to the highest
office no one outside political circles had taken any notice of him and with his third resignation he withdrew
with unusual completeness from public life; his floruit is sharply defined at both ends; it covers two-thirds of
the inter-war period but not its beginning nor its end. About that period a great deal of nonsense has been written,
partly from interested party-political motives. Moreover, we have as yet no complete biography of the man. There
is an excellent life of Neville Chamberlain by Keith Feiling, an abominable but detailed life of Mac Donald by
McNeill Weir, autobiographical works by Churchill, Austen Chamberlain and Snowden, but about Baldwin little beyond
a topical study by Wickham Steed, written in the middle of his career, and a collection of his non-political speeches.
This great and distinctive figure is shrouded in what has been called the dense obscurity of the recent past and
it is said that the younger generation have either no ideas or wrong ideas about him.
He was born in 1867, just before the middle year of Victoria's reign, and it might be said that he always remained
Victorian. He might be called a retrospective man; what others regarded as reforms he inclined to regard as attempts
to recover values which were being lost in the Gadarene onrush of " progress "
Like nearly all good men Baldwin was proud of his family. One of the things he was proud of was that for six hundred
years, first in Shropshire and afterwards in Worcestershire, they had lived within sight of the Clee Hills. "I
am a provincial heart and soul," he said on more than one occasion, and again, quite early in his second premiership,
he looked forward to the day when he would go back to Worcestershire "to read the books I want to read, to
live a decent life, and to keep pigs." Worcestershire, pigs and the briar pipe were conspicuous on the Baldwin
escutcheon. There may have been a conscious artistry about all this, for Baldwin was nothing if not an artist.
His mother was one of four remarkable sisters. One of his aunts was the mother of Rudyard Kipling, another the
wife of Burne Jones and the fourth the wife of Sir Edward Poynter, a second-rate painter perhaps but sufficiently
esteemed in his day to become President of the Royal Academy. To one of these aunts young Stanley read aloud half
a dozen of the Waverley novels before he was nine years old.
After a leisurely career at Harrow and Cambridge he entered the old family business and was an ironmaster, as they
called it in those days, for twenty years. It was a firm "where strikes and lock-outs were unknown .....where
nobody got the sack . . . and where a large number of old gentlemen, used to spend their days sitting on the handles
of wheel - barrows, smoking their pipes." His father was M.P. for West Worcestershire and when he died in
1908 Stanley took over that part of the family business also and entered the House of Commons. He quickly became
one of the most popular members of the House, but seldom spoke and remained unknown to the readers of newspapers.
In 1916, just before his fiftieth birthday, he accepted the humble office of Parliamentary Private Secretary to
his friend Bonar Law, another ironmaster, leader of the Conservative party and member of Asquith's coalition. Never
were two men less alike: Bonar Law, a skillful and aggressive debater, a man of enormous industry with a first-rate
head for figures; Baldwin, no great debater, not a hard worker and certainly no head for figures, but as it turned
out the bigger man of the two; a man who could without effort, when the time came, impress his personality on the
whole nation as only three other politicians have done in the present century, Joseph Chamberlain, Lloyd George
and Winston Churchill, and all three of these were what Baldwin never was, restful, astringent personalities. Baldwin's
strength was in quietness and confidence.
Lloyd George succeeded Asquith. Bonar Law became deputy prime minister and Baldwin Financial Secretary to the Treasury.
The Khaki election of December, 1918, provided an enormous majority for the government and it was Baldwin who remarked
of them, to his friend Keynes, that they looked " a lot of hard-faced men who had done very well out of the
war." In 1921 Bonar Law retired on account of ill-health and Baldwin reached cabinet rank as President of
the Board of Trade.
For this office one may conjecture that he had not
great aptitude and he certainly made no mark in it. He was said to be the most silent member of the Cabinet. But
though he did not speak he thought the more. He conceived a profound distrust and detestation of the Lloyd Georgian
regime, its levity, insincerity, extravagance, recklessness, cynicism. When, in the autumn of 1922, it appeared
that the leaders of the Conservative party, Austen Chamberlain, Birkenhead and Horne, were prepared to go to the
country again under Lloyd Georgian leadership he decided to strike - in both senses of the word. At the once famous
Carlton Club party meeting of 17th October, 1922, he moved a resolution to the effect that, when the next general
election came, the Conservative party should fight "as an independent party with its own leader and its own
programme." Much to his surprise, and though every other Conservative cabinet minister voted against it, the
resolution was carried by a handsome majority. Lloyd George resigned. Bonar Law, his health apparently restored,
became prime minister of a weak government from which all the leading Conservatives held aloof, and won the consequent
election with a programme of " Tranquillity." Baldwin moved up to second place as
Chancellor of the Exchequer, and when Bonar Law's health finally collapsed six months later succeeded him as prime
minister.
