Mr. Lloyd George

Preface

The author freely acknowledges his debt to Mr. Hugh Edwards, M.P., Mr. H. Duparcq, Mr. Harold Spender, and Mr. Walter Roche, whose works will be in their various ways invaluable to the writer of the biography of Mr. Lloyd George. Nothing could be more admirable than the industry which has been expended in gathering facts concerning Mr. George's early life while the witnesses still live; and little remains for research in this direction. It would be impossible to enumerate all the authorities,— British, French, and American, — consulted as to the later activities of the subject, and the author must content himself with indicating the source of any specific borrowing. He has to thank Mr. D. Willoughby for valuable co-operation with regard both to the plan and the material of the work, and is greatly indebted to Mr. E. A. Jenkins, of the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, for the results of long and close parliamentary observation.

Contents

CHAPTER FAOB

I THE COTTAGE-BRED BOY II

II THE PEOI'LE's lawyer 2()

Chapter I

THE Coalition Mind, so eminently illustrated by the subject of this study, is no new thing. Towards the close of the third century of the Christian era the son of a Dalmatian slave, profiting no less by the lack of commanding talent in his competitors than by his own great abilities, attained supreme power in the Roman world, effected a union of parties, skilfully converted actual and possible rivals into obedient lieutenants, contrived an elaborate bureaucratic system, and became in effect the founder of a new Empire.

"As the reign of Diocletian," remarks Gibbon, "was more illustrious than that of any of his predecessors, so was his birth more abject and obscure. The strong claims of merit and of violence had frequently superseded the ideal prerogatives of nobility ; but a distinct line of separation was hitherto preserved between the free and the servile part of mankind."

The historian of the British Empire, equally impressed with a sense of significant novelty in the contrast between the unnotable origin and the illustrious achievement of the Right Honourable David Lloyd George, may be tempted to one of those fanciful parallels which are the besetting weakness of the historical imagination. The task would be neither more difficult nor more futile than many actually attempted. It could be shown that the British statesman, like the Roman, was helped by the failure of a predecessor whose qualities were "rather of the contemplative than the active kind." It could be argued that both showed "dexterity and application in business ; a judicious mixture of . . . mildness and rigour ; steadiness to pursue ends; flexibility to vary means," a disposition, moreover, never to employ force, when a purpose could be effected by policy. It could be maintained that each "ensured his success by every means that prudence could suggest, and displayed with ostentation the consequences of his victory." Stress might be laid on the dexterity with which both coordinated apparently obdurate and discordant elements, so that the "singular happiness" of their administrations could (for a time at least) be "compared to a chorus of music whose harmony was regulated and maintained by the skilful hand of the first artist." The successor of Gibbon might, indeed, lack the fortune to discover in any British Field Marshal the analogue of that "faithful soldier" employed by Diocletian, who was "content to ascribe his own victories to the wise counsels and auspicious influence of his benefactor." But, while noting how the Roman Senate was deprived of its "small remains of power and consideration," he would hardly ignore the coincidence of a rapid if accidental decline in the prestige and authority of the House of Commons during the period of Mr. George's ascendancy. Observing that both the Dalmatian and the Welshman made ostentation one principle of rule, and division another, and that both "multiplied the wheels of government," he might show that in each case the system involved a "very material disadvantage" — that is to say, "a more expensive establishment and consequently an increase of taxes," which became in a brief space an "intolerable and increasing grievance."

So far the parallel is little more strained than most things in this vain kind. Nor is it impossible that time may further fortify it. In the full blaze of his glory Diocletian commanded the respect of the philosophic and the astonishment of the vulgar by a voluntary retirement. The modern statesman has more than once hinted that he, also, may some day withdraw to await, in rural seclusion, the day when he is laid, in accordance with wishes he has sometimes expressed, in a simple tomb under the shadow of his own mountains.^ Antique record

*A. G. Gardiner ("Pillars of Society") relates that on the day of the memorial service to the Marquess of Ripon a companion laughingly leaves it uncertain whether Diocletian's interest in the cabbage antedated his removal to Valona. Mr. George, in the plenitude of his powers, has already revealed an interest, rare in urban mankind, in the still humbler mangel-wurzel.

