Baldwin: A Biography

589 Pages·1969·44.404 MB·English

by  Keith Middlemas & John Barnes

Baldwin ·
A BIOGRAPHY
KEITH MIDD_LEMAS
. . .
JOHN B4\RNE'S· ·
•
' .
++++++++++++++++++
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
•
'The great man of the age is the one who can put into words
the will ofh is age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish
it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he
actualises his age.'
HEGEL: Philosophy of Right
(English translation, 1942), p. 295
-
CONTENTS
List of illustrations X1
Introduction xiii
An Ironmaster's Son I
2 A Victorian Busin~man 19
3 Quiet Backbencher 39
4 Financial Secretary 60
5 In the Cabinet 77
6 The Fall .of the Coalition 95
7 Chancellor 125
8 Prime Minister 158
9 The Settlement of Europe 178 .
IO The Tariff Election !.212
The Dangers of Defeat !.250
II
12 The Appeasement of England !.278
13 Defence: the Price of Churchill 317
14 'But you are Foreign Secretary' 342
15 The General Strike 378
16 The Coal Strike 418
• 17 Into the Maze 444
18 A New Style of Leader 479
19 929: Defeat 507
I
20 The Irwin Declaration 5go
21 Empire Free Trade 545
A•
CONTENTS
22 Resignati9n? 58o
23 The Political Crisis 603
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
24 Agreeing to Differ 639
25 High Tide of Tariffs 669
26 India 697 Frunlispi4e Stanley Baldwin at Chequers in 1924
27 Defence: the Last Ditch 718 (b elul«n pagu :J98 and 399)
28 The Balance of Force 756 Childhood
2 Trinity undergraduate
29 Prime Minister ~ain 8o2 Married
3
30 Abyssinia 826 4 The fint Board of Directors ofBaldwins Ltd, 1902
5 St Moritz 1913
31 The Hoare-Laval Pact 870 6 Baldwin skiing at St Moritz . .
32 Hitler and the Rhineland goo 7 Engelberg, l 9 1 l
8 The cousins in I g I 7
33 The Year of the Locust g26 9 Astley Hall
34 The Abdication 974 IO View from the terrace at Astley
II In the garden at Chequers
35 Years and Honours 1018 12 The Chancellor at his dcslc
36 An Enemy of the People 1052 I3 Signing the American Debt Settlement
In the hills above Aix-les-Bains
14
Epilogue ro73 Baldwin and Tom Jones arriving at Montague House
I5
Appendix A: Baldwin and the Air Defence 16 Baldwin and Curzon in 1924
Research Programme 1085 17 Baldwin's Installation as Rector of St Andrews
18 The Old Berkeley Hunt at Chequers
Appendix B: The Third Falconer Lecture 1092 19 - Leaving 10 Downing Street during the General Strike
Notes on Sources 20 Baldwin addressing the Junior Imperial ~e
1101
2I Baldwin and Austen Chamberlain after Locarno
Index
1125 22 At the British Embcmy in Paris
<.
( ~twten pages 782 and 783)
~3 The Imperial Conference, 19~3
~4 The Imperial Conference, 19~
~5 With the Chancellor of the Exchequer
~ Watching cricket
~7 With the King and Walter Hammond in 1938
28 Leaving the Boathouse to watch the Varsity crews at practice
29 Receiving the freedom of Bewdley
30 'This may be your lut chance to photograph me'
31 The National Government
32 Baldwin, MacDonald and Simon
LIST OF ILLUSTilATIONS
Colleagues~ (o) Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain (b) With
33
Sir Samuel Hoare (c) With Lord Hailsham at the King's Silver
Jubilee (d) Bridgeman and his wife
On board the Emprus of Britain, July 1932 INTRODUCTION
34
Baldwin as Chancellor of Cambridge University
35
36 Publicity filming in the garden of Number 1 o
37 Arriving at Number IO during the Abyssinian Crisis
38 The Prince of Wales in 1927
39 Leaving Number IO during the Abdication Crisis No British Prime Minister of the last seventy years has been more harshly
40 Telegram from the Duke of Windsor stereotyped than Stanley Baldwin. No one has been so much ignored, after
41 In the kitchen garden at Astley the initial judgements of contemporaries had been made. Even the life of
42 By the gate into the broad walk, Astley Bonar Law, the 'unknown Prime Minister', tenant of that office for only
43 A~ March 1938, after Eden's resignation eighteen months, has been treated with scholarly affection; yet of a man
44 With a Polish officer in the gardens at Astley, 1944 who held the supreme political position three times, and great power during
the whole period 1922-37, there is little but the outworn comments and
partisan judgements of the Second Worid War and the late 194os. Old
Cartoons attitudes die slowly. Even his chief whip, later Lord Margemon, wrote to
the authors in 1g65: 'Baldwin was an enigma -and should remain so.'
