Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: Photograph of David Lloyd George]
LLOYD GEORGE
THE MAN AND HIS STORY
BY
FRANK DILNOT
AUTHOR OF
"THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH"
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
LLOYD GEORGE: THE MAN AND HIS STORY
Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published March, 1917
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
I. THE VILLAGE COBBLER WHO HELPED THE BRITISH EMPIRE
II. HOW LLOYD GEORGE BECAME FAMOUS AT TWENTY-FIVE
III. FIGHTING THE LONE HAND
IV. THE DAREDEVIL STATESMAN
V. THE FIRST GREAT TASK
VI. HOW LLOYD GEORGE BROKE THE HOUSE OF LORDS
VII. AT HOME AND IN DOWNING STREET
VIII. A CHAMPION OF WAR
IX. THE ALLIANCE WITH NORTHCLIFFE
X. AT HIGH PRESSURE
XI. HIS INCONSISTENCIES
XII. HOW HE BECAME PRIME MINISTER
XIII. THE FUTURE OF LLOYD GEORGE
APPENDIX--MR. LLOYD GEORGE ON AMERICA AND THE EUROPEAN WAR
FOREWORD
Mr. Lloyd George gets a grip on those who read about him, but his
personality is far more powerful and fascinating to those who have
known the man himself, known him during the time his genius has been
forcing him to eminence. He does not fill the eye as a sanctified hero
should; he is too vitally human, too affectionate, too bitter, and he
has, moreover, springs of humor which bubble up continually. (You
cannot imagine an archangel with a sense of humor.) But it is this
very mixture in the man that holds the character student. Lloyd George
is quite unpretentious, loves children, will join heartily in the
chorus of a popular song, and yet there is concealed behind these
softer traits a stark and desperate courage which leads him always to
the policy of make or break. He is flamingly sincere, and yet no
subtler statesman ever walked the boards at Westminster. That is the
man I have seen at close quarters for years. Is it to be wondered at
that he alternately bewilders, attracts, and dominates high-browed
intellectuals? Strangely enough, it is the common people who
understand Lloyd George better than the clever ones. Explain that how
you will.
I have seen David Lloyd George, present Prime Minister of England, as
the young political free-lance fighting furiously for unpopular causes,
fighting sometimes from sheer love of battle. I have seen him in that
same period in moods of persuasion and appeal pleading the cause of the
inarticulate masses of the poor with an intensity which has thrilled a
placid British audience to the verge of tears. Since then I have seen
him under the venomous attacks of aristocrats and plutocrats in
Parliament when his eyes have sparkled as he has turned on them and
hissed out to their faces words which burned and seared them and caused
them to shake with passion. And in the midst of this orgy of hate
which encircled him I have seen him in his home with his
twelve-year-old blue-eyed daughter Megan curled up in his lap, his face
brimming with merriment as, with her arm around his neck, she asserted
her will in regard to school and holidays over a happy and indulgent
father. That is the kind of man who now rules England, rules her with
an absoluteness granted to no man, king or statesman, since the British
became a nation. A reserved people like the British, conservative by
instinct, with centuries of caste feeling behind them, have
unreservedly and with acclamation placed their fate in the hands of one
who began life as a village boy. It was but recently I was talking
with a blacksmith hammering out horseshoes at Llanystumdwy in Wales who
was a school-mate of Lloyd George in those days not so very long ago.
The Prime Minister still has his home down there and talks to the
blacksmith and to others of his school companions, for he and they are
still one people together, with ties which it is impossible for
statecraft to break--or to forge. I have met Lloyd George in private,
have seen him among his own people at his Welsh home, and for five
years as a journalist I had the opportunity of observing him from the
gallery of the British Houses of Parliament, five years during which he
introduced his famous Budget, forced a fight with the House of Lords,
and broke their power. I purpose to tell in plain words the drama of
the man as I have seen it.
