SCHOOL DAYS
“Ye Presences of Nature in the sky
And on the earth! Ye visions of the hills
And Souls of lonely places! can I think
A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed
Such ministry?”
WORDSWORTH’S _Prelude_.
THE training of a little Welsh Nonconformist child in a village Church
School must lead either to submission or to revolt. In most cases it
leads to submission. In this case it led to revolt. That is what makes
the story of David Lloyd George worth telling.
To subject children of one faith to the religious discipline of another
in a school subsidised by the State was, and still is, part of the
ordinary machinery of life in this island; and it is generally
acquiesced in by children, who as a rule suffer from a great fear of
varying from their kind.
But in this case there were influences behind the boy which suggested
the thought of injustice; and there is no more flaming thought in the
mind of a young child. There was the uncle in the workshop, type of the
heroic and the divine; he was against the system, and did not hesitate
to say so in the presence of the boys. Then there was the village
blacksmith, whose “smithy,” hard by the school, was a sort of village
cave of Adullam; he said so between the clang of the hammer on the
reverberant anvil, and what he said was law. No wonder that there
stirred in the boy’s mind the working wonder whether he should really
submit.
There was, for instance, the yearly visit of the rector, the squire, and
the gentry, in full feudal state, to hear the replies to the Church
Catechism—a sort of annual homage to the powers that were, not unusual
in village schools.
Then there was the visit of the Bishop, who was willing to confirm as
many children, Baptist or otherwise, as the rector would present for him
to lay hands on.
Now David admired his schoolmaster and worked hard and steadily in the
only school accessible to him. But when the Church tried to turn his
necessity to such uses he remembered that he was a Nonconformist child
born of Nonconformist parents. Then he became a rebel.
The tales of these school revolts have already become part of the heroic
legends of Wales. They have been told in many forms. I will try to tell
the simple facts as gathered from contemporary witnesses and comrades.
The most famous revolt occurred over the Catechism. We can recapture the
scene. There were the three village authorities—the Squire, the Rector,
and the Schoolmaster, together with the Diocesan Inspector and a bevy of
fair ladies—standing in front of the little class of Welsh children in
the grey little building, expecting nothing but meekness and docility.
Nothing fierce about these visitors, you may be sure—rather an attitude
of smiling expectancy as they waited to hear the children repeat in
chorus the comforting assertion that they were ready to order themselves
“lowly and reverently” to all their “betters.”
But look at the children. Their eyes look strangely bright and their
lips are drawn together. There have been many whisperings on the way to
school, and much flitting to and fro of the small Scotch cap with the
ribbons that David wore. Some look flushed; others look grave and pale.
Fear battles against resolve. Something big is struggling in those
little minds.
The rector puts his questions; the squire affably awaits the reply; the
schoolmaster looks stern. Little David looks unusually innocent.
There is a dead silence.
The rector raises his eyebrows and repeats the question:
“What is thy duty towards thy neighbour?”
Still, a dead silence.
And so the question is passed from child to child. The little heads are
shaken. The little faces grow paler and paler. But still silence.
The rector turns to the schoolmaster questioningly. The schoolmaster is
white with vexation. The squire smiles indulgently. Little David looks
more innocent than ever.
But farther along the line, behind his little desk, sits a boy with a
little troubled, anxious face, looking as if he were the centre of guilt
in that little company. He watches with growing trouble the ashen face
of the schoolmaster; for he loves his master with all his soul, and he
cannot bear to see him suffer. For this is little William George—a boy
of milder, quieter temperament, given to love his enemies; and when his
much-distressed head master appeals to the children to recite the
Apostles’ Creed it is William George who suddenly breaks the silence
with a strident “I believe,” and all but two or three “infant” Die-hards
join in the recital that followed. The schoolmaster turns to the class
with a flush of pleasure; the rector smiles—“good boys”—the squire
nods approvingly; and the scene ends as suddenly as it began.
So much for the Catechism revolt. The second revolt arose over the
Church’s claim to “confirm.”[12]
It was little William Williams, one of David’s intimates, who had been
selected as a capture for the Bishop. His father, a Calvinistic
Methodist, but with a kindly heart for the great, had surrendered the
lad to the rector. William had been duly prepared and instructed.
Confirmation day had arrived. William Williams, shining with soap, smart
in his best clothes, was already on the road—walking to school to join
the church boys. There the little catechumens, all duly marshalled, were
waiting to be marched off to the church.
But on the way to school it was fated that William Williams should meet
David Lloyd George. Seeing his friend so smart, David naturally asked
what he was going to do. Williams told him. David’s eyes flashed; his
voice rang out. He argued; he persuaded; he urged. Not that! Not that!
