FIRST SKIRMISHES
“And now,
Out of that land where Snowdon night by night
Receives the confidences of lonely stars,
And where Carnarvon’s ruthless battlements
Magnificently oppress the daunted tide,
There comes, no fabled Merlin, son of mist,
And brother to the twilight, but a man.”
_William Watson on Mr. Lloyd George._
ENTERING the House of Commons in April 1890, David Lloyd George walked
straight into one of those great party struggles which in those days
supplied the British public with an efficient substitute for the Prize
Ring. The subject was a clause in the Budget of 1890 compensating the
Drink Trade for abolished licences. The whole Liberal Party attacked
this clause hotly under the leadership of Mr. Gladstone. The whole
Unionist Party supported it.
On the face of it, the young Lloyd George, hot with temperance
enthusiasm, could not have found a more congenial theme. But his letters
and diaries reveal that he felt an immediate chill on contact with the
House of Commons. He found the drink question being used as a great
party weapon on both sides. Shrewd political calculations had annexed
one party to drink and another party to temperance. But the young Lloyd
George, drunk with the temperance faith, detected no real enthusiasm on
either side.
“The debate,” he wrote to his uncle on May 16th, “was rather an unreal
one, no fervour or earnestness characterising it. The House does not
seem at all to realise or to be impressed with the gigantic evils of
drunkenness.”
It was characteristic of young Lloyd George that he hoped for a great
change in the atmosphere when the country was really aroused; and he
proceeded to do his best to arouse it.
Often in the years that followed the young Lloyd George felt the same
chill in the atmosphere of Westminster. He often used to say in those
days that he found it necessary to renew his strength by constantly
visiting the constituencies. He was always rather a platform man than a
House of Commons man: he was never a great lobbyist. Often in those
early years he used to find that he gained more inspiration from great
popular meetings than from a week in the House of Commons.
He was a little timid of the House of Commons—perhaps wisely so. He saw
in a moment that the House liked to be wooed carefully. “I shan’t speak
in the House this side of the Whitsuntide holidays,” he wrote to his
uncle. “Better not appear too eager. Get a good opportunity and make the
best of it—that’s the point.” There, at any rate, he showed that he had
the first qualification for parliamentary success—respect for his
audience.
I can remember the ferment of expectation that gathered round Mr. Lloyd
George among those of us who, in those days, watched the House of
Commons from the gallery. We had heard vaguely of him as a great
“spell-binder” in North Wales. We had been told that no man equalled him
in his power of rousing Welsh crowds in the Welsh tongue. We had heard
that he had the gift of the “hwyl”; and, not knowing quite what that
meant, we expected to see something resembling a Druid appear on the
floor of the House of Commons. Imagine our surprise, therefore, when we
saw a slim, well-groomed young lawyer in a frock coat and with
side-whiskers. The few questions he asked in the first week revealed
that he had a soft, rather sweet voice, and was more inclined to speak
in a whisper than a shout. All these things seriously upset our
calculations, and considerably disappointed the hopes of all fervid
sketch-writers.
It was on June 13th, 1890, that he first broke his parliamentary silence
by a speech on the compensation clauses. He supported Mr. Acland’s
amendment for diverting Mr. Goschen’s grant from liquor compensation to
technical education.
It was by no means the speech of a fanatical Druid. It was a
soft-spoken, skilful piece of debating expressed in excellent idiomatic
English. It was full of swift debating thrusts and sharp-edged jests. It
was in this speech that he described Lord Randolph Churchill and Joseph
Chamberlain as “political contortionists who can perform the great feat
of planting their feet in one direction and setting their faces in
another.” Here was just the kind of humour that the House of Commons
loves. It came well within the line of that traditional parliamentary
wit which has to be appreciated even by its victims.
In fine, Mr. Lloyd George’s maiden speech seemed a good start for a
promising parliamentary career. It was approved by Mr. Gladstone,
praised by Sir William Harcourt, and cheered by the House itself.