A year before the war broke out, while he was still bitterly hated by
the Conservatives, I was visiting him at his Welsh home near
Llanystumdwy and he asked me what I thought of the district. I said it
was all very beautiful, as indeed it was. I emphasized my appreciation
by saying that the visitors at the big hotel at Criccieth near by were
one and all enchanted. They were nearly all Conservatives, I pointed
out, and there was just one fly in their ointment. "I know it," said
Lloyd George, vivaciously, with a quick twinkle in his eye. "Here's a
bay like the Bay of Naples, God's great mountains behind, beautiful
woods, and green meadows, and trickling streams--everything the heart
of man can desire, and in the midst of it all HE lives." He paused and
deepened his voice. "Satan in the Garden of Eden," he said. It was
just his twist of humor, but it told a story. Now for the companion
picture. The last time I saw Lloyd George was one dark evening in the
December which has just gone by. It had been a day of big political
happenings; the Asquith Government had resigned, Bonar Law, the
Conservative leader, had been asked by the King to form a Ministry and
had said he could not do so. Lloyd George's name was being bandied
about. In those few fateful hours Britain was without a Government.
At seven o'clock I was at the entrance of the War Office at Whitehall.
Through the dark street an automobile dashed up. The door was opened,
and a silk-hatted man stepped out and passed rapidly into the War
Office, and then the little group of bystanders noticed that the
footman at the door of the automobile was wearing the royal livery.
The silk-hatted visitor was obviously a messenger from King George.
Three minutes later the War Office doors swung open and two men came
hurrying out. The first was the King's messenger, the second was Lloyd
George. The latter's shoulders were hunched with haste, his hat was
pressed deep and irregularly over his forehead, his face, set hard, was
canted forward. He almost scrambled into the conveyance, and three
seconds later the automobile was going at top speed for Buckingham
Palace. The King had sent for Lloyd George to ask him to become his
Prime Minister.
F. D.
_January, 1917._
LLOYD GEORGE
I
THE VILLAGE COBBLER WHO HELPED THE BRITISH EMPIRE
One day in the year 1866 a middle-aged cobbler named Richard Lloyd,
occupying a tiny cottage in the village of Llanystumdwy in North Wales,
had a letter delivered to him by the postman which was to alter the
whole of his simple and placid life. It was a letter from his sister
and bore melancholy tidings. The letter told how she had lost her
husband and how she and her two little children were in distress. She
was the mother of the present Prime Minister of Britain. The elder of
her two children, then three years old, was David Lloyd George.
Miss Lloyd, the sister of Richard Lloyd, the cobbler, had married, a
few years before, a William George who came of farming people in South
Wales. A studious young fellow, he had devoted himself to reading, and
presently passed the examinations necessary to become a teacher in the
elementary schools. The countryside offered him no opportunity of
advancement and he migrated to the big city of Manchester, where he
secured a position as master in one of the national schools of the
district. In Manchester were born two children, the elder of whom,
David, was fated in after years to rise to fame. David's birthday was
January 17, 1863. Far indeed were thoughts of future eminence from the
struggling family during that time in Manchester.
Under the strain of city life the health of William George began to
fail. Country-bred as he was, he pined for the open air of the fields
and the valleys, and very soon the doctor gave him no choice and told
him that if he wished to prolong his life he must leave the city
streets. And so it came about that William George and the two children
forsook Manchester and went back again to country life in South Wales
to a place called Haverfordwest. William George took a farm and for a
year or more he and his wife toiled on it. How much of the work fell
on Mrs. George can only be guessed, but she must have carried a full
share, for her husband's health was undermined, and the home had to be
kept up not only for the sake of her husband, but the children as well.
She was in delicate health, and her efforts must have been arduous and
painful. Withal, destiny had its severest blow still in hand. William
George had not recovered his strength; an attack of pneumonia came upon
him, and his death occurred some few months after leaving Manchester.
Mrs. George, overwhelmed by the death of her husband, was at the same
time faced by financial difficulties and the problem of maintaining the
existence of herself and her two children. To carry on the farm
single-handed was impossible. There were, moreover, immediate
liabilities to be met. She could find no way out, and the upshot was a
public auction sale of the farm effects and the household furniture.
