Foreign News: Mr. John Bull

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Baldwin regularly insisted that he wanted to return to raising pigs on his farm. "Since 1914," he wistfully told his Bewdley constituents a year before retiring, "I have never seen the pageant of the blossom from the first damson to the last apple [in Worcestershire]. . . . And if that isn't a sacrifice, I don't know what is."

... To the Last Apple. After each political blunder, Baldwin would admit his fault, and blandly assume that he would be forgiven. During the 1926 General Strike (which came after Baldwin abruptly broke off talks with the Trades Union Congress), he went on the air to ask Britons in a hurt voice: "Can't you trust ME? . . ." Yet he broke the General Strike largely because the British people did trust him.

But Baldwin will be longest remembered for the last fruit of his political life. In 1936 he told Edward VIII that he could not marry Wallis Simpson, a divorcee, and remain King. When he stood before the House of Commons to tell how he personally had forced the King to that choice, he showed the supreme self-confidence that lay behind his modest façade. He said: "I consulted—I am ashamed to say it, but they have forgiven me—none of my colleagues." And most Britons who turned to Baldwin again & again in the muddling years between wars did not complain. They thought him dull, but they counted on him to be soundly, solidly, intuitively British.

Six months later, he retired to Worcestershire. The new Hanoverian King made him Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. At Astley Hall he sat through the war which he had been so reluctant to admit was approaching, and saw the Laborites whom he deplored come to power. There Lady Baldwin (who said to a friend after the British lost Tobruk in 1942, "Stanley has only been gone [from the government] five years, and look what a mess they are in") died two years ago. And there, last week, Death came to 80-year-old Stanley Baldwin. The successor to his title is eldest son (of six children) Viscount Corvedale—a Laborite M.P.