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The Right Honourable  Stanley Baldwin  1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG, PC
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
In office 7 June 1935 – 28 May 1937
Monarch	George V Edward VIII George VI
Preceded by	Ramsay MacDonald
Succeeded by	Neville Chamberlain
In office 4 November 1924 – 5 June 1929
Monarch	George V
Preceded by	Ramsay MacDonald
Succeeded by	Ramsay MacDonald
In office 23 May 1923 – 16 January 1924
Monarch	George V
Preceded by	Andrew Bonar Law
Succeeded by	Ramsay MacDonald
Chancellor of the Exchequer
In office 27 October 1922 – 27 August 1923
Prime Minister	Andrew Bonar Law
Preceded by	Robert Stevenson Horne
Succeeded by	Neville Chamberlain
Born	3 August 1867(1867-08-03) Bewdley, Worcestershire, United Kingdom
Died	14 December 1947 (aged 80) Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire, United Kingdom
Political party	Conservative
Spouse	Lucy Ridsdale
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Religion	Anglican

Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG, PC (3 August 1867 – 14 December 1947) was a British statesman and thrice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Contents 1 Early life 2 First appointment as Prime Minister 3 Return to office 4 Later life 5 First Government, May 1923 - January 1924 5.1 Changes 6 Second Cabinet, November 1924 - June 1929 6.1 Changes 7 Third Cabinet, June 1935 - May 1937 7.1 Changes 8 In film and television 9 Miscellaneous 10 Notes and references 11 External links

Born at Lower Park House, Lower Park, Bewdley in Worcestershire, England, Baldwin was educated at St Michael's School, Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. His University career was blighted by the presence, as Master of Trinity, of the former schoolmaster who had punished him at Harrow for writing a piece of schoolboy smut. He was asked to resign from the Magpie & Stump (the Trinity College Debating Society) for never speaking, and after receiving a third-class degree in history went into the family business. As a young man he served very briefly as a Second Lieutenant in the Artillery Volunteers. He married Lucy Ridsdale on 12 September 1892.

He proved to be very adept at the family business of iron manufacturing, and acquired a reputation as a modernising industrialist. Later, he would inherit £200,000 and a directorship of the Great Western Railway upon his fathers death in 1908.

In the 1906 general election he contested Kidderminster but lost amidst the Conservative landslide defeat after the party split on the issue of free trade. However, in 1908 he succeeded his deceased father, Alfred Baldwin, as Member of Parliament (MP) for Bewdley. During the First World War he became Parliamentary Private Secretary to Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law and in 1917 he was appointed to the junior ministerial post of Financial Secretary to the Treasury where he sought to encourage voluntary donations by the rich in order the repay the United Kingdom's war debt, notably writing to The Times under the pseudonym 'FST'. He personally donated one fifth of his quite small fortune. He served jointly with Sir Hardman Lever, who had been appointed in 1916, but after 1919 Baldwin carried out the duties largely alone. He was appointed to the Privy Council in the 1920 Birthday Honours. In 1921 he was promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade.

In late 1922 dissatisfaction was steadily growing within the Conservative Party over its existing governing coalition with the Liberal David Lloyd George. At a meeting of Conservative MPs at the Carlton Club in October Baldwin announced that he would no longer support the coalition and famously condemned Lloyd George for being a "dynamic force" that was bringing destruction across politics. The meeting chose to leave the coalition—against the wishes of most of the party leadership. As a result the new Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law was forced to search for new ministers for his Cabinet and so promoted Baldwin to the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer. In the November 1922 general election the Conservatives were returned with a majority in their own right.

In May 1923 Bonar Law was diagnosed with terminal cancer and retired immediately. With many of the party's senior leading figures standing aloof and outside of the government, there were only two candidates to succeed him: Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, and Stanley Baldwin. The choice formally fell to King George V acting on the advice of senior ministers and officials. It is not entirely clear what factors proved most crucial, but some Conservative politicians felt that Curzon was unsuitable for the role of Prime Minister because he was a member of the House of Lords (though this did not stop other Lords being seriously considered for the premiership on subsequent occasions). Likewise, Curzon's lack of experience in domestic affairs, his personal character (found objectionable), and his aristocratic background at a time when the Conservative Party was seeking to shed its patrician image were all deemed impediments. Much weight at the time was given to the intervention of Arthur Balfour.