That was how he got there, a man of no distinction as yet, either in parliamentary debate or departmental administration.
He had simply destroyed Lloyd George and circumstance supplied the rest. For the moment he was "our unknown
prime minister." How would he make himself known?
"Very strangely," as it seemed to his depreciators among the coalitionists " faith, by losing his
wits " and, though in possession of an ample majority, plunging into an unnecessary general election within
a year of the last one - and losing it. Baldwin was troubled by the problem of continued unemployment. He believed
that the cure could be found in the protection of home industries, for he had been a protectionist ever since Joseph
Chamberlain's campaign twenty years before. Bonar Law, though as convinced a protectionist as himself had dropped
protection from his programme in the previous election. Baldwin wanted it back and held that he could not get it
back without a verdict from the electorate.
This political honesty did not prove the best policy, though Baldwin never regretted it. The result was the first
of the two minority Labour governments of the inter-war years, dependent on Liberal support. That support was withdrawn
after a nine months' experiment and yet another election followed. The Conservatives secured a larger majority
than before and Baldwin was now installed for what proved a parliament's full life-time of five years. It was a
far stronger government than his first, for the coalitionists returned to the fold after a half-hearted attempt
to get rid of him and
re-establish the coalition under the premiership of Sir Robert Horne. It was on this occasion that Birkenhead is
said to have remarked "I think Abraham Lincoln said that it is a mistake to swop asses while crossing a stream."
Austen Chamberlain took the Foreign Office and secured the Locarno treaties which opened a brief period of international
improvement. Churchill, returned to the Conservative fold after twenty years elsewhere, took the Exchequer and
made budgets more interesting than anyone since Gladstone, excepting, of course, the Lloyd George budget of 1909.
Neville Chamberlain took the Ministry of Health where he proved himself beyond question the best departmental legislator
and administrator of the inter-war period. But we are not concerned with these. What did Baldwin
make of his second premiership?
Though election tactics had again deprived him of his right to introduce a full programme of protection, his government
was free to offer protective duties to particular non-basic industries which could prove their special need of
such. Thus a sort of " retail " protectionism began which, as Baldwin correctly foresaw, broke down century-old
prejudices in favour of free imports and prepared the way for the adoption of "wholesale" protection
by the leaders of all three parties in the crisis of '1931'. But this was not the prime minister's chief interest.
The Conservative party had acquired the alternative title of Unionist at the time when it absorbed the Liberal
Unionists who had separated themselves from Gladstonian Liberalism on the issue of Irish self-government. Unionism
then meant maintenance of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Now that Ireland had secured by force
far more than Gladstone had offered it Unionism as a party label had lost its original meaning, but Baldwin wished
to preserve the name for an entirely different purpose. The Conservative party was Unionist because it stood for
the co.-operation of all classes in the service of the nation as opposed to the socialist doctrine of class war.
Baldwin's Conservatism was fundamental, the Conservatism
of Disraeli and Burke, but it was never partisan. " If I were not the leader of the Conservative party,"
he once remarked, "I should like to be the leader of the people who do not belong to any party." It was
observed that he treated his opponents across the floor of the House with an unusual courtesy, quite abandoning
the tradition of "Pickwickian" abuse (for which see the first chapter of that classic) which is so wearisome
to un-political persons. Though he distrusted the Left wing intellectuals he had strong sympathies with the average
Labour member. No doubt they were apt to be sentimental and muddleheaded, but these were weaknesses from which
he was not himself immune. He recognized their moral earnestness and remarked that in an earlier, which with him
generally meant a more sensible, generation they would many of them have been Nonconformist ministers. It was noticed
that in the smoking room he spent as much time chatting with them as with his own supporters. All this was not
political tactics but the nature of the man, and that was why he became at his best a more completely national
and "Unionist" leader than any prime minister in peace time since Palmerston. Labour leaders themselves
acknowledged it, and not least so full-blooded a socialist as George Lansbury. "When I listen to the prime
minister at any time," he once said in the House, "he almost persuades me that I ought to be his supporter
and I think his speeches have a similar effect on a good many other people, too." Remarks of that kind have
not been made, in peace time, about either of the distinguished and admirable men who have succeeded Baldwin in
the leadership of the Conservative party.
