by Roy Jenkins
The year 1937 was an easy and agreeable one for Baldwin. His energy and his power were still running out. But, thanks to his handling of the Abdication, a glow of achievement had replaced the murk of anti-climax which seemed likely, during most of 1936, to surround his final period of office. He was able to plan with precision and enthusiasm the date of his own retirement, to look forward to it because it was in no way forced upon him, and to believe that he would be remembered with affection and regret. He was the only Prime Minister between Lord Salisbury (who resigned in 1902) and Harold Wilson (in 1976) to make such an unforced departure. And Salisbury, who died in 1903, was unlike Baldwin in not having the opportunity of enjoying his repose.
During the final months Baldwin handed over more and more power to Neville Chamberlain. After the changeover he soon and predictably became critical of Chamberlain, but before it took place he seemed wholly unattracted by the game of balancing one possible successor against another. Chamberlain was not everyone’s favourite, even within his own party. He made a bad Budget error8 on the threshold of the succession, many Tory MPs were said to prefer (of all people) Inskip, and there seems no doubt that Baldwin, had he wished, could have stirred up a good cauldron of uncertainty. He did not so wish. Perhaps, despite lack of affection, he felt he owed Chamberlain something after so many years of efficient subordination. Perhaps he feared that any doubt would mean the postponement of his own release. And, lassitude apart, he had more than enough sense to see that after the triumph of the Abdication, with the memory of the vicissitudes of the previous year so fresh in his mind, a calm movement away from the gaming tables and towards the chip-cashing caisse was obviously prudent.
May 28 1937, sixteen days after the Coronation of King George VI, became the chosen date. His last speech in the House was more than three weeks before, and the occasion seemed to be organized by all concerned as a commemorative epitome. There was a threatened dispute at a Yorkshire colliery. As there was a London bus strike actually taking place this threat, even if it materialized, seemed fairly peripheral to the success or otherwise of the Coronation. Nevertheless it was brought before the House, Baldwin came down, spoke movingly of ‘our young King and Queen’ who were about to ‘dedicate themselves to the service of their people’, and pulled out, gently and without tension, all his old stops about industrial peace, democracy and the avoidance of strife. Tom Williams,• Labour Member for the constituency in which the colliery was situated, announced that it would be folly to continue the debate, and the dispute, perhaps not a very difficult one in any event, got itself settled. The old maestro having been asked to give a last exhibition of his art, no one wished it to go wrong.
His final Cabinet was on 26 May. Chamberlain paid a tribute to Baldwin, which while predictably pedestrian, was a great deal less embarrassing than Harcourt’s reading from ‘a well-thumbed manuscript’ at the famous ‘blubbering Cabinet’ which said farewell to Gladstone in 1894. Baldwin then paid another tribute to MacDonald (still there as Lord President of the Council), for whom it was also the end. The next day in the House of Commons he was able not only to listen to tributes to himself—a rare experience, normally confined to a man’s widow—but to perform the rôle of an out-of-season Father Christmas. He announced an increase in Members’ salaries from £400 to £600. It was particularly welcome on the Labour side of the House. He left the Palace of Westminster that afternoon on a wave of fulfilment and popularity. It was most unusual in British politics, as much for its measured orderliness as for its warmth. Changes of Prime Minister normally occur more abruptly and disagreeably. It was, of course, much too good to last.
Baldwin became an earl and a knight of the garter. As happened with Balfour, the second honour, being quicker to confer, came first, and he was briefly and incongruously Sir Stanley Baldwin. Then, ten days later, he became Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. His residential problems were fewer than in 1929. He left Downing Street after three or four days, and Chequers after a fortnight. But so far from there being any question of selling Astley, he was able once again to take a full-scale London house in Eaton Square. The shares of Baldwins Ltd had made a substantial recovery. His annual income, including his Prime Minister’s pension of £2000, was between £15,000 and £20,000 (the equivalent of £300/400,000 today).