It is only when we approach the matter of birth that the parallel fails. Mr. George's extraction might be held "obscure," though only in a sense embracing all but a tiny minority of his fellow-citizens. In no sense could it be deemed "abject," still less "servile." It was not even in the genuine sense poor. In speaking of himself as a "cottage-bred man" and a "child of the people," Mr. George has contributed to a popular misunderstanding. By a tragic but common accident he spent his early years in close contact with the true poor. But his pedigree and family traditions, and even his upbringing, were authentically middle-class, and his own plane and ideas, from the first awakening of ambition, were those appropriate to the order which of all others offers the largest freedom and widest choice of self -development.

Yet in some degree Mr. George's rise to supreme power does in truth present a significance such as Gibbon finds in the contrast between Diocletian's origin and destiny. It marks the end of a definite order of things. It does not necessarily herald the triumph of "democracy." It does, with almost ritual emphasis, break the continuity of "gentlemanocracy." The true distinction between Mr. Lloyd George and his predecessors has relation neither to birth nor to early poverty. It is simply a difference in training and tradition. Before him — with the dubious exception of Disraeli — no British prime minister had lacked the traditional outlook of the English upper classes. When Mr. Lloyd George went to lo Downing Street in the last month of 1916 that dreary threshold was passed for the first time by an official tenant who had missed (or escaped) the varnish of English higher culture. Of his predecessors some might, by chance, have lacked a public school or university education. But they were still gentlemen, because they had

remarked, "When you die we'll give you a funeral like that." "No you won't," came the swift, almost passionate reply. "When I die you will lay me in the shadow of the mountains."

either family, or money, or both. Those, on the other hand, who possessed neither money nor a coat of armour were gentlemen by virtue of their passage through one of the national factories for the manufacture of gentlemen. But David Lloyd George, belonging to no family, possessing no money, was deprived of what is called "formal education."

It was indeed no ill-informed or ill-bred man who mused, perhaps in the very chair on which Pitt used to sit astride in the eager perusal of despatches, on problems vaster and more desperate than even Pitt had to revolve. Thirty years in the practice of politics and of a learned profession had given him a social ease and flexibility adequate to all the probable demands of his station. A strong memory, a rapid perception, wide i£ desultory reading, constant converse with the most considerable minds of his time had supplied the defects (easily exaggerated) of his schooling. It would be ridiculous to suppose that the varied experiences of a life spent in close contact with every kind of superiority could have left a singularly adaptable nature more deficient in the social arts and graces than a professor or a country clergyman. It would be absurd to suggest that the statesman of fifty-three was in general culture the inferior of every dull squire who happened to have taken a pass degree thirty years before. But it would be equally uncritical to ignore the fact that the acquirements of maturity are held on a different tenure from the lessons unconsciously learned in youth. For good and ill Mr. George was distinguished in mind and spirit, in instincts and ideals, materially and indeed incalculably, from all his predecessors, and not least from those who, so far as concerned extraction, belonged as little as himself to the gentlemanly caste.