Three-year-old David, not understanding the tragedy of it all, was
nevertheless impressed by the scene on the day the neighbors came to
bid for, and to buy, the things that made up his mother's home. Even
now he can recall how the tables and chairs from the house, and the
plows and harrows from the fields, were scheduled and ticketed in and
around the homestead and disposed of by the auction to the highest
bidder. He could not understand it, but somewhere deep within the
sensitive child was struck a note of pain, the echoes of which have
never left him throughout his strenuous life. He felt dimly in his
childlike way the loneliness of his mother. He has never forgotten it.
Lonely indeed she was. She had but one friend to turn to, and that one
friend was her brother, Richard Lloyd, the village shoemaker up in
North Wales. To him she wrote and told her story.
It was her letter which Richard Lloyd paused in his work to read that
day some fifty years ago. This village cobbler, destined unwittingly
to play such an important part in the history of the British Empire, is
still alive and hale and hearty, still lives in his old district. I
saw him recently, a tall, erect, fearless-eyed man, though in the
neighborhood of ninety, perhaps past that age. He had a full beard,
snow-white, and a clean-shaven upper lip, reminiscent of the fashion of
half a century ago. He lives, of course, in comfort now and enjoys a
dignified, happy old age. Vigorous still, he continues to preach in
the chapel of the Nonconformist denomination of which he is a member.
I tried to picture him as he must have been fifty years back, a
studious, middle-aged man, rigidly religious, a confirmed bachelor,
dividing his time between his calling, on the one hand, and the study
of the Bible, on the other.
He lived at that time a laborious life, frugal by necessity, doing his
duty as he saw it, and I dare say he appeared to a casual observer an
uninteresting village type, a silent man, sincere in his bigoted way,
but colorless as such persons must always be to those of a different
class. To me he will remain one of the most interesting men I have
ever seen. Richard Lloyd read his sister's letter and formed his
resolution. He decided to go to her help. And thus it was he
journeyed to South Wales and brought the widow and her two little boys
up north to Llanystumdwy, where he lived. He installed them in his
cottage, a little two-story residence with a tiny workshop abutting
from it at the side where he carried on his shoe-mending. In front the
main road ran by, twisting its way through the village, and thence
through woods and meadows, and giving access within a mile on either
side to park-lands attached to the big country houses of wealthy people
to whom the village cobbler was a nonentity and a person of a different
order of beings from themselves. They were not to know, these rich
neighbors, that the cobbler was bringing for protection to his humble
home a child destined to be a Prime Minister of the country. Prime
Minister in a crisis of its history.
Of the little family's years of struggle there are a few glimpses.
Cheerfully Richard Lloyd bent himself to his self-imposed task of
lightening his sister's lot, and Mrs. George worked hard that her
children should not suffer from want. There was no money to spare in
the household. Mrs. George baked bread so as not to take anything from
their small resources for the baker. Twice a week there was a little
meat for the family. Subsequently, as the children grew bigger, a tiny
luxury was here and there found for them. At Sunday morning breakfast,
for example, they received as a treat half an egg each to eat with
their bread-and-butter. In the garden behind the cottage vegetables
were grown to eke out supplies, and it was one of the tasks of young
Lloyd George to dig up the potatoes for the household.
Llanystumdwy, the boyhood home of Lloyd George, is a picturesque
village, a mile or so from the sea, nestling at the foot of the Snowdon
range. Meadows and woods embower Llanystumdwy. Rushing through the
village a rock-strewn stream pours down from the mountains to the sea,
with the trees on its banks locking their branches overhead in an
irregular green archway. Look westward to the coast from Llanystumdwy
and you have in Carnavon Bay one of the finest seascapes in Britain.
