YOUTH
“Who, with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;”
WORDSWORTH’S _The Happy Warrior_.
PORTMADOC is a little provincial business town lying on the coast some
five miles to the west of Criccieth in the very heart of Cardigan Bay.
It stands at the mouth of the Glaslyn, one of those little mountain
rivers which flow southward through wild valleys from the Snowdon range.
The river broadens to a port at its mouth and the town spreads on both
banks. A hundred years ago the land here was below high-water mark. It
was redeemed by an enterprising man who has given his name to the town
and the estate.[14] The old high-water mark can be seen far up the
valley, and it is an actual fact that every building in Portmadoc itself
stands on land snatched from the sea.
Here in Portmadoc, just east of the Town Hall, stood the office of
Messrs. Breese, Jones, and Casson, the firm to which David Lloyd George
was articled after he had passed his Preliminary Law Examination. There
the square-built, airy chambers still stand. Here, in this building,
young David Lloyd George, aged sixteen, took his seat at the window on
one of those high stools where the clerks of to-day still sit; and
doubtless the young David’s eyes sometimes glanced anxiously at the same
old clock that still measures out the limits of work and play. The
preliminaries of this articling took some time; but within six
months—at the opening of 1879—David had been fully articled by his
uncle as clerk to Mr. Casson, the junior partner.
Portmadoc itself stands in prim straight rows of slate-roofed houses
built at right-angles to the long main street. The great thing about the
town is that from every corner of its streets you can see the mighty
mountains of Snowdon on the horizon. It was still under those Eagle
Rocks that David’s life-work was to be carried on for the next few
years.
It was no longer possible for him to live in the little cottage at
Llanystumdwy, which was over seven miles from Portmadoc and two miles
from Criccieth railway-station.
So it was arranged that the lad should spend the week at Portmadoc and
go back to his uncle’s home at week-ends.
During the week he lodged with some good people whose children had gone
out into the world[15] and who looked after him for several years as if
he had been their own child. Like many another young Welshman he was
also taken into the kindly fraternity of the chapel folk, who looked
after him on behalf of his uncle. He soon began to find friends. On
Wednesdays he would attend the little chapel; and he was especially fond
of frequenting the little candle-making workshop behind the main street,
where the workmen can still be seen ingeniously contriving the special
illuminant candles for the slate quarries of North Wales. There, as in
the smithy at Llanystumdwy, he found much congenial company for
discussion and debate; for it was a significant fact that in youth David
Lloyd George was always drawn to the places where men assemble and
discuss their affairs.
Here was a youth at the age of sixteen taken out of his village and
thrown into the larger turmoil of the world’s affairs. The solicitors’
firm to which he was articled was an important legal centre in
Carnarvonshire. The solicitors were Clerks to the Petty Sessional
Division, and Mr. Breese was also Clerk to the Lieutenant of the County,
besides being the Liberal agent for Merionethshire. Finding that the
youth was handy and smart, they soon began to use him as deputy in their
various functions. So David found himself immersed into all the affairs
of a great county, besides being in constant touch with the stirring
life of a little port. The ships and sailors were ever coming and going,
and all the murmur of larger interests flowed in from outside. There, in
that little corner of Wales, they could constantly hear “the great wave
which echoes round the world.”
From the vantage-post of his firm the boy could gradually gain an
insight into the whole machinery of county administration.
In law, as in journalism, provincial experience is a far better school
for a young man than that of London; for in the provinces work is less
specialised, and the young clerk in a busy lawyer’s office has a chance
of such varied work as his powers show him capable of. David Lloyd
George, for instance, now found himself often called upon to undertake
responsible tasks; to watch the interests of his firm in the Police
Court or in the Quarter Session; to collect rates and taxes; to find his
way through that complicated network of wire entanglements which British
wisdom had thrown around the exercise of the suffrage. The canvassing
work which he did for his firm in their capacity as Liberal agents stood
him in very good stead later on which he had to do the same work for
himself. It was during this period that he acquired, too, that intimate
mastery of the details of rural rating with which he afterwards
astonished the House of Commons. During the same years he achieved an
insight into the surprising affairs of many county families. There is no
surer way of finding out the secrets of the English land system than to
look at them through the peep-holes of a good lawyer’s office.
No doubt the young Lloyd George lost much by being plunged so early in
life into the urgencies of practical work. But he also gained. For it
would have been difficult to devise a training more suitable for a
coming statesman.
For a time the young man was absorbed by his new work; and, indeed, it
was enough to take up his energy. David Lloyd George was from the
beginning a keen lawyer. He was not content with practical experience;
he read hard at the law; but in his case law did not take form in his
mind as a fixed dead thing, but as a vital function of growth, with
possibilities of perpetual change and reform.
