Lloyd George

Stephen Constantine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781138147737
• eBook ISBN: 9781134963584
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

An understanding of Lloyd George's long and prominent political career elucidates many of the key issues in modern British history. Seen by some as `the man who won the war', he was central to the political activity which appeared to secure the pre-eminence of the Liberal party before the First World War, but which later contributed to its reduction in status. His initiatives in government, particularly in the area of social reform, helped to redefine the relationship between the state and society and laid the basis for the Welfare State. This pamphlet examines these developments with reference to Lloyd George's Welsh background, his personal ambitions and his response to the challenges posed to Liberal society by radical conservatism and socialism. It draws on the wealth of material that is now available and provides a concise, interpretive study.

1

Cottage-bred man: MP for Wales, 1863–96

In 1919 the economist John Maynard Keynes, who had served with Lloyd George as a Treasury official at the Versailles Peace Conference, attempted to sum up his impressions of the man. ‘How can I convey to the reader … any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?’ (J.M. Keynes, Essays inBiography, 1933). This description reflected Keynes’s lamentable ignorance of the United Kingdom. It owed more to his passion for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes than to his knowledge of the world outside Cambridge and London. ‘Lloyd George is rooted in nothing’, he wrote. In fact, Lloyd George was rooted in Wales, and it is there that we must begin. His upbringing and experiences as a young MP were to determine his values and to affect much of his subsequent behaviour.

Lloyd George frequently referred in political speeches to his childhood and Welsh upbringing. It was a technique of personal reminiscence then rarely employed by British politicians but common among American presidents, not least two of Lloyd George’s heroes, Abraham Lincoln, the former small-town lawyer, and James Garfield, whose ‘log cabin to White House’ career was mythologised in popular literature. Lloyd George, like his role models, was prone to trade upon his ‘ordinary’, even deprived, background as a way of establishing a rapport with popular audiences: he could claim thereby to understand and to embody the true aspirations of everyman and everywoman. During his first election campaign in 1890 he denounced his aristocratic opponent for not realising that ‘the day of the cottage-bred man has at last dawned’ (quoted in Frank Owen, TempestuousJourney, 1954, p. 55).

It was an effective technique because it was partly based on reality. Lloyd George was, indeed, a thoroughbred Welshman. His father, William George, came from Pembrokeshire in South Wales and his mother, Elizabeth Lloyd, from Caernarfonshire in the North. Moreover, it was a family which experienced its share of misfortunes. Lloyd George’s father, like both his grandfathers, died young, only 43, when the boy Dafydd was only 1, his sister not yet 3 and his mother expecting a third child. The family was rescued by the generosity of his mother’s younger brother, Richard, Uncle Lloyd, then a 30 year-old bachelor living in the tiny village of Llanystumdwy, two miles from Criccieth. Their new home, Highgate (now the Lloyd George Museum), may be described as a cottage, three rooms downstairs and two up, substantial and of stone, and with a workshop next door, but since Lloyd George’s maternal grandmother also lived there it was somewhat crowded. There were times when the extended family experienced financial stress, particularly when Lloyd George was in his late teens. Certainly these were experiences rare among his later parliamentary leaders, cabinet colleagues or political opponents. This was not the childhood of Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, Balfour or Lord Curzon. Yet it seems not to have brought him closer to other men from humble backgrounds, like John Burns, Ramsay MacDonald or Ernest Bevin.

That it did not do so may be explained by a closer look at his social origins. In many respects, and particularly in the context of North Wales, David Lloyd George was a privileged child. The social categories devised to describe an industrialised English society fit uncomfortably as indicators of social class in late nineteenth-century rural Wales, but it is not straining the term too much to describe his origins as middle class, albeit of modest pretensions. His father came from a comfortable farming family, but his intellectual aspirations led him into a career as a schoolteacher. He was a somewhat peripatetic one, holding posts for example in Liverpool, in Pwllheli, where he met and married Elizabeth Lloyd, and latterly in Manchester, where David was born on 17 January 1863 in the district of Chorlton-upon-Medlock. (Predictably, Lloyd George claimed to be a Mancunian when it served his political purposes.) When David’s father died he left assets worth £768, a tidy sum in those days. Moreover, the household into which the Georges were absorbed was that of an independent family firm: Richard Lloyd was a skilled shoemaker, but also an entrepreneur, employing two apprentices. There was never any question of the George boys entering anything but a professional career, if not as teachers or religious ministers then as lawyers. At some financial sacrifice, both sons became articled clerks in an important Porthmadog practice, David in 1878 and his younger brother William in 1882; both qualified as solicitors, and together they formed in 1887 their own locally-based firm, Lloyd George and George. (Lloyd George’s political career increasingly left the business to be run by William, who with remarkable self-denial and considerable skill supported not only his own family but also that of his brother, at least while he remained a backbencher.) It might also be noted that David derived social prestige and some financial benefits, as well as affection and in due course five children, from his marriage in 1888 to Margaret Owen, the daughter of quite a comfortable Criccieth farming family.

