page_title: Stanley Baldwin
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Stanley Baldwin / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Astley, Worcestershire, memorial to Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG PC FRS (1867–1947), three times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
context_page_description: Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG, PC, PC, JP, FRS was a British Conservative statesman who dominated the government of the United Kingdom between the world wars, serving as prime minister on three occasions.
  Born to a prosperous family in Bewdley, Worcestershire, Baldwin was educated at Hawtreys, Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the family iron and steel making business and entered the House of Commons in 1908 as the Member of Parliament for Bewdley, succeeding his father Alfred. He served as Financial Secretary to the Treasury and President of the Board of Trade in the coalition ministry of David Lloyd George and then rose rapidly: in 1922, Baldwin was one of the prime movers in the withdrawal of Conservative support from Lloyd George; he subsequently became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Bonar Law's Conservative ministry. Upon Bonar Law's resignation due to health reasons in May 1923, Baldwin became Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party. He called an election in December 1923 on the issue of tariffs and lost the Conservatives' parliamentary majority, after which Ramsay MacDonald formed a minority Labour government.
context_section_description: Upon his retirement in 1937, he had received a great deal of praise, but the onset of World War II would change his public image for the worse. Baldwin, Chamberlain and MacDonald were held responsible for Great Britain's military unpreparedness on the eve of war in 1939. Peter Howard, writing in the Sunday Express (3 September 1939), accused Baldwin of deceiving the country of the dangers that faced it in order not to rearm and so win the 1935 general election. During the ill-fated Battle of France in May 1940, Lloyd George in conversation with Churchill and General Ironside railed against Baldwin and said that "he ought to be hanged".
  In July 1940, a bestseller Guilty Men appeared, which blamed Baldwin for failing to rearm enough. In May 1941, Hamilton Fyfe wrote an article ("Leadership and Democracy") for Nineteenth Century and After, which also laid those charges against Baldwin. In 1941, A. L. Rowse criticised Baldwin for lulling the people into a false sense of security and as a practitioner in "the art of taking the people in":
  what can this man think in the still watches of the night, when he contemplates the ordeal his country is going through as the result of the years, the locust years, in which he held power?
  Churchill firmly believed that Baldwin's conciliatory stance toward Hitler gave the impression that in the case of an attack by the German dictator, Britain would not fight. Churchill was known for his magnanimity toward political rivals such as Chamberlain but had none to spare for Baldwin. "I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill," Churchill said in declining to send him 80th birthday greetings in 1947, "but it would have been much better had he never lived." Churchill also believed that Baldwin, rather than Chamberlain, would be most blamed by subsequent generations for the policies that led to "the most unnecessary war in history".  An index entry in the first volume of Churchill's "History of the Second World War" (The Gathering Storm) 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 quoted a speech in the Commons by Baldwin that gave the false impression that Baldwin was speaking of the general election, instead of the Fulham by-election in 1933, and omitted 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". 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 in public life".
  In 1948, Reginald Bassett published an essay disputing the claim that Baldwin "confessed" to putting party before country and claimed that Baldwin was referring to 1933 and 1934 when a general election on rearmament would have been lost.
  In 1952, G. M. Young published an authorised biography of Baldwin that asserted that Baldwin united the nation and helped moderate the policies of the Labour Party. However, Young accepted the chief criticisms of Baldwin that he failed to rearm early enough and that he put party before country. Young contends that Baldwin should have retired in 1935. Churchill and Beaverbrook threatened to sue if certain passages in the biography were not removed or altered. A settlement was reached to remove the offending sentences, and the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis had the "hideously expensive" job of removing and replacing seven leaves from 7,580 copies.
  In response to Young's biography, D. C. Somervell published Stanley Baldwin: An examination of some features of Mr. G. M. Young's biography in 1953 with a foreword by Ernest Brown. This attempted to defend Baldwin against the charges made by Young. Both Young and Somervell were criticised by C. L. Mowat in 1955, who claimed that they both failed to rehabilitate Baldwin's reputation.
  In 1956, Baldwin's son A. W. Baldwin published a biography entitled My Fath
caption: Memorial to the 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley near his home, Astley Hall
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