Thus his apprenticeship began to feed and stimulate his instinctive
interest in public affairs. His daily experience led him back at every
turn into larger public interests and speculations. He had his week
evenings free; and so gradually among the young men of Portmadoc he was
led into that life of debate which has always been his very life-blood.
In 1880 his uncle, his mother, his brother, and his sister gave up the
little cottage at Llanystumdwy and moved to “Morvin House” in Criccieth.
Richard Lloyd and Mrs. William George, their mother, had now saved
enough to enable Uncle Lloyd to give up the bootmaking; and his interest
was now so much centred round David that he decided to make a move that
would enable the youth to live at home. The little house where David was
to live for the next ten years was just beneath the walls of that
shattered Norman castle which crowns a precipitous cliff on the very
edge of the sea. Now battered and worn by the assaults of man and the
ravages of the ocean, that castle was once a strong link in that scheme
of blockhouse fortresses which the Normans built to keep down North
Wales. The ruins typify to-day the valour of this land of bards, and
prove the power of a little nation over a mighty conqueror. At its
strongest, the rule of the Normans extended very few feet beyond those
castle walls. Now this fortress is in ruins; and all around the very
portals of that ancient blockhouse you will hear few words of any
language except the very tongue which the Normans tried to ban and to
bar.[16]
To this house David Lloyd George now came home every evening and he was
able to give up his kindly lodgings in Portmadoc. This return to the
strongest influence in his youth perhaps explains a certain deepening of
purpose which now becomes visible in his diaries[17]; but there emerges
also a new independence of spirit. Somewhat to the alarm of the uncle,
the youth was beginning to exhibit a rambling interest that went far
outside that still lagoon of puritanism which was the home of that high,
simple spirit. There was already a touch of that defiant self-confidence
which has so often since puzzled and troubled both the followers and the
counsellors of Mr. Lloyd George. The young man was reading widely and
daringly—not merely sermons, but plays, histories, and novels. He was
going through crises of spiritual doubt unknown to the securely anchored
soul of his foster-father. He was catching the malady of his age, and
finding its remedy, as so many others of that time found it, in the
vague anodyne of books like Carlyle’s _Sartor Resartus_.
His growing spirit was finding outlets in every direction. He was
attending political meetings and listening eagerly and critically to
such gospel as his elders preached. He had begun writing regularly for
the newspapers; and over the challenging name of “Brutus,” the _North
Wales Express_ was producing a series of articles,[18] vigorous and
combative—a little young and flamboyant, but always arresting and
stimulating to the audience of young Wales.
Already in the 1880 Election those articles, written by a boy not yet 18
years of age, played no insignificant part in North Wales: and now the
people of Carnarvonshire were beginning to ask of the young David, as in
the old days another people asked of a greater prophet—“Who art thou?
What sayest thou of thyself?”
To these questions the daring youth soon began to give an answer with
both speech and action. In 1881, the third year of his apprenticeship,
he was elected a member of one of those little centres of intellectual
energy which were growing up all over Wales in the dawn of this new
time. The Portmadoc Debating Society may have meant little to the world;
but it meant a great deal to itself and to the town of Portmadoc. This
little assembly met weekly in a room over a shop in the Portmadoc High
Street. There came together an eager throng of young Welshmen determined
to discuss for themselves all the problems of the day. Their debates
covered every great question of the eighties. David Lloyd George, now
eighteen years of age, did not intend to be a silent member. He soon
began to speak often. He took part in debates on all the great problems
that occupied his later life—Franchise and Free Trade, Trade Unionism
and Irish Land, even the Channel Tunnel. On all these subjects he
expressed bold and progressive opinions, and in this little school he
began to train his power of speech.
Such a passion for debate is a common disease of youth, and often passes
like a fitful fever. But with the young Lloyd George it was not to be
so. It was soon clear that the power of speech was with him a very
special gift, and he threw into it a great deal of care and industry.
Men at Portmadoc will still describe how he could be seen walking along
the high-road gesticulating as he practised his speeches; and there is
no doubt that at this moment of his life he already had some dim
perception that he possessed the magic gift of oratory.
There are those in Portmadoc to-day who can still remember some of these
youthful orations, and especially remember the wonderful speech which he
made in 1881 on the Egyptian crisis of that year. At that moment
conflicting opinions swirled round the figure of Arabi Pasha—the
Egyptian Nationalist leader. Was he a hero or a villain? History has not
even yet quite decided.[19] But the young Lloyd George was in no doubt.