When Lloyd George arrived in the House of Commons in 1890 he was, then, not without some privileges. Getting himself born in 1863 had also been a shrewd career move. It brought him to maturity when the character of the House of Commons was changing. For much of the nineteenth century, MPs, and especially ministers, had been drawn largely from the ranks of the leisured classes, usually landowners, often sons of aristocrats, who alone had the resources of time and money to support a career in Parliament. (Payment of MPs did not begin until 1911.) Admittedly lawyers had also formed a parliamentary contingent, but, from the late nineteenth century, professional society in Britain was to expand and to bring an increased number of lawyers along with businessmen into the Commons. In this respect Lloyd George was coming in on the tide.

He was privileged, too, in the intellectual and cultural environment in which he grew up. The genetically-minded might suspect that he derived some of his formidable intellectual equipment from his schoolteacher father. Certainly he inherited his books. Packed in tea chests, these had been humped up from Pembrokeshire after his father’s death and crammed into the Highgate home in Llanystumdwy: volumes on history, on education and on religion, plus encyclopaedias, English poetry, Shakespeare’s plays and the novels of Dickens and Hugo. As a boy, Lloyd George read much of this, and with care. To this learning was added the contribution of Uncle Lloyd. Richard Lloyd was a man of local intellectual distinction, the unpaid pastor of a small Baptist sect, the Disciples of Christ or Campbellites, and his home and conversation were enriched by a wide reading of serious political and religious newspapers. The chapel itself was an intellectual stimulus which in our secular age we must not overlook. On top of this, the George children were well-taught by the local schoolteacher, David Evans, a man of rare distinction. Furthermore, as a trainee lawyer Lloyd George was drawn into the remarkably vibrant intellectual life of Porthmadog, especially centred on its debating society. Lloyd George earned no university degree, but he was no untutored sonof-the-soil. These intellectual stimuli reflected, moreover, not merely personal good fortune. The sustaining context was the deep-rooted cultural revival which blessed Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Over the battlements of Caernarfon Castle fly today a Welsh Dragon and the banner of Cadw, the Welsh historical monuments authority. These are ambiguous flags to be seen floating above that engine of English imperialism, Edward I’s castle. They say something about Welsh resilience, and they owe much to a Welsh cultural recovery launched particularly in Lloyd George’s lifetime. The Welsh, of course, are the descendants of those Celts who had successfully resisted Anglo-Saxon invasion of the British Isles, but they had had a tough time surviving later Norman and Plantagenet penetration. Paradoxically, the coming to the English throne of the Welsh Tudors only hastened their apparent absorption into the English polity and English culture, following the Act of Union in 1536. When Lloyd George was born, Wales lacked the independent legal system, the national church and the distinctive educational practices enjoyed by Scotland. Administratively, Wales was treated as part of England, its counties governed by English law, its MPs and lords sitting in the British Parliament, its English-speaking bishops responsible to an English archbishop, enforcing the doctrines of the Anglican Communion and enjoying the privileges of the Established Church in Wales. Although most of its landowners were Welsh and resident, unlike the many absentee landlords of Ireland, they were integrated into the dominant English-speaking culture, and sent their daughters to schools modelled on English institutions and their sons to English universities. Most, like the principal landowner in Lloyd George’s Llanystumdwy, could speak no Welsh. A notorious entry in a nineteenth-century edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica reads ‘Wales — see England’.

And yet the ingredients for a Welsh cultural and even political resurrection were not absent, and the mix became richer while Lloyd George was growing up. First, there was the language. The legal and educational efforts of the Anglican Church and English state since the time of the Tudors had failed to suppress it. (Uncle Lloyd was partially deaf because of a blow received from a teacher for speaking Welsh at school.) A parliamentary Education Commission urged its suppression in 1847 as an obstacle to progress, and thereby provoked many Welshmen to rise to its defence, for example, via the National Eisteddfod first held in 1858. In fact, the census of 1891 reveals that, out of a Welsh population of nearly 900,000, at least 55 per cent of adults were Welsh-speakers with proportions of over 90 per cent in rural Caernarfonshire and Merioneth. Many could speak only Welsh. Lloyd George himself was brought up in a Welsh-speaking home. Welsh was his first tongue; English remained a foreign language, however fluently he came to speak it. Oddly enough, whereas the very backwardness of rural Wales with its poor communications had once served to preserve the Welsh language and traditional culture, the partial modernisation of Wales in the late nineteenth century actually fostered their enrichment, partly by stimulating the development of small-town Welsh-speaking communities, like Porthmadog, led by modest middle-class businessmen and professionals, like Lloyd George, and partly by improving the means of communication, especially by cheapening the printed page. The removal of stamp duties in 1855 and paper taxes in 1861, combined with cheaper and faster printing technology, encouraged the production and wider distribution of a vast range of inexpensive Welsh-language newspapers.