The Two Winstons 331 It is at once the curse and pleasure of writing recent history that the
2 'Dear, Dear! Surely Mr Zinoviev hasn't missed the post!' 525 subject begins as a battlefield whose trenches and fortifications are the
3 The Man with Sealed Lips 888
memories of politicians justifying their past actions, and where the maps
4 Rip Stan Winkle Returns 966 are drawn by newspaper commentators, catching the fleeting impression of
the combatants. Compounded by the inevitable restriction on government
documentation, the political history of the interwar yea.rs resembles a
mediaeval palimpsest, with argument scratched on top of argument, long
before the historian attempts to reduce the whole to order. When some of the
contemporary memoirs, embellished with literary brilliance, lay claim to the
status of world history, it may take a generation to scrape away the layers or
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS to see clearly what Baldwin once called 'the many~dedness of truth'.
Despite the admirable work of Professor Mowat and more recent original
J.
research by authors such as D. C. Watt, A. Marwick and Professor Samuel
:ne pu~lishers ~d the authors wish to thank the following for providing Beer, British history during the inte:rwai: period is still largely inchoate and
illustrations for this volume and for penlli§ion to reproduce them:
obscure. Many well-known episodes, even the General Strike and the 1931
the Boyle Collection, plates 1 (a), (b), (c) and (d), 3, 41 and 42; Lord
crisis, have not been placed fully in perspective and others, notably the origin
Baldwin,, pla~es 4 to 10, 13,_ 14, 21, 22, 25 to 27, 29 to 32, 36, 43 and 44; of and responsibility for British rearmament in the 193os, told wrongly or
the Radio Times Hulton Picture Li0brary, Frontispiece, plates 11, 12, 15,
not at all. In many cases it is undesirable for political biography also to be
17. to 20, 23, 24, 138, 33 {a), (b), (c) and (d), 34, 35, 37 and 39; The Sunday the history of the subject's time - indeed it is the besetting sin. But in
TimM, plate 40.
Baldwin's case it is almost inevitable and the authors can only apologise
to readers familiar with the detailed story of the period. Baldwin neither
published nor wrote his memoirs and he was ill-served by his unwilling
Cartoons
official biographer. Few of his friends contributed to his defence because,
1, P1111eh; 2 and 3, cartoons by David Low by arrangement with the Trustees by the time the attack was mounted, the majority were dead. His political
and the &ming Standard; 4, by Strube of the Daily &tpress. opponents then castigated him, not merely in their published recollections
but in accounts which claimed to amount to definitive history. Their
-
XIV BALDWIN INTRODUCTION xv
verdict has been repeated to an extent which can only be explained by a gratitude; and we acknowledge also the many people who have patiently
deep-rooted prejudice against the actions and the values of the generation and thoughtfully answered our questions and given us their recollections of
in which he lived. \Vhen writing of a political leader who was more of a Baldwin and his times, in particular the late Lord Attlee, the late Lord
contemplative philosopher than a man of action, more the type of President Bruce of Melbourne, Lord Butler, Mr Cecil Brinton, Lord Crathorne, Lord
than of Prime Minister, whose influence was so subtle and pervasive that Citrine, Lord and Lady Davidson, Mrs Alan Dore, Sir Patrick Duff, Sir
it affected almost all departments of government yet which cannot easily John Elliot, Sir Patrick Gower, the late Sir James Grigg, the late Lord
be read in a list of treaties or of Acts of Parliament, it is necessary to tell a Hankey, Sir Charles Harris, Sir Ralph Hawtrey, Sir John Hodsoll, Vice
great part of the story of his time. And to do that, we found it necessary Admiral Sir John Hughes-Hallett, Mr Geoffrey Lloyd, MP, the late Sir
to start from scratch. Frederick Leith-Ross, the late Lord Margesson, the late Lord Monsell, Sir
To apologise for the length of the book is only to admit that, in a shorter Otto Niemeyer, Professor Eric Patterson, Mr Stewart Perowne, the late Sir
scope, it could not have been more than an essay. \Ve were fortunate in Dennis Robertson, Lord Salisbury, Miss Elsie Saunders, Lord Swinton, Lord
time, being able to use the whole range of Cabinet and departmental archives Stuart of Findhorn, Sir Graham Vincent and Sir Horace \Vilson.
