Baldwin (5 page)

Neither the campaign nor the result purged him or his family of a settled if unenthusiastic feeling that he ought to go into the House of Commons. The member for Worcester City was on this occasion one of the dozen or so gentlemen who, after most
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century general elections, as a sort of ritual but somewhat haphazard sacrifice to virtue made by an easy-going society, were unseated on petition for allegedly corrupt electoral practices. Joseph Chamberlain, who had held Birmingham and much of the West Midlands firm for Unionism and Tariff Reform, suggested that Baldwin should step into the seat. The Baldwin family were strong for protection, which commended them to Chamberlain. But it was not enough to commend Stanley to the City of Worcester Conservative and Unionist Association. They preferred Edward Goulding,
^•
whom Baldwin described as ‘an Irishman, whom I then thought and think still, to be vastly my inferior. So I was turned down in my own county town in favour of a stranger …’
⁴
It was one of the few occasions in his life when he
tried
and failed. For some years to come, his parliamentary prospects seemed blocked. It did not occur to him to look for a seat outside Worcestershire, and even if it had there was little reason why he should have secured one.

Then, in February 1908, his father died suddenly. Two days after the funeral Stanley Baldwin was selected as candidate for Bewdley. Before the end of the month he was returned unopposed. It remained his seat for a few months short of thirty years. His majorities were not always as big as he would have liked, notably in 1923, his first election as Prime Minister, when he rashly asked for 10,000 and got 6000; but he was never in remote danger of losing the seat.

He was in his forty-first year when he entered the House of Commons, six months over the watershed which Joseph Chamberlain, thirty years before, had thought was the limit if a fully effective parliamentary career was not to be precluded. He was younger at entry than either his predecessor (Bonar Law) or his successor (Neville Chamberlain) as leader of the Conservative Party, but older, and in most cases significantly so, than any other Prime Minister, of any party, of the past two hundred years.

The House of Commons accepted him as a quiet, agreeable member of some substance, not the sort of man who would ever dominate in debate, or who would lead a school of thought, but a man who with three or four others might constitute a very effective block within his party to a course or an individual of which or whom they did not approve. Baldwin spoke very little—only five real speeches, interlaced with an occasional stray intervention, between his election in 1908 and the outbreak of war in 1914. Until then he appeared perfectly content with his placid existence. He had two substantial houses (in London he lived at 27 Queen’s Gate until 1913, when he bought 93 Eaton Square, a still larger house with—an uncharacteristic touch for Baldwin—a more fashionable address) and plenty of money with which to run them and do anything else he wanted. He was vice-chairman of Baldwins Ltd and could get his way in the firm when he wished, without having to take full executive responsibility for what was becoming an increasingly large business. He had succeeded his father on the board of the Great Western Railway, although not in the chairmanship. He counted as a significant businessman on the Conservative benches. He had a growing circle of friends, almost entirely non-aristocratic, both in Worcestershire and in London, both inside and outside the House of Commons, and he entertained on a moderate scale. Being a backbench Member of Parliament rounded off his life rather than offering a springboard for future achievement. Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, F. E. Smith strove for the glittering prizes of politics. So, somewhat less rumbustiously, did Bonar Law and Austen Chamberlain.
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Asquith and Balfour enjoyed them without the striving. Baldwin at this stage appeared to contemplate neither the strife nor the prizes.

The outbreak of war made him more restless. He was forty-seven, too old for military service yet young enough to feel that something more was required of him than the life he had hitherto led. At first the main change was that he began to give away quite a lot of money, mainly to Worcestershire charities.
Over a few years he disposed of about £40,000. Then he served on several Government committees of enquiry or review as well as engaging in a little more political manoeuvring than had been his habit. In the early part of the first coalition he was rather anti-Lloyd George and pro-Asquith, but by December 1916 he was ready for a change and accepted the pro-Lloyd George lead of Bonar Law, who had a little hesitantly made him his parliamentary private secretary a few months before. He was also ready for office, and was delighted when an offer came in the first few weeks of the new Government. It came in a rather strange form. Nominally he merely continued as parliamentary private secretary to Law at the Treasury. But Law was without a junior minister in the Commons. The new Financial Secretary was Sir Hardman Lever, a businessman brought in from outside politics to galvanize the Treasury. But as he was at first without a seat in Parliament and in any event left almost immediately for extended duty in the United States, he was unable either to galvanize or to discharge any of the traditional functions of his office. Quite exceptionally, therefore, Baldwin was allowed to perform as a member of the Government and spoke from the front bench from February 1917 onwards. In July the position was regularized and he was given the title and salary of Joint Financial Secretary. He was a few weeks short of his fiftieth birthday, a somewhat elderly junior minister. But for the last two years of the war he at least had something to do.