Almost the only incident to mar the near perfection of the period immediately surrounding his retirement was the absence of any reply to a somewhat sententious letter of reminiscence and good wishes which he sent to the Duke of Windsor (as King Edward had become). Perhaps the Duke (his temper not improved by his wife having just been refused the style of HRH) thought that Baldwin had already done well enough out of the events six months before, without an entitlement to further expressions of fulsome goodwill.
Soon, and no doubt inevitably, some more substantial specks of cloud began to appear in the sky. In July there was a return of the nervous trouble of the previous year. He could not stay in London until the end of the session as he had intended to do. Then in August the Aix visit went wrong. His arthritis made it impossible for him to walk as he had been used to doing. As a result he became bored and left early. So often he had struggled to stay on when others were trying to get him back. It was a typical paradox that now, when he could, had he wished, have stayed for the whole autumn, he should leave before the allotted time was up.9
During that autumn (of 1937) he attended a few more commemorative occasions but made no political speeches. There was at first little to engage his political interest, but this changed after Eden’s resignation in February 1938. He liked Eden, and he found it easy to disapprove of the way in which Chamberlain had handled relations with him. He saw a good deal of Eden in the next months, and with a genuine desire to see him Prime Minister gave him a lot of advice. Unfortunately most of it was wrong. He could be shrewd in analysis, as when he told Eden that if war came ‘the country will want [Churchill] to lead them’, but that Eden’s chances were better in peace.13
He was less strong on recipes for action. He advised Eden to stay away from the House of Commons and to make some non-political speeches in the country on subjects such as ‘England’. He became increasingly willing to see him wound Chamberlain, but had no idea how a resigned minister should conduct an attacking campaign. His own experience—always, except once, resisting and not provoking the attacks—had been so different. His other trouble was that he did not really agree with Eden on policy. He was as much of an appeaser as Chamberlain, but less dogmatic and self-righteous. He was looking not for a new policy for Britain, but for a political protegé for himself, someone who would be more gracious and romantic than Chamberlain. But he was not himself able to be of much help. He had no great store of political influence, and he never made any effective use of the platform of the House of Lords. He spoke there only very infrequently, and then tentatively and ineffectively. His post-Munich speech was a typical example. He would not have gone to Munich himself, he said, but he praised Chamberlain’s courage for acting differently. The chance of peace must be clung to, but the time gained must be used well. He concealed his real criticism, which was that the ‘Peace with Honour’ statement was a piece of emotional exhibitionism, and as a result his speech lacked any real impact. The old master of the House of Commons, despite his quiet style, never found his feet in the House of Lords.
Even so, the last two years of peace were for Baldwin a time of interest, enjoyment and even influence, compared with what was to come afterwards. As late as the summer of 1939 Sir Stafford Cripps, expelled from the Labour Party and hardly a natural Baldwin man, was urging him to be a brick in a wall of anti-appeasement national unity. Baldwin was also still in strong demand, at home and abroad, as a deliverer of lectures and addresses of note and distinction. In both April and August 1939 he was in North America, his first visit to Canada since the Ottawa Conference of 1932, his first visit to the United States since his debt negotiation of 1923. From the second visit he returned to an England on the verge of war.
He never lived in Eaton Square again. Astley was half taken over by evacuees. Worse, and more important, it was an England in which he first ceased to have a rôle, and then a year or so later acquired a minor and disagreeable one.
In the winter of 1939-40 he became still more critical of Chamberlain. In May 1940, he believed that his replacement by Churchill was wholly desirable. He was not seduced, although his excuse for this would have been much better than most, by the politically widespread enthusiasm for the alternative of his old friend Halifax. Later in 1940, when Chamberlain was dying, Baldwin wrote him a notable letter of sympathy and warmth. ‘Whatever S.B. cannot do,’ Tom Jones had written three years earlier, ‘he can speak a funeral oration.’14 He could also write a valedictory letter.