It is indeed, a fact of prodigious importance that at a great capital crisis in British history the supreme power of direction fell into the hands of a statesman so little imbued with what is called the public school spirit. The case was exaggerated by Mr. George's Welsh birth; in England the public school spirit extends far beyond the public schools. That spirit is eminently aristocratic, and if for over two hundred years the aristocratic temper of British political institutions had been maintained through much superficial change it was chiefly because almost every middle-class statesman of the first rank had been touched, through the universities and public schools, with the tone and tradition of aristocracy. Such tradition was, indeed, necessary to the curious conspiracy called cabinet government. Absolutism, whether regal or democratic, works through a chain of subordinates who are essentially servants. Under cabinet government subordinates are not servants, but colleagues who for convenience acknowledge a limited primacy on the part of one of their number. The system can be maintained only on the ideas so strongly inculcated in the public schools, of class loyalty, of team work, of a common aim and pride, of the subordination of individual interests to those of a side, of the vulgarity of personal display, and of the treachery (beyond a point) of personal ambition. The whole thing is a conspiracy rather than a government, and therefore the honour and the discipline of cabinet rule are rather those of a pirate craft than of a king's ship; loyalty is modified by round robins, and the black spot is sometimes tendered. But it is nevertheless felt strongly that the interest of the ship should before any come first, and further there is a certain duty to other pirate crews ; they may be fought, but they must never be betrayed to Execution Dock, A politician, in short, may intrigue against another politician in the same crew ; he may even change crews and fight his former comrades ; but he must be reasonably loyal to the ship while he is in it, and he must never seriously betray the general interest of all politicians.

Even in his subordinate days Mr. George found some difficulty in accommodating his remarkable talents and character to this conception. He could seldom resist the temptation of organising movements, whether in the forecastle or the officers' mess, against the peace of the skipper, and sometimes even committed the enormity of appealing from pirate law and opinion to the common enemy and victim of all political parties — the public. His relation to the orthodox politician was rather that of the individualist trader, in the break-up of mediaevalism, to the coUectivist guildsman. With his advent to full power the cabinet system went altogether. Government at once became scarcely less personal than in Stuart days. Under other names and in other forms the Whitehall of another age returned with sharp abruptness. The cabinet's place was taken by what our ancestors would have called a Cabal — a body owing its existence merely to the Primate Minister's fancy, and subservient to him as no cabinet was subservient to the most imperious prime minister between Walpole and Mr. Asquith. The House of Commons ceased to have much importance beyond that of a convenient theatre for the more impressive kind of ministerial declaration. Ministers felt no occasion to trouble about its confidence; the main thing was to retain, by desert or trick, that of the prime minister. Unknown men exercised the most despotic powers on the simple authority of Mr. George's "Go and get busy." On the other hand, experienced statesmen found themselves liable to interference in those matters which had always been considered within the sole discretion of a departmental chief.

In a week the whole face of English political life was changed. Only the more stupid politicians continued the dull business of public speech and question; astute generals quickly discerned that to get things done it was better not to address the War Office; foreign diplomatists of perception at once realised that the real Foreign Minister slept in Mr, George's bed and sat at Mr. George's breakfast-table; there was hardly a coal-heaver who did not soon divine that the one man to reach was not the disconsolate President of the Board of Trade, or the dummy Minister of Labour, but the head of the Government. Mr. George, indeed, has never been a prime minister in the old sense. His system has revealed many virtues and many defects ; but its vigour and its caprice, its prompt decisions and its unashamed reversals of policy, its audacities of conception and its panicky abandonments have nothing in common with the virtues and defects of parliamentarism. The source of his power is personal; the exercise of it is personal. The policy of his government has been simply the expression of his varying inspirations and prejudices, modified by tactical necessity. It has never been that of a government of the older type, — that of a number of men, some clever, some stupid, some rash, some cautious, but all restrained by a mass of tradition, convention, and precedent, constitutional, social, and spiritual. Mr. George has done many things, and left undone many more, through fear of losing popular favour or of antagonising men likely to be useful to him. But he never hesitated to do a thing because it has never been done, or because, as the phrase goes, it is "not done."

This disposition has, no doubt, its roots in character, and would doubtless have been manifested in some degree, whatever the statesman's antecedents. But the accident of temperament would have been more gently felt, the breach in the continuity of things political would have been less abrupt, but for two facts. Mr. George was born and bred a Welshman, that is a man outside the English tradition. The circumstances of his life prevented his assimilating that tradition, and he arrived at supreme place singularly unaffected by the spirit which, for good or ill, has informed almost every prominent British statesman since the old English kingship became the modern "crown."