He saw in Arabi a hero of romance rightly struggling for the freedom of
a small nation. The impassioned speech in which he defended Arabi gained
for him the first attentions of the Welsh press. It revealed to his
hearers that deep enthusiasm for freedom among the little nations which
afterwards became his leading public characteristic. Men who heard the
speech still speak of it as a remarkable event in Portmadoc.
At that time young Lloyd George was slim of body and pale of face; the
portraits that exist possess none of that twinkling gaiety which came to
him in later years. Youth with him, as with many, seemed to be the
gravest period of his life; and indeed it happened that very heavy tasks
were laid upon these young Welshmen at the opening of their lives.
For these were perilous years in Wales. The power of the old order had
been shaken, but not shattered. The constituencies indeed could no
longer be divided up by the squires at a private meeting in Carnarvon;
it was not quite so easy now to woo a seat through a Welsh interpreter.
The General Election of 1868 had revealed the power of the new order;
but the day of Welsh Nationalism was still to come. The older men stood
aloof; there was much of the old cringing humility still left in the
social life. The squires had punished the Welsh farmers of
Carnarvonshire for their votes in 1868 by ruthless, widespread
evictions, and a certain fear had been spread through the county. It was
clear to the young Lloyd George that this fear could only be destroyed
by a new dose of daring and defiance. Thus beneath the shadow of Snowdon
the new spirit of young Wales was working up to a storm.
It is not to be wondered at if his debating achievements caused in the
mind of this eager young man certain stirrings of ambition that began to
belie the opinion of his old schoolmates. In November, 1881, he visited
London for the first time: and, like most young men with kindly London
friends, he was taken to see the House of Commons. At this time he was
keeping a fairly full diary; and the entry of this date (November 12th)
is rather remarkable in view of subsequent events:
“I will not say but that I eyed the assembly in a spirit similar
to that in which William the Conqueror eyed England on his visit
to Edward the Confessor, as the region of his future domain. Oh,
vanity!”
Perhaps it is scarcely fair to intrude on such self-communings of early
aspiring adolescence—easily forgivable for their naïve boyish pride.
But in the same diaries, a year or two later, this young articled clerk
jots down another reflection rather strangely prophetic of what was to
come. A quotation appeared in the _Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald_ which
signified that David Lloyd George was already in the public eye:
“When first the college rolls receive his name,
The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame,
Resistless burns the fever of renown,
Caught from the strong contagion of the gown.”[20]
Young Lloyd George makes a curiously level-headed comment on this
reference to his thirst for renown:
“Perhaps (?) it will be gratified. I believe it depends entirely
on what forces of pluck and _industry_ I can muster.”
Strangely sober reflection for the eighteenth year!
The desire for fame—that “last infirmity of noble minds”—was already
there. But it had not turned the head of the young man. Already he
seemed to have some measure of the task before him, and of the effort
that would be required to achieve it.
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[14] Mr. A. Maddocks. One of the men who was interested in this project
was the poet Shelley.
[15] Mr. and Mrs. D. Lloyd Owen, Auctioneer, High Street, Portmadoc.
[16] After writing this I came across the following passage in a speech
of Mr. Lloyd George’s made in the House of Commons: “Two thousand years
ago the great Empire of Rome came with its battalions and conquered that
part of Carnarvonshire in which my constituency is situated. They built
walls and fortifications as the tokens of their conquest, and they
proscribed the use of the Cymric tongue. The other day I was glancing at
the ruins of those walls. Underneath I noted the children at play, and I
could hear them speaking, with undiminished force and vigour, the
proscribed language of the conquered nation. Close by, there was a
school where the language of the Roman conquerors was being taught, but
taught as a _dead_ language.”
[17] These diaries are very fully published in Herbert Du Parcq’s
excellent _Life of David Lloyd George_, London; Caxton Publishing
Company Limited, 1912.
[18] A large selection of these articles can be read in the pages of Mr.
Du Parcq.
[19] Lord Cromer always called him an adventurer. Mr. Wilfrid Blunt has
always regarded him as a great patriot.
[20] From Dr. Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes” (135-138), an early
poem, based on Juvenal’s Tenth Satire. The third and fourth lines should
run—
“Thro’ all his veins the fever of renown
Burns from the strong contagion of the gown.”
The poem was popular with such different judges as Sir Walter Scott,
Byron, Cardinal Newman, and Matthew Arnold.
[Illustration: “UNCLE LLOYD”: MR. RICHARD LLOYD,
THE UNCLE OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE.]
[Illustration: THE SMITHY AT LLANYSTUMDWY:
THE OLD “VILLAGE PARLIAMENT.”]