Baldwin

Stanley Baldwin was born in 1867, the son of a rich Worcestershire ironmaster and educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He then worked in the family business for twenty years. He did not enter the House of Commons until he was forty, and was not even a junior minister until the threshold of fifty. Less than six years later he became Prime Minister and dominated British politics for the next 15 years - being elected to the highest office three times. In this reappraisal, Roy Jenkins discusses Baldwin's handling of the General Strike, 1927, and the Abdication, 1936, as well as the underlying issues of the period: the rise to power of organized Labour, and the first impact of Britain's industrial decline and the threat of dictators.