  From a Photograph by Miss Olive Edis, F.R.P.S., THE PRIME MINISTER
BY HAROLD SPENDER “Who, if he be called upon to face Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined Great issues, good or bad, for human kind, Is happy as a Lover; and attired With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired.” The Happy Warrior. NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOREWORD My thanks are due for assistance in writing this book to Mr. Lloyd George, with regard to whom I have the privilege of drawing on the memories of twenty-seven years of unbroken friendship; to Mrs. Lloyd George; to Mr. William George, the Prime Minister’s only brother; to Mr. Philip Kerr and Miss Stevenson, C.B.E., his secretaries; and to Mr. Arthur Rhys Roberts, formerly his professional partner. For certain chapters I owe particular thanks to Sir John Stavridi, Consul-General of Greece and Councillor of the Greek Legation; to Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, G.C.B., Permanent Secretary of the Board of Trade; and to Mr. W. T. Layton, C.B.E., formerly of the Ministry of Munitions. I wish also to express my gratitude to all the other numerous persons who have so generously helped me in this important task. H. S. London, 1920. CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE PRIME MINISTER THE PRIME MINISTER CHILDHOOD“When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.” Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Act v, Sc. i. Every school-child is familiar with that striking shape taken by North Wales on the map of Britain, so like to a human being pointing with outstretched arm down St. George’s Channel towards the Atlantic. In that shape Anglesey is the head, and Carnarvonshire is the pointed arm. On the lower side of the arm, towards the hollow of the armpit, there lie a village and two small towns. Naming from west to east they are Llanystumdwy, Criccieth, and Portmadoc. In these three places and in the country around them the childhood and youth of David Lloyd George was entirely spent. It was there that he was trained and educated, and there that his mind first formed vivid impressions of the universe—there, on the sea-limits of Wales between the mountains and the ocean. It is a fertile country, watered by streams from the mountains and showers from the Irish Channel, a country of deep grasses and rich woods right up to the foot of the mountains and down to the verge of the sea. From every raised point you obtain wide-stretching views. Facing you along the south-eastern horizon are the hills of Merionethshire, often shrouded in sea-mist, but on good days clear to the utmost detail of field and hedgerow. Still farther away, in the very best weather, can sometimes be seen even the outline of St. David’s Head and of the Pembrokeshire hills. Nearer home, the great stretch of Cardigan Bay sweeps round to the east in many a bend and fold of the coast. From above Criccieth you can see the famous castle of Harlech and the golden glitter of the sands at Barmouth, though you cannot hear the “moaning of the bar.” Taking it all in all, there are few finer prospects along the immense and varied sea-board of these islands. Turn from the sea and look northwards; and you will gain glorious glimpses of the great piled mountains of the Snowdon group, sometimes hidden in cloud, sometimes clear to every wrinkle of their rugged outlines. These are “Eyri”—the “Eagle Rocks”—black in storm, blue and green in the sunshine, purple and crimson in the sunset. There is no mere prettiness in these mighty views, no soft luxury of Italian backgrounds, and yet no barren terrors of arctic solitudes. On all sides there is majesty and power—the power of the height and the storm, the majesty of the winds and the deeps. Of these three places in which Mr. Lloyd George spent his childhood and youth, Portmadoc is the business town, Criccieth is the pleasure resort, and Llanystumdwy is the village. Portmadoc, with its straight-set streets of little grey houses, speaks of money and affairs; Criccieth is a little watering-place of lodging-houses and villas prettily placed in the innermost bend of Cardigan Bay; Llanystumdwy is just a little Welsh village drawn back from the sea and cosily hidden away in the woods, astride a little mountain river which hurries down to the sea with many a rippling murmur and many a gleam of white foam on its brown waters. It was to this little village of Llanystumdwy—Welsh of the Welsh in name, situation, and tradition—that David Lloyd George was brought at the age of a year and a half. Up to that time, indeed, life had not gone very well with the young child. For his father, William George, had just died in the prime of his life, at forty-four years of age. Mrs. William George, with David and his elder sister Mary, had been left but scantily provided to face an unsmiling world. David’s father, William George, was an able, earnest man, very sociable, full of fun and humour, and very happy in his home life. Brought up on a prosperous farm in South Wales, he could easily have followed smoothly and serenely in the steps of his thriving forefathers. For there, on that fertile coast, his father and grandfather had farmed well and fared sumptuously, holding their heads high.