MORE than 70 years after he died, a statue has at long last been erected in Worcestershire to the county’s most distinguished politician.

Stanley Baldwin served three terms as British Prime Minster, having to deal with the General Strike of 1926 and the constitutional crises caused by the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936, when the King gave up the throne for the love of American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

There are public memorials to Baldwin at Westminster, but now one has been unveiled in his home town of Bewdley by the Duke of Gloucester, following a £130,000 fundraising appeal by Bewdley Civic Society, the president of which is Beatrice Grant, Baldwin’s great granddaughter.

Mrs Grant, wife of county estate agent Andrew Grant, said: “Generous donations from many individuals and institutions made it possible to commission one of the country’s leading sculptors, Martin Jennings, to create this magnificent work in bronze. It is a befitting tribute to have the only statue of Baldwin here in Bewdley and I would like to thank the statue appeal/fundraising committee for all their tireless work. What started off as a conversation between two people, soon galloped into a project full of ideas and organisational skills to deliver this venture.”

Baldwin was born in 1867, the son of an iron and steel magnate. He entered Parliament in 1908, succeeding his father as Unionist member for Bewdley, and rapidly rose through the ranks, being seen as a safe pair of hands in difficult times. He was Prime Minister in 1923-24 and then again from 1924-29. His third premiership was from 1935-37. Among his many achievements were equal voting rights for women in 1928 and the granting of widows and orphans pensions in the Trades Disputes Act of 1927.

Baldwin was profoundly affected by the First World War and the sacrifices made during it, both by the men and women of Worcestershire and by those of the country as a whole. In 1919 he gave a fifth of his wealth anonymously to the Treasury as a thank-offering on the conclusion of the peace treaties with Germany, saying that to honour those who died “we must live for each other, and not for ourselves”.

He founded the Lord Baldwin Fund for Refugees, raising £500,000 to bring Jewish children from Nazi Germany to the UK to be placed with foster parents. Locally, he became the first president of Bewdley Civic Society and the first president of Stourport-on-Severn Working Men’s Club.