“Will the bloody duck swim?”

On 7 November 1924, Winston Churchill was named Chancellor of the Exchequer by the new Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. It was an astonishing offer—no more so than to the invitee. “I was surprised,” Churchill wrote, “and the Conservative Party dumfounded.”¹

Churchill had left the Conservatives over Free Trade in 1904, and had since largely been regarded as a renegade—even when serving the Lloyd George Liberal-Tory coalition government in four different offices from 1917 to 1922.

Churchill happily grasped Baldwin’s offer: “I should have liked to have answered, ‘Will the bloody duck swim?’ but as it was a formal and important conversation I replied, ‘This fulfils my ambition. I still have my father’s robe as Chancellor. I shall be proud to serve you in this splendid Office.’”²

Responsible for economic and financial matters, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is one of Britain’s four great Offices of State. Churchill now held what was then seen as the second most important post in government.

Baldwin’s meteoric rise

Stanley Baldwin was born on 3 August 1867 to a prosperous family in Bewdley, Worcestershire. He was educated at Harrow School (like Churchill) and Trinity College, Cambridge. Baldwin joined the family iron and steel business, then entered the House of Commons in 1908 as the Member for Bewdley, succeeding his father Alfred.

Baldwin served the Lloyd George Coalition as Financial Secretary to the Treasury (1917–21) and President of the Board of Trade (1921–22). He rose rapidly in the party ranks. In 1922, he was a prime mover behind the withdrawal of Conservative support from Lloyd George. A Labour-Liberal coalition governed briefly but could not be maintained, and Baldwin led the Conservatives to a sweeping victory in October 1924.

“That turbulent pushing busybody Winston”

Baldwin first offered the Exchequer to Neville Chamberlain, who preferred to pursue major reforms at the Ministry of Health. When Chamberlain suggested Churchill, Baldwin replied that the Conservatives would “howl.” Chamberlain said the howl would be louder if Churchill returned to the Admiralty, and Baldwin agreed.

There were indeed many “howls.” The Morning Post lampooned “the idea of scrapping the Conservative Party in order to make a home for lost Liberals.” The return of prodigals, it added, “does not appear to us to promise success.” The Guardian said Churchill had “quitted the sinking ship and for the second time the reward of this fine instinct has been not safety only but high promotion.”³

At the Admiralty, Baldwin’s new First Lord, Sir William Bridgeman, wrote his wife: “I am afraid that turbulent pushing busybody Winston is going to split the party. I can’t understand how anyone can want him or put faith in a man who changes sides just when he thinks it is to his own personal advantage to do so.”

Austen Chamberlain, unaware of his half-brother Neville’s role, wrote to his wife of Baldwin: “Beloved S.B. is mad!… I feel that this particular appointment will be a great shock to the party.” Sir John Simon told an amused audience: “There is a new piece of jazz music…the ‘Winston Constitution.’ You take a step forward, two steps backward, a side step to the right, and then reverse. You can see that the piece is well named.”⁴

Baldwin, however, believed Churchill in the government was better than Churchill out. Otherwise he might align with Lloyd George to form a center party. With the possible aid of Churchill’s friend Lord Birkenhead in the House of Lords, Baldwin might be opposed by Parliament’s three most eloquent speakers.

Baldwin’s Chancellor

“Although Churchill never became one of Baldwin’s intimate friends, their relationship in these years was close and amicable,” wrote Baldwin’s biographers. The PM “admired Churchill’s brain and perhaps rather ruefully, his energy. If at times a gleam of quizzical amusement crept into his eyes when he contemplated his Chancellor, in general he trusted and supported him.”⁵

Nearly every morning on his way through to the Treasury, Churchill would look in on Baldwin for in the Cabinet Room. At weekends, before going to Chequers, Baldwin would call on his new Chancellor.

From the onset, Churchill was determined to master the complexities of finance and soon demonstrated an understanding of the subject. Every year in the House of Commons, the Chancellor of the Exchequer presents the Government’s budget. On 28 April 1925, Churchill delivered his first Budget Day speech. Clementine, Diana, and Randolph were seated in the Visitors’ Gallery.

Churchill’s first Budget

Churchill’s speech ran two-and-a-half hours. He believed that the key to fiscal health was productivity. He wanted to lower taxes on the poor and raise them on unearned income. In support of his earlier social reforms, Churchill proposed a reduction in the pensionable age from seventy to sixty-five, immediate payment of benefits to over 500,000 widows and orphans. He asked to abolish “restrictions, inquisitions and mean tests” for welfare applicants.

Funds would be set aside to provide health insurance for thirty million Britons, it was here, Churchill argued, that “the State, with its long and stable finance, can march in and fill the immense gap.” A special sense of urgency, he felt, should spur the government’s obligation to help those rendered helpless by circumstances over which they had no control.

