Academics From England

"In a world of voluble hates, he plotted to make men like, or at least tolerate, one another. Therein he had much success, within the shores of this island. He remains the most human and lovable of all the Prime Ministers."

"Mr. Stanley Baldwin had not an enemy on our side of the House, and he was trusted by all our members. His weakness as a leader of the Tory Party was that he was incapable of political meanness. He neither made low accusations nor delivered foul blows; and if he rarely soared into the regions of lofty rhetoric or of fine achievement, he never descended to the commonplace in either. Reliable, friendly, and solid, without tricks or frills, he was liked by everybody."

"One well-remembered speech was made by Mr. Baldwin...on the 6th March 1925. The occasion was the discussion of a Private Member's Bill dealing with the political funds of the Trade Unions. Mr. Baldwin...strongly deprecated raising this controversial issue when at that time it was most important that nothing should be done to create the suspicion that Parliament was attacking the Trade Unions... He concluded his speech with the words: "Although I know that there are those who work for different ends from most of us in this House, yet there are many in all ranks in all Parties who will re-echo my prayer, 'Give peace in our time, O Lord.'" It was significant that the greatest volume of cheers which followed the conclusion of Mr. Baldwin's speech came not from his own Party but from the Labour benches. I hardly remember a speech which made at the time it was delivered such a deep impression upon the House of Commons. It was a revelation of the real Stanley Baldwin. It showed a sympathy with the poor, and intense desire to promote co-operation between capital and labour. No one could doubt his sincerity and his good intentions. The speech revealed the deep-seated and fundamental differences between the sane and sober Conservatism of Mr. Baldwin and the old Toryism of the great body of his Party. It was a speech which will always be remembered by those who had the privilege of hearing it."

"In the last resort, Baldwin was a good man. He left maybe a legacy of neglect. But he also preserved and enhanced the civilised values that have distinguished British politics and the British people."

"Breakfasted...with Smuts at the Savoy... I asked him what he thought of Baldwin who was something of a dark horse. Was he strong and was he able? Smuts gave a somewhat qualified judgment on both points. An excellent man he said and thoroughly well meaning and honest, but lacking, he evidently thought, in judgment and drive."

"Lunched with Ramsay MacDonald at the Athenaeum... The Government was absolutely discredited in the country. It was the feeblest and foolishest within memory and a real discredit to the country... As to poor Baldwin I was talking to him the other day about something and he was entirely at sea... He is an extraordinary failure. He does not know what he wants to do and, if he did, he has no power to assert himself—the weakest prime minister within memory."

"As Leader of a party the right hon. Member for Bewdley was a generous and chivalrous opponent; as the Leader of the House we knew that its honour and dignity were safe in his hands; and as long as spaciousness of mind and spirit, and therefore breadth of human sympathy and understanding, are qualities which are honoured in this country, so long will he be reckoned among the greatest of our Parliament men. ... The right hon. Member for Bewdley goes from this House to another place, and our confident good wishes go with him for his health and vigour. We may be sure, not only, as the Leader of the Opposition said, that he will enjoy his leisure and rest but that he will yet play a formidable part in the affairs of the nation."

"The central figure is beyond question that of Mr. (now Lord) Baldwin... He was Prime Minister when the German rearmament reached dimensions which clearly necessitated a national effort in response. He shut his eyes to the evidence before him. He procrastinated when the evidence could no longer be ignored. He feared opposition from the electorate, but he neither tested the will of the people by a declaration of policy nor attempted to guide it by informing them of the danger which confronted them. He vacated his office with the nation unprepared—unprepared even to prepare... It was only, however, the fateful period in history which began in January 1933 that revealed most fully these defects, of an intermittent will to action and a disinclination to work at distasteful tasks, and made them a great national disaster. He lulled the growing anxiety of the nation by a pledge of air parity with the nearest Power within striking distance. He did nothing to implement it. In one of the most extraordinary confessions a Prime Minister has ever made he has admitted that he refrained from ever proposing the policy which he thought the safety of the country required because he believed it would be unwelcome to the people—the public whom he had not only not instructed but had led into a fool's paradise. Not absence of vision, nor incapacity to judge the needs of a situation, or even to act when the will was there—but a recurrent lethargy of the will was his undoing—and ours."