The most brilliant and picturesque Welshman since Glendower was born on English soil. There still remains, in a dingy suburb of Manchester, the little two-storied house, built flush to the mean street, where, on January 17, 1863, a "sturdy, healthy little fellow, stronger and much more lively than his sister," and blessed with a wonderful head of "fine curly hair," ^ wailed his first comments on a not too promising world. A melancholy train of circumstances explains the incongruity of the appearance, in surroundings so alien, and so lacking in amenity, of one destined to add in such large measure to the prestige of his country. William George, the father of the future Prime Minister, was a man of considerable talent and no mean culture, but lacking in exactly those qualities of decision, energy, appetite for action with which his elder son has proved so richly endowed. He seems to have been a born

* His father's description, quoted by Mr. Hugh Edwards, M.P., "D, Lloyd George."

dilettante. Sprung from a substantial yeoman family long settled in Pembrokeshire — the Georges are supposed to owe their name, most rare in Wales, to a Flemish mercenary in the train of Henry Tudor ^ — he early conceived a strong distaste for the life of the land. He could not live, he said, with his nose dug into the soil. At the same time his mind was of the soft texture that rebels against the effort of concentration necessary to master any of the learned professions. He refused the opportunity to become a doctor, and finally drifted into teaching, in the fallacious hope that it would at once afford a satisfactory career and indulge his passion for that kind of reading which appeals rather to the bookworm than to the purposeful student. The choice proved in every way disappointing. William George taught in London and Liverpool; he tried unsuccessfully to establish himself as a private schoolmaster in Haverfordwest ; at length he was driven to accept the pure drudgery of a primary school at Pwlheli, in Carnarvonshire.

Here the clever but unpractical scholar — only a man of exceptional gifts could have attracted the notice of a highly intellectual divine like Dr. James Martineau, and only an unpractical man could have failed to make effective use of such endowments — married Miss Elizabeth Lloyd, of Llanystumdwy. The need of improving his circumstances impelled a move shortly afterwards to Newchurch, in Lancashire, but the venture turned out unfortunately. The Lancashire smoke distressed Mr. Greorge's lungs; the Lancashire temperament jarred on his haughtily sensitive spirit. The school managers were for the most part "rude mechanicals" with ideas of their own and a direct way of expressing them, and William George's disposition was such that (to quote his own words) he would "rather be the master of workpeople than their servant." So the odyssey of disdainful impracticability had to be resumed. At last, ill and despairing, Mr, George determined to return to the life of the land which he had contemned. 'Mr. Hugh Edwards, M.P., "D. Lloyd George."

It was while he was fulfilling his last scholastic engagement, the temporary charge of a school at Manchester, that the event occurred which has preserved his misfortunes from the oblivion common to thousands of such obscure tragedies. No. 5 New York Place, where David Lloyd George was born, was only the shelter of the moment, and the child, named after his grandfather and his mother, was but a very few months old when he left the filth and smoke of Lancashire for the pure air of Wales. William George bought the lease of a small holding near Haverfordwest, and settled down to the life of a small farmer. In June, 1864, a chill caught in gardening on a damp day rapidly developed into pneumonia, and, when his little son was still under eighteen months of age, William George died in his forty-fourth year.

A few days after the funeral Mrs. George gave birth to a posthumous son, on whom the name of the father was bestowed. To this child also was assigned a due part in the family epic. Gentle and unselfish, William George was marked from the first to be his brother's understudy. Unconsciously, in the home and at school, he rehearsed the part he was to play in maturity. This David, who was later to stand in need of a fitting Jonathan, found one without looking beyond his family circle.

In Wales, as in Ireland, ancestors are no monopoly of the rich, and Mrs. William George's possession in this respect would have been worth much to an English upstart. She could number among her forefathers a legendary knight and an indubitable astronomer. But in the middle nineteenth century the glories of the family were a little faded, and the only relative to whom the widow could look for succour was her bachelor brother, Richard Lloyd, the shoemaker of Llanystumdwy.