The King turned to Baldwin to become Prime Minister. Initially Baldwin also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer whilst he sought to recruit the former Liberal Chancellor Reginald McKenna to join the government. When this failed he instead appointed Neville Chamberlain.

The Conservatives now had a clear majority in the House of Commons and could govern for another five years before being constitutionally required to hold a new general election, but Baldwin felt bound by Bonar Law's old pledge at the previous election that there would be no introduction of tariffs without a further election. With the country facing growing unemployment in the wake of free-trade imports driving down prices and profits, Baldwin decided to call an early general election in December 1923 to seek a mandate to introduce protectionist tariffs and thus drive down unemployment. Although this succeeded in reuniting his divided party, the election outcome was inconclusive: the Conservatives won 258 MPs, Labour 191 and the Liberals 159. Whilst the Conservatives retained a plurality in the House of Commons, they had been clearly defeated on the central election issue of tariffs. Baldwin remained Prime Minister until the opening session of the new Parliament in January 1924, at which time the government was defeated in a motion of confidence vote. He resigned immediately.

For the next ten months, an unstable minority Labour government under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald held office, but it too fell and another general election was held in October 1924. This election brought a landslide majority of 223 for the Conservative party, primarily at the expense of the now terminally declining Liberals. Baldwin's new Cabinet now included many former political associates of Lloyd George: former Coalition Conservatives Austen Chamberlain (as Foreign Secretary), Lord Birkenhead (Secretary for India) and Arthur Balfour (Lord President after 1925), and the former Liberal Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer. This period included the General Strike of 1926, a crisis which the government managed to weather, despite the havoc it caused throughout the UK.

At Baldwin's instigation Lord Weir headed a committee to 'review the national problem of electrical energy'. It published its report on 14 May 1925 and with it Weir recommended the setting up of a Central Electricity Board, a state monopoly half-financied by the Government and half by local undertakings. Baldwin accepted Weir's recommendations and they became law by the end of 1926. The Board was a success. By 1929 electrical output was up fourfold and generating costs had fallen. Consumers of electricity rose from three-quarters of a million in 1926 to nine million in 1929.^[1]

In 1929 Labour returned to office, the largest party in the House of Commons (although without an overall majority) despite obtaining fewer votes than the Conservatives. In opposition, Baldwin was almost ousted as party leader by the press barons Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook, whom he accused of enjoying "power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages".

By 1931 Baldwin and the Conservatives had entered into a coalition with Labour PM Ramsay MacDonald. This decision led to MacDonald's expulsion from his own party, and Baldwin, as Lord President of the Council became de facto Prime Minister for the increasingly senile MacDonald, until he once again officially became Prime Minister in 1935. His government then secured with great difficulty the passage of the landmark Government of India Act 1935, in the teeth of opposition from Winston Churchill, whose views enjoyed much support among rank-and-file Conservatives.

In 1932 Baldwin would tell the Commons: "The bomber will always get through. The only defence is offence". He started a rearmament programme and reorganised and expanded the RAF, in the face of strong opposition from the opposition Labour Party. During his third term of office from 1935 to 1937 the worsening political situation on the Continent brought his own foreign policy under greater criticism, and he also faced the abdication crisis of King Edward VIII. With the abdication successfully weathered he would retire after the coronation of the new King George VI and was created Earl Baldwin of Bewdley.

Baldwin's years in retirement were quiet. With Neville Chamberlain dead, Baldwin's perceived part in pre-war appeasement made him an unpopular figure during and after World War II. A newspaper campaign hounded him for not donating the iron gates of his country home to war production (they had in fact been exempted on grounds of artistic merit). During the war, Winston Churchill consulted him only once, on the advisability of Britain's taking a tougher line toward the continued neutrality of Éamon de Valera's Ireland (Baldwin advised against it).

In June 1945 Baldwin's wife Lucy died. Baldwin himself by now suffered with arthritis and needed a stick to walk. When he made his final public appearance in London in October 1947 at an unveiling of a statue of King George V a crowd of people recognized the former Prime Minister and cheered him, but Baldwin by this time was deaf and asked, "Are they booing me?" Having been made Chancellor of Cambridge University in 1930, he continued in this capacity until his death in his sleep at Astley Hall, near Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire, on 14 December 1947. He was cremated and his ashes buried in Worcester Cathedral.