A single speech will always be remembered, by those who know anything about Baldwin, as establishing his position
in this regard. In 1925 a back-bench Conservative introduced a private member's bill to alter the legal arrangements
affecting trade unionists who did not wish to subscribe to the party-political funds of their Unions. The details
need not trouble us. The proposed change was regarded by
almost all Conservatives as a matter of plain justice but it was a small matter, and was bitterly resented by the
Labour majority in the Unions. The prime minister took an unusual step in intervening in a debate of this kind
and addressed to the House a striking appeal for forbearance. There was, he admitted, a case for the change, but
the case for peace and goodwill and national unity was far stronger. Let it never be said that in any encounter
of what was called the class war the Conservative party fired the first shot. The bill was rejected.
Baldwin's speech had contained the words "Give peace in our time, O Lord," but the prayer was unfavourably
answered. The next year was the year of the famous general strike.
We cannot tell that complex story here, but we cannot altogether omit it for it was one of the principal crises
of Baldwin's career and at various points it illustrates both his strength and his weaknesses. First there was
the question of the subsidy. Owing to the catastrophic decline of the coal industry, since the palmy days when
France had so obligingly occupied and sterilized the Ruhr, the owners offered a reduced wage. The men demanded
the old wage, and the T.U.C. demanded that the government should make up the difference by subsidizing wages. All
through the month of July, 1925, Baldwin refused and on the last day of the month he consented. There should be
a subsidy for eight months, during which a royal commission would discover what ought to be done to set the industry
on its legs again.
He defended himself with the characteristic comment that it is better to be rattled into peace than rattled into
war." No doubt he hoped the best from the Samuel Commission, but it is also true that he realized that the
government was unready for a general strike and that eight months would give it time. Had the strike come in August,
1925, instead of May, 1926, it would have inflicted a very great deal more injury on the country and suffering
on thousands of harmless individuals.
His action, or inaction, when the Report was issued is open to much severer criticism. It was an excellent Report.
If at this point Baldwin had said "We accept the Report as a whole and propose to impose its terms upon the
industry," he might, with his immense prestige and the weight of public opinion behind him, have got away
with it and broken down the competing obstinacies of owners and miners. He might also have provided the Conservative
party with what it never subsequently discovered, a reasonable alternative to nationalization. But he did not do
this. He said, in effect, "There are various things in this Report which some of us do not like, but we will
accept it if the owners and miners will do the same." This invited both parties to pull the Report to pieces
and reject the parts they did not like. So the weeks passed and the subsidy ended and the general strike began.
 |
And then in a flash the strong Baldwin thrust the wobbling Baldwin aside and stood forward as the national leader. The general strike was an unconstitutional attempt to coerce a government installed in power with an enormous majority less than two years before into doing what it believed to be wrong, a conspiracy against the constitution which was the only true embodiment of the national democracy. He refused all parley until the general strike was called off. It was called off in nine days. |
The government jogged along for three years more
and the prime minister made delightful speeches on the Bible and the Boys' Own Paper, the Oxford Dictionary and
the novels of Mary Webb, and then went to the country with an election programme summarized as "Safety First"
and an election poster showing good old Father Baldwin smoking his good old briar pipe and looking rather like
" Ye olde worlde " clergyman whose portrait stilt calls attention to the merits of a certain brand of
pipe tobacco. It did not quite come off, perhaps because the "flappers" under thirty had just been enfranchised
and preferred Socialism and cigarettes. Labour took office for the second time with a minority dependent on Liberal
support. At the same time an unprecedented withering of trade and industry, known as the great slump, began in
America and spread over the world. The unemployment figures, which the wicked Conservatives had left at just under
1,500,000, rapidly doubled under the more skillful and sympathetic management of the worker'sown party.
We approach the late summer and autumn of 1931, the breakdown of Labour policy, the break-up of the Labour cabinet,
the formation of a so-called National government with a Socialist (or ex-Socialist?) as prime minister and an overwhelming
majority of Conservatives, a majority further increased by the subsequent election, among its supporters. Here
again we have a complicated, and controversial story which we have not space to tell. We have only to consider
the part played by Baldwin.