He added ardently: “It is the stragglers, the exhausted, the weak, the wounded, the veterans, the widows and orphans to whom the ambulances of State aid should be directed.” To achieve his aims, Churchill found the funds and balanced the budget without raising taxes.

Return to Gold

The most dramatic moment in Churchill’s first budget was his disclosure that Britain would return to the Gold Standard. This had ended during the late war, when governments suspended the convertibility of their currencies into gold. Their object was to freely finance their escalating military expenditures.

The Times reported that the announcement was greeted with “tremendous cheers.” “No responsible authority has advocated any other policy,” Churchill declared. “It has always been a matter of course that we should return to it.” Even former Labour Chancellor Philip Snowden supported the decision, but some advisors and experts disagreed.

Originally Churchill had been apprehensive over a return to Gold. Earlier in 1924 he said it would favor “the special interests of finance at the expense of the interests of production.”⁶ In February, he had remarked: “I would rather see Finance less proud and Industry more content.”⁷ To focus on arguments against the return to Gold, he even gave a dinner for the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes.

In the end Baldwin, himself a former Chancellor, pressed Churchill “not to rock a boat which was already virtually launched, and to which the Bank of England was committed.”⁸ Loyally, Churchill supported the decision.

General Strike of 1926

On 28 April 1926, a day after Churchill’s second budget speech, mine owners told Baldwin that their losses required an immediate wage cut.⁹ The miners rejected any cuts. Baldwin proposed increasing the working day by an hour to eight hours while keeping wages the same. The owners agreed but the miners refused.

On 1 May the Miners’ Federation declared: “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.” Mine owners closed the mines, locking out a labor force of 1.2 million. The Trades Union Congress responded by declaring a General Strike beginning 4 May.

Negotiations continued until shortly before the deadline. Late on May 2nd, the Cabinet, gathered in Churchill’s room in the House of Commons, learned that the printers of the Daily Mail had stopped publication of the paper because of its anti-union leading article. Ministers saw this as an attempt to silence the press. Refusing further negotiations, they called for immediate and unconditional withdrawal of strike notices.

Churchill and the British Gazette 

The General Strike shut down wide swathes of industry including newspapers, and Churchill was asked to prepare a plan for a Government newspaper. He proposed that it contain not only news but statements to “relieve the minds of the people.” On 4 May the government seized the printing presses of the Morning Post. There Churchill supervised production of a government newspaper, the British Gazette.

The General Strike brought Britain almost to a standstill, as the government organized emergency measures to keep food in shops and medicines in hospitals. It lasted nine days until May 12th. Although Churchill instantly favored negotiations when the strike ended, no adequate arrangements were made. Churchill’s defiance of the strike and involvement with the British Gazette forever diminished his reputation with the trade union movement.

Differences over India

Baldwin and Churchill, close allies during the General Strike, parted company over India. Anxious to appease the growing movement for home rule, Baldwin appointed Edward Wood, Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax) Viceroy of India. Their object was eventual dominion status for India. Churchill was appalled at the thought of relinquishing the heart of the Empire. He considered Britain’s imperial possessions a reason for its greatness.

Remarkably, under the circumstances, Baldwin briefly thought of making Churchill Secretary of State for India. “He was very good all through the Irish troubles,” the PM wrote Irwin. “[H]e has imagination, courage: he is an imperialist; he is a Liberal. BUT—we do know the risk. Should it be taken…. The Indian Question will be the biggest threat for the new parliament.”¹⁰

There is no record of Irwin’s reply; it could not have been positive. In any case, the idea was swept away by events. In the 1929 General Election, Labour won the most seats for the first time. Ramsay MacDonald again became prime minister.

Indian affairs were temporarily sidetracked by the Great Depression. By 1931 MacDonald, seeking unity in the face of economic collapse, created a National Government. Baldwin became his deputy, then his successor. But Churchill, having broken with Baldwin over India, was not part of that government which, under Baldwin and then Chamberlain, lasted until war in 1939.

“Monument of shame”

The Government of India Act was passed by the Commons and received Royal Assent in August 1935. It provided a large measure of autonomy to the provinces of India and extended the franchise. A “Federation of India” would be include both British India and the princely states.