His winged words went home. In a few moments William Williams, aged
fourteen, felt thoroughly ashamed of himself. His best clothes and his
clean collar became garments of shame. He was willing to follow David
anywhere.
The two boys managed to get out into the school-yard; and there, in the
twinkling of an eye, they were over the wall. They hid behind the hedge.
In a few moments out came the schoolmaster, hurried and eager; he could
see no one in sight. He blew his whistle once, twice, and yet again.
There was no reply. Time pressed. The Bishop could not be kept waiting.
There was nothing for it but to go back and fetch the others.
So David and William Williams stood and watched while the little
procession of children, with their nicely washed faces, walked across
the school-yard to the church.
Then, when all had passed by, out came the two rebels. Without a pause
they jumped over the wall, leapt into the road, and made for Richard
Lloyd’s workshop. Instantly, when he had heard their story, the
bootmaker dropped his last and patted the boys on the back. “Well done,
my boys!” he cried; “well done!”
I will suggest to any Anglican reader that he should, for the moment,
try to look at the situation from the point of view of his Nonconformist
neighbour. Suppose that he, an Anglican parent, were obliged by law to
send his boy to a Baptist School because no other school existed in his
village. Suppose then that the Baptist minister took advantage of this
situation to baptize the boy up to the neck in the village stream. What
would the Anglican parent do? Why, probably something much more violent
than either uncle Lloyd or nephew David.
Yet the spirit of rebellion is rare, and the act is slow. Doubtless
there were other boys in that school whose hearts waxed hot within them,
and other parents whose blood boiled. But they did nothing. Where David
Lloyd George differed from the other boys, and his uncle from the other
parents and guardians, was just here—that they acted while the others
merely raged. That is the startling difference.
They possessed that particular quality which explodes in deeds. There it
was already—this care thing called courage, which was, in process of
time, to become the driving-wheel of the whole machine.
It is not to be thought that a boy thus endowed was to prove a pattern
boy in all directions. David was sound enough at heart; but he was
certainly not a saint. He was not born with a halo round his curly head.
In that little village he was often the leader of enterprises of pith
and moment. He was not without suspicions of piracy. “It’s that David
Lloyd George,” was the sure comment of the village mother when she found
her fences down. Wherever those two ribbons were seen flying in the
wind, you might be sure that the other boys were not far behind. You
would scent mischief in the tainted breeze. There was indeed much to be
done. There were fish to be caught; rabbits to be snared; dogs to be
trained. There was even—alas!—at one time a privy “cache” in the woods
where pipes and tobacco were stored to be fearfully tested on uncertain
stomachs.
No, certainly David was no model of the boyish proprieties; no candidate
for a stucco niche. He was already a Robin Hood of the woods, an
adventurer of that winding, brawling stream. He led others into the
adventures with him; for he was already gregarious to the finger-tips.
He would draw along with him his more cautious brother; and, somehow, it
always seemed to be the brother who bore the weight of the trouble that
followed.
Not that David ever shirked the penalties of his youthful sins. He was
ever ready to “face the music.” He would bravely stand before his uncle
in his sterner moods; and many an explosive of argument and reproof had
to be expended on his well-entrenched defences.
Not that his uncle ever took up that relentless attitude which drives so
many children faster on the downward path. He remembered the text—“Whom
He loveth He chasteneth,” or, as it has been rewritten, “lick ’im and
love ’im.” But Richard Lloyd never let the stripes blot out the love. He
always believed in this boy David. That was the real secret of the
uncle’s influence. Beneath the rough, dusty ore he already saw the
gleaming gold.
There were indeed some rare features about this boy’s character. His
early companions testify to some features that still shine in memory.
“He was the most kind-hearted boy I ever met,” said one who was an
inseparable. “If he ever got a penny he would buy his sweets, and then
divide up the whole among the other boys.” He was very fond of
animals—a glorious virtue in the young. There was always a dog in his
train—and a dog, being ever young, loves youth and mischief. Then David
was ever full of pity for the weak. Pity and audacity met in his nature.
They made him at school, as in after-life, a terror to the bully and a
trial to the boaster.
His youthful companions cannot remember that he was notably ambitious.
But he was from early days a lover of books; and that often held in
leash his passion for adventure. He rarely, for instance, played truant
from school. There is one historic dawn, still standing out in red
letters in the memory of his friends. On that morning the school-bell
sounded to deaf ears; all that day those spirits from prison scampered
by the river-side testing a new dog.[13] The deed was never repeated.
That day of glowing delight was probably burnt into his memory by one of
those reprimands from an uncle whose words cut deeper than another’s
whips.