When half the members of the Labour cabinet refused to accept the proposal of its own committee to make a 10 per
cent cut in the allowances of the unemployed, and Mac Donald tendered his resignation, the natural consequences
would have been that the King should "send for Mr. Baldwin" and ask him to form a Conservative government;
that he should proceed to do so and therewith dissolve parliament, after which he would have presumably secured
a majority not smaller than those of 1922 and 1924. But this did not happen and the credit (or discredit) must
rest fairly and squarely on Baldwin's shoulders. Mac Donald may have wished to preside over the party he had hitherto
devoted his life to opposing; the King may have wished it; but only the Conservative leader could bring the Conservative
party into such an arrangement. The man who broke the coalition of 1922 was the man who made the coalition of 1931.
He was accused of inconsistency and admitted the charge. His obvious defence was one of which he could hardly make
public use at the time. Lloyd George had been " a dynamic figure"; he had swallowed the Conservative
party and was in process of digesting it. Mac Donald was anything but that, and the swallowing and digesting were
to be, as it were, the other way round.
But the original design was very different from what actually happened. The National government, according to the
first official announcement, would not exist for a longer period than was necessary to dispose of the emergency:
and when that was achieved the political parties would resume their respective positions. As soon as the financial
crisis had been settled there would be a general election and at the general election there would be no merging
of political parties and no 'coupon'.(Nomination of candidates approved by the coalition leaders: a term of political
slang dating from the general election of 1918) Baldwin said much the same at a party meeting: "When this
parliament dissolves, when the economies are carried and the budget balanced, you will have a straight fight on
tariffs against the Socialist party."
Actually, "disposing of the emergency" was a matter not of weeks but of years; the general election was
fought exactly as the prospectus had said it would not be fought and the so-called National government continued
under Mac Donald, Baldwin and Nevilie Chamberlain until it was swept away in the whirlwind of May, 1940. Was this,
as an alternative to a purely Conservative government in 1931, a " good thing"?
There was much to be said in its favour. It was desirable from the standpoint of confidence, both at home and abroad,
to secure an overwhelming expression of national unity, and those who fought the election of 1931 testify to the
deep impression made on the minds of ordinary open-minded people (the people whose leader Baldwin once said he
wanted to be) by the fact that all the party leaders - except Lloyd George - were behind the same programme. Baldwin
no doubt thought of it as an exhibition of the "Unionism" to which he always aspired. He probably did
not realize the deep and savage personal feuds within the Labour party, or that the three old official Labour leaders
he had taken into partnership were already "lost leaders " so far as their own party was concerned.
In fact, once the election and the worst of the
economic crisis was over, the peculiar series of events by which the National government had got itself created
as a temporary expedient and installed itself as a permanency provoked division rather than unity. It soon ceased
to be a National government at all for the free trade Liberals quickly withdrew from it and the Labour party recreated
itself under new leaders, a weak and embittered and consequently unreasonable opposition who felt that they had
been tricked and bamboozled. Mac Donald they attacked with a scurrility happily rare in British politics. Of Baldwin
they created a fancy picture as an incarnation of Machiavelli. But there was nothing Machiavellian about Baldwin
; the weaker points of his career suggest that he was not Machiavellian enough and made insufficient allowance
for bad qualities he did not share. He could not easily believe in the pettiness of party careerists, much as later
he could not easily believe in the blood lusts of the Nazis.
Between 1931 and 1935 the National government did the job for which it had been created and pulled the country
out of the slump earlier than most of the other victims of that worldwide catastrophe. Then it undertook a comprehensive
policy for the elimination of slums, which had made some progress before it was cut short by the second world war.
In 1935 Mac Donald retired and Baldwin became prime minister for the third time. The change
was of no great significance for he had from the first been the most powerful member of the government. In the
same year the ambition of Mussolini confronted the British government and people with the problem of Abyssinia.
So here is another of these complex and controversial stories.
The British public wanted two things and it could not have them both. It wanted peace and it wanted to keep Mussolini
out of Abyssinia. Baldwin rightly judged that, like him, it wanted the former more than it wanted the latter. The
country was profoundly pacifist. A Socialist had won a by-election at Fulham by puffing all his emphasis on opposition
to the first timid installment of rearmament and secured a majority of 10,000 in what was accounted a safe Conservative
seat. Attlee, recently elected leader of the Labour party, said in the House of Commons, "We deny the need
for increased air armaments." The "Peace Ballot" (A widely answered questionnaire issued by the
League of Nations Union.) showed, so far as it showed anything, that an overwhelming majority of people put their
trust in the League of Nations, believing that such an institution existed, whereas what was called the League
of Nations was simply Great Britain and France (which would in no circumstances fight Italy) and a host of minor
states much more likely to need protection than to take up arms for the protection of others.