"People of all parties came to see him, particularly the Labour men, many of whom he liked. I am sure no one can know Baldwin without liking him, even getting fond of him."

"Just seven years ago I sent home a despatch in which I summarised all the sinister passages of Mein Kampf and drew attention to the revival of militarism which could only have one end i.e. war. And that was the concern of all who were threatened. This despatch which was called the Mein Kampf despatch made a considerable sensation but was pigeon-holed in due course. Neither MacDonald nor Baldwin would face facts. The former is dead – the latter completely discredited. Blame attaches to several of the present Ministers. The safety of the Empire is more important than balanced budgets or disarmament aspirations. Baldwin & Co. literally gambled with the safety of the Empire and this was unpardonable. Our Government should have started to rearm intensively after the reoccupation of the Rhineland which showed what Hitler thought of international obligations. You may say that the country would not have stood for re-armament. What then is the rôle of a government? Should it be to keep itself and its party in power at all costs or, if necessary, to tell the country unpalatable truths. If Baldwin had resigned on the question of rearmament the resignation of a Government with such an overwhelming majority would have produced an immense effect."

"[Mr Baldwin is] an honest and decent man [and although I disagree with] the Conservatives on every point...he found them on the whole honourable men who at least stuck to their opinions."

"To contemporary historians Mr. Baldwin is the Good Man, the Idealist, the Honourable Gentleman. He has every qualification for the part. I am inclined to believe that he is the only politician in our time who has honestly put his party before himself and his country before his party...We forget neither Lord Balfour's white-hot idealism, nor Lord Oxford's passionate interest in the working man, nor Mr. Lloyd George's selfless indifference to power, when we say that under no other leader could England have come through the General Strike so well. He has proved to us convincingly that cleverness is not enough...We are so unused to hearing a politician called 'The Good' that for the moment we have nothing but bouquets to throw at our Mr. Baldwin. But this will not last. The time will come when we shall be looking round for other ammunition."

"Baldwin risked the loss of his country in war rather than risk the loss of his party in an election. In foreign and defence policy he played politics with the life of Britain through his squalid electoral calculations; in his home policy he bequeathed to the next generation our present industrial structure through his lazy timidity which sought to avoid trouble at all costs. The doom of defeat was averted despite Baldwin, but the nemesis of the Baldwin epoch still haunts our country."

"One could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air."

"No British Prime Minister of the last seventy years has been more harshly stereotyped than Stanley Baldwin. No one has been so much ignored, after the initial judgements of contemporaries had been made."

"Nevertheless, if, in the important task of preserving and fostering the underlying unity of the nation on which its ultimate strength depends, Baldwin succeeded, in the supreme duty of a Prime Minister—the preservation of honourable peace and the military posture to enable Britain to play in any period her appropriate role—he failed. He left to his successor, in terms of the foreign situation and the ability of Britain to meet the rapidly approaching dangers, a bleak and barren heritage, although he handed on, at any rate in terms of human feeling, a country where kindliness and decency still ruled, and men and women, when the test came, had the spirit to meet it worthily."

"Stanley Baldwin was a successful Premier because every conventional Englishman knew that he shared his prejudices and represented his interests."

""You are a believer, Mrs. Baldwin", I whispered to her. "I am indeed", she replied, "and I must tell you that every morning when we rise we kneel together before God and commend our day to Him, praying that some good work may be done in it by us. It is not for ourselves that we are working, but for the country and for God's sake. How else could we live?" She looked at me sincerely and naturally, and I realized the simple earnestness of their conception of life."

