Baldwin (29 page)

Thomas Jones,
Whitehall Diary,
vol. 1,
1916-25;
vol. II,
1926-30
, Oxford University Press, 1969 and 1971

Robert Blake,
The Unknown Prime Minister: the Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law,
Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1955

Frank Owen,
Tempestuous Journey: Lloyd George, His Life and Times,
Hutchinson, 1954

John Grigg,
Lloyd George,
vol. I,
The Young Lloyd George’,
vol. II,
The People’s Champion;
vol. III,
From Peace to War, 1912-16,
Methuen, 1973, 1978 and 1985

John Campbell,
Lloyd George: the Goat in the Wilderness, 1922-31
, Jonathan Cape, 1977

David Marquand,
Ramsay MacDonald,
Jonathan Cape, 1977

Stephen McKenna,
Reginald McKenna,
Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948

Harold Nicolson,
Diaries and Letters, 1930-9,
Collins, 1966

Charles Stuart (ed.),
The Reith Diaries,
Collins, 1975

Viscount Samuel,
Memoirs,
Cresset Press, 1945

Gregory Blaxland,
J. H. Thomas. A Life for Unity,
Muller, 1964

Lord Vansittart,
The Mist Procession,
Hutchinson, 1958

Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie (eds.),
The Diary of Beatrice Webb
, vol. III,
1905-24
and vol. IV,
1924-43,
Virago, 1984 and 1985

A. J. P. Taylor,
English History, 1914-1945,
Oxford University Press, 1965

R. Page Arnot,
The Miners: Years of Struggle,
Allen and Unwin, 1953

¹
For a second or third premiership to begin, there must be a return to office after a break. The life of an administration does not cease with a general election, and a premiership does not necessarily start with a new parliament.

²
Annual dinner of the Society at the Hotel Cecil, 6 May, 1924. Reprinted in
On England
by Stanley Baldwin, first published in 1926, with seven subsequent impressions between then and 1937 when it appeared as an early Penguin.

³
Baldwin was always fond of railways, travelled by them whenever he could, was an amateur of their timetables, and enjoyed his directorship of the GWR. He was also good at getting around London by bus or tube. But he could never drive a motor car (he liked to claim that the internal combustion engine was responsible for more human misery than any other invention) and he never entered an aeroplane. In being unable to drive he was no different from at least three of his successors, but he was the last Prime Minister who never flew.

⁴
This pattern of disloyalty has been curiously prevalent amongst Harrow’s notably distinguished quartet of Prime Ministers of the past 150 years. Peel, Palmerston, Baldwin and Churchill were Harrovians. Churchill joined Baldwin in sending his own son to Eton. Peel deserted Harrow for Eton for his two youngest sons. Palmerston, who had no son, neither sustained nor contradicted the pattern.

⁵
The story is at least
ben trovato
in having Baldwin as Prime Minister travelling by train alone, which Asquith and Gladstone had done before him, but which no post-war occupant of the office, except perhaps for Attlee, would have thought of doing.

¹
The only other future Prime Minister who was discussed for the Speakership was Campbell-Bannerman (in 1895), three years before he most unexpectedly became leader of the Liberal Party.

²
This was one of the most crucial parliamentary occasions in Lloyd George’s career. It is remarkable that he should have started the day by going out to a leisurely breakfast party.

³
Davidson’s secretary, who later worked for Baldwin in 10 Downing Street, and was still there, promoted to preparing answers to parliamentary questions under Neville Chamberlain but demoted to dealing with ‘the post’ under Churchill (J. Colville,
The Fringes of Power,
page 124
).

⁴
At first (being a little hard of hearing) Robinson apparently assumed that he was being asked for more money, beyond the £30,000 he was thought to have paid, and compliantly drew out his cheque book. (John Campbell,
F. E. Smith,
pages 599-600.)