Chamberlain’s death left Baldwin more exposed. He became the best available villain for those who wished to fasten upon an individual to blame for Britain’s plight. His mail became abusive. His press, when anyone bothered to write about him, became almost uniformly hostile. There was a damaging row about the requisition for scrap of his wrought-iron gates. Some suggested that the whole estate and house ought to be taken over. By the standards of a Blum or a Reynaud he was hardly subjected to persecution. He lived quietly in half his old house, he sometimes went to visit friends in other parts of the country, and occasionally to London, where he stayed in the Dorchester Hotel and was asked to luncheon by Churchill, whose venom was reserved for the index of his book. But he lost nearly all the glow of affection and respect in which he had retired. Most people forgot about him; and the majority of those who did not were unpleasant.
He was again short of money. His material fortunes always seemed to be less stable than those of most rich men. Astley became very run down. By the last year of the war, when he was seventy-seven, he was a rather decrepit old man, living in a rather decrepit old house. He kept up a routine of a sort, but as, from a mixture of laziness and disapproval of political scribblers like Lloyd George and Churchill, he never wrote anything, and increasingly preferred sniffing old books to reading new ones, there was not much purpose to his life. The end of the war, perhaps even the political upheaval of 1945, might have produced a lightening of spirit and a new interest. But Lucy Baldwin died between VE day and the general election. Baldwin was very uxorious and became still more bereft.
He devoted some considerable part of his attention to arranging for G. M. Young, his friend as he thought, to write his biography. It turned out, although of course he never saw it, to be both unfriendly and inadequate. Almost his last public engagement was to go to London in October 1947 and attend the unveiling of the statue of King George V in Old Palace Yard. He was almost unrecognized. Two months later he died in his sleep at Astley. He was buried, beside his wife, in the nave of Worcester Cathedral. Fifty-five years of unadventurous apprenticeship had led to fourteen years of leadership, buffeting but successful, crowned by a spectacular retirement, followed, ironically, for a man who set so much store by repose, by a sad decade of dismal leisure.
Biographical Appendix
L. S. AMERY (1873–1955), MP for the South (later Spark-brook) division of Birmingham (1910–45), occupied almost every ‘imperial’ Cabinet post in the last days of the British Empire. He was First Lord of the Admiralty (1922-4), Secretary of State for the Colonies (1924-9) and for the Dominions as well from 1925, Secretary of State for India (1940-5). He was a very short man, of high academic achievement, who had been an ardent tariff reformer, in season and out of season, from before even Joseph Chamberlain’s conversion.
Max Aitken (1879-1964), cr. 1st Lord BEAVERBROOK 1917, was for most of his life an impish voyeur of politics, who used his newspaper more for mischief than for profit, let alone instruction. He was an arch-appeaser in the thirties but a dynamic Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940-1, before gradually returning to mischief for the latter part of the war and the subsequent peace. He was however a loyal friend (although mostly a bad advisor) to Churchill, who aroused his fealty more than anyone since Bonar Law–an odd pair to choose. This fealty certainly did not extend to Baldwin.
Frederick Edwin Smith (1872-1930), cr. knight 1915, baronet 1918, baron 1919, viscount 1921, 1st Earl of BIRKENHEAD 1922, was the archetypal thrusting lawyer politician who rumbustiously and ruthlessly sought ‘the glittering prizes’ (his own phrase in his somewhat notorious Glasgow Rectorial Address of 1922). Conservative MP for the Walton division of Liverpool (1906-19), Solicitor-General (1915), Attorney-General (1915-19), Lord Chancellor (1919-22), Secretary of State for India (1924-8), he was gifted with a powerful physique which his excesses destroyed by the age of fifty-eight and a dialectical armoury which comprised bludgeons and rapiers in equal and unusual combination. Many thought that he had a cool head and good judgement as well. Churchill adored him (after Smith’s death, thirty-five years before his own, he had no close associate who treated him as an equal) and paid a remarkable tribute to his courage and steadfastness in the foreword to a biography written by the 2nd Lord Birkenhead soon after the death of his father. The most recent and massively impressive study of Smith by John Campbell leaves a less favourable impression. It is not written destructively, but there can rarely have been a biography which more enhanced the reputation of the author and more damaged that of the subject.