For the moment the young Welsh victor was a conspicuous figure. He stood
in the limelight. He received from many quarters those purple favours
which have turned the heads of so many young members fresh from a
by-election. For this return, coming after several defeats of other
candidates, was a notable event in the close and desperate partisan
warfare of those years.
It was an event, indeed, deemed worthy of special attention from the
veteran leader of the Liberal hosts, Mr. Gladstone smiled on Wales. On
May 29th Mr. Lloyd George was invited to Hawarden with a party of Welsh
constituents, who sang hymns and folk-songs on that historic lawn. The
young recruit was introduced to the Grand Old Man, who honoured him with
a special oration. “The Carnarvon Boroughs,” he said in his stately way,
“are a formidable place for the Liberal Party to fight. Penrhyn Castle
is an important centre. But truth, justice, and freedom are greater than
Penrhyn Castle!” Mr. Gladstone was no doubt thinking of little more than
his beloved cause of Ireland; but the words echoed through Wales with a
meaning that perhaps Mr. Gladstone himself little dreamed of.
Thus David Lloyd George was initiated into the sanctities of the Liberal
party. But he was not always to prove an easy and obedient acolyte.
For the House of Commons had not yet had any taste of Mr. Lloyd George’s
rebellious humours. The real test of this quality was yet to come.
It came on August 13th of this year (1890) when he let himself go with a
touch of his own native daring on some of the items of the Estimates. He
selected them from among those decorative payments which are far too
easily granted by an assembly always inclined to be kind to the great
and prosperous. One of the items was a payment of £439 on the
installation of Prince Henry of Prussia as a Knight of the Garter. “What
service,” asked Mr. Lloyd George boldly, “has Prince Henry of Prussia
ever rendered to this country? He has not yet rendered any service to
his own country, to say nothing of service to Great Britain.”
Then he passed to an item of £2,769—“equipage money” to the
Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. “The Lord-Lieutenant,” said Mr. Lloyd
George, “is simply a man in buttons who wears silk stockings and has a
coat-of-arms on his carriage.” At this he was called severely to order
by the Chairman, but that did not prevent him from a ruthless comparison
of this expenditure with the recent report of a Sweating Committee and
the terrible revelations of poverty contained in that document.
Here the House of Commons had a touch of the real Lloyd George whom they
were to get to know so well in the future. It was for this that he had
come to Westminster; not for conventional party speeches, but for plain
homely utterance on the pomps and conventions and extravagances of the
great world. Here we get a first hint of his mission: a difficult and
even cruel mission—to tell the comfortable and wealthy that they were
living on the poor—to tell the decorative that they must be decorative
no longer, but must either be useful or come down from their high
places. He knew that such talk was not going to be popular in the House
of Commons, but he was looking to another quarter for approval. Writing
in his diary the day before delivering the speech on Prince Henry of
Prussia’s Garter he made the following significant entry:
“My audience is the country.”
It was to the country, indeed, that he was already making his chief
appeal. His biggest efforts of this year were made outside the House of
Commons. The first was made on May 7th at the Metropolitan Tabernacle,
where the Liberal Party appeared in full force to support Welsh
Disestablishment. He prepared his speech with the utmost care. He sent
notes of it down to his uncle at Criccieth and received the comments and
criticisms of the “Esgob”—the “Bishop”—as he loved to call Richard
Lloyd.
Mr. Lloyd George was perhaps a little humanly disappointed when he
discovered that, graded by party officialism, he had been given the
lowest place in the list of speakers at the Tabernacle. But this was
soon forgotten when he once got into his stride. Although the audience
had been dismally thinned by a succession of dreary orations, they sat
out his speech to the end. He had intended to go on for only five or ten
minutes: but the cheering and laughter of his audience carried him on
for twenty-five. This was the very thing—here was a man to whom Welsh
Disestablishment was an actual life issue, and not a mere new item in a
party programme. When at last he sat down, the audience seemed
surprised. Like a wise man, he left them unsatisfied, and the result was
that the public soon demanded more.