Turn to the east, and the rising mountains culminate in the white
summit of Snowdon and other giant peaks stretching upward through the
clouds. Could Providence have selected a more fitting spot for the
upgrowth of a romantic boy? Lloyd George's Celtic heart had an
environment made for it in this nook between the Welsh mountains and
the sea. Little wonder that he has never left the place. At the
present time his country house is on the slope overlooking Criccieth,
about a mile from the old cobbler's cottage where he spent his boyhood
forty years ago.
Lloyd George was sent quite early to the church elementary school with
the other village children. There seems to have been nothing of the
copy-book order about his behavior, nor are any moral lessons for the
young to be drawn from it. He set no specially good example, was not
particularly studious, was quite as mischievous if not more so than his
schoolmates, and on top of all this--sad to relate after such a
record--was practically always at the head of his class. He achieved
without effort what others sought to accomplish by hard and persistent
work. He just soaked up knowledge as a sponge soaks up water; he could
not help it. Out of school hours he was a daring youngster filled with
high spirits, and very active. He had dark-blue eyes, blackish hair, a
delicate skin, and regular features, and the audacity within him was
concealed behind a thoughtful, studious expression--just such a boy as
a mother worships. That old Puritan, his uncle, worshiped him, too,
though I am quite sure he concealed the fact behind the gravest and
sometimes the most reproving of demeanors. An interesting point is
that the vivacious and keen-witted child understood and was devoted to
this serious-minded uncle of his. Richard Lloyd worked hard to make
the boy grow up a straight-living, brave, and God-fearing man, and his
influence on his young nephew was strong from the start. There is a
story told about this. The children of the village school (which was
connected with the Established Church of England) on each Ash Wednesday
had to march from the school to the church, and were there made to give
the responses to the Church Catechism and to recite the Apostles'
Creed. That sturdy Nonconformist, Richard Lloyd, denied the right of
the Church of England to force children, many of them belonging to
Nonconformist parents, to go to church to subscribe to the Church
doctrine. Lloyd George carefully digested his uncle's protest, and
went away and organized a revolt among the children. The next time
they went to church they refused to make the responses. Lloyd George
as the ring-leader was punished, but the rebellion he organized stopped
the practice of forcing Church dogmas into the mouths of the children.
This is a very suggestive story. I know the main facts to be true
because not so very long ago Lloyd George himself confirmed them to me.
At the same time I beg leave to doubt whether any great spiritual
fervor was the motive power of Master Lloyd George at that time. It
was just the first outbreak of his desire for revolt against the powers
that be--wicked powers because his uncle had said so--and the
satisfaction of that instinct for audacious action which has marked him
ever since. To me there was not much of the saint about the boy Lloyd
George; he was just a young daredevil--which, on the whole, is perhaps
the more attractive.
By the time Lloyd George was ten or eleven years of age his mother and
his uncle became filled with thoughts as to his future. They both knew
the boy was specially gifted, both realized that unless special effort
were made he must inevitably drift from school into the lower ranks of
labor, probably that of work on a farm. There were long and anxious
consultations between the cobbler and his sister. Finally Richard
Lloyd came to a decision, a decision which was to have a lasting effect
on the destinies of the British nation. He resolved on a noble act,
the nobler in that he had no idea what tremendous consequences would
spring from it.
By long years of work and self-denial he had saved a little sum toward
his old age. It amounted to a few hundred pounds. It was all he had.
He decided to devote that sum toward the making of his nephew, Lloyd
George, an educated man, toward putting him in a profession where he
might have a chance in the world.
