STANLEY BALDWIN

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 255, 24 July 1937, Page 7 (Supplement)

STANLEY BALDWIN

A Eulogy by Mr. Arthur Bryant “Stanley Baldwin,” a tribute by Arthur Bryant (London: Hamish Hamilton). Mr. Arthur Bryant is frankly a hero worshipper. He can see no failing in his hero. Mr. Baldwin was always right and the others always wrong. The language of the book is unadulterated eulogy, and Mr. Baldwin becomes a veritable paragon. As one closes the book one feels if only half of " hat Mr. Bryant says is true it is a thousand pities that Mr. Baldwin (now Earl Baldwin of Bewdley) has laid down the cares of office. There can never be another Prime Minister like him. Had anyone else been at the helm of British politics in these last few momentous years the ship of state would have plunged to irretrievable disaster on the rocks of discord and dissension in the seas made menacing by the turmoil of class against class. One hastens to add that Mr. Bryant has sound reasons for thinking and writing as he has. His subject is one of the most solid and stolid of Englishmen, a man with whom character counts for more than anything else. He nothing shabby did or mean. And he trusted his fellow men as few men of authority have ever trusted them. Also he came into politics not “to feather his own nest” but for the good he felt he could do. His ends were completely disinterested. His strength and his character were at all times used for the benefit of England. Not even his bitterest enemies ever suspected Mr. Baldwin’s ideals.

Thus Mr. Bryant starts with the great advantage of having to present a man who is the very soul of honour. And Mr. Bryant, secure in that advantage, has ridden “his hobby” with a right royal will and has presented the man in a most attractive style. It is a book which, when once started upon, is difficult to be put down until the last page is read.

Mr. Bryant traces Mr. Baldwin’s life through from his early days as a worker in his father’s iron works in Bewdley through his steady rise to power, assumption of office as “the unknown Premier,” and latterly the “leadership of faith and character.”

Mr. Baldwin is of the very stuff of his beloved Worcestershire. “Oi am wot Oi am and carn’t be no ’ammeter,” and “carn’t be druv.” He inherited “the repute for hard work, shrewd sense and honesty that Worcestershire men had learn to associate with the name of Baldwin.” They “did their best to love their neighbour, rich and poor, served God and honoured the King. They believed in and practised the ancient feudal rule of England that those who had privileges should bear burdens. They treated the men in the works ... as human beings and neighbours. ... In ill-times they looked after them and their womenfolk, regardless of balance-sheets and profits. They believed that personal goodwill Ms the first asset in a man’s capital.” Those qualities of greatness remain with Stanley Baldwin to-day. It was not unusual, soon after his assumption of the Prime Ministership, to hear Mr. Baldwin spoken of as a man with “second class brains.” To the extent that lie was always suspicious of mere cleverness he was not displeased with the description. It is well to remember, however, that even as a child “lying comfortably on his stomach on the hearth-rug before the winter fire, or in the summer in the orchard at the back of the house,” he was an avid reader of some of the very best of English literature. “Before he was nine,” Mr. Bryant tells us, “he had read aloud all of ‘Guy Manner's, Ivanhoe,’ ‘Red Gauntlet,’ ‘Rob Roy,’ ‘The Pirate,’ and ‘Old Mortality.’ Progress,’ ‘Peter Simple' and Midshipman Easy’ lie also read.” He was very assiduous in his attendance at church, and he came to have a real love of the Bible, both for its teaching and it language. “The language of the English Bible leaves its mark on you for life,” he said in after years. At his first school he was greatly in advance of other boys of his age. Derivable from the “.strain of Quaker blood in him,” there was also seen to be in him “an obstinacy” which preferred “the stake” rather thru to giving way on a principle. At Harrow and at Cambridge he did not work over-hard. I attribute such faculties as I have,” he once said, “to the fact that I did not overstrain them in youth.” He spent much time playing the piano, and he even had thoughts of the Church as a profession.

But his father had cast him for another destiny. “The Baldwins were hereditary makers of iron. . . At 21 he crossed the road to the forge and started his life as a man of business and industrialist at two pounds a week.” That was his life for twenty years. Also, “he farmed a few acres, bred pigs and won prises at village flower shows, played cricket and sang in the choir.”

_ “Local life gave him more than physical strength. It gave him earth in which to plant those deep roots from which his knowledge of England grew, and the inward power that came from that knowledge.” When his father entered Parliament, Stanley Baldwin was the real director of the Baldwin firm. All the men trusted him and they brought: their troubles to him. When his father died it was recognised that the son should carry on the tradition of service in Parliament. And amid all the trials of the years Worcester has remained loyal to him as he has to it. He entered Parliament in 1908, and up to the outbreak of war in August, 1914, he delivered only five speeches in the House of Commons. But he was well liked by everybody, and he was a good listener. He was one of the few industrialists who made nothing out of the war, for he gave back to the State all that he could be said to have made. And he was generous—quixotically so —in numerous different ways. It was a very surprised world that saw in Stanley Baldwin the destroyer of the Lloyd George Coalition —the downfall of the “Ministry of All the Talents” brought about by “secondclass brains.” “What worries the Cabinet,” said a writer in that fateful year, “is that Mr. Baldwin is an honest politician.” He made his decision to upset the Coalition without reference even to his wife, and fully expected his action would spell the end of his political career. Instead, and to his great surprise, it made him the hero of England. This part of Mr. Baldwin’s career Mr. Bryant has dealt with in detail and very attractively and convincingly. “He had never planned out or schemed his life, nor sought office or a career. His only idea in politics had been one which he had inherited from his father—service to the people of his own country.” And that has been his ideal through the years, as Mr. Bryant

lovingly shows. He is shown as a man of infinite patience and resource, who believes that time is on his side for the practical working of the faith that is stirring in him —the happiness of tiie people as a whole, not merely the happiness of a particular section of them. “There is only one thing which I feel is worth giving one’s strength to, and that is the binding together of all classes of our people in an effort, to make life in this country better in every sense of the word. That is the main end and object of my life in politics.”

And so through Mr. Bryant's book one may get a picture of the man who is now Earl Baldwin of Bewdley as he really is. And for this it is well worthy of being read. But it is also a tract on politics as we would wish them to be in every country. After reading this book one has a much higher opinion of human nature.