[1] But William George was not content with farming. Early in life he fell in love with books and the things of the mind; and through his short life he wandered—a true “scholar-gipsy”—from school to school, trying to kindle the youth of Wales to the passion for knowledge in those early difficult days before the Education Acts had come to make the schoolmaster a power in the land. He taught in London and Liverpool; he opened a grammar-school of his own in Haverfordwest; he served the Free Churches and the Unitarians—any and all who felt the fire of knowledge and shared his passion to extend its power. He became the friend of that great, pure spirit, Henry Martineau[2]—a fact alone sufficient to prove his high quality. The fire of the schoolmaster’s zeal burnt him up. He was never a strong man; and a life of excessive labour had exhausted him before his time. He resolved to lay down his ferule and return to the land of his forefathers. As his last teaching task, he took a temporary headmastership at Manchester and lodged in a little house in York Place, off Oxford Road. A few years before, when teaching at Pwllheli, he had loved and wedded Elizabeth, the daughter of a Baptist minister, David Lloyd, who preached and ministered in Criccieth and the village of Llanystumdwy. With fair skin and a wealth of dark hair, Mrs. William George was in youth and early womanhood a comely and fascinating woman. I saw her only in later life; and, though sorrows and trials had told on her frail frame, her troubles had only added to the fine charm and spirituality of her character. “Happy he with such a mother!” She proved to William George a capital housewife, and helped him to save enough to leave to her a small property even out of their hard-earned savings. To this couple had already been born the daughter Mary. Now, on January 17th, 1863, a son was born also and named David, after his two grandfathers—David George and David Lloyd. His admiring father recorded at the time that the little David was a “sturdy, healthy little fellow” with curly hair. At any rate, his father thought so; and thus, as a last flash of happiness to his dying father, little David came into the world. By such a chance twist of events, Manchester can claim to be the birthplace of David Lloyd George. Before he went to Manchester, William George had already decided to give up schoolmastering; and soon after David’s birth, towards the end of 1863, he left Manchester and entered into occupation of a small farm named Bwlford, about four miles from Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire. It was close to the home of his fathers. But this change came too late to save his life. He was already a tired man, and he was not equal to the strain of outdoor labour. On June 7th, 1864, he died of pneumonia, due to a chill caught in gardening. Thus little David was left fatherless before he had lived eighteen months on the earth; and on the threshold of life he was robbed of the influence which ought to be the strongest prop and stay of a young boy’s life. His father left him before the age of memory. Yet memory is a strange thing; for when Mr. Lloyd George revisited the home of his infancy some few years ago, he recalled instantly, with surprising accuracy, some features of his father’s farm.[3] The sudden death of William George left David’s mother with two small children on her hands, and another on the way to this vale of tears. The family inheritance ought to have left her in comparative security to bring up this family well. But William George, with that large-hearted generosity which had always characterised him, had allowed the family patrimony which devolved on him as heir-at-law to be enjoyed by others whom he thought to be in greater need than himself. Such savings as they had put together from a schoolmaster’s salary could not suffice to bring up a family in comfort or security. Thus to the grief of her husband’s death there was added for Mrs. William George a grave and acute anxiety for the upbringing of her children. It looked as if that little family would be driven into that wilderness of poverty which is no easy dwelling-place in these islands. But far away up in Carnarvonshire, in that little Welsh village which was her birthplace, Mrs. William George had a brother named Richard Lloyd.