"He ambled along, dilatory always, but instinctively astute. He misled everyone but responded quickly to popular moods. I learnt from close friends of his that fear of war was always a principal motive of his policy, or lack of it... He knew, like Chamberlain after him, that rearmament was the first step to another German war, and there was truth in the accusation made by his Right-Wing critics that he and MacDonald obstructed the increases of British defence that would normally have been considered necessary if Britain was to defend the Empire without powerful allies. Baldwin was never an Imperialist. At the same time, he did nothing to make the Disarmament Conference a reality and everything to destroy the alternative policy of collective security. His fear and hatred of war were perfectly sincere and he ended his famous 'the-bomber-will-always-get-through' speech by an earnest appeal to youth to prevent such a horror... What was the key to Baldwin?...It was the Worcestershire countryside and the works of Mary Webb, a warm-hearted popularizer of country life, not the ideas and values of his cousin, Rudyard Kipling, which appealed to him. In short, he was a 'Little Englander'. His disliked foreigners and believed that England could not survive another war. Big ideas like the League were dangerous, but the British people would fight for their interests if sufficiently hard-pressed. They might have to arm against Hitler, and though he did not much care about the Empire, he thought it treasonable to talk, as many were doing, about returning the colonies to Germany... He drew contrast between the tranquil, old-world life of the countryside...and the dire results of a civilization of mechanical speed, ruthlessly binding every worker to a conveyor belt... Humane, kindly, the outlook of a genial country gentleman, not of Kipling, and not - no, certainly not, of the Federation of British Industries... He had the right qualities of leading a coalition. He acted like a Conservative, spoke like a Liberal and was always in words and actions a true representative of the great British middle-class."

"[Baldwin is] a pure utopian [who had turned] Disraelianism [from] a sham...into an honest sentiment of pleasing odour."

"Baldwin...was undoubtedly looked up to with something like affection by Members in every part of the House. The young and progressive wing of his party had a special regard for him. His speeches, particularly on industrial problems, struck just the note which we thought appropriate and illuminating. The fact that the Right wing and especially the so-called "Industrials" had little love for him, confirmed our feelings... In these early days, I knew him only as the man who had led us to a great electoral victory and who had made it possible, through his reputation for decency and fair-mindedness, to win the support of working men and women throughout the country."

"Baldwin had made a deep impression, upon all those who heard it, by his broadcast in the previous election. The radio broadcast...was used effectively for the first time in 1924... Baldwin had adopted a method—afterwards perfected by President Roosevelt—of what was to be called "the fireside chat". He was simple, clear, moderate, and seemed to remember the vital point that in a radio speech...the audience is confined to two or three people in their own homes. They want talk, not a speech... At the time of the General Strike his wisdom and sympathy impressed us all, as had his famous speech on the Political Levy Bill the year before... He affected to dislike "intellectuals". But that is a common pose of men of high intellectual qualifications; and Baldwin was certainly much more of a sensitive artist than of a rugged countryman. For he was half Celt... Even to the most superficial observer it was clear that Baldwin operated at his best in a crisis, and this was followed by a need for rest and recuperation. He was highly strung, nervous, and indeed the opposite in almost every way to the "image"...which the party machine built up of him. It was said of Lord Liverpool that the secret of his policy was that he had none. To some extent, this was true of Baldwin also. Protection, "safeguarding", defence, above all European problems, did not excite him unduly. He was not a great administrator. He was an influence, and an influence for good. The fact that he commanded the respect and even affection of the Labour Opposition confirmed our admiration for our leader."

"[A]ny criticism of Mr. Baldwin was little short of blasphemy."

