It was an intensely difficult period. In the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War, the raw passions of democracy, inflamed both by totalitarian temptations from the far Left as from the far Right, were threatening to burn the house down. If Britain’s parliamentary democracy was to have a chance of surviving, it had to come up with an alternative that could also catch the public’s imagination. That is what the great conservative leader and Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, succeeded in doing long before Roosevelt did something of the same order with his New Deal in the United States. In a whole series of speeches of incomparable eloquence, both inside and outside Parliament, Baldwin sought to link patriotic pride to the uniquely English set of gentlemanly rules and conduct towards others.* He appealed to the best of the working class and the best of the industrialists to prove to the world that in the self-sacrificial, altruistic ideal of the English gentleman, unique to this country, lay the only safe way forward. As a result of English history, he argued, a unique system of mutual obligations and duties had been evolved that could and must be called upon to help the country escape the looming horrors of class war. Let the best among the working-class leaders and among the industrialists defy Marx by showing that in England both were capable, like true aristocrats, of behaving nobly, not so as to facilitate the dominion of one particular class but in the interest of serving the country as a whole. Baldwin’s constant evocation of England’s rural arcadia was not due to any sentimentally nostalgic desire to put the industrial clock back. How could it be, given his own ironmaster’s background? No, it was due to his belief that in the pre-industrial centuries some unique quality of trust had been engendered that could once again be enlisted to see the nation through difficult and dangerous times. Class war, socialism, fascism were un-English ideas, only suitable, if suitable at all, for foreign countries unlucky enough not to have developed the English gentlemanly habits of conciliation and compromise that would see us through the problems of the twentieth century, just as they had seen us through the problems of previous centuries. Greedy acquisitiveness was the enemy wherever it reared its ugly head, particularly, of course, among the rich. Baldwin abhorred ‘the hard faced millionaires who had done well out of the war’. In fact it was he who coined the phrase, not Keynes, and he hated ostentatious displays of wealth. The word ‘service’ was central to his discourse, especially the service owed by the rich, the privileged, and the well educated, who were repeatedly adjured to put human rights before the rights of property. Britain was, in one of his phrases, ‘a noble democracy’. Even if industrialists and trade union leaders everywhere else knew only how to behave like ‘robber barons’, in Britain at least they could be relied upon to behave like Christian gentlemen. That was the ideal he preached and, in his courteous treatment of Labour Party leaders and trade union leaders, also practised, according them a public respect he went out of his way not to accord to many of the industrialists.
Montagu Norman agreed with every word. He, too, believed that the wealthy classes should place love of country before money; that wealth involved stewardship; that industrial employers should aim to act as trustees for the whole community; and, above all, that employees were only as good as their employers. He, too, deplored managers and directors who were interested primarily in their salaries and fees – people we now call fat cats – and refused to have them at his table, believing that flaunting vulgar ostentation offered revolutionaries their best justification.*
Like most public-school boys of the period, at any rate those at the public schools, I was deeply affected by Baldwin’s great speeches, one of which I was taken to hear in a packed and enthusiastic Albert Hall. Collections of his speeches were presented as school prizes and bishops used quotations from them as a text for their sermons. His main theme was very simple: that instead of looking abroad for grand new ideologies to solve the problems of the twentieth century, all classes should instead buckle down, in the time-honoured way, to do their duty, which, of course, is what, when the war came, most of them did. So whatever can be said by way of criticism of Baldwin for not attending to the country’s material rearmament, nobody can justly deny him the credit for carrying out an exercise in moral rearmament quite unparalleled in the nation’s history.
W. H. Auden’s jibe about the 1930s being a ‘low dishonest decade’, therefore, does not at all accord with my own recollection. I remember it as a decade when the concept of duty* was stretched to cover pretty well everything; when selfishness was regarded as the mark of the beast, the root of all moral failure; when altruism was held to be the root of all virtue; and when, under Baldwin’s spell, those aspiring to govern were adjured to dedicate themselves, if not to the service of God, then with all the more fervour to the service of their fellow men. Rereading these speeches today – dismissed at the time by intellectuals of the Right and the Left as impractical and unrealistic – I have to say that they seem to have stood the test of time far better than the writings of those same intellectuals, which now read like the ravings of madmen. In any case, if the 1930s really were such a ‘low and dishonest decade’, one question has to be asked. How did it come to pass that of all the countries that lived through those years, Britain, alone among the great European powers, escaped relatively unscathed from the corrosions of fascism and communism and went into the war against Hitler so relatively united and with such relatively high national morale? While Churchill’s courageous oratory was certainly part of the answer, the Baldwin balm was also a blessing beyond price.
The support of the ruling classes for the Chamberlain policy of appeasement is much more difficult to cast in a good light. But here again, from my particular viewpoint, it did not strike me then, and it does not strike me now, as in the least ‘low’ or ‘dishonest’ in the ordinary sense of those words. My stepfather, who had a won a DSO in the Boer War, stood foursquare behind Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, not out of weak unwillingness to face up to the reality of war – his long talks in Berlin and London with Dr Schacht, Hitler’s economic adviser, had dissolved all illusions on that score – but rather out of an equally strong determination to be realistic about the consequences for Britain of going to war with Hitler. His charge against Churchill was that while he was telling the British people the truth about the gravity of the former reality, he was grossly deceiving them about the gravity of the second, which could not fail, he believed, to be the end of Britain as a great and independent power, win or lose the war. Going to war could well be Churchill’s ‘finest hour’, Norman used to say, but for Britain it would be the beginning of the end. Like Robert Fossett, the fictional hero of Christopher Hollis’s book, The Death of a Gentleman – which came out in 1943 – Norman always ‘shuddered at the folly of those who talked as if a war would be merely a matter of beating Hitler, and that then, that evil removed, the world would go on its comfortable way of progress, like a man who has had an aggravating tooth removed at the dentist. Starting a war was much more like starting a glacier. The world was full of disruptive, nihilistic forces, and, once the ice began to move, none could say how far it would travel, nor what at the last would survive its catastrophe.’ In Norman’s view, therefore, the appeasers were not a lot of unpatriotic poltroons, as against the Churchillians who were patriotic statesman willing to grasp nettles. Rather the opposite. It was the appeasers who were grasping the most frightening nettle of all, which was that the only way for Britain to survive as a great power, and the only way for the old conservative Europe to survive, was to avoid a war with Hitler, even if this did involve paying the horribly