⁵
The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres between the Allies and Turkey demilitarized the Dardanelles and gave a zone around Smyrna to the Greeks. In August 1922 the resurgent Turkish nationalists of Kemal Ataturk threw the Greeks into the sea, reoccupied Smyrna and advanced north to Chanak, where they threatened the Straits and menacingly confronted a small British force which represented the Allies. The British Government was willing to negotiate a frontier rectification in favour of the Turks, but not to yield to force—a reasonable enough position. However, the Prime Minister (who was inclined to identify the Greeks with the Welsh), Churchill and Birkenhead, supported by Austen Chamberlain and Robert Horne, were held by most of the rest of the Cabinet, by Bonar Law from outside, and by the weight of Tory backbench opinion to have behaved with unnecessary and irresponsible bellicosity. The split with almost uncanny precision thus ran along the line which was to divide the Coalitionists from the anti-Coalitionists as sharply as the British were divided from the Turks at Chanak. Curzon sat on the barbed wire on both issues, although he was later to achieve a great diplomatic triumph at Lausanne, where he unexpectedly secured a freely negotiated agreement with the Turks. This Conference of Lausanne, which lasted from November 1922 to February 1923, was notable not only for securing the demilitarization of the Straits but also for providing the circumstances out of which Harold Nicolson wrote his supremely funny essay
Arketall.

⁶
In fact he did nothing of the sort, for he found ‘poor dear old Austen’ firmly on the wrong side.

⁷
Abbreviation for ‘the Goat’, as Lloyd George was unflatteringly referred to by some of his less friendly colleagues.

⁸
The Coalition had joint Chief Whips as did the Churchill Coalition twenty years later. Wilson (1876-1955), MP for Reading (1913-22) and Portsmouth South (1922-3), then Governor of Bombay (1923-8), was Conservative Whip; F. E. Guest (see
page 48
supra),
1875-1937, third son of the 1st Lord Wimborne and first cousin of Churchill, was Liberal Whip.

⁹
Henry Wickham Steed (1871-1956). His brief editorship (1919-22) was an interval between the two spans of Geoffrey Robinson (later Dawson,
q. v.
).

¹⁰
Ernest Pretyman (1860-1931), MP for Woodbridge (1895-1906) and Chelmsford (1908-23).

¹¹
Only MPs were invited to speak or vote in the meeting although some peers attended, including Birkenhead, whose late arrival during Austen Chamberlain’s speech was greeted by a cry of ‘traitor’, which Chamberlain mistakenly thought was intended for him.

¹²
He was asked, as a disinterested elder statesman and former Conservative Prime Minister, to come to London and see the King on the afternoon of Whit Monday (22 May). When he returned to the house at Sheringham in Norfolk where he was staying he was asked by old mutual friends, ‘And will dear George [Curzon] be chosen?’ ‘No,’ he replied with feline Balfourian satisfaction, ‘dear George will not.’ (K. Rose,
Superior Person,
page 383.)

¹³
A late sixteenth-century house beyond Yeovil, Somerset, which Curzon could not resist acquiring on a long lease despite the fact that he was already renting Hackwood, near Basingstoke, and, after the death of his father in 1916, owned Kedleston in Derbyshire. He was a great improver of all his properties, even removing a small hill at Hackwood so that the view should be less impeded.

¹⁴
Since first drafting this passage I have read Kenneth Rose’s excellent 1983 biography of King George V. I think he would contest at least the emphasis of what I have written. Such at any rate would seem to follow from his summing-up sentence: ‘The King had preferred Baldwin to Curzon for one reason alone: that he sat in the House of Commons’ (page 273). But I am not convinced that there is necessarily a conflict. The King knew Curzon much better than he knew Baldwin, and no doubt did not wish to wound him unnecessarily. It therefore suited well to fasten firmly on the objective House of Commons point. It might have been regarded as much less conclusive had the peer under consideration been preferred on merits by the King and by the generality of Conservative opinion. And indeed the King went out of his way to make it clear that he was not laying down a rule against a House of Lords Prime Minister for the future: ‘What I said was that there were circumstances in which it was very undesirable that a peer should be Prime Minister and in my view this was such a case’ (Rose, pages 272-3). One of the circumstances was perhaps the fact that the Government was already very strongly represented in the House of Lords. Another, in my view probably more important, was the personality and character of the two contenders. Seventeen years later, when a similar issue arose between Churchill and Halifax (except that Halifax was not a contender), the latter was certainly not automatically excluded because of his membership of the House of Lords, although once again it was a fortunate contributory factor.