Baldwin remained Financial Secretary to the Treasury for four years. He served two Chancellors, Bonar Law in war and Austen Chamberlain in peace. He preferred Law, who was less stiff, although Chamberlain’s more leisurely pace of work was better suited to Baldwin’s own practice. Both of them regarded Baldwin as an acceptable and agreeable assistant, but not as a great deal more. He spent long hours in the House of Commons and he was skilful at the quiet conduct of minor business. Although it was recorded that ‘he could read a balance sheet’ (not in fact a particularly useful attribute for the Treasury), there is no evidence that he left any imprint upon Exchequer policy. Both his Chancellors—the two most important figures in the Conservative Party—thought of him, not as a man of promise, but as a man who deserved some reward by virtue of his service. In 1920 he was offered the Governor-Generalships, first of South Africa and then of Australia, together with a peerage. He declined. His name was also mooted for the Speakership of the House of Commons. It is not clear whether he was tempted or not, but the suggestion was not pressed. They were all offices which indicated that he was held in good regard, but not considered a serious candidate for major political advancement.
¹

Baldwin himself, however, had already raised his sights
rather higher. At the time of Chamberlain’s appointment he had written to his mother: ‘I am pretty certain that I shall be left where I am which is what I wanted, for the only promotion I should care about would be the Exchequer itself which would never be given to a minister of only two years’ experience. I anticipate that Austen will be my new chief, an appointment that will meet with a good deal of criticism.’
¹
Baldwin’s modesty, about which he wrote and spoke frequently, was not excessive.

The outside offices for which his name was subsequently canvassed were all posts in which Lloyd George took little interest. Baldwin, in the Coalition Government, was a moon who moved with and around the leader of the Conservative Party. With the Sun King himself he had little direct relationship. Of course he saw him occasionally, but rarely if ever alone. During 1918 they met principally at Lord Derby’s
breakfasts, from which Baldwin recorded impressions and interchanges which indicate both that the Prime Minister was a near stranger to him and that he was not above a little daring toadying. On 4 March he wrote: ‘[The breakfasts] give me a good opportunity of studying that strange little genius who presides over us. He is an extraordinary compound.’ And on 15 May, the morning of the Maurice
debate,
²
he recorded: ‘We proceeded thus: S.B.—“You know, PM, that for ten years we have been trying to catch you deviating by an inch from the strict path of veracity and pin you down. We never succeeded. But now others think they have got you and they will find out this afternoon that they have caught you speaking the truth. They will have the shock of their lives.” The little man roared with laughter and it evidently pleased him for he went about afterwards telling the Cabinet that “he had been caught telling the truth”.’
²

So indeed it might have pleased him, for as has subsequently
become clear, the best that can be said about the debate, from the Prime Minister’s point of view, is that he had one facet of the truth while General Maurice had another. But what is of greater Baldwin significance is the clear indication that at this stage he had developed little of the pervading antipathy towards Lloyd George which was to be the making of his own career.

Baldwin’s most notable act as Financial Secretary was to write an anonymous letter to
The Times.
It appeared on 24 June 1919. It was of some length and contained a number of
obiter dicta
about the obvious gravity of the crisis through which the nation had passed, the less obvious but equally searching crisis which it still faced, the dangers of living in fools’ paradises and believing that there could be play without work, the crushing burden of debt, and the responsibilities of the wealthy classes. A voluntary levy, he decided, was the answer. The operative part of his letter ran as follows:

I have been considering this matter for nearly two years, but my mind moves slowly; I dislike publicity, and I had hoped that somebody else might lead the way. I have made as accurate an estimate as I am able of the value of my own estate, and have arrived at a total of about £580,000. I have decided to realise 20% of that amount or say £120,000 which will purchase £150,000 of the new War Loan, and present it to the Government for cancellation.

I give this portion of my estate as a thank-offering in the firm conviction that never again shall we have such a chance of giving our country that form of help which is so vital at the present time.

Yours, etc.

F.S.T.

The gesture was generous and public spirited, with an element of naïveté about it. The anonymity (not perhaps best protected by the choice of pseudonym) held just long enough

for Baldwin to be alone in the secret amongst those present when he performed his statutory Financial Secretary’s duty of witnessing the burning of the cancelled bonds, but not for much longer. And the attempt to start an avalanche of donations was a complete failure. Baldwin had aimed by his example at a debt reduction of £ 1000 million. In the result only about £½ million, including his own gift, was received.

Even more revealing of Baldwin’s personality than
The Times
letter and the action it announced was the note which he wrote immediately afterwards to John Davidson,
who despite a twenty-two-year age gap had become and was to remain one of his closest friends: