James Baldwin-Webb

Colonel James Baldwin-Webb TD (5 February 1894 – 17 September 1940) was a British Army officer, businessman, and Conservative Party politician who served in the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament (MP) for The Wrekin from 1931 to his death at sea in 1940.

Family background He was born in Remenham, Berkshire, the only son of James Bertram Webb and his wife Elizabeth Anne Baldwin, of Wylde Green, Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire. He was educated privately.

Business career After leaving school, Baldwin-Webb worked in his maternal grandmother's family firm of Messrs Baldwin's(Birmingham) Ltd, then a firm of hardware merchants. He then joined the local staff of Lloyds Bank in Birmingham, where he passed all major banking examinations, but left the company when he joined the army at the outbreak of World War I in August 1914.

Military career At the outbreak of World War I, Baldwin-Webb enlisted in a Territorial Army (TA) unit, the 46th North Midland Divisional Train of the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), becoming a commissioned officer in a few weeks.

After the war he continued to serve, part-time, with the Train and rose to lieutenant-colonel in its command, from 1925 to 1931. He was promoted full colonel in February 1932,

Death Although Baldwin-Webb did not see active service after the outbreak of World War II, continuing to appear in Parliament, he later became honorary secretary of the British Volunteer Ambulance Corps (originally called the Anglo-French Ambulance Corps Ernest Szekulesz, a Hungarian journalist who survived, recalled that Baldwin-Webb helped women and children into the lifeboats, especially one in particular, Lifeboat 6. Baldwin-Webb managed to persuade the wife of Rudolf Olden, Ika Olden, to leave the ship without her husband. He also persuaded another reluctant woman, Anne Fleetwood-Hesketh, mother of Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh, to enter this lifeboat as well. Fleetwood-Hesketh, had insisted that the children go first, but after some time she reluctantly stepped into Lifeboat 6. ) Ernest Szekulesz, Anthony Quinton and his mother, and Monkia Lanyi already grieving the loss of her husband, watched Baldwin-Webb leap from the deck, some forty or fifty feet above them, landing in the water. The sound of the man splashing into the sea was later described as "the slap of an oar." Anthony Quinton thought he saw Baldwin-Webb smile, before he fell unmoving in lifeless in the water.

A road, Baldwin-Webb Avenue, in Donnington, Telford in Shropshire, is named after him.