ABSTRACT
Baldwin was born on 3 August 1867, the only child of Alfred Baldwin, a Worcestershire ironmaster, and Louisa MacDonald. He was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then worked in his father’s business. He married Lucy Ridsdale in 1892 and appeared to be setting himself up for a career as an ironmaster. Indeed, since his father was an MP, it fell increasingly to him to run the family business. It was during these formative years that Baldwin developed many of the skills and attitudes that he was to employ in his later political life. He was a paternalistic employer and sought good relations between employers and workers; he had developed sound business
acumen and, raised in semi-rural Worcestershire, he grew to love the English countryside, later turning this to his political advantage. The last of these interests he greatly developed, in the nostalgic society of the immediate post-First World War years, in his emphasis upon Englishness, which he associated with an idyllic rural and semi-rural society, a land of lost repose, where harmony and understanding resided. This theme was the subject of many of his lectures and some of his books. They emphasized the ‘golden age of paternalism’, the close relations between workers and employers, peace and industry, and a notion of ‘Englishness’. Effectively he wanted to preserve the ‘mythical’ characteristic values of the past in the new industrial world and associated them with the Conservative Party.