His estate was probated at £280,971.

Baldwin was essentially a One Nation Conservative. Upon his retirement in 1937 he had indeed received a great deal of praise; the onset of the Second World War would change his public image for the worse. Rightly or wrongly, Baldwin, along with Chamberlain and MacDonald, was held responsible for the United Kingdom's military unpreparedness on the eve of war in 1939. His defenders counter that the moderate Baldwin felt he could not start a programme of aggressive re-armament without a national consensus on the matter. Certainly, pacifist appeasement was the dominant mainstream political view of the time in Britain, France, and the United States.

For Winston Churchill, however, that was no excuse. He firmly believed that Baldwin's conciliatory stance toward Hitler gave the German dictator the impression that Britain would not fight if attacked. Though known for his magnanimity toward political opponents such as Neville Chamberlain, Churchill had none to spare for Baldwin. "I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill," Churchill said when declining to send 80th birthday greetings to the retired prime minister in 1947, "but it would have been much better had he never lived."

An index entry in the first volume of Churchill's "History of the Second World War" records Baldwin "admitting to putting party before country" for his alleged admission that he would not have won the 1935 Election if he had pursued a more aggressive policy of rearmament. Churchill selectively quotes a speech in the Commons by Baldwin and gives the false impression that Baldwin is speaking of the general election when he was speaking of a by election in 1933 and omits altogether Baldwin's actual comments about the 1935 election "we got from the country, a mandate for doing a thing [a substantial rearmament programme] that no one, twelve months before, would have believed possible".^[2] In his speech on Baldwin's death, Churchill paid him a double-edged yet respectful tribute: "He was the most formidable politician I ever encountered".

• Stanley Baldwin - Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons
• Lord Cave - Lord Chancellor
• Lord Salisbury - Lord President of the Council
• Lord Cecil of Chelwood - Lord Privy Seal
• William Clive Bridgeman - Home Secretary
• Lord Curzon of Kedleston - Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Leader of the House of Lords
• The Duke of Devonshire - Secretary of State for the Colonies
• Lord Derby - Secretary of State for War
• Lord Peel - Secretary of State for India
• Sir Samuel Hoare - Secretary of State for Air
• Lord Novar - Secretary for Scotland
• Leo Amery - First Lord of the Admiralty
• Sir Philip Lloyd-Greame - President of the Board of Trade
• Sir Robert Sanders - Minister of Agriculture
• Edward Frederick Lindley Wood - President of the Board of Education
• Sir Anderson Montague-Barlow - Minister of Labour
• Neville Chamberlain - Minister of Health
• Sir William Joynson-Hicks - Financial Secretary to the Treasury
• Sir Laming Worthington-Evans - Postmaster-General

• August 1923 - Neville Chamberlain took over from Baldwin as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sir William Joynson-Hicks succeeded Chamberlain as Minister of Health. Joynson-Hicks' successor as Financial Secretary to the Treasury was not in the Cabinet.

• Stanley Baldwin - Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons
• Lord Cave - Lord Chancellor
• Lord Curzon of Kedleston - Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Lords
• Lord Salisbury - Lord Privy Seal
• Winston Churchill - Chancellor of the Exchequer
• Sir William Joynson-Hicks - Home Secretary
• Sir Austen Chamberlain - Foreign Secretary and Deputy Leader of the House of Commons
• Leo Amery - Colonial Secretary
• Sir Laming Worthington-Evans - Secretary of State for War
• Lord Birkenhead - Secretary of State for India
• Sir Samuel Hoare - Secretary for Air
• Sir John Gilmour - Secretary for Scotland
• William Clive Bridgeman - First Lord of the Admiralty
• Lord Cecil of Chelwood - Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
• Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister - President of the Board of Trade
• Edward Frederick Lindley Wood - Minister of Agriculture
• Lord Eustace Percy - President of the Board of Education
• Lord Peel - First Commissioner of Works
• Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland - Minister of Labour
• Neville Chamberlain - Minister of Health
• Sir Douglas Hogg - Attorney-General