It is not easy now to picture the sort of man and tradesman Richard Lloyd was. On his business side he must not be confused with the yellow and melancholy being who now gains a precarious livelihood by doing odd repairs in an English hamlet. He made boots and did not merely botch them; in England, and in Wales even more, there was still room for the handicraftsman. Richard Lloyd was no mere cobbler, but a master shoemaker, generally employing one or two journeymen; he lived in proud if rough independence; he could call his soul, as well as his shop, his own. Poor he was, but firmly rooted; his was not the kind of poverty that can at any moment be converted, on the will of another, into destitution. His customers wanted his work and could not well go elsewhere, and he was under no necessity to lie or flatter lest "the stores" should tempt them. He could, and did, order his spiritual and intellectual life as he saw fit, and was one of the few people who, in what his nephew has called "the blackest Tory parish in the land," could afford to stand forth as a consistent and unabashed Radical. Between leather and scepticism there was long thought to be some mystical relation; but Richard Lloyd was remarkable even in rural Wales for the fervour of his religious emotions and the rigidity of his religious principles. He belonged to a small sect, an offshoot from the Baptists, called the Disciples of Christ. A distinguished tenet of this body was its condemnation of a paid ministry as unscriptural, and Richard Lloyd, like his father before him, was one of its most valued preachers. On indifferent matters he tended to a certain liberality, and had little in common with those unlettered saints who hold secular learning to be superfluous and even undesirable. His naturally gentle disposition softened the asperity of the Calvanistic temper, and his social relations with professors of other creeds were generally correct if not cordial. But when any attack was made on his faith, or on the political creed which for him represented that faith in its temporal aspect, every fibre of his being stiffened in resistance; and for many years his shop was the trysting-place of all that withstood what were to him the twin powers of evil, the Established Church and the Tor)- Party.

A stalwart and stately soul had an appropriately impressive lodgment. In his extreme age, with his long forked whiskers of snowy white, Richard Lloyd was still a man to challenge a second glance. But, with the severest of his life's battles left far behind, his features had softened into comparative ordinariness. In his middle years his face, lined with care, overcast by habitual melancholy, stern with the slow anger of one who sees in every human injustice an affront to the Almighty, was scarcely less arresting than that of some gaunt saint of Spagnoletto or El Greco. Whatever else may be said of it, Welsh Nonconformity in the nineteenth century was a genuinely popular religion; with the dignity always attaching to a faith held fervently by the common people; and this dignity could hardly have been better symbolised than in the figure, almost majestic in its apostolic combination of poverty and saintliness, of this village shoemaker, \/

Such was the second father of David Lloyd George, the part he had assumed as a matter of course on the news of William George's death. He at once sought his sister, offered her a home, arranged for the realisation of her effects. The house and furniture were sold, to the anger of the children, who resented the auction as an outrage, and, child-like, resorted to little stratagems to prevent certain cherished articles being taken away. As David was at this time little over eighteen months old, the circumstance indicates a precocity and strength of memory that would be almost incredible, were independent proof of the fact not forthcoming.^

Llanystumdwy, the new home of "David Lloyd" — for so he was to be known for many years to come — lies inland on the River Dwyfawr, about two miles from the sea at Criccieth. The most casual study of the village, physically and politically considered, suffices to a due realisation of its influence on the future statesman. Behind it rise the mountains which have served in so many picturesque perorations. Between them and the sea is capital shooting and fishing, then, as now, strictly preserved. To the most unreflective stranger there comes always in such places a specially strong sense of the contrast between the wild freedom of nature and the restrictions imposed by law. A thoughtful native impressed by the liberty

* Several witnesses agree that Mr. George, when visiting his old home in middle life, pointed out several alterations made since his childhood. In the interval he had never been in the neighborhood.

and repressed by the restrictions may be assumed to be much more powerfully affected. To a vivid spirited lad with some natural taste for small poaching and extensive hedge-breaking — and such, it is to be lamented, was "David Lloyd's" early reputation — it was natural enough that the silhouette of the game-keeper should stand forth with sinister distinctness against the background of the everlasting hills.