from 1 922 to 1937, opened under the new thirty-year rule. The material
available is so vast that it would be presumptuous to claim more than pre Private Collections
liminary investigation. Many years will be needed to build up a full picture Leopold Amery (Mr Julian Amery, MP)
even of the activities of the Governments of the interwar period. But we Lord Bayford (Mr Geoffrey Block)
have tried, by concentrating on the minutes of the Cabinet and especially Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty (The Earl Beatty)
of the most important Cabinet committees, to piece together the essential Lord Bridgeman (Viscount Bridgeman)
picture of Baldwin's political life. Miss Phyllis Broome
If government material were the only source, the portrait would be J.P. Boyle
highly prejudiced. \Ve have been privileged to use a large number of private Austen Chamberlain (Birmingham University Library)
papers, including, of course, Baldwin's own, and two collections in particular, Neville Chamberlain (Mrs Stephen Lloyd)
those of Lord and Lady Davidson and of Doctor Thomas Jones, his close Lord Crathorne
friends, without which it would have been almost impossible to work. Lord and Lady Davidson
To the present Earl Baldwin of Bewdley we owe a considerable debt for Sir James Grigg
his kindness in allowing us to use his private collection of papers and photo Hickleton Papers (Lord Halifax)
graphs and for reading the typescript to correct our errors of fact. He has Lord Hardinge of Penshurst (Lady Hardinge)
never exercised, as many families do, the prerogative of well-meant criticism Dr Thomas Jones (Mrs Eirene White, MP and Mr Tristan Jones)
- the more devastating for being gently wielded - and the opinions expressed Lothian Papers (National Library of Scotland)
here are entirely our own. \Ve should also like to thank the other members Sir Arthur Steel Maitland (The late Sir Keith Steel Maitland, Bt.)
of the Baldwin family who have given so much help over the last few years; Samuel Papers (Executors of the late Lord Samuel, and the Clerk of the
the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library for permission to see the Records, House of Lords)
Baldwin papers deposited there; and Mr J. P. Boyle for showing us his Salisbury Papers (Lord Salisbury)
collection of Baldwin material. Lord Templewood (Cambridge University Library)
We are most grateful to Her Majesty the Queen for her gracious permis Lord Weir
sion to quote from papers in the Royal Archives at Windsor; to the Comp
troller of the Stationery Office for permission to quote from the state papers Published Works
deposited in the Public Record Office; and to Mrs Eirene White, MP and We are grateful to the following publishing houses and authors for per
Mr Tristan Jones for permission to quote from their father's diary.* The mission to quote from works of which they hold the copyright:
private collections which we have seen are listed below with the published Lord Avon: Memoirs, Vol. I, (Cassell)
sources. \Ve acknowledge permission to quote from these sources with deep A. W. Baldwin: My Father, The True Story (George Allen and Unwin Ltd)
.I * Part of which has already been publisht>d: lt'hitehall Diary Vols I and II (Oxford Lord Birkenhead: F. E. the Life of F. E. Smith, ISt Earl of Birkenhead (Eyre &
Spottiswoode)
University Press, 1969).