There is, indeed, an epic story of a holiday hunt of a hare down in the
Aberkin farm between the village and the sea. The boys followed the dogs
and the dogs went through the river, but an old ganger on the railway
refused to allow the boys to cross the bridge. But David was not to be
daunted. “Come on, boys!” he cried; and straight through the river he
went almost up to his shoulders!
As the years went on he became more serious. He conceived the idea of
going to see the world. He spent weeks with maps and made a plan of a
journey. Boys will do such things, and the difficulty generally comes
when the tickets have to be bought. That was where David Lloyd George’s
plan broke down. But if he could not wander in the body, he could at any
rate travel in the spirit. He read more and more as the years went on.
After twelve, remaining on at school after his friends, he became rather
a lonely boy. At that time he would often go off with a book into the
woods; and he acquired the habit of climbing a tree and there reading
for hours in some kindly fork of the branches far away from his romping
friends.
There, alone in the woods, his mind formed; and the shadowy whims of
youth—perhaps influenced, like Wordsworth’s, by the surrounding
mountains and sea—steeled into firmer stuff. When he was a very small
boy he would say, boy-like, to his uncle, “I am going to be a giant,
like that tree.” This infantile yearning after something larger than his
natal fate seemed to grow upon him. A sense of power seemed to be
working within him. Strange, when you consider the cramping conditions
of his life. Here was a boy living in a little cottage in a remote Welsh
village; talking a despised language; an obscure member of a race
scoffed at by the powerful of this earth. He had already proclaimed
himself faithful to a religion contemned by all who wished to rise in
life. He was surrounded by a peasantry long trained to humility; living
in houses that belonged to others; with few rights in their own
land—excluded from their own woods and fields by laws of trespass, and
menaced with dire penalties if they killed the wild animals of their own
land. He found himself born with little freedom beyond the liberty of
the village street. There were few adventures for him that were not
crimes in the eye of the law. In such a life there seemed enough to
quell any growing spirit and to crush any latent ambition. For in those
days the social power of the Welsh squires was still scarcely
challenged; their claims shadowed all the large spaces in the world
around him.
Yet this boy began to look at all this with candid, unprejudiced eyes.
He began to grasp the fact that what was required was daring, and still
daring.
In this vision he was by no means alone. It was a perception dimly
stirring in the minds of all those multitudes of youth who were then,
during those years, the first to pass through the new schools of the
nation and to win the franchise of the mind. Again, where he was alone
was in the courage to pursue this vision—the courage to act as well as
to see.
At the age of fourteen (1877) it became necessary to choose a
life-calling for David Lloyd George. The village National School had
finished its work for the boy. The extra two years’ schooling had
brought him as far as that training could take him.
Richard Lloyd was not indeed compelled by any law, human or divine, to
carry the boy’s education any further. He would certainly have achieved
as much as most men consider due to a sister’s child if he had now taken
David from school and apprenticed him to his own honourable handicraft
of bootmaking.
But Uncle Lloyd knew only too well the carking cares of a workman’s
life. He knew what it was to feel a mind-hunger which cannot be sated.
Those who saw much of the preacher-bootmaker in those days tell how
eager he was for books—how in this eagerness he struck up a very
admirable friendship with the kindly village curate; how, after his long
day’s work, he would read half through the night, and how the village
doctor, going on some errand of midnight or dawn, would still see the
light of his candle shining through his bedroom window.
Such a life is often filled with an aching regret. The hardly tasked
body yearns for a fuller freedom—the freedom to follow, undisturbed,
the clear call of the mind.
It was such a life that he dreamed of for his boys when he decided to
send them, at all costs, into one of those learned professions which
Britons hold in so much honour. His eager aim was to free them, at any
sacrifice, from the great burden of manual drudgery.
That being decided, it was not so easy to make a choice between the
professions. Richard Lloyd was not one of those men who think it a sign
of strength to force children into careers against their own will. Above
all, he wished to have the following wind of their free consent and
help.
The “ministry” was practically closed to them by that rule of their
uncle’s Church which forbade Christian service as a means of livelihood.
The Established Church, indeed, was an open road for them; there
“Welcome!” was written over the door for every clever Welsh village boy.
If David had consented to follow the lead of some of his village
friends, who can say that he might not have ended as an Archbishop? The
thought never took serious shape at Highgate Cottage. I scarcely dare to
think of what would have been said in the village “smithy” or the
uncle’s workshop if David had turned his steps towards that primrose
path—as both he and his brother were more than once invited to do.
Richard Lloyd’s own desire was that David should be a doctor. But the
lad had an instinctive, physical shrinking from disease and death.