Moreover, many of those Welshmen sucked into English and thereby into Western European culture could not help being affected by the tide of nationalism sweeping the nineteenth-century world. There was the excitement of Italian and German unification, the role models of Mazzini and Kossuth, even the musical inspiration of Dvorak, Smetana and Tchaikovsky. Close at hand there was the example of an Irish Home Rule League, first formed in 1873, and Scotland gained its own Secretary of State in 1885.

In addition, religious Nonconformity had become well-established in Wales since the beginning of the century. Subsequent revivalism from the 1850s ensured that chapel members easily exceeded the communicants of the Anglican Church. By 1905 the latter mustered some 193,000, whereas the Nonconformists numbered over 550,000, made up particularly of Methodists, Wesleyans, Independents and Baptists. Nonconformity served as an incentive for cultural and political autonomy against the perceived tyranny of the Anglican Church and the English state, and also acted as a conduit through which cultural and political aspirations could be expressed. It followed that Nonconformity generated a conflict tantamount to a Welsh civil war. Nonconformist ministers and their intellectual and political allies among tenant farmers and the small-town bourgeoisie waged a verbal, and sometimes invoked a physical, assault upon an unholy trinity of enemies: the anglicised landowners, the Anglican clergy and their perceived allies, the brewers. Nonconformists demanded, for example, changes in the licensing laws to give greater local political control over the granting and renewal of publicans’ licenses. In addition, they found repugnant the mechanism whereby the state since 1833 had helped maintain in many areas the Anglican monopoly over elementary education by granting financial subsidies to Church schools: this represented one of the ways by which the Anglican Church sought to bend the minds of the young and maintain its privileges. The most famous episode of Lloyd George’s early life was when he led a schoolboy rebellion against his Anglican headteacher and the diocesan inspectors by refusing to recite the Anglican Creed. Ultimately, Nonconformists claimed, the only proper solution was the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales, leaving it to compete for souls with Nonconformist chapels, preferably after prising loose its grasp of the property and other endowments it had accumulated over centuries. The Church was also buttressed by the collection of tithes, extracted by Anglican landowners from Nonconformist tenants. Objections to this exploitation were capable of being widened by radicals like Lloyd George into a wider assault on the wealth, power and prerogatives of overmighty landowners: in the 1880s, for example, only 4.2 per cent of farms in Caernarfonshire were owner-occupied, the rest being rented from landlords.

These campaigns required democratic political expression, and in each case the Liberal party was increasingly accepted as the vehicle to bring satisfaction. After all, the Liberal party elsewhere in the United Kingdom espoused the aspirations of Nonconformists. The cause of temperance and licensing laws had been accepted by the Liberal leadership. Gladstone had agreed to the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869 and had initiated major land reforms in Ireland in 1870 and 1881. And he seemed responsive to nationalist aspirations: if those of Italy, Bulgaria and Ireland, why not those of Wales?

Major electoral reforms had also made it possible at last to express popular demands and Welsh democratic aspirations through the political system. The franchise had been widened in 1867, but more important in rural Wales was the extension of the householder vote to the counties in 1884. The redrawing of constituency frontiers in 1867 and especially in 1885 also helped grassroots political opinion to become more articulate, and the secret ballot introduced in 1872, plus the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883, allowed voters to express themselves without fear or favour. Local government reforms, especially the act of 1888 which introduced electorally-accountable county councils, added further opportunities to assert local democratic opinion.

The result of these political changes at a time of religious and cultural excitement was the political transformation of Wales. The region had been notoriously a Tory stronghold through the first half of the nineteenth century, but in the election of 1868 came significant Liberal gains. Some tenants were expelled from their farms for voting the ‘wrong’ way by angry Tory landlords, but thereafter, protected by the secret ballot, the tide turned hugely to the Liberals. In 1880 29 of the 33 Welsh seats were captured, in 1885 30 of the 34.

