This year marks the 150th anniversary (or sesquicentennial) of the birth of Stanley Baldwin who led the Conservative Party for fourteen years(1923-37), serving three terms as Prime Minister (1923-24, 1924-29 and 1935-37). The first ever statue of him will be unveiled towards the end of 2017 at Bewdley in Worcestershire, the constituency he represented for nearly thirty years.
On January 26, Alistair Lexden co-hosted a reception for some 150 people in the Lords to launch a fundraising appeal for the statue. A humorous piece about the reception appeared in The Times’s diary column, TMS, on February 1 under the heading ‘Fair and Square’:
“Lord Lexden, the Conservative historian, was in a lavatorial mood at an event to mark the launch of a fundraising appeal for a statue of Stanley Baldwin in the former PM’s seat of Bewdley. He spoke of how in 1933 news was brought to Baldwin in the Commons that his party had lost a by-election in Rotherham. Instead of a reaction, Baldwin muttered for several minutes: ‘If square seats don’t bother ‘em/ They’ve got rum bums in Rotherham.’ It turned out that some years earlier he had changed trains there and used the loos, which had square seats. Someone had scrawled the couplet on the wall. I trust he hadn’t used it in the campaign leaflets.”