Colonel James Baldwin-Webb TD (5 February 1894[1] – 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.
He was born in Remenham, Berkshire,[2] the only son of James Bertram Webb and his wife Elizabeth Anne Baldwin, of Wylde Green, Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire.
It was a time of depression and at his maiden speech in the House of Commons, he moved a motion to urge the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald to help create employment by a progressive policy of carrying out public works where there was greatest need.
He was described by an unnamed source as "the best commercial traveller the Wrekin division has ever had" for his mainly successful efforts to gain orders for local industries.
It was on a voyage to Canada to fund-raise for the Corps[3] that he lost his life, as he was drowned when the SS City of Benares was torpedoed and sunk in the North Atlantic by a German submarine.
[8] German Nazi propagandists later claimed that he and Olden were sailing on a British government mission to persuade the then-neutral United States to enter the war.
[9]) 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.