Baldwin, Arthur Windham, 1...-?

Title: 3rd Earl Baldwin of Bewdley

(Arthur) Windham Baldwin (1904-1976), 3rd Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, was born on 22 March 1904, and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He served in Royal Air Force, 1941-1945, and became director of the Great Western Railway Company. He died on 5 July 1976.

George Malcolm Young (1882-1959), historian, was born at Charlton, Kent, on 29 April 1882. He attended St Paul's School, London, and Balliol College, Oxford, and became a Fellow of All Souls in 1905. He joined the Board of Education in 1908, and the Cabinet Office in 1916. Young retired from public service after the First World War and, settling in Wiltshire, devoted himself to writing. His biography of Stanley Baldwin was published in 1952. He died at Goring, Oxfordshire, on 18 November 1959.

This collection comprises papers assembled by Arthur Windham Baldwin, 3rd Earl Baldwin of Bewdley (1907-1976) for the biography of his mother and aunts, The Macdonald sisters (London: Peter Davies, 1960). Four of them married Alfred Baldwin, father of Stanley Baldwin, later a Conservative Prime Minister and 1st Earl Baldwin; Edward Burne-Jones, the eminent pre-Raphaelite painter; Edward Poynter, a President of the Royal Academy of Arts; and John Lockwood Kipling, the father of the author Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936).

One of Lord Baldwin's principal informants was, in her old age, Miss Edith Ramsay Plowden (1854-after 1938), daughter of George Augustus Plowden who had entered the Bengal Civil Service in 1828. Unmarried, she had lived in Lahore with her brother (Sir) Henry Meredyth Plowden (1840-1920) who rose to be Chief Judge of the Chief Court of the Punjab, 1880-1894. She studied art and published designs for wood-carvers in 1895 and 1907, as well as some stories. A friend of five of the Macdonald sisters, she also knew the young Rudyard Kipling. Encouraged by Lord Baldwin in the later 1930s she set down her recollections and delivered a talk to the Kipling Society in July 1938 on 'Rudyard Kipling's parents in India' (partly published in Kipling Journal, 46 (July 1938), 42-5. She gave Baldwin an incomplete manuscript of the recollections (a later typescript apparently having been lost), along with letters from John Lockwood and Alice Kipling and from Rudyard. It is likely that she returned to Rudyard other letters from him and his family, and that he (or his wife) destroyed most of them; she certainly returned a volume of verses he had given her in November 1882, and he destroyed it (Thomas Pinney (ed.), The letters of Rudyard Kipling, 4: 1911-19 (London: Macmillan, 1999), 282). What survive in Kipling's papers are only another 44 letters to her from his parents (SxMs 38/1/10).