[4] He was not at all like the wealthy godfather of the storybooks. He was not by any means rich or prosperous. He was just the village bootmaker at a time when boots were still made in villages. True, he was also, like his father before him, a preacher and a minister. But he possessed no rich living or easy sinecure; on the contrary, like Paul the tent-maker, he received no penny of pay for either his preaching or his ministry. He belonged to a religious community classed with the Baptists and called the “Disciples of Christ,” who held a belief, unpopular in ecclesiastical circles, that a man ought to preach the Gospel of Christ and feed His flock without pay or reward.[5] In that simple faith he then preached and taught in the plain, grey little chapel above Criccieth and baptized in the little green basin of fresh spring water ever renewed by the running stream. Yet this preaching bootmaker did not seem to have suffered seriously in his Christianity by this strange and rare distaste for endowment. If it be still, as an Apostle once thought, “true religion and undefiled” to “visit the widow and the fatherless,” Richard Lloyd went straight to the mark. For on receiving his sister’s tragic news he put down his tools, left his workshop, and started out to help his bereaved relations. There was no railway from Criccieth to Carnarvon in those days; so for some twenty miles he journeyed on foot. Then from Carnarvon he took the train to Haverfordwest, and joined his widowed sister on her farm, a true friend and comforter. He stayed for some months helping her with the sale of her farm-lease and her stock. Then he took back the mother and the two children, Mary and David, to his own little home at Llanystumdwy. That is a plain record of a simple and heroic act. There, in that little Welsh mountain village, without any show or fuss, the sister and her children became part of Richard Lloyd’s home. A few months later the third child was born posthumously—a second boy, William George. The little stranger was welcomed in that simple, hospitable home. So for the next twelve years the little family lived and throve in the bootmaker’s cottage at Llanystumdwy; and there, in those village surroundings, little David grew from infancy to manhood. Let us see what the surroundings were. The little cottage stands to-day for all the world to visit—two-storied, four-roomed, creepered, slate-roofed; then called “Highgate,” now “Rose Cottage”—a sweet-smelling name. The front door opens on to the living-room—a warm, cosy chamber with a raftered ceiling, a big fireplace, and a floor of worn slate-slabs. It was in this room that the family had their meals and gathered in the evenings when the uncle read and talked to them. It was there that he cheered and rebuked those growing boys. You step round a low screen into a smaller room, once a storeroom for leather, but in those years used as the boys’ study. Here the boys were “interned” during the daily hours of home work; for Uncle Lloyd was as strict as he was kind. Between the two rooms a small cottage staircase mounts to the bedrooms—now three, in those days two. The boys slept in the little front room looking over the street. Descend again and pass through the back door. You pass into a fair-sized cottage garden, with several fruit-trees—apple, plum, and gooseberry. Every inch of the soil is filled with vegetables. There are traces of an old pigsty that once stood against the cottage wall. Move a few steps to your left, and you can enter a little stone building that gives the impression of having been a single-roomed cottage. It is now like a capacious cave. This was Richard Lloyd’s workshop. There is a large fireplace in the corner near the garden. On the side nearer the road is a space where the benches of Richard Lloyd’s workmen ran along the wall by the small window. There by the door is the little hole in the wall where Richard Lloyd kept his papers and into which the boys pushed their books. It looks like an old spy-hole, now blocked at the farther end. This place was not merely a workshop. It was known as “the village Parliament.” Here the “village Hampdens” poured out their grievances; hither the evicted farmers and underpaid labourers came to consult the village oracle. On wet days the place was crowded. For bootmakers are notorious storm-centres both in town and country; and this bootmaker was a prophet and priest as well. It was always both the refuge and the guard-room of the village children. There, against the corner, looking into the sad grey wall, stood the children who had misbehaved, waiting for Richard Lloyd’s kindly word of release. Good boys would often bring bad boys to be punished; and the good boys did not always get off without a clearance of soul. Who could tell whether “Uncle Lloyd” was going to be stern or soft? It was always a fascinating mystery for children—that workshop; in any case, there were always the bootmakers’ tools to finger and handle if you were lucky. The children knew that Uncle Lloyd found it very hard to refuse a thread; and what more fascinating than