Churchill opposed it to the last. He called a “gigantic quilt, a jumbled crotchet work, a monstrous monument of shame built by pigmies.”¹¹ Manfred Weidhorn deftly summarized how Baldwin for once had the better of his old colleague:

Stanley Baldwin has much to answer for at the bar of history, but in this matter he was right. While Churchill carried on about how the facts were against Indian independence, Baldwin likewise urged people to face up to the truth. The principal fact “today,” he concluded, was that “the unchanging East has changed.” With that one nugget, the usually pedestrian Baldwin shoots the usually eloquent Churchill, with his romantic, Victorian, imperial rhetoric, right out of the water.¹²

Despite their differences, Baldwin maintained his respect for Churchill. A year after the India Bill was passed, Baldwin was staying with friends in Lancashire. Table talk at dinner turned viciously on the subject of Churchill. Baldwin looked attentive, but remained quiet. Then he put down his pipe and said quite decisively: “You can say what you like about Winston, but I tell you that man can work—and how he can work.”¹³

“Tell the truth to the British people”

In Parliament on 10 November 1932, Baldwin spoke of “A Fear for the Future.” Disarmament, he said, would not stop war, but it would reduce the dangers and opportunities of making war. The world was filled with fear, and fear was the greatest cause of war.

Then he added: “I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.”¹⁴

Baldwin admitted that he’d intended to shock—to make the public think. Members of Parliament were shaken and many deeply moved. But Churchill asked just where did Baldwin’s reasoning led. It created, he said, anxiety, perplexity, fatalism and helplessness. Then he demanded:

Tell the truth to the British people. They are a tough people and a robust people. They may be a bit offended at the moment but if you have told them exactly what is going on, you have insured yourself against complaints and reproaches which are very unpleasant when they come home on the morrow of some disillusionment.¹⁵

Unfortunately, what people remembered most from this exchange was Baldwin’s phrase, “the bomber will always get through.” It was seen as defeatism—proof of the futility of rearmament. Baldwin later tried twice to explain what he had intended to do in his speech, but the public’s view remained.

The Rhineland

On 7 March 1936, a few thousand German troops reoccupied the Rhineland, a strip of land inside Germany bordering on France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Occupied by France since the Treaty of Versailles, the Rhineland included the industrial Ruhr Valley and the celebrated cities of Aachen, Bonn, Cologne and Düsseldorf. Hitler’s action was a blatant violation of the Treaty, but Baldwin believed Britons considered Versailles unfair to Germany. He decided to take no action, and France would not act on her own.

Churchill’s public criticism was muted. He had urged creation of a Ministry of Supply (in essence Defense), hoping to be called to office. Instead, Baldwin created a “Minister for the Coordination of Defence,” a somewhat waffling title, appointing Sir Thomas Inskip, who knew nothing of the subject.

Remaining ostensibly pro-Baldwin, Churchill began a series of fortnightly articles on foreign affairs for the Evening Standard. He began by calling for collective security, lest civilization “slide remorselessly downhill…. There may still be time,” he wrote. “Let the States and people who lie in fear of Germany carry their alarms to the League of Nations at Geneva.”¹⁶

What was needed, Churchill wrote, was “a coalition of the willing.” The problem, wrote Richard Langworth, “was that the willing were few—and demonstrably unwilling to cooperate.”¹⁷

The Rhineland confirmed that Hitler had a free hand for further aggression. The path was laid for the annexation of Austria, the seizure of the Sudetenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia, and the invasion of Poland in 1938-39. But by mid-1937 Baldwin had retired.

“We must keep him fresh…”

Churchill campaigned for Baldwin in the 1935 election, still hoping to be appointed in the new administration. Baldwin’s National Government won a substantial majority, and the press reported that Churchill was being considered. Baldwin saw this as his most difficult Cabinet decision. Unfortunately, the Tory whips and Neville Chamberlain were hostile, and again Churchill was left out.

Baldwin’s ambivalence about his former Chancellor was apparently genuine. Defending his decision to his former Parliamentary Private Secretary, Baldwin wrote: “I feel we should not give him a post at this stage. Anything he undertakes he puts his heart and soul into it. If there is going to be a war—and no one can say that there is not—we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.”¹⁸

Reflecting on what lay ahead, Baldwin told another colleague: “We may not get through this business without war. If we do have a war, Winston must be prime minister. If he is in now, we shan’t be able to engage in that war as a united nation.” Biographers Middlemas and Barnes wrote: “Strangely prophetic as these words were, they show how acutely Baldwin had judged the situation at home and abroad.”¹⁹

Where Baldwin and Churchill diverged

On 7 March 1933, Baldwin said two things frightened him: lack of defense against air raids and German rearmament which, he said, “would be a terrible thing, in fact, the beginning of the end.” A year later the Government pledged to make “their primary object the attainment of air parity in first-line strength between principal powers.”²⁰

Yet the March 1934 Air Estimates, only £20 million,  provided for an increase in the first-line air strength from 850 to only 890. Alarmed, Churchill declared that Britain was now “the fifth air power,” half the strength of France:

Germany is arming fast and no one is going to stop her. That seems quite clear. No one proposes a preventive war to stop Germany breaking the Treaty of Versailles. She is going to arm; she is doing it; she has been doing it.

I have not any knowledge of the details, but people are well aware that those very gifted people, with their science and with their factories—with what they call their “Air Sport”—are capable of developing with great rapidity the most power Air Force for all purposes, offensive and defensive, within a very short period of time….