After the great speculation had been decided on it was settled that
young David should be brought up as a solicitor. This necessitated not
only the provision of certain heavy fees in connection with the
examinations, but also time spent in a prolonged course of study. The
few hundreds of pounds was a small-enough amount, and it was obvious
that it would have to be sparingly expended if it were to cover all
that was required. Young Lloyd George was a brilliant youth, but even
his brilliancy could not help beyond a certain point. The old cobbler
saw one way of economizing. He set himself the task of personally
learning the elements of French and Latin in order to impart them to
his nephew. I have often imagined the mental agony of the cobbler
struggling with those foreign grammars. But he succeeded. His nephew
also succeeded. Young George passed his preliminary examination and
his intermediate without difficulty. Then while he progressed further
he had to have experience in a solicitor's office--which ran away with
more money. At twenty-one, however, he was finished, and was admitted
a solicitor. All that had been gone through for him to reach this goal
is shown by the fact that, having been formally enrolled as a lawyer,
he and his family at that time could not raise the three guineas
necessary to purchase the official robe without which he could not
practise in the local courts. He at once went out and worked in an
office and earned that three guineas.
He was now launched in the world. The great adventure of life began
almost immediately for him.
II
HOW LLOYD GEORGE BECAME FAMOUS AT TWENTY-FIVE
The personalities of history flash across our vision like
shooting-stars in the sky, emerging from hidden origins, making for
their unknown goal with a speed and brilliance at once spectacular and
mysterious. They are incalculable forces; we can only look at them and
wonder at them. It is futile and quite useless to try to define the
secret motive power of these personalities by puny analyses of moral
influences and by a catalogue of their feelings and surroundings. They
follow their destined course and raise our admiration or our fears and
all the while they give us no real clue to the powers within their
souls or the end they serve.
There had been many endeavors to link up Lloyd George with certain sets
of beliefs; sincere persons have associated his prominence with his
Liberalism, with his Nonconformity, with his passion for the interests
of the poor, and in these later days with his fervor for national and
patriotic effort. As a matter of fact, the framing of his dogmas has
had little or nothing to do with the power of the man. He is one of
those persons whom nature has made of dynamite; who would have blasted
a way for himself in any kind of conditions. It is neither to his
credit nor to his discredit that Heaven has given him an individuality
which has taken him throughout life to distinction and high
achievement. He has always swung to his tasks like a needle to the
Pole.
It so happened that by the surroundings of his youth--the piety and
pride and modest circumstances of his uncle and his mother--he was
early thrown into certain spheres of activity. But these spheres were
merely the medium for his powers. A wider survey than that of the
enthusiastic Nonconformist or the patriotic Welshman shows that Lloyd
George's nature would have cleaved its way like a sword through any
obstacle in any cause. He simply could not have helped it. Destiny
had set a mark on him from birth.
He was only seventeen when on a visit to London he went for the first
time to the House of Commons to listen to the proceedings from the
gallery and here is an abstract from his diary at that period: "Went to
Houses of Parliament. Very much disappointed with them. . . . I will
not say I eyed the assembly in the spirit in which William the
Conqueror eyed England on his visit to Edward the Confessor--as the
region of his future domain. O Vanity!" A country youth without
money, without prospects, sitting in the exclusive Parliament House of
the most exclusive nation of the world, watched the assembly before him
and there occurred to him the thought of conquering it single-handed.
That is what it came to. Of course his reference is in the nature of a
joke. It could hardly be otherwise. But it was a joke which has
proved to be a prophecy.
Before he was seventeen Lloyd George had already dived deep into
controversy. His school of debating consisted of the cobbler's
workshop and the village smithy at Llanystumdwy, where in the evenings
young men and old men and a sprinkling of boys used to assemble to
discuss in a haphazard way questions of ethics, the politics of the
day, and most of all the rights and wrongs of the religious sects to
which they respectively belonged. Richard Lloyd, on the one hand, and
the old blacksmith, on the other, would stir the discussion now and
again with a sagacious word. It is easy to imagine the ripple of
musical Welsh which sometimes drowned the tap-tap of the cobbler's
hammer, or was submerged beneath the clang of the anvil. The bright
eyes and excited faces of these Celts partly illumined by the oil-lamp
or by the sudden glow of the blacksmith's furnace must have provided
pictures worth record for themselves, quite apart from the personal
interest they would now possess.
In the midst of the discussions young David would plunge with a wit and
understanding beyond his years, and he stood up to his seniors with
both gravity and audacity. "Do you know," said the gray-haired
blacksmith to Richard Lloyd one day, "I really had to turn my serious
attention to David last evening or he would have got the best of me."
