19
Where is the match?
Baldwin, now almost sixty, presented himself to the public as an unassuming country gentleman. On meeting him for the first time, few would have guessed that he came from a family with an industrial empire. The Tory leader would pause mid-sentence to take a long draw on his trademark pipe, a symbol of the Victorian rural world to which Baldwin constantly referred. In this bygone place, ‘old gentlemen spent their days sitting on the handles of wheelbarrows smoking’ while listening to ‘the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy’. This was England before the strikes, the gas canisters and the disintegrating empire; a society in which everyone had a place and everyone knew what it was. Baldwin believed in the population’s inherent love of the countryside and the domestic hearth. The English were, he thought, a nostalgic and conservative people, distinguished by the virtues of decency, modesty, justice and common sense.
‘Master Stanley’ claimed to have a second-class intellect, despite his education at Harrow and Cambridge. Yet first-class intellects, he claimed, were usually reluctant to follow instructions. Dangerous men of genius, such as Lloyd George, also made the mistake of believing they could solve problems through initiative. Far better to do nothing, the prime minister reckoned, or to cautiously react to events as they unfolded. The middle-class industrialist thus cast himself as the heir of Salisbury and Balfour; he provided a bridge between the plutocratic Tory party he led and the party of landed wealth over which his predecessors had presided.
When Baldwin took office, the king urged him to combat class war, but the Tory leader needed no urging. His vision of a harmonious England marked him out as a ‘onenation Tory’ of the Disraelian school, while his Tariff Reform programme of 1923 demonstrated that he was also a ‘Tory democrat’ in the mode of Chamberlain and Randolph Churchill. He criticized Labour for exacerbating class division and struggle, while his party stood ‘for the unity of the nation, and of all interests and classes within it’. He preferred to focus in speeches on potentially unifying issues, such as ‘Englishness’ or ‘the countryside’, rather than on controversial or divisive party-political matters. He also attempted to revive popular interest in the empire, and to associate his party with national institutions such as the monarchy and the Anglican Church. He had Baldwin’s remarkable management skills, as well as that sense of timing which is indispensable to a successful politician. This selfeffacing and ostentatiously average Englishman had known exactly when to strike Lloyd George, the pre-eminent politician of the age.
On entering Downing Street in 1924, Baldwin declared that his ambition was ‘to bring about a unity of the nation’, yet the nation he governed was characterized by class division. George Orwell would call England ‘the most class-ridden country under the sun’. It was assumed that every aspect of an English person’s character and life – his or her education, attire, health, opinions, pastimes, manners, aspirations, wages and pronunciation – depended on social position.
It was certainly true that the working classes were less healthy than people higher up the scale. When in work, they had to ‘make do’ with a low weekly cash wage out of which they paid rent. Moving above the crucial £250-per-year threshold and through the gradations of the middle class, monthly salaries were more common, along with the ownership of houses and motor cars and the employment of servants. In the final band were the upper classes who had a monopoly on the country’s wealth. One per cent of the nation owned two-thirds of its assets.
Antagonism between the classes was acute and palpable. ‘The upper class,’ commented one Liberal MP, ‘despise the working people: the middle class fear them.’ The workers, with their collective bargaining power and readiness to strike, were a threat to those ‘above’ them. Manual workers appeared, to middleand upper-class eyes, ‘uncouth’, ‘filthy’ and ‘militant’; their wage ‘demands’ were seen as exorbitant, while the unemployment benefits that supported them when they were out of work seemed undeserved and costly.
There was also little solidarity between the upper and middle classes. Members of the upper class regarded the middling ranks as vulgar and insolent; their children were seldom permitted to play with ‘such people’, in case they picked up unfortunate habits. For their part, the middle classes were more critical of unearned upper-class wealth in the Twenties than perhaps at any other period in the century. The middling orders did, however, feel a residual awe for the waning aristocracy, and expressed this in an enthusiasm for the monarchy and the cultivation of upper-class accents. They also aspired to send their children to private schools, the ‘engines of privilege’ through which the upper class perpetuated their power. Meanwhile, both the middle and upper classes were resented by the workers. Baldwin was aware of ‘a growing feeling of class consciousness’ and a ‘bitter antagonism running through the workshops, north and south, east and west’, though he blamed it on the propaganda of the Labour party.
Class was not the only thing that divided the English – there was also the experience of the trenches. Those who had fought in the war and received scant reward for their suffering felt isolated from the rest of the population. ‘All was not right with their spirit,’ a journalist commented of workingclass ex-privates. ‘They were subject to queer moods, fits of depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure … the daily newspapers have been filled with the record of dreadful crimes, of violence and passion … The murders of young women, the outrages upon little girls.’ As usual, it was women who suffered the consequences of male alienation. As for the upper-middle-class and aristocratic officers, those who came home from the war found the old Edwardian guard still in charge of landed society, as though ‘the great interruption’ had never occurred.
Almost every facet of English life in the Twenties was marked by conflict between the generations. There was a sharp contrast between the regular church attendance of a portion of the older generation, for example, and the steep decline in churchgoing among the young. ‘We are lukewarm in religion,’ commented the young philosopher and radio broadcaster C. E. M. Joad, ‘unimpressed by authority, distrustful of moral codes, and impatient of moral restraints.’ Once more, the experience of war seems to have been decisive. Millions had prayed for peace, but their prayers had gone unanswered. What kind of God would sit by and watch such carnage? Besides, patriotic church ministers from all Christian denominations had encouraged the butchery; how could the young generation genuflect before them?
Baldwin’s eldest son Oliver was one of the decade’s angry young men. He had loathed his schooling at Eton, displaying a disdain for authority, discipline and tradition. Yet it was his experience of the Western Front that set him vehemently against ‘the old men’ who had ‘betrayed the young’. After the war Baldwin urged his son to marry the daughter of one of his political allies, but Oliver told his father he was homosexual and moved in with his partner. In 1924, his struggle against his father was expressed in the most emphatic way imaginable when he stood as a Labour candidate at the general election.