beeswax? Sticky, black, and smelly! But put out your hand for the knife—then ten to one he would see you—and instantly the stern look would come into his grey eyes, his eyebrows would contract, and he would cry in the voice which thrilled you—“No! No! Not that! Not that!” Pass out of this little crumbling old building, with the slates now sagging down as if the whole thing might collapse, but for the one upright beam which now supports the roof, and take a few steps still to your left along the stone footpath. There you find the garden divided from the street only by a low wall of rubble. Over that wall, David—like that other David, the sweet-singing psalmist of Israel[6] would often leap, and head across the village on some boyish adventure. In these buildings the Lloyds had lived for several generations. There is still (1920) living in the village of Llanystumdwy an old tailor of ninety-five years of age whose chief pride it is that he made the first pair of trousers for the Prime Minister of England. The old man can remember David Lloyd, the grandfather of the Prime Minister, cutting leather in the little room on the right of the entrance door of the cottage. He can remember this friend and neighbour, who was also a minister and preacher, breaking forth into singing verse when moved, as those bardic preachers of Wales are still wont to do.[7] Bobby Jones, the son of this old tailor, was one of David’s intimate comrades of boybood; and they two carved their names together on the trees in the woods and on the village bridge. Many legends have already grown round Richard Lloyd’s cottage and the life lived in it. There is no need to exaggerate the poverty of that home. Richard Lloyd was a master bootmaker and always employed at least two hands. He must have earned a good weekly sum. His chief fault was that he could not collect his money. It was somewhat distressing to Mrs. William George to hear her brother serenely say to customers: “I can wait—any time will do.” She, being a woman, well knew that in the matter of collecting debts there is no time like the present. At any rate, all that he had was theirs. They were fed on simple fare—more oats and barley, as Mr. Lloyd George has since told us, than wheat—but they were well fed. Eggs were cheap in the village, and the garden was full of vegetables. There were doubtless hard times. There was little meat—perhaps they were none the worse for that. But these children were nevertheless always held up in school as models of neatness and cleanliness. There was little to spare for pleasure. There was no easy flow of “pocket-money” for these boys. But they possessed the heart of the whole matter. They loved one another, and they were happy. “It was a little paradise,” says one who stayed there often,[8] and when asked to explain she adds: “there was such high talk.” “Plain living and high thinking,” was the note of that little home. Here, indeed, was— “Fearful innocence, And pure religion, breathing household laws.” There was also much kindness and humanity. Richard Lloyd could not for long be a stern uncle. The pictures handed down to us are Goldsmithian in their quaint and simple charm—the little David sitting on one of his uncle’s knees and punctuating his infant periods by beating his fist on the other; or, in later years, wheedling his uncle with some clever boyish defence of an indefensible prank; or listening for long hours, with open mouth and eyes, to the “deep sighing of the poor,” as the farmers and labourers from all the district round poured their tales of woe into the ears of the gentle village seer. I saw much of Richard Lloyd at a later time. He was a man who always lived on the heights of thought and feeling; he was one of nature’s great men to whom goodness was a delight: he was one of God’s crusaders. Tall and bearded, but with a clean-shaven mouth and dark eyebrows, he was a man of singular dignity and strength both in bearing and expression. It is difficult to describe the impression of mingled strength and tenderness which he gave. His face had some of the vigour of the eagle; and yet with it all his voice had some of the softness of the dove. He loved children with all the strength of his large, warm heart; and yet he was never weak with them, but sometimes very stern, with the strength of those who can be “cruel only to be kind.” “He was the most selfless man I ever knew,” is the deliberate verdict of one of his foster children to-day. “Even in illness he never spoke of himself. It was painful to him even to think of himself.” Such was the high influence that filled that little cottage and made it a fit nursery for a ruler of men. From the moment that Richard Lloyd took over the guardianship of his sister’s bereaved family he gave to the task all his resources of money, love, and wisdom. He was not one of those who know limits to giving— “Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore