Some years before his death in 1947, Earl Baldwin of Bewdley asked the historian G.M. Young to become his official biographer, a request to which Young acceded with misgivings. Declining health and a lack of sympathy with his subject made his task increasingly burdensome to him, but he was persuaded to continue by his publisher, Rupert Hart-Davis, and the volume appeared in 1952. It received good reviews, and won the James Tait Black Prize; but ‘…it is not a satisfying book; Young’s touch had begun to fail him’. It disappointed Lord Baldwin’s family and friends, and many of the politicians and civil servants who had known and admired him, by its lukewarm tone, its misunderstanding of much that was important in his personality and thought, and its unsatisfactory explication of some significant events in his career.
Young wrote the biography in manuscript, sending chapters to Hart-Davis to be typed. The firm retained the manuscript and returned batches of typescript to the author. During printing, Young felt himself unable to cope with long strips of galley-proofs, so these were cut up for him and pasted into a dummy book. Young made additions in manuscript on loose sheets to both the typescript and the galleys.