-
XVI BALDWIN INTRODUCTION XVII
Lord Birkenhead: The Prof in two worlds (Collins) Miss Marian Janes and !vfrs J. A. Holdsworth, and our wives who have had
Robert Blake: The Unknown Prime Minister (Eyre and Spottiswoode) to live with this book for an unconscionable length of time.
Sir Arthur Bryant: Stanley Baldwin (Hamish Hamilton) Throughout the book we have adopted the practice of inserting notes on
Lord Citrine: .Men and Work (Hutchinson) the text at the foot of the page. All sources are indicated by small numbers
Sir Charles Petrie: Life and Letters of Austen Chamberlain (Cassell) which refer to notes at the end. Quotations from Baldwin's speeches and
Iain Macleod: Neville Chamberlain (Muller) Cabinet papers are not indexed separately but referred to either in the text
Sir Keith Feiling: Neville Chamberlain (Macmillan) or in general notes on the sources in each chapter. Editorial insertions in
Sir Winston Churchill: The Gathering Storm (Cassell) passages quoted are marked in square brackets. We have deliberately dis
The Earl of Ronaldshay: Life of Lord Curzon (Benn) pensed with footnotes identifying the personalities in the text, but instead
The Marchioness of Curzon: Reminiscences (Hutchinson) have explained them, as far as possible, at the first mention of each name.
Leonard Mosley: Curzon (Longmans) In all cases, however, the Index contains a brief description of persons at the
Randolph Churchill: Lord Derby (Heinemann) first instance of their names.
Sir Evelyn Wrench: Geoffrey Dawson and our Times (Hutchinson)
Duff Cooper: Old Men Forget (Hart-Davis)
Lady Diana Cooper: The Light of Common Day (Hart-Davis)
Sir P. J. Grigg: Prejudice and Judgement (Cape)
Lord Halifax: Fulness of Days (Collins)
Sir J. R. M. Butler: Lord Lothian (Macmillan)
Harold Macmillan: Winds of Change (Macmillan)
Sir Harold Nicolson: George V (Constable and Nigel Nicolson)
Sir Henry Clay: Lord Norman (Macmillan)
Andrew Boyle: Montagu Norman (Cassell)
Lord Percy: Some Memories (Eyre & Spottiswoode)
Lord Samuel: Memoirs ( Cresset)
Lord Simon: Retrospect (Hutchinson)
Lord Swinton: Sixty Years of Power (Hutchinson)
Lord Templewood: Empire of the Air (Collins)
Lord Templewood: Nine Troubled Years (Collins)
Lord Vansittart: The Mist Procession (Hutchinson)
G. M. Young: Stanley Baldwin (Rupert Hart-Davis)
W. J. Reader: Architect of Air Power (Collins)
Sir H. Williams: Politics Grave and Gay (Hutchinson)
Lord Winterton: Orders of the Day (Cassell)
Lord Zetland: Essays (.John Murray)
and to Faber and Faber Ltd for permission to quote the lines from T. S.
Eliot: Ash Wednesday.
VVe should like to apologise for any cases where we have overlooked, or
inadvertently infringed copyright.
Finally we thank those who have made a long task easier by their kindness
and understanding: the Librarians of Cambridge University, Windsor
Castle, and the London School of Economics, and the staff of the Public
Record Office; our long-suffering typists who have coped with execrable
'
I handwriting and the sheer bulk of manuscript, especially Mrs R. G. Coffin,
).
l
CHAPTER ONE
++++++++++++++++++
AN IRONMASTER'S SON
'ON a morning in May, among the Malvern Hills, a strange thing happened
to me as though by magic. For I was tired out by my wanderings and as I
lay down to rest under a broad bank by the side of a stream and leaned over,
gazing into the water, it sounded so pleasant that. I fell asleep. And I dreamed
a marvellous dream ...' So wrote John Langland at the beginning of Piers
Plowman, and for the obscure fourteenth-century cleric, the plain which
stretched across seven counties from \Vorcestershire to Wales, 'thronged
with all kinds of people, high and low together, moving busily about their
worldly affairs', was the image of the world.