If any of those who read this narrative are beginning to have an idea
that this fourteen-year-old boy was by way of becoming a prig they may
be relieved by the knowledge that when the youngster was not taking a
hand in polemics in the smithy or the cobbler's cottage he was often
enough leading the boys of the village into some kind of mischief. One
old inhabitant came to have the fixed belief that David was the origin
of pretty well all the mishaps in Llanystumdwy. Let a gate be found
lifted from its hinges, a fence or hedge broken down, or windows
smashed, and the old man had the one explanation, "It's that David
Lloyd at it again."
It is important to know that Richard Lloyd, the shoemaker, was not only
studious and intelligent, but was independent beyond his class. A kind
of benevolent feudalism still existed in the district, and villagers at
election time fell naturally into the groove required by the rich
landowners and gentlefolk of the neighborhood. Once at an election
three or four of the cottagers voted Liberal instead of Conservative.
They were promptly turned out of their dwellings. The time came when
the shoemaker was the only Liberal voter in the place. He remained
quite unshaken by persuasion, influence, or material considerations.
Lloyd George even as a young boy gloried in his stalwart uncle. He was
rebellious that it should be possible to cow other people, and the
knowledge of the prevalent thraldom poured deep into young Lloyd
George's soul. This simple religious village folk lived hard, with but
a week's wages between them and want, lived, so to speak, on sufferance
under the vicar and squire and land-owner, who, while often kindly
enough and even generous in their way, expected obedience, and who
exacted servitude in all matters of opinion. The big people and the
cottage folk were two entirely different sets of beings. What a
precipice there was between them can hardly be understood by those who
have not passed some time in the village life of Britain. A man who
took a rabbit or hare from the preserved coverts of game extending for
miles in all directions was rigorously prosecuted as a criminal. A man
who took fish from prohibited waters was often a good deal more harshly
adjudged than the drunken brute who beat his wife or the assailant in
some desperate fight. And let it be noted that these superior people
had veritable power of government, for from them were drawn the benches
of magistrates--amateur local judges, who sat weekly or monthly, as the
case might be, to punish evil-doers of the district. Many of these
people in some of the relations of life were quite admirable, but when
it came to any question of the protection of privilege, the
preservation of property, or the rights in general of their superior
class, these landowners were as merciless in the North Wales district
as in many other parts of the country. Scorn and rage grew in the
heart of young Lloyd George as he realized that these individuals had
no claim over their fellows in personal worth or understanding, that
they were practically unassailable by reason of their ramparts of
wealth, that they lived in comfort, if not in luxury, while those whom
they dominated were struggling hard for a bare subsistence. I can
imagine the youth reciting the couplet which sets out the position:
God bless the squire and his relations,
And keep us in our proper stations.
Worldly knowledge and bookish knowledge were acquired by Lloyd George
during the next few years while he was going through his law course in
the office of a firm of solicitors in the neighboring little town of
Portmadoc. While there he had further opportunity for developing his
natural powers of oratory, for he became a member of a local debating
society which regularly had set battles on all kinds of
topics--political, literary, and social. At twenty-one his
preliminaries ended and he became an admitted solicitor competent to
practise law and to appear as an advocate in the local civil and
criminal courts. He was penniless, he had no friends likely to help
him in his profession. But he had confidence in himself. Hidden fires
were burning behind those steady dark-blue eyes of his. The office
work which he undertook to secure the money to buy his official robe
was accomplished with a run. Then he put up a little brass plate
announcing to all and sundry in the locality that he was prepared to
practise law. Though he had no rich friends, he possessed certain
assets in the reputation he had made among the residents of the
district by his sparkling good humor, his ready sympathy with distress,
and his vivacious wit in debate. Individuals of the humbler class soon
began to come to the young solicitor for advice and assistance. He
found himself engaged to defend people charged with small offenses
before the local magistrates and to fight cases connected with small
money transactions before the county court--which was the civil
tribunal. Clients found in the young fellow not only a shrewd lawyer,
but a friend who entered into their cases with ardor.