¹
I recall being told how, in my father’s first few months as a Labour member in 1935, Baldwin stopped him beside the open fire which then burned in the ‘no’ division lobby and talked for a quarter of an hour or more about his own experiences as a young man on visits to the tinplate mills of my father’s Monmouthshire constituency.

²
He described his method of approaching a speech in a letter to Davidson written a couple of years later: ‘I just want a quiet morning to think … it is just getting that two or three hours undisturbed, walking about the room and sitting in an armchair, that restores my equilibrium. It is by turning over things in my mind that the precipitate [an oddly chemical use of the word] is formed out of which the speeches come, and if I don’t go through that curious preparatory cud-chewing, then the work suffers’ (Robert Rhodes James,
Memoirs of a Conservative,
page 197).

³
Offers of the Washington Embassy, made by Conservative leaders to their predecessors, do not have a happy history. Mr Heath was not pleased by such a proposal from Mrs Thatcher in 1979.

⁴
With Lloyd George, of whom he was frightened, he did it behind his back. ‘Girlie, I am getting very tired of working or trying to work with that man,’ he wrote to his wife in 1921. ‘He wants his Forn. Sec. to be a valet almost a drudge and he has no regard for the convenances or civilities of official life.’ With Baldwin, of whom he was not frightened, he did it to his face: ‘I must confess,’ he wrote in the autumn of 1923, ‘I am almost in despair as to the way in which foreign policy is carried on in this Cabinet. Any member may make any suggestion he pleases and and the discussion wanders off into hopeless irrelevancies… No decision is arrived at and no policy prepared. Do please let us revert to the time-honoured procedure … we must act together and the P.M. must see his F.S. through.’ It is not clear what was the ‘time-honoured procedure’ to which Curzon referred with such nostalgia. He had served in no Cabinet before that of Lloyd George.

⁵
Page 58
supra.

⁶
This passage, unlike most of Jones’s recordings of Baldwin’s views, signally fails to catch his rhythm and style. It reads more like a snatch of Attlee’s conversation.

⁷
Sir Archibald Salvidge (1863-1928) was principal Conservative Party organizer in Liverpool; an extremely effective mobilizer, with some brewery assistance, of the working class Protestant Tory vote; and partly because of a special relationship with Derby, probably the most nationally influential local agent of any party during this century.

⁸
J. R. Campbell (1894-1969), holder of the Military Medal for gallantry in the First World War and much later editor of the
Daily Worker,
was at that time temporarily acting as editor of the
Workers’ Weekly.
As a result of an article urging soldiers to let it be known that neither in the class war nor in a military war should they turn their guns upon their fellow workers, the Director of Public Prosecutions recommended that he be prosecuted for sedition. The Attorney-General (Sir Patrick Hastings) concurred and Campbell was arrested. This led to a storm on the left of the Labour Party. Hastings consulted the Cabinet and withdrew the prosecution, claiming that he reached the decision on his own and not as a result of the Cabinet discussion. This led to a slowly mounting storm on the right, culminating in a major debate on 8 October, a Conservative censure motion and a Liberal amendment to refer the matter to a Select Committee. MacDonald resisted both. At the end the Conservatives voted for the Liberal amendment to their own motion and the Government was defeated by 364 to 198. MacDonald asked for and was granted an immediate dissolution, which nobody greatly wanted as it was the third within twenty-four months.