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stage his thoughts turned towards being ordained. But then they turned away again. He did however enjoy the physical beauty of Cambridge, and retained a strong affection for the place on this ground at least. He was delighted by the somewhat undeserved honour of the Chancellorship of the University, which was bestowed upon him in 1930, and which he retained to the end of his life.
    He came down from Cambridge in 1888, and without either great enthusiasm or great reluctance went into the family business. For twenty years he served as second-in-command to his father. He had no desire to take over the first place. He worked with reasonable diligence, getting to Wilden by eight o’clock most mornings, and also travelling a good deal—to South Wales, to Birmingham, to London and even on one occasion to the United States—on the firm’s affairs. He tooklong holidays, habitually spending a winter month in Switzerland and a summer month or more in France or Italy. Despite the
persona
which he subsequently cultivated, he was not an insular Englishman. He could read French easily, and could manage some German. He knew pre-1914 Europe very well.
    His energies were never enormous, but limited though they were, he used a large part of them outside the business. He accepted the semi-political duties of a man of substance in his county. He never had much enthusiasm for making money. He distrusted those who were too rapidly successful. He once shocked Bonar Law, who took a rather more respectful view of money matters, by saying that ‘a man who made a million quick ought to be not in the Lords but in gaol’. 3 He liked a steady business, moving up rather than down, operating in not too competitive a climate, and able as a result to maintain a paternal relationship with the workpeople. This was almost exactly how Baldwins Ltd operated in the nineties.
    In 1892, at the age of twenty-five, Baldwin married Lucy Ridsdale. He had met her while staying with his Burne-Jones cousins at Rottingdean, a Sussex coastal village which had not then become a suburb of Brighton. She was the daughter of a scientist who was at one time Deputy Master of the Mint. During the years of Baldwin’s premierships she appeared a slightly ridiculous figure to the sophisticated young. This was due partly to her hats and partly to her remarkable prowess as a lady cricketer. Neither of these were fundamental criticisms. She was on the whole a very satisfactory wife. She did not share Baldwin’s intellectual or aesthetic tastes, and she did not accompany him on the long walks which were a staple part of his recreation in Worcestershire or at Aix. But she provided him with loyalty, sensible advice and a closely shared experience of life for over fifty years. And she allowed others, notably Mrs Davidson (later Lady Davidson, MP), to take the walks.
    The Baldwins had six children, two sons and four daughters, born between 1895 and 1904. The eldest son, who lived out his life as a bachelor of somewhat eccentric habits, became deeplyestranged from his parents as a young man. He joined the Labour Party, and denounced Baldwin personally as well as politically at the 1923 election. The personal break, although not the political one, was later happily repaired. He was once acting vice-consul in Boulogne, served in the Armeno-Turkish war of 1920, was several times a Member of Parliament, and ended his public career as Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Leeward Islands. He died relatively young in 1958. The second son, Windham or ‘Bloggs’ Baldwin, the father of the present earl, lived a calmer life enlivened by some association with the fashionable literary world, and died in 1976. Three of the daughters married, all respectably, none ‘brilliantly’. One (Lady Lorna Howard) is still alive. The fourth (Lady Betty Baldwin) spent some time in a nunnery and wrote a mildly sensational book about her experiences.
    During his twenty years of more or less full-time business