"His...purpose was so to conduct the affairs as to bridge the dangerous division into which the nation had fallen in the years immediately following the First War. He therefore set out by studied moderation to win for himself a position almost above party. Baldwin wooed the Labour Members in the House of Commons and won their confidence. His whole philosophy led him to regard it as one of his main tasks to make the Labour Party safe for democracy, and to lead it away from revolutionary to constitutional methods. Moreover, he knew that the Conservative Party had no future unless it could win the support of that central body of electors... It should therefore be the Centre and Left of the Conservative Party which should dominate its policies, and not the Right. In this spirit and by such methods, class strife and crude ideologies would be gradually tamed. It was partly owing to his example and understanding that the terrible suffering and discontent, caused by large-scale unemployment, did not take the form of dangerous and subversive movements."

"In 1914 there was a...deeper antagonism in the industrial field between the employers and the workers... To-day I find an atmosphere completely different... I asked myself how it came about that so marked a change had taken place during the last few years. I tried, with a friend who was walking with me, to trace the development back to some point in time. We went back to a speech you made in the House of Commons when Fred Macquisten introduced a Bill which would have affected the Trade Unions. Your speech was made in opposition to the Bill... It seemed to me, this evening, that in your speech you made flesh the feelings of us all, that the antagonism, the bitterness, the class rivalry were unworthy, and that understanding and amity were possible... May I add that, though you see little of us nowadays, your name is often on our lips and thoughts of you in our hearts."

"When I listen to him at any time, he almost persuades me that I ought to be his supporter, and I think that his speeches have a similar effect on a good many other people, too."

"I rarely escape the conclusion, especially when I read your major speeches, that it is tradition rather than fundamentals that has placed you among the forces of the right."

"There was an attraction at first that Mr Baldwin should not be clever. But when he forever sentimentalises about his own stupidity, the charm is broken."

"Baldwin said that one of the least enjoyable duties of a Conservative leader was to listen to lectures on the laziness of the working class from men whose idea of a hard day's work was to spend an hour blowing greenfly off their roses with the smoke of a cigar."

"What [Free Churchmen] have felt is — that in you we have had a man at the head of our national affairs whom we could entirely trust. I am just old enough to remember the kind of faith Free Churchmen had in Mr. Gladstone. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say they have placed a very similar faith in you."

"There was no one half so good at the business of getting the middle class and the working class to vote the same way."

"We got S. B. to admit the truth of the story that he was asked by an old Harrovian in a railway compartment, who saw S. B. sporting the old tie: 'Were you not at Harrow in my time? What have you been doing since?' And this was when S. B. was Prime Minister."

"This administration under Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and that of Mr. Baldwin, which followed a year later, were marked by much industrial strife, culminating in the General Strike of 1926. Baldwin's handling of this critical phase was deft and sure. He sensed unerringly, as he was to do later during the abdication of King Edward VIII, the British people's sentiments and led them without hesitation. In the aftermath of the General Strike, he rejected vengeful acts. No British statesman in this century has done so much to kill class distinctions nor felt them. It was his policy to fuse Disraeli's two nations and his success is no mean monument. If in foreign affairs there were faults of omission, on the home front he practised a positive statesmanship which influenced the future. It was his faith in the British people and his conviction that they should be led in no selfish spirit of class advantage, that drew many of the younger men in his party towards him and held their loyalty. We had seen British soldiers fight and die together, we did not see why the nation should not live together and did not think Socialism necessary to make this possible. Baldwin was the antithesis of the hard-faced men who were alleged to have dominated the Conservative Party immediately after the first world war. In character and purpose he expressed what we wanted to achieve in politics at home."

"He was of the generation of the White Marxists who preceded the Red. The only foreigner he recognised, using the only slogan he feared – and anticipated – was the man still to come who should say, ‘Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.’ It was his preoccupation, almost his obsession, to see that when that tocsin sounded there would be no chains left in England. He won that war."

"In Britain the inter-war years were marked by a decline in the power of two traditionally important institutions: the monarchy and the military. In December 1936 Edward VIII abdicated, having been bullied into doing so by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, who disapproved of the American divorcée he wished to marry and who asserted that the British public (and the governments of the Dominions) shared his sentiments. The armed forces, meanwhile, were starved of cash on the principle that there would not be another major war for at least ten years - a 'Ten-Year Rule' that was introduced in 1919 and reaffirmed annually until 1932. In Japan the opposite happened. Monarch and military both grew more powerful. The Japanese answer to the Depression was not national socialism, as it was in Germany. It was imperial militarism."

