Baldwin (25 page)

Sir Arthur Griffith-BOSCAWEN, (1865-1946) was Minister of Agriculture for the last year of the Coalition Government. He lost his seat at Taunton, to which he had surprisingly switched from Dudley in 1921, at the 1922 election. He was nevertheless appointed Minister of Health by Bonar Law and, apparently after seventeen unsuccessful attempts to secure other nominations, was adopted as Conservative candidate for the by-election at Mitcham, where he was defeated by Labour as a result of the intervention of a Conservative Coalitionist. He never held office or achieved membership of the House of Commons again. With C. F. G. Masterman and Patrick Gordon Walker he was one of the very few British politicians of this century to lose his place in a Cabinet by personal electoral misfortune.

William Clive BRIDGEMAN (1864-1935), cr. 1st Viscount Bridgeman 1929, was the son of a country rector who was the younger son of an earl. MP for Oswestry (1906-29), Home
Secretary (1922-4), First Lord of the Admiralty (1924-9). He was a cricketer of quality who played in the Eton and Cambridge XIs and became President of the MCC.

George CAVE (1856-1928), cr. 1st Viscount Cave 1918, was MP for Kingston, Surrey (1906-18), a Chancery lawyer of note, Solicitor-General (1915-16), Home Secretary (1916-19), a Lord of Appeal (1919-22) and Lord Chancellor (1922-January 1924 and again from the end of 1924 until his death). His most notable electoral feat was his defeat of Asquith (by 987 votes to 441) for the Chancellorship of Oxford University when Curzon died in 1925. ‘The greatest living Oxonian’ (Birkenhead’s campaigning description of Asquith—but Birkenhead had no reason to be pro-Cave, who had replaced him on the Woolsack when ‘the cabin boys’ took over from the admirals in 1922) was trounced by the least distinguished Lord Chancellor of the first thirty years of this century (’a brewers’ lawyer’, as he was derisively but inaccurately described by Asquith partisans). It showed the conservatism of the Oxford MAs in the twenties (on a very low poll), but also, probably, an unwillingness to allow a
parvenu
Liberal, even if of exceptional repute and gravitas, to be both Earl and Chancellor of Oxford.

Lord Robert CECIL (1864-1958), cr. Viscount Cecil of Chelwood 1923, was the third son of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (the Prime Minister), MP for Marylebone East (1906-10) and for Hitchin (1911-18), Lord Privy Seal (1923-4) and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1924-7). It was from this last office, in which he was in effect Minister for League of Nations Affairs under Austen Chamberlain, that he resigned, holding the policy of the Government towards naval disarmament to be obstructive. Party politics sat lightly on his drooping shoulders. In 1921 he had been in negotiation with Grey and Asquith for the formation of a centre grouping and in 1924 he had been restrained with difficulty by his eldest brother from joining the Labour Government. His dominating concern was support
for collective security. He was President of the League of Nations Union (1923-45), was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937, and gave his London house to Philip Noel-Baker, the Labour MP who was equally devoted to the Geneva cause.

Sir (Joseph) Austen CHAMBERLAIN (1863-1937), KG 1925, was the nearest approach to a man-made statesman there has been in modern British politics. The man who made him was his father, Joseph Chamberlain (1837-1914), an original politician of great flair, some of it destructive. Austen (to differentiate him from his father he was one of the first politicians to be habitually addressed and referred to by his Christian name) copied the eyeglass, orchid, wing collar, frock coat and hair parting of his father. He espoused his causes and even fell undemandingly in love with his father’s third wife (formerly Miss Mary Endicott, the daughter of President Cleveland’s Secretary of War, later Mrs Carnegie, who died only in 1957). Unfortunately, he inherited only the trappings. He was conventional and cautious, where his father had been daring and insolent. Beatrice Webb, who admittedly had half wanted to marry Joseph Chamberlain, thought Austen ‘dull and closed-minded … intellectually dense’ (
Diary,
vol. IV,
page 70
).

Despite his provenance he had no real roots in Birmingham, even though he represented it or its suburbs in Parliament for forty-five years, and divided his time between South Kensington and a small house in Sussex with a rock garden and the unfortunate name of Twitt’s Ghyll. He was however a man of exceptional loyalty, decency, and, towards the end, experience. He was a junior minister (1895-1902), Postmaster-General (1902-3), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1903-5), Secretary of State for India (1915-17), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1919-21), Lord Privy Seal (1921-2), Foreign Secretary (1924-9), and First Lord of the Admiralty (August-October 1931). He was twice on the route to the Prime Ministership
but did not press his own claims. In the memorable words of F. E. Smith, ‘He always played the game and he always lost it.’ An even more vivid portrait of him is conjured up by a mid-1920s incident at Polesdon Lacey, Mrs Ronald Greville’s indulgent house in the Surrey hills. Displeased by the performance of her inebriated butler at dinner, she scribbled, ‘You are very drunk; leave the room immediately’ on a piece of paper and handed it to the miscreant servant, who mistily surveyed the room, decided without difficulty where the message would make most impact, and placed it first on a silver salver and then before Sir Austen Chamberlain.