English attitudes to the country are complex, often illogical, born of
romantic feeling and the deep need of men in an industrial age to compensate
for their loss of traditional memory. For their own square of downland, fen
or plain they passionately claim a uniqueness which they call England.
The further from the land they live, the more persistent the myth that the
country represents a stability and continuity absent from city life, an
existence not only preferable but in some sense morally superior. Of the
writers after Cobbett, only Thomas Hardy was prepared to admit the inbred
stultified misery of rural poverty, growing out of the great agricultural
depression and sitting squalidly inside the doors of what, at least till the 1930s,
were labourers' hovels. Men trying to scratch a living from the soil drew
little comfort from the beauty of the countryside and in the years between
the wars it was hard to find contact between their rough appreciation of the
soil and the placid vision of the tourist. Too often, as love of the country
widened, the rural population declined. Even the novels of the period like
those of Mary Webb, who had some notion of the raw necessities of agri
cultural life, are overlaid with a soft romantic aura.
From birth to his early forties Stanley Baldwin lived within sight of the
Worcestershire hills. He liked to picture himself as a village squire, but there
was little of the hobnailed countryman about him. Many of his friends
wondered how he retained the impression that he was bucolic. His feeling
for the land was not the soft deception of the city farmer. It stemmed directly
from the romantic poets, from a childhood steeped in \Vordsworth and
BALDWIN AN IRONMASTER •s SON 3
Walter Scott. He saw, not 'the old castles and timbered black and white narrow lanes dropping into deep sudden clefts between buttresses of red
houses for the motoring visitors. But to the imaginative child brought up sandstone. The streams meander across a countryside of slow-brooding
among the ploughlands and pools and dragon flies there is "a richness on the fertility, sharply separated from Wales by the deceptive Severn, beautiful but
world, so it looked what our panon used to call sumptuous".' dangerous, with cold currents and sudden depths, treacherous to the unwary
'To me England is the country and the country is England.' So Baldwin swimmer. But Baldwin's real love was for the high places, thrusting sharply
began one of the ma;t effective and often-quoted ~ges from his speeches out of the plain. The Malvern Hills, green but steep, the crests of their ridges
and he went on to depict the 'sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer bare and windy above the trees, captured his imagination even before
on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the Edward Elgar set their domestic wildness to music. From his garden at Ast1ey
sound of a scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team com Baldwin could look on a clear evening at the whole length of the Cotswolds
ing over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since 'lying like an opalescent bar of blue against the sky, straight, rigid, like the
England was a land. ... The wild anemones in the woods in April, the last Apennines seen from the Plain of Lombardy,' and to the ring of hills from
load at night ofhay being drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on, when Clent to Clee, the sharp line of Edge Hill, the fine-cut cameo ofBredon, the
you can scarcely distinguish the figures of the horses as they take it home to little shapes of Ankerdine and Berrow Hill, and the graceful neighbours,
the farm, and above all, most subtle, most penetrating and most moving, Woodbury and Abberley, rising above thickly wooded slopes to the ridge
the smell of wood smoke coming up in an autumn evening, or the smell of walks, from which he could gaze across many counties, into the old marcher
scutch fires; that wood smoke that our ancestors, tens of thousands of years lands towards Wales or across the heathlands to.industrial Birmingham.
ago, must have caught on the air when they were coming home with the The small country towns that he knew so well, Bewdley and Stourport
result of the day's forage, when they were still nomads, and when they were on-Severn, retain an eighteenth-century prosperity and vernacular elegance.
