Mr. John Bull

The 20th Century's "most English of the English" was really half Celt (on his mother's side)--and made a point of saying so when he was among Scots. "I remember that in my early days," Stanley Baldwin once said, "it was with difficulty that one could stand up while the band was playing God Save the King, because we had a Hanoverian and not a Jacobite king." More significant was the rest of his background: upper middle class, Harrow-Cambridge, chapel-turned-Church, just the proper mixture of trade and land and what he proudly admitted were "second-class brains." With this equipment, plus a sturdy character, for three times as Prime Minister he ruled a Britain that distrusted brilliance.

Stanley Baldwin was born Aug. 3, 1867 in Wilden, Worcestershire, the town where his great-grandfather in the late 18th Century had started the family fortune by building an iron foundry. Baldwin's nurse, to assure his success, climbed to the attic with the newborn baby, stood on a chair, and raised him toward the roof.

Stanley inherited from his father Alfred the thriving steel works of Baldwins, Ltd., a directorship of the Great Western Railway, and the pocket borough of Bewdley in Worcestershire. He made little impression at school or Varsity, or in the House of Commons. After seven years in Parliament he was feeling useless and ready to quit. But his wife, Lucy Ridsdale (with whom he had fallen in love as he watched her bowl in a cricket match), urged him to stick it out three more years.

From the First Damson . . . That was time enough for Tory leaders to recognize an unimaginative "safe" man. In 1922 Prime Minister Bonar Law put Stanley Baldwin in his Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Bonar Law resigned, there seemed to be no one in the Tory party to replace him except Viscount Curzon. Since Curzon was in the House of Lords (and therefore unable to face the growing Labor opposition in the House of Commons), the prime ministry went to Baldwin. "But," cried out Curzon, "[Baldwin] is a man ... of the utmost insignificance!" A Mayfair hostess asked: "Is the new Prime Minister what you would call an educated man?"

Britons quickly learned to know him as a pipe-smoking, stocky, imperturbable Average Man who might have served as model for Punch's famed John Bull. He and Lucy were strict Sabbatarians, would not even read Sunday papers. His radio chats, larded with folksy platitudes about "service" and "playing the game" kept him at No. 10 Downing Street.

Baldwin could be generous: in 1919 he gave $600,000, one-fifth of his personal fortune, to the state, to convince other rich men "that love of country is better than love of money." He could be generous, at the right moment, to political enemies: when his Tory followers demanded anti-trade-union legislation in 1925, he came out against it, with a Baldwinian peroration: "Give us peace in our time, O Lord."*

Baldwin regularly insisted that he wanted to return to raising pigs on his farm. "Since 1914," he wistfully told his Bewdley constituents a year before retiring, "I have never seen the pageant of the blossom from the first damson to the last apple [in Worcestershire]. . . . And if that isn't a sacrifice, I don't know what is."

... To the Last Apple. After each political blunder, Baldwin would admit his fault, and blandly assume that he would be forgiven. During the 1926 General Strike (which came after Baldwin abruptly broke off talks with the Trades Union Congress), he went on the air to ask Britons in a hurt voice: "Can't you trust ME? . . ." Yet he broke the General Strike largely because the British people did trust him.

But Baldwin will be longest remembered for the last fruit of his political life. In 1936 he told Edward VIII that he could not marry Wallis Simpson, a divorcee, and remain King. When he stood before the House of Commons to tell how he personally had forced the King to that choice, he showed the supreme self-confidence that lay behind his modest fac,ade. He said: "I consulted--I am ashamed to say it, but they have forgiven me--none of my colleagues." And most Britons who turned to Baldwin again & again in the muddling years between wars did not complain. They thought him dull, but they counted on him to be soundly, solidly, intuitively British.

Six months later, he retired to Worcestershire. The new Hanoverian King made him Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. At Astley Hall he sat through the war which he had been so reluctant to admit was approaching, and saw the Laborites whom he deplored come to power. There Lady Baldwin (who said to a friend after the British lost Tobruk in 1942, "Stanley has only been gone [from the government] five years, and look what a mess they are in") died two years ago. And there, last week, Death came to 80-year-old Stanley Baldwin. The successor to his title is eldest son (of six children) Viscount Corvedale--a Laborite M.P.

*Baldwin borrowed the phrase from the Book of Common Prayer. Baldwin's successor as Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, devalued the phrase politically by using it in defense of the Munich pact.

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