Lucy Baldwin Lucy Baldwin Lucy Baldwin, Countess Baldwin of Bewdley, ("née" Ridsdale; 19 June 1869 – 17 June 1945) was an English writer and activist for maternity health. From 1892 until her death in 1945, she was the wife of Stanley Baldwin, three-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She was invested as a Dame of Grace, Order of Saint John of Jerusalem and a Dame Grand Cross, Order of the British Empire, and styled as Countess Baldwin of Bewdley on 8 June 1937. She was born Lucy Ridsdale in Bayswater, London, the oldest daughter of Edward Lucas Jenks and Esther Lucy
Stanley Baldwin crises in foreign affairs, including the public uproar over the Hoare–Laval Pact, Remilitarization of the Rhineland and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Baldwin retired in 1937 and was succeeded by Neville Chamberlain. At that time, Baldwin was regarded as a popular and successful Prime Minister, but for the final decade of his life, and for many years afterwards, he was vilified for having presided over high unemployment in the 1930s and as one of the "Guilty Men" who had tried to appease Adolf Hitler and who had – supposedly – not rearmed sufficiently to prepare for the Second