"There were few new Conservative Members in the Parliament of 1923. I remember the advice that Baldwin gave us. He spoke of the Labour Members, now for the first time supporting a government of their own party. In those days the overwhelming majority of them were trade unionists, who had spent their working lives in factories or the mines. "Though", Baldwin said, "you may have had better educational advantages, do not presume upon that, they know more about unemployment insurance than you. Above all, never be sarcastic at their expense.""

"Baldwin still baffles me. He must have a good deal of ability, and a certain recklessness which wears the aspect of courage. But he certainly lacks judgement, industry, drive, initiative, resourcefulness and no man can lead the nation out of its great trouble who lacks these qualities. He is either a very great man with a purpose beyond the plumbing of ordinary minds—or he is a bloody fool. He has some of the attributes of the impostor—nay many. He has an abnormal conceit which persuades himself and therefore others that he is superior in essential to those who surround or preceded him. If he pulls it off then he will put on a pedestal by countless worshippers and it might take long before he is found out."

"If the Conservative Party jettisons Mr. Baldwin it will sacrifice its greatest electoral asset... So long as Mr. Baldwin leads the Conservative Party so long will its "right" wing be unable to dominate the party's counsels and narrow its purposes—of this the Trade Disputes Bill was a sufficient example... Nor, with Mr. Baldwin as its Leader, will the Conservative Party ever sink to become the creature of millionaire newspaper owners or a mere appanage of big business."

"If there was one issue above all others about which Stanley Baldwin cared deeply, it was understanding in industry. It was his life ambition to try to make a contribution in this sphere, and I think that he achieved it. Some here will recall...the last speech that Stanley Baldwin ever made in this House. It was on 5th May, 1937. Negotiations in the coalfields were not going well; there was tension which was reflected in a Debate in this House. Stanley Baldwin felt that this was a situation to which he could make his last contribution as a Member of this House, and he did so simply, sincerely and successfully. When I saw Lord Baldwin last, only a few weeks ago, it was of that speech he spoke to me. It was for speeches like these, and actions like these that he would, I am sure, wish to be remembered, and without doubt they played their part in promoting national unity for the ordeal which lay ahead... Stanley Baldwin was a patient and tolerant man of wide human sympathies. He knew his fellow countrymen and found friends among them in every walk of life. Anything in the nature of class consciousness or snobbery was anathema to him. He was incapable of vindictiveness or rancour and rarely showed resentment even at the harshest sayings of his critics. His strength as a Parliamentarian—and it was a formidable strength—lay rather in the reserve and reasonableness with which he would state his case... [H]e was in all things essentially, characteristically English an Englishman who worked in industry and who loved the countryside."

"As long as you are at the head of a Government, it will stand for what is honourable. The iron entered into my soul, when Ll[oyd] G[eorge]'s Government after the war let down and corrupted public life at home and destroyed our credit abroad. Ever since it has been a relief to have public honour reestablished and you will always stand for that."

"Baldwin's methods had been slow. He avoided detail; critics said that he avoided thought. He did not avoid thought about the major problem of the time. He assumed that, since constitutional safeguards would not stop socialism "if the Socialists [were] determined", persuasion had to work instead. Considering that he was a reactionary Tory, his achievement was remarkable. By the time he began his third period as Prime Minister, no politician doubted that his freedom from "high and dry Toryism" made him "totally acceptable" to his non-Conservative colleagues, to the "mugwumps", "clericals" and earnest, theoretical "liberals" who were to be found in all parties and to the many Labour politicians for whom his "quintessentially English" combination of peaceful intentions and a "modern outlook" provided a social reassurance which no other Conservative could provide. Baldwin aimed to demonstrate the humanity, responsibility and social edgelessness of industrial wealth... [H]is speeches became statements of decency and law in face of the "wild menace of totalitarianism". He talked about England and the English and did not "hesitate to speak in plain terms of Christianity"."