We want the measures to achieve parity. No nation playing the part we play and aspire to play in the world has a right to be in a position where it can be blackmailed.”²¹

Baldwin replied that if all efforts for limiting arms failed, the government would “see to it that in air strength and air power this country shall no longer be in a position inferior to any country within striking distance of its shores.” This, wrote Churchill, “as almost a solemn and definite pledge.²² The pledge was not fulfilled.

“Better if he had never lived”

Winston Churchill forever believed the Second World War could have been avoided. So forceful were his feelings that once his magnanimity deserted him. Declining to send a message on Baldwin’s eightieth birthday, he wrote: “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been better for our country if he had never lived.”²³ Martin Gilbert wrote:

In my long search for Churchill, few letters have struck a clearer note than this one. Churchill was almost always magnanimous: his tribute to Neville Chamberlain in 1940 was among the high points of his parliamentary genius. But he saw Baldwin as responsible for the “locust years” when Britain, if differently led, could have easily rearmed, and kept well ahead of the German military and air expansion, which Hitler had begun in 1933 from a base of virtual disarmament.

Churchill saw Baldwin’s policies, especially with regard to Royal Air Force expansion, as having given Hitler the impression, first, that Britain would not stand up to aggression beyond its borders, and second, that if war came, Britain would not be in a position to act effectively, even to defend its own cities.²⁴

Magnanimous in the end

Happily, that very harsh remark was not Churchill’s last word on his old colleague. In May 1950, he spoke at a memorial dedication three years after Baldwin’s death. No one could have asked for more:

[A]lthough I had several deep political differences with [him], we were always good friends, and I never remember a time when I could not discuss with him any matter, public or private, frankly and freely, as man to man.

Here was a statesman who, over a long period of years, exercised a remarkable personal influence upon British politics and British fortunes. He was three times Prime Minister…. [H]e achieved two enduring triumphs. The first was the Pact of Locarno…the highest point reached in the peaceful settlement of Europe between the two world wars. The second was a five years’ steady improvement, judged by every test, in the standards of life, labour and employment of the British people….²⁵

Churchill concluded with a generosity that matched his tribute to Neville Chamberlain a decade before:

As I was his chief critic upon these issues, and my words are upon record, I have a right to declare here and now, by this sandstone memorial, that his courage and patriotism did not fail, although the tragic course of events belied his judgment….

Not all who now claim superior wisdom foresaw what was approaching. Here, then, there is erected this simple monument to the virtues and services of a good Englishman, who loved his country and faithfully sought the advance in the well-being of those whom it is now the fashion to call “the common people,” but who were always dear to his heart.²⁶

Endnotes

¹ Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2015), 513.

² Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5, Prophet of Truth 1922-1939 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 59.

³ William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1983), 785.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1969), 290.

⁶ Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Pimlico, 2000), 469.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ For an extensive Britain’s coal industry prior to the General Strike and Baldwin’s effort to prevent it, see Middlemas and Barnes, Baldwin, Chapter 15.

¹⁰ Baldwin to Lord Irwin, in Middlemas and Barnes, 536.

¹¹ Robert Rhodes James, Churchill: A Study in Failure 1900-1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), 212.

¹² Manfred Weidhorn, introduction to Winston S. Churchill, India: Defending the Jewel in the Crown (Hopkinton, N.H.: Dragonwyck Publishing, 1990), xxxvi.

¹³ Middlemas and Barnes, 712.

¹⁴ Ibid., 735-36.

¹⁵ Ibid., p.736.

¹⁶ Richard M. Langworth, Churchill and the Rhineland, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2023, accessed 4 September 2024.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Baldwin to J.C.C. Davidson, in Middlemas and Barnes, 872.

¹⁹ Baldwin to Sir Thomas Dugdale; Middlemas and Barnes, 872-73.

²⁰ Defence White Paper of 1934, quoted in Middlemas and Baranes,.738.

²¹ Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), Arms and the Covenant (London: Harrap, 1938), 123-24.

²² WSC, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 89

²³ Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey (London: HarperCollins, 1994), 106.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ “Unveiling of a Memorial to Lord Baldwin,” Astley, Worcestershire, 20 May 1950, in WSC, In the Balance (London: Cassell, 1951), 281-82.

²⁶ Ibid., 282-83.

The author

Fred Glueckstein travels widely in search of Churchill and is a regular contributor to The Churchill Project.

Further reading

Larry P. Arnn, “Churchill and Socialism,” 2019.

Nick Bosanquet & Andrew Hallenby, “Churchill: A Great Reformist Chancellor of the Exchequer,” 2023.

Richard M. Langworth, “Churchill and the Rhineland: ‘They Had Only to Act to Win,” 2023.

_____ _____, “Churchill’s Magnanimity: Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947),” 2021.