still roaming the forests and the plains of the continent of Europe. These The industrial revolution saw the development of small factories and
things strike down into the very depths of our nature, and touch chords that Brindley's canal brought trade to their wharves, but the later growth of
go back to the beginning of time and the human race, but they are chords industry passed them by. They have remained a part of the land, rooted in
that w~th every year of our life sound a deeper note in our innermost being.' the past. Fields run up to the walls of iron works and down to the secluded
Baldwin drew strength from the countryside and always returned to it Severn ports. Pastoral and industrial attitudes mix, but in a form that, even
for spiritual refreshment. Like Antaeus he was invincible so long as his feet in Baldwin's time, was already out of date. When society was still rooted in
were on the earth. That much of his love was for a myth, that in many ways country life, when his own foreman was also bailiff of the home farm,
he shared the complex off eelings which leads so many Englishmen to give to Baldwin's industrial experience grew out ofr elations between master and men
their suburban houses names which echo the countryside whilst at the same which were not typical of England, teaching him an older rule, that in an
time neglecting the source of their illusion, is not to deny its potency nor its ordered paternal society all men were neighbours with their own rights and
fundamental nature. It is perhaps these inbred fictions which explain the status to be defended with that 'central English virtue of considerateness'
influence of region on some at least of its inhabitants and it was with men of and with an eye to the share that they all had in a common enterprise.
such understanding, like Edward Wood, heir to the great Halifax estate on Bewdley had been one of the great towns of the marches and through the
the Yorkshire wolds, that Baldwin felt most in sympathy. They were both fields in which Baldwin walked flowed 'the river on whose banks I was born,
provincials at heart; in contrast at least to Churchill who once asked the river that, age-long, has divided Celt and Saxon in their secular strips'.
Baldwin's advice about a speech he had to give in Worcestershire and was Time, on a May morning, disappears in a haze ofm emories ofW elsh warfare,
surprised to find that the Severn flowed through that county. 'I was brought Simon de Montfort, and the battles of the Civil War. Distilled from history
up in London,' he explained. Baldwin entered politics late in life and his and from landscape, rise the philoliophy and prejudice of local pride and
attitudes and prejudices were shaped already by his lifu in late Victorian local independence. From the old bridges he would gaze into the mysterious
Worcestershire society. Whether his understanding of this life was acute, depths of Shropshire from where his father's family had come and he would
whether it told more than heredity, is not to be measured but neither can it watch the smoke from the distant train as it wound its way to Wyre Forest,
be discounted. Cleobury Mortimer, Neen Sollars and Tenbury Wells, names 'redolent of the
There ~An ha.ve been few more beautiful parts of Rngland mw ill.ch to !lpringtime of ~n Enemnd long ~ pwM1 ~ ruid hiA Mind \vould go baek to
the
grow to maturity. West Worcestershire ia a land of dark red earth, rich Langland to whom the names must have been similar mwic as he lay on
blossom of apple, damson, pear and plum, hop-filled fields, high hedges and slopes of the Malverns 'while the great poem of Piers Plowman shaped itself
4 BALDWIN AN IRONMASTER' S SON 5
in his brain'. His own imagination took fire from names like 'The Welch education at the Wesleyan Collegiate Institution at Taunton, Alfred was
Gate', and 'The Warden of the Marches' which brought back to him set to work in the family firm, which now embraced worsted spinning mills
'memories of the long-forgotten strife between Welsh and English, of Ludlow at Stourport, a carpet manufactory at Bridgenorth and was soon to extend
where the big castle still stood, and of Woodbury Hill where Owen Glen to a tinplate works at Wolverhampton. When, at the age of sixteen, he
dower came before the great fight beneath its slope, as the result of which became a partner, there were seven other members of the family in the
the bones of English and Welsh have lain in common ground for five business. The structure of the finn was top-heavy and about 1860 it became
centuries'. necessary to divide control; a cousin, Enoch, and his family, managing
Baldwin's ancestry on his father's side was purely English at least as far Baldwin, Son and Company at the foundry in Stourport, while Alfred's
back as the seventeenth century. Then they had been small landed pro half-brothers and brothers ran E. P. and W. Baldwin at Wilden forge a
prietors in Corve Dale in Shropshire, but later declined to the ranks of mile away.
