This review was originally published in the TLS of November 12, 1999
Since his death in 1947, Stanley Baldwin has not lacked biographers. He has,
however, always remained a controversial and enigmatic figure. It was
therefore a characteristic start to the vicissitudes of Baldwin’s posthumous
reputation that the official biographer, G. M. Young, was a writer of whom
the subject himself felt nervous, whose book was disowned by the family when
it appeared in 1952, and who then became the target of a filial counterblast
by Baldwin’s second son in My Father, the True Story (1952). It was not
until a generation later that Keith Middlemas and John Barnes produced their
Baldwin: A biography, a book whose 1,100 pages offered the first scholarly
but favourable support for the man. They were followed on to the same
revisionist side of the argument by Montgomery Hyde, Kenneth Young and Roy
Jenkins, each adding a little more breadth to the judgment of Baldwin but
none of them, it must be said, matching up to Middlemas and Barnes in the
extent of their work in the archives or the detail offered to the reader. .
. .
Nevertheless, despite five solid book-length studies, historians have remained
grudging in their praise of Baldwin’s career, unsure whether he had any
personal views worth serious analysis (whether indeed he had any personal
views at all), and half-hearted in accepting his biographers’ defence of the
man over industrial crises in the 1920s, or the pace of rearmament a decade
later. Philip Williamson now mounts the most cogent defence of Baldwin and
his political style that has yet been published, and assures us that we have
all been wrong for the past half-century.
Indeed, one of the less attractive features of the book is its unnecessarily
confrontational tone (mainly by the classic academic method of assassination
by footnote) with which it deals with most of the earlier literature. By the
end of the opening chapter, Williamson has briskly seen off (among others)
Ben Pimlott, Robert Blake, Stuart Ball, David Cannadine, Martin Wiener,
Robert Skidelsky among the historians (and indeed John Ramsden too, though I
naturally count myself honoured to be in such company), and Tom Jones among
Baldwin’s contemporaries, sometimes by citing exaggerated and even parodic
versions of their views, and invariably without acknowledgement of the
relative paucity of archival material in earlier decades. Maurice Cowling
alone receives accolades, but then Williamson consciously (if
unconvincingly) locates his book within the Peterhouse “high politics”
school of which Cowling has been the acknowledged leader. There is rarely
acknowledgement of a debt to anyone else, though the author has, like all of
us, had to draw heavily on the literature that he found already in place.
This is a shame, for Williamson’s is the best book on Baldwin yet to appear,
as well as by far the most favourable, and the author’s insistence on
standing alone could well lead to its being undervalued rather than to its
findings being generally accepted. He deserves all possible credit for the
diligence of his research, the breadth of his vision and the rigour of his
analysis. Voluminous Baldwin family papers that were not made available for
previous biographical studies have yielded pure gold; he has tracked down –
no doubt only after considerable personal effort – business papers relating
to the first half of Baldwin’s adult life: he has used the great range of
public and private archival sources now available; he has gathered thousands
of opinions about Baldwin in the press and the literature; and he has made a
systematic study of Baldwin’s own public and private utterances . . . . The
material available thus differs both in extent and in volume from that which
earlier writers assembled.
He can therefore give us for the first time an adequate account of the crucial
shaping influences on Baldwin from his family, locality and industrial
experience: pre-parliamentary life occupies almost 20 per cent of the book,
as against about 3 per cent of the much longer work by Middlemas and Barnes,
and it is convincingly related to all that follows too. There are inevitably
some areas for which speculation remains more possible than proof, for
example when Williamson tries to link the views of Baldwin’s Cambridge
teachers Seeley and Cunningham with their pupil’s later public utterances,
but for the most part solid evidential research here replaces anecdote and
shallow, untestable psychological hypothesis.
Baldwin’s life before 1908 emerges then as far more convincingly linked to his
political career and his mature thinking, sometimes by proving hypotheses,
sometimes by challenging them. Baldwin was indeed the product of an
industrial system in which labour relations were exceptionally good in the
family firms, but his business career was not in an old-fashioned ironworks,
but in a modernizing industrial conglomerate, which also in due course
brought him directorships in banking, railways and coal, and which required
long before 1920 a grasp of foreign problems and international trade.
Williamson’s analysis of Baldwin’s highly personal style of leadership is
equally masterly, again solidly underpinned by evidence. Here was a man who
might well have gone into the Church, whose personal faith was at the heart
of all that he did both in business and politics, and whose pulpit style of
public address earned him the approbation of men of goodwill in all parties,
often more indeed in other parties than in his own, given his need to rein
back the Tories’ own partisan instincts in order to pursue the national,
consensual, healing approach that was his central objective after the First
World War and the transition to mass democracy. Hence the tributes from
Liberals, from the leaders of the Nonconformist Churches (who would only a
generation earlier have looked on an Anglican Tory leader as barely
preferable to an Irish Catholic), from moderate Labour men, trade unionists
and the mass of barely political men and women over which he had such a
strong personal hold.
To be sure, Baldwin could also use his personal standing as a man of probity
for short-term partisan advantage, as he did especially in the elections of
1924 and 1931, but these campaigns remained none the less within a broad
framework of national, paternalist inclusiveness that saw all men and women
– and all parties and their creeds – as potentially useful to the State and
nation.
Williamson’s Stanley Baldwin is not quite a biography, and it is certainly
neither a “political life” nor a “life and times” in their conventional
senses. It does contain a single chronological chapter in which Baldwin’s
career is effectively summarized, but thereafter the material is organized
in linked essays laid out more or less as their sequence relates to the
Baldwin life, beginning with family background and ending on the
international issues that dominated his leadership in the 1930s. The second
half of the book does not therefore challenge or modify previous orthodoxies
as much as the first – or indeed as much as the author would have us believe
– but these five essays on Baldwin’s thinking on economics, the constitution
and public affairs, nationality, religion and ethics, and finally on
defence, do enormously enrich our understanding of those areas. Most
importantly, by treating Baldwin’s speeches, the social and political
strategy behind them, and his underlying ideological framework, as worthy of
rigorous intellectual study, Williamson elevates his subject enormously
among Britain’s twentieth-century leaders. Baldwin emerges as a much greater
man than most (if not quite all of us) would have suspected. He was a man
who was not afraid to practise as well as preach the view that “no man is so
strong as he who is not afraid to be called weak”. . . . .
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