But what about "sanctions " ? (i.e. Economic boycotts or embargoes, authorized by the League.) Baldwin
said "Real sanctions mean war," but the country was determined to have sanctions, so the only possibility,
if one ruled out war, was the imposition of sham sanctions ; and this was tried, with a flourish of Geneva trumpets
from Sir Samuel Hoare, the foreign secretary. When Mussolini refused to be impressed Hoare and his French colleague
Laval hastily concocted, without the approval in advance of the British government, their once notorious "proposal"
to give Mussolini half of Abyssinia if he would consent to forgo the rest. It was not so cynical a policy as it
seemed, for the half to be sacrificed consisted of territory inhabited by other African tribes and conquered by
Abyssinian imperialism at a comparatively recent date. Baldwin did not like the idea but he accepted it from loyalty
to his colleague, and therein, for once, he entirely misjudged the temper of the British public. They had taken
Abyssinia to their bosoms as a little black Belgium and would have nothing to do with such a judgment of Solomon.
So Hoare resigned and Mussolini annexed Abyssinia. Churchill's opinion, expressed in the first volume of his work
on the Second War, is that we would have done well not to burn our fingers with the championship of Abyssinia at
all. But Churchill was not in office and Great Britain is a democracy. Great Britain was determined that we should
do "something" about Abyssinia and also determined not to go to war about it Baldwin full-filled both
these determinations - with ignominious results, no doubt: but it is not very easy to see what else he ought to
have, or could have, done. In general it may be said that throughout his career Baldwin disliked foreign affairs,
regarding them as a disagreeable necessity, and left them as much as possible to his successive foreign secretaries.
Between the outbreak of the Abyssinian war and the
Hoare-Laval fiasco there had been a general election, the last before 1945. It was no doubt somewhat artfully timed,
for at that moment Abyssinia monopolized attention and the government appeared to be "supporting the League"
in a manner entirely approved by the opposition. As a result it lost far less of its enormous 1931 majority than
it would otherwise have done, very much less than it would have done if the election had been held a very few months
later, after the Hoare-Laval episode. Once again the unfortunate Labour party had a raw deal.
In its election programme the government asked for a straightforward rearmament mandate: to increase the Air Force
to a point of equality with that of Germany, to recondition the fleet by the replacement of obsolescent ships and
to organize industry for speedy conversion to defence purposes. It seems that the credit for this programme should
go more to Neville Chamberlain than to Baldwin, but accepted it with whatever reluctance, and it is a sound principle
that a prime minister gets praise - or blame - for whatever his government does. In the course of the campaign,
however, he let fall a most unfortunate remark. "I give you my word," It said in an address to the Peace
Society, "that there will be no great armaments." One sees what he meant. The programme did not include
conscription and he was free to pledge himself against conscription (which was what his audience wanted of him)
without going behind the programme of his party. None the less, granted the resources of party-political distortion,
it was an unfortunate remark.
More than a year later he returned to the subject and made the matter worse. Saying that he was going to be "appallingly
frank," he told the House of Commons that he had at the last election not proposed to the country as drastic
a rearmament programme as circumstances required because, if he had done so, his government would have been defeated
by a largely pacifist opposition, which would have done less for rearmament than his government was now doing.
Churchill says that this statement "carried the naked truth about his motives into indecency . . . the House
was shocked." It was certainly annoyed. The Labour party was annoyed because the part of his statement that
concerned them was true; the Conservatives because the part that concerned them was not. They had asked for a rearmament
mandate quite adequate to the circumstances of 1935 - when Hitler's rearmament was still in its early stages and
his troops had not yet entered the Rhineland - and they had got it. It was one of those occasions when Baldwin's
treatment of a ticklish subject was altogether too casual, undocumented and unprepared. To the end there remained
something amateurish about him ; it was part of his charm .
Only one major crisis remains, the abdication of Edward VIII, and of this we will say nothing. It was generally
agreed, even by those who were usually Baldwin's severest critics, that his handling of this matter was a masterpiece
of tact, firmness and sympathy. A few months later he retired and was succeeded by Neville Chamberlain.
Such was Stanley Baldwin. The reader will perceive that I like the man, and he will also agree that I have not
tried to cover up the weak spots in his record. He is not to be reckoned among the dynamic figures who shape the
course of history according to their will, but he was a character of singular nobility, grace and charm, a living
embodiment of the qualities that have made British public life more sweet and wholesome than that of a good many
other countries. One may apply to him words from a Bidding Prayer with which I happen to be familiar and say that
" he is truly to be reckoned one of the Worthies of England."