And if this aspect of squire-rule suggested precocious speculations of emphatic tendency, still more positive was the effect of another. At his uncle's shop he heard countless stories of the terrorism exercised over tenants and cottagers at parliamentary elections. He was five years old when, after the election of 1868, numbers of men were turned out of their holdings because they had dared to vote against the wishes of their landlords. The memory of these dread things was burned in by countless repetitions; their effect was heightened by the dramatic instincts of men speaking a language singularly suited to emotional expression; and it is small wonder that the lad grew up to think of landlords as almost a separate species, as men of prey, a race unjust, implacable, uncompassionate, with desires "bloody, greedy, starved, and ravenous." Even their religion was an offence. To the lad brought up in the straitest sect of the Baptists, the Parish Church became the symbol, not alone of a noxious superstitution, but of a domination detested as alien and resented as practically oppressive. For the rest the shoemaker's meagre table, often meatless — the chief luxury "half-an-egg on Sundays" ^ — imparted an indelible impression of the concrete facts of poverty.

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that David Lloyd's life was generally sombre, or that it was overshadowed by any painful sense of humiliation. Some of its privations were due to the situation and the period rather than to the worldly circumstances of the household; fresh meat was something of a rarity in quite well-to-do country households before the days of cold storage, and the art of dividing a soft-boiled egg was perfectly understood by middle-class mothers when eggs could be bought for twenty-two or twenty- four to the shilling. The * The fact was stated by Mr. Lloyd George in a speech made in 1898.

Lloyds, moreover, were not a specially humble family; they enjoyed, on many grounds, — material, moral, and intellectual — a sort of primacy in the village. The glimpses we have of the lad's life suggest a "happy human boy." The good uncle knew how to be severe; his religion forbade much gaiety; and, as in most puritan households, there was a tendency to expect and promote an unnatural spiritual precocity; David Lloyd seems to have learned to preach almost as soon as to manage a hoop. But the ill effects which might have been produced on a child of another temperament were happily wanting. Even as a lad Mr. George seems to have been able to divide his being into water-tight compartments. There was the small Calvinist chapel-goer, thinking how fine it would be to occupy a pulpit and make people tremble some day. There was the fiery little politician. There was the scholar, never applying specially, but always quick and competent. There was the wanderer in woods and raider of orchards. There was the devourer of every book that happened to pass the censorship of his uncle. Each of these was a separate being. The uncle knew nothing until much later of the nephew's eager interest in light literature. The boy who got good conduct marks at school was a different being among the chosen companions of his small naughtinesses, and few, again, of these comrades understood the deeper things which even then were simmering in his active brain.

Those who think of education in terms of expense and complication may smile when Mr. Lloyd George insists that he sat at the feet of a "great schoolmaster." Those who remember how thorough were some of the old Voluntary schools in what they did profess to teach, and how conscientious were many of the masters, will not be disposed to deny David Evans's title to that tribute. He knew much, and could teach all he knew. Under him the lad acquired and (more important) digested a considerable stock of information. Curiously enough, arithmetic was his strong subject; he acquired great skill in the working of long practice sums, and was never known to make any mistake as between ninepence and fourpence. He acquired much arcana of geography, and was reputed unequalled in his knowledge of "principal towns" and "chief products." He gained also an amazing acquaintance with the Scriptures, and especially with those Old Testament stories which for him supplied much of the excitement other boys find in detective stories. General literature he assimilated in the manner peculiar to him in later life; reading rapidly, and without apparent system, he managed to possess himself of the substance of any work, frivolous or learned, and what he had once noted he never forgot. His early habit of carrying a bundle of books is said to have given him that forward tilt of the head which has persisted through the years.^