Sir Arthur Griffith-BOSCAWEN, (1865-1946) was Minister of Agriculture for the last year of the Coalition Government. He lost his seat at Taunton, to which he had surprisingly switched from Dudley in 1921, at the 1922 election. He was nevertheless appointed Minister of Health by Bonar Law and, apparently after seventeen unsuccessful attempts to secure other nominations, was adopted as Conservative candidate for the by-election at Mitcham, where he was defeated by Labour as a result of the intervention of a Conservative Coalitionist. He never held office or achieved membership of the House of Commons again. With C. F. G. Masterman and Patrick Gordon Walker he was one of the very few British politicians of this century to lose his place in a Cabinet by personal electoral misfortune.
William Clive BRIDGEMAN (1864-1935), cr. 1st Viscount Bridgeman 1929, was the son of a country rector who was the younger son of an earl. MP for Oswestry (1906-29), Home Secretary (1922-4), First Lord of the Admiralty (1924-9). He was a cricketer of quality who played in the Eton and Cambridge XIs and became President of the MCC.
George CAVE (1856-1928), cr. 1st Viscount Cave 1918, was MP for Kingston, Surrey (1906-18), a Chancery lawyer of note, Solicitor-General (1915-16), Home Secretary (1916-19), a Lord of Appeal (1919-22) and Lord Chancellor (1922-January 1924 and again from the end of 1924 until his death). His most notable electoral feat was his defeat of Asquith (by 987 votes to 441) for the Chancellorship of Oxford University when Curzon died in 1925. ‘The greatest living Oxonian’ (Birkenhead’s campaigning description of Asquith—but Birkenhead had no reason to be pro-Cave, who had replaced him on the Woolsack when ‘the cabin boys’ took over from the admirals in 1922) was trounced by the least distinguished Lord Chancellor of the first thirty years of this century (’a brewers’ lawyer’, as he was derisively but inaccurately described by Asquith partisans). It showed the conservatism of the Oxford MAs in the twenties (on a very low poll), but also, probably, an unwillingness to allow a parvenu Liberal, even if of exceptional repute and gravitas, to be both Earl and Chancellor of Oxford.
Lord Robert CECIL (1864-1958), cr. Viscount Cecil of Chelwood 1923, was the third son of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (the Prime Minister), MP for Marylebone East (1906-10) and for Hitchin (1911-18), Lord Privy Seal (1923-4) and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1924-7). It was from this last office, in which he was in effect Minister for League of Nations Affairs under Austen Chamberlain, that he resigned, holding the policy of the Government towards naval disarmament to be obstructive. Party politics sat lightly on his drooping shoulders. In 1921 he had been in negotiation with Grey and Asquith for the formation of a centre grouping and in 1924 he had been restrained with difficulty by his eldest brother from joining the Labour Governme
nt. His dominating concern was support for collective security. He was President of the League of Nations Union (1923-45), was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937, and gave his London house to Philip Noel-Baker, the Labour MP who was equally devoted to the Geneva cause.
Sir (Joseph) Austen CHAMBERLAIN (1863-1937), KG 1925, was the nearest approach to a man-made statesman there has been in modern British politics. The man who made him was his father, Joseph Chamberlain (1837-1914), an original politician of great flair, some of it destructive. Austen (to differentiate him from his father he was one of the first politicians to be habitually addressed and referred to by his Christian name) copied the eyeglass, orchid, wing collar, frock coat and hair parting of his father. He espoused his causes and even fell undemandingly in love with his father’s third wife (formerly Miss Mary Endicott, the daughter of President Cleveland’s Secretary of War, later Mrs Carnegie, who died only in 1957). Unfortunately, he inherited only the trappings. He was conventional and cautious, where his father had been daring and insolent. Beatrice Webb, who admittedly had half wanted to marry Joseph Chamberlain, thought Austen ‘dull and closed-minded … intellectually dense’ (Diary, vol. IV, page 70).