Earl Baldwin Of Bewdley, K.G. 1867-1947

Abstract

This tribute is an attempt to portray the qualities of a remarkable man and is in no sense a chapter in the political history of our times. Stanley Baldwin—the title of nobility can never replace the name by which he was familiarly known—was admitted to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1927 under the Statute which permits the election of ‘those who have rendered conspicuous service to the cause of Science or are such that their election would be of signal benefit to the Society’. The honour was well merited and the obligation implied in its acceptance was fully discharged. At that date Baldwin was approaching the summit of his powers, having already been twice Prime Minister and likely to occupy that exalted position again. Many honours and dignities had come to him and many more were to follow, but to the end of his days he cherished with special pride the honour of being numbered among those who sought truth by ways unfamiliar to him. He was in no sense a scientist. Beyond attending in his early business life a brief course of lectures on metallurgy delivered by Turner at Birmingham he had never undergone the discipline of a scientific training; the soil on which his intellectual gifts had been nourished was a compost of classics, literature and history, a mixture which produced rich fruits but denied to him access to the scientific thought of his generation. Nevertheless, as became one whose spiritual home was Cambridge, he had a profound respect for the working of the scientific mind and he formed many close friendships with scientific men, envying them poignantly and with lovable humility, their possession of knowledge from which he was excluded. His contribution to science was, in consequence, mainly that which can be given by a Prime Minister and by a Lord President of Council sympathetic to the claims of science as worthy of man’s highest endeavour and of support by the State.