tenant farmers. One ancestor had been a yeoman of the Crown in the time In 1864, the two half-brothers died and the control of Wilden passed into
of Henry VII, another worked an iron forge at Cleobury in the late the hands of two dissolute elder brothers, George and Stanley, who by mis
seventeenth century and there were, so Baldwin liked to recall, many country management and overspending brought it to the edge of bankruptcy. The
parsons among his forebears. They possessed a crest of some antiquity decline was exaggerated by the financial crisis of 1866, which centred on
though without much heraldic justification. Later, in the nineteenth century, contracting and railway speculation and which cut back the demand for iron
there were attempts to trace a pedigree back to the Count Baldwin who and steel. Alfred, by thirteen years the most jullior of the three, was so dis
ruled Jerusalem after the third Crusade, but it is far more likely that, as so illusioned that he nearly left to take a job with an ironworks in the north,
many families did after the Reformation, possessing the means and the ambi but, when financial disaster threatened, he took control and in September
tion, they claimed the status of gentry as well. For seven hundred years the 1870, dissolved the partnership, bought out his brothers, paid their sub
family had not stirred twenty miles from the dale but shortly after the middle stantial debts to the firm and moved into the ironmaster's house by the works
of the eighteenth century the early growth of industry aroused a previously at Wilden. Where he obtained the capital to do this is not known. Probably
undeveloped business sense. Drawn into coal and iron production, first at the Old Bank helped since the sum involved in the partnership was
Broseley and later in Worcestershire, they then came to Stourport-on £20,000. Certainly in its later fonn, as the Capital and Counties Bank, it
Severn in 17 80, and by Brindley's new canal set up a foundry, whose walls continued to hold the firm's account and goodwill fifty years later.
still survive, where they made some of the best hinges in the world. They With Alfred Baldwin, Stanley Baldwin's father, heredity and environment
were small businessmen, content to build up a reputation and a quiet pros come together. The man who, at twenty-nine, had forced out his in
perous monopoly. The size of the firm can be gauged from the fact that the competent seniors was hardly representative of the Victorian entrepreneur,
Old Bank of Berwick and Company in Worcester tided it over the trade as popularised by Samuel Smiles, despite the patriarchal appearance that
depression of 1803, by a loan of £soo. The same bank to which Baldwin suggests the popular association. Tall and heavily built, with a huge beard,
looked back with gratitude, then 'with infinite difficulty helped us to carry his strength was rather that of a man who had succeeded in taming more
through the crises of the twenties of the last century; time and again did they than the usual mass of contradictions within himself. He had an able mind,
stand our friends in days when we were less able to stand on our own feet and his nonconformist schoolingc annot have left him far behind his university
than we are now'. educated contemporaries. His tastes were studious and literary, and in
George Pearce Baldwin, a son of the pioneer of the Stourport factory, practical matters he was not dexterous. But this was his least deficiency: he
raised the family to affluence, after one particularly bad year for the firm was nervous to a crippling degree. It was partly a physical complaint ex
in 1825, by skilful amalgamations with other small concerns and by acquiring pressed in a fear of violence and a morbid dread of thunder and bad weather,
profitable collieries in South Wales. By 1841, the volume of business was partly a mental state which forced him always to be conscious of the fine
large enough to justify the use of the bankers Robarts and Company as edge that separated stress from loss of control. He achieved control by
London agents. This was the year in which Alfred Baldwin, the youngest of remorseless effort of will and constant thought and only a facial tic like a
twelve children, was born, eight months after the death of his father. He wink behind his eyeglass and an occasional tremor in his immense reserve
was brought up by his mother, fonnerly Barah Ghalkley Btanley, the betrnyed the effort it cost him and revealed the tight repression behind the
daughter of a distinguished Wesleyan minister from Northumberland who appearance of power.
in 1845 was President of the Methodist Conference. After a thorough Nothing he achieved was quite usual or conventional. As a businessman