Arthur James COOK (1885-1931) was born at Wookey in Somerset, the son of a regular soldier, but emigrated early to the Rhondda where he worked underground for twenty-one years. In 1918 he became a full-time union official and in 1924, succeeding the oversupple Frank Hodges, he became General Secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, then the largest trade union in the world. Cook, not dissimilar in appearance (but only appearance) from Mr Neil Kinnock, incited vast audiences, preferred oratory to negotiation, presided over a reduction of nearly 40 per cent in the membership of the MFGB, and drove himself into an early death at the age of forty-six.

Alfred Duff COOPER (1890-1954), cr. 1st Viscount Norwich 1952, began and ended his career as a diplomat, in the latter phase Ambassador to the French Committee of National Liberation (1943-4) and then to France (1944-7). In the interval he married Lady Diana Manners, was MP for Oldham (1924-9) and for St George’s (1931-45). He was an irascible, high-living
flâneur,
who was much-loved by his coteries, a talented historical writer and a politician of courage, although an indifferent minister. He was Secretary of State for War (1935-7) and First Lord of Admiralty, (1937-8). Nothing became his occupancy of these service ministeries so much as
his leaving; he resigned over Munich. He was no more successful as Minister of Information in 1940-1, or in Singapore before the invasion.

George Nathaniel CURZON (1859-1925), son and heir of the 4th Lord Scarsdale (to which title he succeeded in 1916), was created Baron Curzon in the peerage of Ireland 1896 (and sat in the House of Lords as an Irish Representative peer from 1908), Earl Curzon of Kedleston 1911, and Marquess Curzon of Kedleston 1921. He was Conservative MP for Southport from 1886 to 1898, when at the age of thirty-nine he was made Viceroy of India, in which great office he experienced both success and chagrin before returning home in some disorder in 1905. He led the ‘hedgers’ against the ‘ditchers’ in the Conservative split over the degree of House of Lords resistance to the Parliament Bill in 1911, preferring retreat to the danger of massive dilution of the peerage. He was Lord Privy Seal (1915-16), Lord President and a member of the small War Cabinet (1916-19), Foreign Secretary (1919-24), and Lord President again from November 1924 until his death. He married two rich Americans, one in 1895 and the second in 1917, and used their wealth to sustain the great titles and the second and third country estates (at Hackwood and Montacute) which he added to the Scarsdale inheritance at Kedleston, but which all fell away with his death. He was a highly intelligent but occasionally ridiculous grandee, a richly anecdotal figure, devoted to public service, whose strength of character did not match his imposing manners and appearance.

Ronald McNeill (1861-1936) was a Kent MP from 1911 until he was created Lord CUSHENDUN in 1927 and entered the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Previously he had been Financial Secretary to the Treasury under Churchill, which was interesting, for McNeill’s most famous parliamentary activity had been to throw a copy of the Standing Orders at
Churchill during an Irish Home Rule scene in November 1912, cutting his face quite badly.

J. C. C. DAVIDSON (1889-1970), cr. 1st Viscount Davidson 1937. Unpaid private secretary at the Colonial Office to Lord Crewe (1910) and Lewis Harcourt (1910-15); and to Bonar Law (1915-20) in successive offices. Conservative MP for Hemel Hempstead (1921-3 and 1924-37). Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for most of Baldwin’s periods of office. Chairman of the Conservative Party (1927-30). Married, 1919, to Joan (Mimi) Dickinson (died 1985), who succeeded him as MP for Hemel Hempstead (1937-59; herself a life peer as Baroness Northchurch from 1963), whom he had met through Baldwin, and to whom Baldwin remained devoted, as to Davidson, throughout his life.

Geoffrey DAWSON (1874-1944), editor of
The Times
(1912-19 and 1923-41), was born Geoffrey Robinson but changed his name by Royal Licence in 1917 (a fashionable year for name changes: King George V moved from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor) in order to inherit a substantial landed property in Yorkshire. He occupied the gap of 1919-23 as Estates Bursar of All Souls College, Oxford.
The Times
under Dawson was almost a great department of state rather than a mere newspaper and its editor almost an honorary member of the Cabinet. He gave lifelong adherence to his chosen heroes, Milner, Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and Halifax. In his first editorship he wrote the leader which precipitated the fall of Asquith. Towards the close of his second he wrote the one which presaged the Munich agreement and the fall of Czechoslovakia.

