Lord Baldwin's famous unsigned letter to The Times in 1917,
stating that he was handing a fifth of his fortune to the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been much quoted since his death. In an article on Lord Baldwin in the Cambridge Review Lord Davidson
tells a story which seems to me well worth reproducing :
" Having been told that a small home, one of the first to be opened in England for the care of the feeble-minded, was in financial straits, he planned to go hiking in the neighbourhood armed with a rather untidy brown paper parcel containing £200 of Treasury notes.
• and a letter in a very illiterate hand explaining that he had the greatest sympathy with all feeble-minded persons and as a passer-by wished to make his contribution. The letter bore no signature, and . he gave half-a-crown to the butcher's boy, whom he met bicycling through the village, to deliver the parcel at the house of the very worried old ladies who ran the home. The joy which it gave them was unbounded."
Incidentally, when General Smuts is installed as Chancellor of Cambridge his predecessor's mantle will literally fall on his shoulders, for the present Lord Baldwin has arranged for his father's robes to be bestowed on the incoming Chancellor.
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