Born and growing up in his social class with its vigorous democratic culture, it is not surprising that the young Lloyd George with his twitching political antennae should have embraced Welsh radical and national causes. In public speeches by the early 1880s he was attacking local Tory landlords, Anglican clergy and the demon drink. He became secretary of the local Anti-Tithe League in 1886, praised Michael Davitt, the leader of the Irish land campaign, when he came to speak locally, and rapidly earned a hot reputation as a lawyer prepared to defend the interests of Nonconformists, tenants and labourers against the presumption of parsons, squires and magistrates. His energy, self-publicity and remarkably mature debating skills soon attracted the attention of local Liberals, and in the summer of 1888 he was pressed to accept nomination as the parliamentary candidate for Caernarfon Boroughs. In 1889 he was elected as an alderman by Caernarfonshire’s triumphant Liberal country councillors. And in 1890, at the age of only 27, he won the by-election which launched his parliamentary career.

It was a sweet victory, defeating the Tory landowner who had been a patron of his elementary school, but not an easy one. He had a majority of just eighteen votes. The constituency was made up of six separate small towns: Caernarfon, Criccieth, Conwy, Nefyn, Pwllheli and Bangor where the Anglican cathedral brought support to his enemies. This remained a marginal constituency until 1906, and it was therefore essential for Lloyd George to attract the widest possible Liberal support: his 1890 programme, more or less repeated at the general election in 1892, was suitably vague on specifics but appropriately general in its support for such standard Welsh Nonconformist and Liberal causes as disestablishment, temperance legislation, land reform, tax changes and support for Gladstone’s Irish policy.

Once in Parliament Lloyd George could not afford, nor, more importantly, did he wish, to disengage from Welsh causes. He knew he had to appear busy on behalf of Caernarfonshire constituents, and he was eager to put his considerable political energies behind the principal campaigns of Welsh Liberals. He did this certainly out of conviction during this first part of his career, but also because he believed these issues and the allies they brought him would widen his power base in Wales and guarantee his impact on Westminster politics. He joined the group of Welsh Liberal MPs under the chairmanship of Stuart Rendel (oddly enough an Englishman though representing a Welsh constituency) who demanded that Parliament should address Welsh grievances and who lobbied their party leaders and also government ministers, whether Conservative or Liberal, on behalf of Wales. Lloyd George himself first made his mark in the Commons, and in public speeches outside, by attacking publicans and demanding licensing reforms. He also condemned the Conservative government’s Education Bill of 1891 for providing yet more state sustenance for Church schools, attacked as too limited their proposals for tithe reform, and mocked additional state expenditure on members of the Royal Family. He rarely missed an opportunity to demand the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales. Moreover, he waged verbal assault on landowners, criticising the inequities their privileges sustained and demanding land reforms: it is probable that this issue most inspired him as a young politician and for much of his later career.

However, it cannot be said that on such major matters during the 1890s much was being achieved. One obstacle was the Conservative party, in power from 1886 to 1892 and again from 1895 through to 1905. Another was Gladstone. As Liberal party leader, his preoccupation with Irish Home Rule excluded all else. Although, for example, the Liberals had officially accepted Welsh Disestablishment in 1891 as part of their programme, Gladstone cannot be seen as ever an enthusiastic convert. Even after his resignation in 1894, his successors remained reluctant to find the parliamentary time and the political energy to ram such a measure through the Commons. Besides, politicians recognised that no such change, nor other radical Welsh demands, would get past a Tory-dominated House of Lords armed with its legislative veto. Welsh Disestablishment bills were introduced in 1894 and again in 1895 but they made little parliamentary progress.

So frustrated did Lloyd George become, with Liberal colleagues as well as Tory opponents, that there came a phase when he seemed about to relaunch his career as the ‘Welsh Parnell’. He had been much impressed by the single-minded discipline of the Irish parliamentary party under Charles Stuart Parnell’s leadership and by its apparent ability thereby to wring reforms and concessions from Liberal and even Conservative governments. Parnell had even got the Liberals to commit themselves to Home Rule for Ireland, a constitutional revolution which would have made conceivable many other Irish domestic reforms. Lloyd George was actually unsure about Gladstonian Home Rule and rather preferred Joseph Chamberlain’s more dilute form of devolution described as ‘Home Rule All Round’, introducing assemblies for Ireland, Scotland and – Wales. He never aspired to create a truly independent Welsh natio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• In the Same Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chronology
• Prologue
• 1 Cottage-bred man: MP for Wales, 1863-96
• 2 Radical backbencher, 1896-1905
• 3 New Liberal, 1906-14
• 4 The man who won the war? 1914-18
• 5 Prisoner of the Tories, 1918-22
• 6 Left outside, 1922-45
• Epilogue
• Further reading