"Baldwin presented the working-class movement as created by average men who were very much like himself and would respond to a message of conciliation. In implying the existence of a strong, gentle and happy people who had not been perverted by "intellectuals" and "press-lords", he held up a repertoire of social heroes, none of whom resembled Beaverbrook or Layton and most of whom reflected, in sometimes eccentric ways, the qualities which the English were supposed to admire. The context was pre-industrial. Though "rural society" had "disappeared" in Baldwin's lifetime, his rhetoric implied an admiration of its virtues... Was Baldwin creating a myth? Probably not... It is likely that Baldwin felt as he spoke, meant what he said and really thought, like his admirers, that he was "recalling" them to "the fundamentals of life"."

"Baldwin had moral, social and aesthetic beliefs, and also a religion, but few of his beliefs were political. He was pessimistic about purpose and felt an instinctive resistance to it. Though he succeeded, where necessary, in mastering the reluctance that he felt, his interests were spiritual and atmospheric, his instrument of demonstration the wand rather than the baton. What he wanted to express were the feelings of a "decent Englishman". In imagination he lived a version of what these were and created a teaching about what they should be. In doing so, he did something that no twentieth-century politician, except Grey, had quite done before. In doing it he implied a consonance between the politics of the public-school gentleman of middle-rank, literary interests and rural tastes and the reticence of the body of the people as a whole. "Englishmen", he wrote in 1935, "may appear to take [their] mutual loyalties for granted: we don't talk about them. But it is good once and again to break the silence of our instinctive reserve and say to each other what we might regret never having said if death came to one of us unexpectedly.""

"Baldwin did not succeed as "a man of the highest character" until the election of 1924. What his victory then showed was that his function was to tie together the moral, industrial, agrarian, libertarian, Anglican and nonconformist bodies of resistance in a not yet fully demagogic combination of naïveté, decency and understatement... If Baldwin ever wanted to do anything positive with power, December 1923 seems to have cured him. Thereafter at the same time as a rural social order was passing, he invented a mindless rural persona which, through a new image of pipe-smoking simplicity, aimed to lessen the distance from an electorate whose voting practice at last had shown that "at core...the working man [was] sound". He peddled a modest morality which, even if not "the old England of the villages...getting a bit of its own back for once", made a point of distinguishing its own reputation from the reputations attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Rothermere the "lecher", Northcliffe the syphilitic, Derby the pantaloon, Birkenhead the drunk, Beaverbrook the adventurer, Horne the "Scotch cad", commercial traveller and smooth ladies' man, Salvidge the "Tammany boss" with his hand in the till and the moral and political indecency of Lloyd George... There can still be no doubting the intention of the nervous imagination with which the "real pen" in Kipling's family approached the task of governing a nation in which a million men had died and 8½ million women had got the vote since Birkenhead's sword had first been sharpened."

"Baldwin, Stanley … confesses putting party before country, 169-70; ..."

"He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened."

"Not even a public figure. A man of no experience. And of the utmost insignificance."

"Mr. Baldwin is a kind of malleable and talkative Coolidge. He has many of the qualities that appeal to the common man. He is by no means brilliant, but the sentiments he gives facile and occasionally felicitous expression to in his many speeches are of the order of thought that passes for common sense with the average British mind. But he has no initiative, and he lacks definiteness and firmness of purpose. He also differs from the American President in the fact that he is altogether devoid of industry, and never works out his problems. His instincts are amiable and kindly. He would prefer to live at peace with all manner of men if he only knew how. But he has never taken pains at any task, and the result is that no piece of work, legislative or administrative, stands to his credit."

"Never once has Mr. Baldwin tried to mislead us."

"The Government simply cannot make up their mind, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps vital to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat."