Winston Churchill

How Churchill
Saw Others:
Stanley Baldwin
What could have impelled
so magnanimous a man
to say of his former chief,
"It would have been much
better had he never lived"?
Richard M. Langwortn
Baldwin with his Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1929
How quickly a single thread leads us "In Search of
Churchill," to quote Sir Martin Gilbert's apposite
book title from a few years ago. Recently on
our Internet forum we were asked for the source of
Churchill's famous recommendation about what to do
with a certain famous corpse: "Embalm, cremate and
bury," WSC replied—"take no chances." This led me
through an instructive journey that defined the vast extent
of Churchill's generosity towards his colleagues—and its
limits.
I first heard the "embalm" remark cited (diplomatically,
without identifying the corpse in question) by Anthony
Montague Browne, Churchill's private secretary
(1952-65) in a marvelous speech to a Churchill Society
dinner at London's Savoy in 1985 (see FH 50). Stephen P.
Johnson of the University of Washington tracked it to
William Manchester's The Last Lion, Vol. 2 "Alone"
(Boston: Little Brown 1988), which stated in a footnote
that it referred to former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
Manchester cited Kay Halle's Irrepressible Churchill
(Cleveland: World 1966), pages 131 and 133, and I was
off. The result was a diverting two hours reading what
Churchill had to say about Stanley Baldwin.
Contrary to Manchester, Halle does not mention
the "embalm" quote in her references to Baldwin, but she
does offer a broad collection. Taken chronologically, they
show the development of Churchill's thought on his longtime
Parliamentary colleague and sometime chief.
Winston Churchill's collegiality, even
friendship, toward those with whom he violently
disagreed was one of his noblest characteristics.
There are many evidences of it in the Official Biography
and elsewhere—and one case where it was not extended in
its usual effusiveness. Churchill was not a hater and was
quick to forgive; but toward one Parliamentary colleague
he did not in the end grant forgiveness.
Stanley Baldwin was elected to Parliament in 1908
but remained a backbencher until 1921, when he rose to
Cabinet rank under Andrew Bonar Law. After Law's death
in 1923 he became Prime Minister, only to be thrown out
by Labour in January 1924. He returned to Downing
Street following the December 1924 election and remained
Prime Minister until Labour was returned in the
spring of 1929.
Churchill, who had come up the hard way in politics
and almost always amid controversy, found Baldwin's
success difficult to fathom. Musing later on Baldwin's rise,
Churchill called him "a countrified businessman who
seemed to have reached the Cabinet by accident." 1 But
Churchill happily accepted the Chancellorship of the Exchequer
in Baldwin's government, probably offered to
him, most historians agree, on the theory that it was better
to have Winston fulminating from the inside than
from without.
In 1931, as the Depression deepened, Baldwin
brought the Tories into coalition with Labour Prime Minister
Ramsay MacDonald, Baldwin himself serving as
Lord President of the Council. Churchill shared few political
positions with either; he referred to them as "two
nurses fit to keep silence around a darkened room." 2 >>>
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