After this success he was deluged with requests for speeches in every
part of England. But wisely he accepted few. He decided to stick closely
to his House of Commons work, and there is no sounder course for any
young Member of Parliament. The result was that at the end of this first
session of 1890 he had already secured a good parliamentary footing.
It may be taken that the transition to Parliament from North Wales was
by no means an easy domestic revolution for a struggling young
provincial solicitor who had only just begun to earn an income.
Politics did not come to him, indeed, with such a crushing burden as it
brings to many young men. The total expenses of this, his first
election, were little more than £200. He definitely refused the offer of
his political friends to raise a fund to cover his election expenses.
But he accepted gratefully the unpaid help of several friendly lawyers
at Bangor and Carnarvon as his election agents. In his later elections
the Liberal Association of the Boroughs covered his expenses. The
labourer is worthy of his hire; and Mr. Lloyd George had wisely accepted
the offer. To that arrangement the Association adhered until the time
when he entered a Ministry (1906)—thus creating one of the finest ties
that can exist between a constituency and its member. Here, at any rate,
was a member who was a public servant and not a public almoner.
But in spite of that great public aid the entrance of David Lloyd George
into Parliament proved a great and growing strain on the young couple.
Their eldest child Dick[34] was already fifteen months old when Mr.
Lloyd George came into Parliament. The growing practice at Portmadoc had
to be left during the Session to his brother, Mr. William George, whose
splendid self-sacrifice and high public spirit have always fortified and
entrenched the private fortunes of his elder brother. While profits
diminished, new expenses grew. A domicile had to be secured in London.
Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd George settled down first (1890) in a flat in Gray’s
Inn, then (1891) in the Temple, and, later on, for six years (1893-9)
Palace Mansions, Kensington. There they set up a simple house, always
open to their many friends. For from the beginning Mr. Lloyd George was
always the most hospitable of men.
For the first year or two of his parliamentary life he continued to
practice in North Wales during the recess and to live during the autumn
months at Criccieth with Mr. and Mrs. Owen, his parents-in-law.[35]
On these returns to his native soil he continued to use his legal
position for those daring assertions of popular right which had become
his passion. At this time, indeed, occurred one of the boldest of these
incidents, when he faced Mr. Casson, the very lawyer to whom he had been
articled. That able provincial attorney had concentrated in his hands
all those secular offices which combine to make a genuine social
tyranny. He was at once Clerk to the Justices and agent to the Tremadoc
estate, which practically covered the whole district. As agent to the
estate, he had allowed some of the houses in Portmadoc to fall into
grave disrepair. At last the thing became a scandal. The Urban District
Council had to take action; and they instructed Mr. William George.
Complaint was in vain; it was soon necessary to prosecute. But the
summons against Mr. Casson the agent could only be issued by Mr. Casson
the Clerk of the justices: and Mr. Casson the Clerk of the Justices
refused to issue it. He seemed safely protected by his own loyalty to
himself.
Not an unusual incident in our happy countryside, in England as well as
in Wales; but Mr. David Lloyd George there and then determined that it
should not occur again in Portmadoc.
Mr. William George reported the situation to his brother, who said,
“Leave this to me.” Next day he went into court. He began by challenging
the bench. For one cause or another he was able to disqualify all the
magistrates except a schoolmaster and a bank manager, men of open minds.
To them Mr. Lloyd George then began to denounce Mr. Casson with
merciless vigour for a whole hour. He lashed him ruthlessly for his
misuse of his powers. He demanded that he should sit where every other
culprit had to sit—in the dock.
Mr. Casson did not remain quiet under these lashes. He protested and
interrupted for a time, but was at last quelled by Mr. Lloyd George’s
attack. Then he subsided into silence until the magistrates sternly
ordered the issue of the necessary summonses. The result was that the
dangerously crumbling walls complained of by the Urban Council were put
in a state of safety for the public.