• April 1925 - On Lord Curzon of Kedleston's death, Lord Balfour succeeded him as Lord President. Lord Salisbury becomes the new Leader of the House of Lords, remaining also Lord Privy Seal.
• June 1925 - The post of Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs is created and held by Leo Amery in tandem with Secretary of State for the Colonies.
• November 1925 - Walter Guinness succeeds E.F.L. Wood as Minister of Agriculture.
• July 1926 - The post of Secretary of Scotland is upgraded to Secretary of State for Scotland.
• October 1927 - Lord Cushendun succeeded Lord Cecil of Chelwood as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
• March 1928 - Lord Hailsham (former Sir D. Hogg) succeeded Lord Cave as Lord Chancellor. Lord Hailsham's successor as Attorney-General was not in the Cabinet.
• October 1928 - Lord Peel succeeded Lord Birkenhead as Secretary of State for India. Lord Londonderry succeeded Lord Peel as First Commissioner of Public Works

• Stanley Baldwin - Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons
• Lord Hailsham - Lord Chancellor
• Ramsay MacDonald - Lord President of the Council
• Lord Londonderry - Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords
• Neville Chamberlain - Chancellor of the Exchequer
• Sir John Simon - Home Secretary and Deputy Leader of the House of Commons
• Sir Samuel Hoare - Foreign Secretary
• Malcolm MacDonald - Colonial Secretary
• J.H. Thomas - Dominions Secretary
• Lord Halifax - Secretary for War
• Lord Zetland - Secretary of State for India
• Lord Swinton - Secretary of State for Air
• Sir Godfrey Collins - Secretary of State for Scotland
• Bolton Eyres-Monsell - First Lord of the Admiralty
• Walter Runciman - President of the Board of Trade
• Walter Elliot - Minister of Agriculture
• Oliver Stanley - President of the Board of Education
• Ernest Brown - Minister of Labour
• Sir Kingsley Wood - Minister of Health
• William Ormsby-Gore - First Commissioner of Works
• Anthony Eden - Minister without Portfolio with responsibility for League of Nations Affairs
• Lord Eustace Percy - Minister without Portfolio with responsibility for government policy

• November 1935 - Malcolm MacDonald succeeds J.H. Thomas as Dominions Secretary. Thomas succeeds MacDonald as Colonial Secretary. Lord Halifax succeeds Lord Londonderry as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords. Duff Cooper succeeds Lord Halifax as Secretary for War. Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister becomes Viscount Swinton and Bolton Eyres-Monsell becomes Viscount Monsell, both remaining in the Cabinet.
• December 1935 Anthony Eden succeeds Sir Samuel Hoare as Foreign Secretary and is not replaced as Minister without Portfolio.
• March 1936 - Sir Thomas Inskip enters the cabinet as Minister for the Coordination of Defense. Lord Eustace Percy leaves the cabinet.
• May 1936 - William Ormsby-Gore succeeds J.H. Thomas as Colonial Secretary. Lord Stanhope succeeds Ormsby-Gore as First Commissioner of Works.
• June 1936 - Sir Samuel Hoare succeeds Lord Monsell as First Lord of the Admiralty.
• October 1936 - Walter Elliot succeeds Collins as Secretary for Scotland. William Shepherd Morrison succeeds Elliot as Minister of Agriculture. Leslie Hore-Belisha enters the Cabinet as Minister of Transport.

Baldwin has been portrayed in the following film and television productions:

• The Forsyte Saga (1967 adaptation), played by Ralph Michael
• The Woman I Love (1972), played by Robert Douglas
• Days of Hope (1975), played by Brian Hayes
• Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978), played by David Waller
• The Life and Times of David Lloyd George (1981), played by Paul Curran
• Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981), played by Peter Barkworth
• The Woman He Loved (1988), played by David Waller
• You Rang, M'Lord? (1991), played by Patrick Blackwell
• The Gathering Storm (2002), played by Derek Jacobi
• Wallis & Edward (2005), played by Richard Johnson

• Baldwin was a cousin of the author and journalist Rudyard Kipling.
• His son, Oliver Baldwin, was a Labour MP.
• Baldwin is the last Prime Minister to have been educated at the University of Cambridge. ^[3]
• Baldwin (along with Arthur Balfour) is one of six Prime Ministers to have been educated at Trinity College, Cambridge.
• He was a low church Anglican.
• He once claimed that if he were stranded on a desert island with only one book for company, he would choose the Oxford English Dictionary.^[4]
• His niece, Monica Baldwin, gained brief notoriety after penning her best-selling memoir I Leap Over the Wall recounting the 28 years she spent as a nun in complete ignorance and isolation of the outside world before World War I until halfway through World War II and her subsequent shocking re-immersion into modern society.