Edward Stanley, 17th Earl of DERBY (1865-1948), Secretary of State for War, (1916-18 and 1922-4), Ambassador to Paris (1918-20). As a tribute to his great estates, personal popularity and regional political influence, he was sometimes called ‘the
King of Lancashire’. Lloyd George, who used him a lot, found him more like a cushion which always bore the imprint of the last man who sat upon him. (This remark, however, is sometimes given other attributions both as to subject and to speaker.)

Victor Cavendish, 9th Duke of DEVONSHIRE (1868-1938), succeeded his uncle, the Marquess of Hartington of Liberal Unionism, in 1908. A junior minister (1903-5 and 1915-16), Governor-General of Canada (1916-21), where his ADC, Harold Macmillan, became engaged to his daughter, Lady Dorothy Cavendish, Secretary of State for the Colonies (1922-4). He occupied high office, but had less brio than most Dukes of Devonshire of the past hundred years.

Bolton EYRES-MONSELL (1880-1969), cr. 1st Viscount Monsell 1935, was a fellow Worcestershire MP with Baldwin for twenty-five of the latter’s twenty-nine years in the House of Commons, sitting for the South or Evesham division from 1910 to 1935. He was a former naval officer who after twelve years in the Conservative Whips’ Office, eight of them as Chief Whip, became First Lord of the Admiralty (1931-6).

Lord Edmund FITZALAN-Howard (1855-1947), younger son of the 14th Duke of Norfolk, changed his surname to Talbot in 1876 to comply with a will and then changed it back again in 1921 when he was created 1st Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent. He was MP for Chichester from 1894 to 1921 and Conservative Chief Whip for six years from 1915.

Sir Auckland Campbell GEDDES (1879-1954), cr. 1st Lord Geddes 1942. A former Professor of Anatomy at Edinburgh, Dublin, and McGill University, Montreal. He was a Lloyd George minister (President of the Board of Trade for the last year) before he went to Worthington for four years in 1920. His elder brother, Sir Eric Geddes, a railway engineer, was also a
minister from 1917 to 1921, before becoming chairman of the Dunlop Rubber Company and of Imperial Airways. It was he, not Sir Auckland, who in 1918 promised to ‘squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak’ and in 1922 wielded the ‘Geddes axe’. The Geddes brothers were Lloyd George discoveries rather in the way that the Young brothers were Mrs Thatcher’s.

Edward (Paddy) GOULDING (1862-1936), cr. Lord Wargrave 1922, was a rich businessman, later chairman of Rolls-Royce, MP for Devizes (1896-1906) and for Worcester City (1906-22). He was the owner of a luxurious Thames-side residence at Shiplake, where he became a backbench dispenser of hospitality and manipulator of politics of sufficient note to be made successively a baronet, a privy councillor and a peer by the Coalition Government. (He was lucky to achieve his honours before Baldwin became leader of the Conservative Party.) His father had been an Irish landowner.

Douglas McGarel Hogg (1872-1950), cr. 1st Viscount HAIL-SHAM 1928. Attorney-General (1922-4 [January] and 1924 [November]—1928). Lord Chancellor (1928-9 and 1935-8). Secretary of State for War and Leader of the House of the Lords (1931-5). The son of Quintin Hogg the founder of the Regent Street Polytechnic and the father of Quintin Hogg (2nd Viscount Hailsham 1950-63, Mr Hogg again 1963-70 and Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone 1970; Lord Chancellor 1970-4 and 1979-).

Edward Wood (1881-1959), cr. Lord Irwin 1925, succeeded as 3rd Viscount HALIFAX 1934, cr. 1st Earl of Halifax 1944, KG, OM, was a dedicated, dignified and mostly far-sighted intendant of the declining years of British power. As Viceroy (1925-31) he saw the inevitability of Indian self-government. At the Foreign Office (Lord Privy Seal and then Lord President, 1935-8, and Secretary of State, February 1938-December
1940), he supported Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement more out of pessimism than optimism. Nonetheless he was within a hair’s breadth of becoming Prime Minister in May 1940. A lot of people who ought to have known better, from Herbert Morrison to Hugh Dalton, preferred him to Churchill at that stage. Fortunately, Halifax did not share their view. His third great post was as Ambassador to Washington (1941-6), where he played a notable role in getting the new world to redress the balance of the old. Baldwin had a great respect and regard for Halifax (or Wood as he then was) and made the inspired choice of sending him to Delhi. For the rest, however, he kept making him President of the Board of Education (1922-4 and 1932-5), a post which, despite being a Fellow of All Souls and Chancellor of the University of Oxford (1933-59), singularly failed to stir Halifax’s imagination. While holding it he frequently hunted two days a week during the parliamentary session.