Of nicely calculated less or more.” He laboured for these children as if they had been his own. If money was spared it was only to save it for their better training in later years. The only available school at that time in Llandystumdwy was the National School provided by the Established Church of England and Wales; and to that school the children had to go. Many years afterwards, when the House of Commons was in the midst of one of its chronic wrangles over religious education, Mr. Lloyd George startled the High Churchmen by putting himself forward as a specimen of their chosen education. He was well within the letter of the fact; but I doubt whether the Llanystumdwy Voluntary School at that time could be called an average Church School; for the head master of the school—a Welshman named David Evans—was more than an average schoolmaster.[9] He was a good “scholar” and mathematician, and he taught well. He gave the young boys that thorough grounding in the elements of knowledge which is really a better gift for the young than all the frills of a more dainty schooling. Richard Lloyd, at any rate, showed his confidenec in this teaching by keeping the boys on at school for two years beyond the ordinary limited time. From twelve to fourteen years of age David Lloyd George worked with a small group of boys also still remaining on at school in what would now be called an “Ex VIIth” standard. These boys carried their mathematics on as far as trigonometry, learned the elements of Latin, and were encouraged to read widely. David Evans kept a close eye on these studies, and Richard Lloyd found the fees well worth his while. I have talked to one of the boys[10] who stayed on at school with David Lloyd George, and his impressions of that time are still very vivid. His recollection is that David Lloyd George was the quickest boy of this little group. David could do twice as much work as any other boy in the same time. He still remembers the envy and annoyance which this habit used to cause among David’s companions. But little David was especially quick at higher mathematics. “He was through trigonometry,” says this witness, “by the time we started.” He was very rapid at mental arithmetic. But perhaps the most active part of his growth came outside his school life. Most of the other boys of their age had left school and gone out to work, and those few picked ones that remained were a small company and hardly numerous enough for games on a large scale. Thus it was that they took to walking instead of play; and during these walks David began to develop that habit of keen discussion which he has loved throughout his life. His favourite subjects in those days were Baptism and Tithe. Among the little company were two pupil-teachers who were a little older than the boys themselves. Both of these teachers were destined for the Church; one of them became a rector and another became a canon of St. David’s.[11] We can imagine the debates that took place within this little company of keen, honest, ardent youths! Thus, in this varied life of work and play, the young David grew from infancy to youth, there in that distant little Welsh village, between the mountains and the sea. [1] Here is his pedigree on the paternal side: William George (farmer) and his wife (lived to 80 and 90 years respectively) " David George (farmer, died at 33) " William George (schoolmaster, died at 44) " David Lloyd George. [2] A large engraving of Dr. Henry Martineau, signed by himself and set in a massive oak frame, is one of the treasured family heirlooms to-day. [3] He noticed that a passage had been widened, and he asked after a green gate which was found to have been removed. He can still remember his sister putting stones under the gate to prevent the men from coming to take away his father’s goods. [4] At this time thirty years of age. Born in July 1834. [5] The movement had its origin in one of those great efforts after a return to simple Christianity which have from time to time stirred the surface of the Welsh Churches. This was led by Mr. J. R. Jones of Ramoth, who died in 1822. David Lloyd became one of its elders, and was largely influenced by the writings of the Campbells. The Campbellites in the United States still number some 2,000,000. [6] See Psalm xviii. verse 29. [7] He was ordained on May 20th, 1828, in the Baptist chapel at Criccieth and died in 1839. This singing habit it known as “hwyl.” [8] Miss Jones, a niece of Richard Lloyd. [9] See Mr. Lloyd George’s charming sketch of the schoolmaster in his speech at Llanystumdwy on September 8th, 1917: “He had a genius for teaching.” [10] Mr. William Williams, who occupies a farm near Llanystumdwy. [11] The Rev. Owen Owens and Canon Camber-Williams of St. David’s. MR. WILLIAM GEORGE, | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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