• More about Stanley Baldwin on the Downing Street website.

Political offices
Preceded by Sir Hardman Lever	Joint Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1917 – 1921 with Sir Hardman Lever	Succeeded by Edward Hilton Young
Preceded by Sir Robert Horne	President of the Board of Trade 1921 – 1922	Succeeded by Sir Philip Lloyd-Greame
	Chancellor of the Exchequer 1922 – 1923	Succeeded by Neville Chamberlain
Preceded by Andrew Bonar Law	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 23 May 1923 – 16 January 1924	Succeeded by Ramsay MacDonald
	Leader of the House of Commons 1923 – 1924
Preceded by Ramsay MacDonald	Leader of the Opposition 1924
	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 4 November 1924 – 5 June 1929
	Leader of the House of Commons 1924 – 1929
	Leader of the Opposition 1929 – 1931	Succeeded by Arthur Henderson
Preceded by The Lord Parmoor	Lord President of the Council 1931 – 1935	Succeeded by Ramsay MacDonald
Preceded by The Viscount Snowden	Lord Privy Seal 1932 – 1934	Succeeded by Anthony Eden
Preceded by Ramsay MacDonald	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 7 June 1935 – 28 May 1937	Succeeded by Neville Chamberlain
	Leader of the House of Commons 1935 – 1937
Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Alfred Baldwin	Member of Parliament for Bewdley 1908 – 1937	Succeeded by Roger Conant
Party political offices
Preceded by Andrew Bonar Law	Leader of the British Conservative Party 1923 – 1937	Succeeded by Neville Chamberlain
Academic offices
Preceded by David Lloyd George	Rector of the University of Edinburgh 1923 – 1926	Succeeded by Sir John Gilmour
Preceded by Austen Chamberlain	Rector of the University of Glasgow 1928 – 1931	Succeeded by Compton Mackenzie
Preceded by The Viscount Haldane	Chancellor of the University of St Andrews 1929 – 1947	Succeeded by The Duke of Hamilton
Preceded by The Earl of Balfour	Chancellor of the University of Cambridge 1930 – 1947	Succeeded by Jan Smuts
Peerage of the United Kingdom
New creation	Earl Baldwin of Bewdley 1937 – 1947	Succeeded by Oliver Baldwin

v • d • e Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom

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v • d • e Leaders of the Conservative Party

In the House of Lords (before 1922) The Duke of Wellington (1830-1846) The Earl of Derby (1846-1868) The Earl of Malmesbury (1868-1869) The Lord Cairns (1869-1870) The Duke of Richmond, Lennox & Gordon (1870-1876) The Earl of Beaconsfield (1870-1881) The Marquess of Salisbury (1881-1902) The Duke of Devonshire (1902-1903) The Marquess of Lansdowne (1903-1916) The Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1916-1922) In the House of Commons (before 1922) Sir Robert Peel, Bt (1830-1846) The Lord George Bentinck (1846-1847) Marquess of Granby (1848) Vacant (1848-1849) Benjamin Disraeli with Marquess of Granby and John Charles Herries (1849-1852) Benjamin Disraeli (1852-1876) Sir Stafford Northcote, Bt (1876-1885) Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Bt (1885-1886) The Lord Randolph Churchill (1886-1887) W.H. Smith (1887-1891) Arthur Balfour (1891-1911) Andrew Bonar Law (1911-1921) Sir Austen Chamberlain (1921-1922) Overall leader (since 1922) Andrew Bonar Law (1922-1923) Stanley Baldwin (1923-1937) Neville Chamberlain (1937-1940) Winston Churchill (1940-1955) Sir Anthony Eden (1955-1957) Harold Macmillan (1957-1963) Sir Alec Douglas-Home (1963-1965) Edward Heath (1965-1975) Margaret Thatcher (1975-1990) John Major (1990-1997) William Hague (1997-2001) Iain Duncan Smith (2001-2003) Michael Howard (2003-2005) David Cameron (since 2005)