Sir Julian Ridsdale (1915–2004)1

DUGALD BARR

Sir Julian Ridsdale

INTRODUCTION AND EARLY YEARS Julian Ridsdale’s interest in Japan was kindled at an early age by the tales of an uncle and of Rudyard Kipling,2 a relation by marriage; together with politics, it was to become his principal interest through- out his life, the two being happily intertwined in his long service to Anglo-Japanese Parliamentary relations. The family was a political one, if of confusing party allegiances. Julian’s uncle, a vice-chairman of the Stock Exchange, was a Liberal MP while his aunt married Stanley Baldwin, the future Conservative prime minister. Born in 1915, Ridsdale grew up in Sussex, in a large and hospitable house where the cousins Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling were frequent visitors. He and his sister were enthralled by ‘Uncle Ruddy’s’ stories, unaware of their narrator’s fame in the greater world. Another favourite uncle had spent some time in Japan, inspired by Kipling’s accounts of his travels there in the late nineteenth century. The two men’s travellers’ tales clearly had the boy hooked.

81 BRITAIN & JAPAN: BIOGRAPHICAL PORTRAITS VOLUME VII

Politics came naturally from the family circle: on Ridsdale’s fi rst visit, aged twelve, to Downing Street, although the lunch engaged him more than the conversation about the recently-settled miners’ strike, the pragmatic and paternalistic approach shown by Baldwin, himself a steelmaker, clearly made an impression on him. After school at Tonbridge, Ridsdale chose an army career and passed into Sandhurst, where he started a debating society, visiting the Oxford Union to debate ‘fi ghting for King and Country’ (a dress rehearsal perhaps for the later infamous debate on this theme); he also won the prize for economics, showing himself ‘a bit of a Keynesian’ – sensibly, since the papers were marked at Cambridge. Ridsdale was commissioned in August 1935 as a second lieutenant in the Royal Norfolk Regiment, where life was a mixture of tradi- tional, expensive mess living, enlivened by the accounts of offi cers who had recently returned from India, and training with obsolete and inadequate weapons. With Germany rearming the army was unimpressed by politicians and Ridsdale found it prudent to down- play his relationship with the Prime Minister; in compensation, that with Kipling gave him some credibility in the endless discussions of India, of which he had no fi rst-hand knowledge. Kipling died in January 1936, two days before King George V (on one day, Baldwin had acted as pall-bearer for Kipling in the morning and delivered the eulogy for the King in the afternoon). Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland and the Abdication crisis were soon to engage him more closely. Ridsdale visited Baldwin at Chequers shortly after the Rhineland takeover and had some inter- esting recollections of his conversations there. Baldwin freely con- fessed to lack of knowledge of foreign affairs and to a reluctance to serve yet again as prime minister. They discussed Britain’s military weakness: the army in essence was little more than a reserve force for India, which Kipling had impressed on his cousin as a ‘sacred trust.’ Beyond this, Baldwin believed he could expect no support from either France or America, which he thought would be quick to brand Britain a warmonger for over-reacting. (The King, warned by Baldwin of the possible consequences of pursuing his affair with Mrs Simpson, threatened to abdicate anyway should Britain declare war on Germany!) When his regiment was posted to Gibraltar, his uncle paid for Ridsdale (delayed by an accident) to take passage on the Japanese liner Terakuni Maru; he was favourably impressed by the captain, ‘a very charming and jovial Japanese, and a real sailor’, and by the warmth of the entire crew, despite the deteriorating world situation. He began to study Japanese and, electing for Japanese food, soon managed to reconcile asa-gohan ( Japanese breakfast) with the motion of the Bay of Biscay.