Richard Lloyd, being a wise man, sorrowfully agreed that David’s
temperament was unfitted for the hospital ward and the sick-room.
His mother, Mrs. William George, pondering the future in her heart, and
watching the boy with a fond mother’s eyes, desired him to be a lawyer.
The mother won.
In those old days when Mrs. William George was in the depths of sorrow
and distress, through the long agony of her husband’s illness, she had
received much help and kindness from an old friend of her husband’s, one
of those tender-hearted family lawyers who are the crown and salvation
of their profession—Mr. Thomas Goffey of Liverpool. The boys had heard
much of this man at an impressionable age; and the effect left on David
was a great desire to go and do likewise. “To be a lawyer like Mr.
Goffey!” That was the shining quest before him.
At this critical moment the memory of this helper acted as a magnet to
them all; and it was this lode-stone that drew on first David, and then
his brother William.
In such pleasant guise did that useful calling present itself; in such
Christian fashion came to the youth this summons. The lawyer’s gown
appeared to him as the robe of the Samaritan.
So far, so good. But the career of the law requires a long
apprenticeship; and apprenticeship means money. The examination fees
alone for a solicitor amount to a good sum, and there was a substantial
premium on apprenticeship to a good firm to be paid in addition. Then
there would be over five years without earnings. Where would they obtain
the resources to face the strain?
At this point Richard Lloyd turned to the pooled family savings of
himself and his sister, Mrs. William George, and dipped deep. Little was
left when sufficient for this purpose had been drawn, and even so the
supply was precariously meagre. Could they find enough to start the two
boys on their careers?
It was clear, on a survey, that they could not send the boys either to a
higher school or to a University. How, then, were they to acquire that
considerable store of general knowledge required of the legal
apprentice?
David had done well under Evans’s faithful tuition. He had advanced into
the higher mathematics; he had read a certain amount of history; he had
now mastered the elements of French and Latin.
But much more was required if he was to pass that first obstruction in
the great obstacle race set before the novice in the law—the
Preliminary Examination. He must, for instance, know more French. He
must read Cæsar and Sallust. The village dominie could not carry David
as far as that.
Here seemed a formidable gulf to bridge. Less formidable barriers have
closed careers to others and driven them back into the workshop.
But human love can leap over great obstacles; and Richard Lloyd was no
ordinary man. He knew neither French nor Latin. Very well, he would set
out to learn them.
So together the uncle and the nephew started into the unexplored. Hand
in hand, they tackled the Latin and the French grammars, and thumbed the
dictionaries. For this great-hearted man knew that if both be ignorant
of the way it is better to go together. Company gives courage. So in the
dark winter evenings, with the light of a candle, they together spelt
out the sentences of Cæsar and Sallust and laboriously read Æsop in
French. I will warrant that those lessons in Latin and French were not
wasted. I even doubt sometimes whether the class-rooms of Eton or
Harrow, with their picked teachers, can show anything so inspiring as
this little village study—the uncle and nephew struggling along that
unknown path, lit only by zeal and affection. May it not be, perhaps,
that the accident of this laborious schooling gave a special nourishment
to the boy’s instinct of self-confidence, proved more potent than the
spoon-feeding of some well-endowed college?
At any rate, this common struggle for knowledge gave the uncle a new
insight into his nephew’s powers. From this time onward the boy became
his very special “Di”—the darling of his heart—the apple of his eye.
He began to perceive that there were few things impossible for this boy
to achieve.
At last this astonishing experiment in coaching came to an end. But his
uncle was determined to stand by the nephew to the end in the first
great trial of his life.
In December, 1877, he accompanied him to Liverpool, where the
examination was to take place. Every morning—as he often told in later
life—Richard Lloyd accompanied the youth to the examination room in St.
George’s Hall; and every evening, after the day’s work, he met him on
the steps of the hall and went home with him.
The examination lasted a week. Suspense was followed by triumph. David
passed.
The young hopeful who had set out from Llanystumdwy with the good wishes
and fervent prayers of friends and neighbours, returned on December 8th
with the first flush of achievement on his cheek.
Nowhere was there a happier Christmas in that year of 1877 than at
“Highgate.”
There was only one man as happy as the uncle and the mother—and that
was the village schoolmaster. It was a proud day when he could solemnly
record the fact of David’s passing in the Log Book of the Llanystumdwy
National School.
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[12] Implying a belief in Infant Baptism, “Confirmation” is regarded as
inconsistent with the creed of the Baptists.
[13] “Bismarck”—a dog snatched from the streets of Hamburg and brought
home by a sailor from the village—a bold and unscrupulous poacher.