When Mr. Lloyd George opened this scene the court was almost empty; but
in a few minutes the public outside had seemed to get wind of what was
happening. Long before the attack ended the court was crowded with
people who made no attempt to conceal their approval. To this day
Portmadoc will tell you that Mr. Lloyd George never did a more necessary
piece of work, or did it more thoroughly, than on this notable day.
It is not remarkable that, feeling these powers growing within him, he
should have thought seriously at this time of being called to the
English Bar. His friend Samuel Evans urged this on him. He put his name
down. But at that point some rare strain of diffidence held him
back—some instinctive shrinking. At any rate, he never carried the
matter further; but went on attempting to combine with his parliamentary
duties the conduct of his solicitor’s practice at Portmadoc.
But he could not go on permanently with this double strain. More and
more the public demanded speeches from him in the autumns; and he had
less and less time for work at Portmadoc. In May 1897 he sent for his
friend Arthur Rhys Roberts, a solicitor who was practising at Newport in
South Wales. He asked him to join him in starting an office in London.
They took rooms in 13, Walbrook, E.C.,[36] where they opened with no
prospects except the vague promises of friends; and for the first three
years David Lloyd George gave a great deal of time to this venture. He
went to the office every morning and to the House in the afternoons. He
worked hard for the firm. He wrote all important letters; he conducted
all important interviews—often at the House of Commons. He was still a
partner at Criccieth, and thus for a time he maintained a double
position in the law—the partner in two firms. But Criccieth counted
less and less, and gradually passed entirely into the hands of his
brother.
He earned a fair income; but it was a hard life, and he had to
supplement it with journalistic work for Welsh papers and for the
_Manchester Guardian_. He was quite a vigorous writer in those days. The
burden was heavy. But he had beside him the great courage and thrift of
his wife, and behind him the high and splendid spirit of his “Uncle
Lloyd.”
His life in those early days was full and serene, crowded with work and
play. The children began to fill his quiver—Dick, Mair, Olwen,
Gwilym—those young voices that speak with our enemies in the gate. He
loved children; and he loved life. He was already surrounded with
friends, and especially with that bright band of young Welshmen who were
gathering to Westminster—Tom Ellis, Herbert Lewis, Frank Edwards, Sam
Evans, Llewellyn Williams. So girt, he ever took life “with a frolic
welcome.”
His was a spirit welded of laughter and tears, moulded for great
adventures. He learnt even in those early days the great art of varying
grave with gay. But then, as now, the gay never took the place first. It
was always there as a servant rather than master—a foil to grave
endeavour; a background to serious purposes.
He had, of course, those little weaknesses that require the forgiveness
of affection. He could always, when he wished, write letters with the
best—especially when letters were really required for business or
affairs. But he would not write the small letters, or answer the small
letters. He was not very precise over social engagements. He was always
more faithful to his humble friends than to the great and fashionable;
and he sometimes forgot Gilbert’s great discovery—that even Belgrave
Square has a heart behind its stucco.
Behind all the colour and zest of his young, eager life there was always
that same quality of courage that knit his character like an iron
girder. He had a serene confidence in his own star. He did not know the
word “impossible.” The greater the obstacle the greater his security of
success. It was this note that dominated his thought and speech.
But, after all, it was at those gatherings of his friends, when the
pipes were lit and the laughter rang free, that the true Lloyd George
was to be seen and heard—the Lloyd George who has since won the hearts
of nations. Those were wonderful meetings of young souls at that little
flat in Kensington. How that symphony of laughter and speech rings
across the years, the echo of those grave debates of youth in which,
though we knew it not, opinions were moulding and a will forming which,
in the coming time, were to fashion and shake the world!
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[34] Now Major Richard Lloyd George.
[35] At first on the farm, and later in Criccieth. Mr. Owen built there
two semi-detached houses, Llys Owen and Brynawel, and there the Owens
and the Lloyd Georges lived for some years next door to one another.
[36] In 1900 they shifted to 63, Queen Victoria Street, E.C., which is
now the office of the firm of Rhyn Roberts & Co., as it has been called
since Mr. Lloyd George severed his connection with it after taking
Government office.