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his mother he inherited a strong Celtic streak, half Welsh and half Highland. She was the daughter of a Wesleyan minister who never earned more than £160 a year, but who brought up five daughters (as well as two sons), and saw one of the daughters married to Rudyard Kipling’s father, another to Edward Burne-Jones, a third to another painter, Edward Poynter, later president of the Royal Academy, and a fourth to Alfred Baldwin.
    Alfred Baldwin was born in 1841 and died in 1908. He was an ironmaster—of the third generation—and not a landowner. He was born prosperous and died rich, but he never owned more than a few acres around his house. At first he lived in the town of Bewdley and then at Wilden, a moderate-sized semi-country house of the 1840s, but within sight and sound of the forge which was the old centre of the family business. He largely reshaped this family business, rescuing it from near bankruptcy in the 1860s, extending it into tinplate in Monmouthshire, carrying through several amalgamations, and turning it into a public company in 1902. He was also chairman of the Great Western Railway and Member of Parliament for the Bewdley division of Worcestershire from 1892 until his death. Yet he was far from being a conventional man of business. He abandoned Methodism early in life and became an extreme High Churchman. He was a scholar of neurotic temperament.
    Stanley Baldwin was born in the house at Bewdley on 3 August 1867, within a year of the marriage of his parents. He was the only child. The house of his childhood was Wilden, where his mother gave him a literary upbringing. When he married he rented a rambling red-brick Georgian house two miles away and bicycled to work at the forge most days. After ten years he rented and moved to Astley Hall, near Stourport, a larger and older stone house with Dutch gables and a wide, soft view across the broken Worcestershire countryside. Later he bought this house, built a new wing, greatly improved the garden, and extended the estate from twenty to one hundred acres, mostly farmed by tenants. In the years between his father’s death and the outbreak of the First War, this became quite a grand establishment. There were ten gardeners and about as many indoor servants. At that time he also maintained a large London house, at first in South Kensington, later in Eaton Square.
    Astley he retained until the end of his life, despite mounting worry about the expense, and spent nearly the whole of his retirement there. During his ministerial years, however, he had used it relatively little—ten days at Christmas, a week in early August, and perhaps a couple of other visits during the year. Apart from the ties of London, he liked and used Chequers a lot, and had established the almost unfailing rhythm of a long late summer holiday at Aix-les-Bains in the French Alps. But his feeling for the triangle bounded by the Black Country, the Cotswolds and the Welsh hills was intense. He loved wide landscape and changing light, and it is very good country for that. ‘It looked stormy but I risked it,’ he wrote of a 1931 Boxing Day expedition with his younger son,
and we drove through Cleobury Mortimer on to the Clees. I never saw the views so wonderful. There was dark cloud to within a couple of yards of the southern horizon, below which a perfect golden background, and there was silhouetted every hill from Clent to theSugar Loaf by Abergavenny and the Black Mountains. We drove down the Angel Bank skirting Ludlow, and then as we turned into Corvedale the sun came out and it cleared …. We drove home round the Brown Clee …. 2
     
    The next day he motored to four miles south of Hereford to lunch with an old cousin, and the day after that he attended two funerals, both of ‘old Worcestershire friends who died on Christmas Day’. His agricultural knowledge was very limited. He could not have milked a cow, and he poked pigs much more often in cartoons than in the farmyard. But he was a