He differed from other lawyers of the country towns, men who had grown
prosperous in their profession, in so far as he always put up a
tremendous fight, whatever the chances of success. He was, moreover,
never hampered by deference for the bench. It was the practice of the
magistrates, most of them local land-owners and all of them belonging
to the propertied classes, to browbeat any local solicitors who showed
signs of presumption--that is to say, of independence and lack of what
was regarded as proper respect in their conduct of cases before the
court. Lloyd George said things and did things which the most
experienced and successful solicitors of the district would have shrunk
from as ruinous to their business. He made it a practice never to
waste a word in any subservience to magistrates who showed an
overbearing disposition. The magistrates, to their amazement, found
they could not overawe the young upstart. When one realizes the
unchallenged caste rule of those local bigwigs and the extraordinary
respect which was paid to them by advocates and litigants alike, it is
easy to understand the amazement and the shock which came upon them
when young Lloyd George not only refused to submit to their bullying,
but stood up to them and even thrust wounding words at them. It was an
unheard-of proceeding. Some of these magistrates, lifelong supporters
of Church and state, must sometimes have wondered why the presumptuous
youth was not struck dead by Providence for his temerity. He, on his
part, was never so happy as when he was shocking them. Clients quickly
grew in number. The farmers found him an enthusiastic defender of
their rights, the shopkeepers trusted him with their small business
worries, and if there were any poachers to be defended where was there
to be found so able, so sympathetic, and so fearless an advocate as
young Lloyd George? All this time it must be remembered he was but
early in the twenties, little more than a boy.
Many instances might be given of his audacity in the face of the lordly
magistrates before whom he appeared. Here is one that is typical.
Lloyd George was retained to defend four men who were charged with
illegally taking fish from prohibited waters--in other words, accused
of poaching, the most deadly sin of all to the owners of the land. The
case was tried before a big bench of magistrates, all of them local
celebrities. Early in the proceedings Lloyd George put in a plea that
the court had no jurisdiction in the matter. In response the
chairman--the presiding magistrate--replied grandiloquently that such a
point must be decided by a higher court.
"Yes, sir," said Lloyd George, "and in a perfectly just and unbiased
court."
The magistrate stared open-eyed at this impudence, and promptly
proceeded to put Lloyd George in his place. "If," said he, "that
remark is intended as a reflection on any magistrate sitting on this
bench I hope Mr. George will name him. A more insulting and
ungentlemanly remark to the bench I have never heard during my
experience as a magistrate."
"Yes," replied Lloyd George, "and a more true remark was never made in
any court of justice."
This was more than flesh and blood could stand. In admonitory tone the
chairman said: "Tell me to whom you are referring. I must insist upon
your stating if you are referring to any magistrate sitting in this
court."
"I refer to you in particular, sir," said Lloyd George.
"Then I retire from the bench," said the chairman, rising from his
place. He turned to his fellow-magistrates. "This is the first time I
have ever been insulted in a court of justice."
In company with a colleague he left the court. A third magistrate
remarked that he could not proceed with the case until Lloyd George had
apologized.
"I am glad to hear it," said Lloyd George, imperturbably. Promptly
another magistrate went out. One of the few justices remaining
repeated the demand for an apology. Instead of apologizing Lloyd
George made the following reply; "I say this, that at least two or
three magistrates of this court are bent upon securing a conviction
whether there is a fair case or not. I am sorry the chairman left the
court, because I am in a position to prove what I have said. I shall
not withdraw anything, because every word I have spoken is true."
This was really too much. All the lot of the magistrates went out,
their departure being accompanied by the few barbed words from the
young advocate. What happened when the magistrates got together
outside the courtroom can only be guessed. They must have had a
painful discussion among themselves, because presently four of them
came in and rather meekly said they would try the case, though they
again made a protest to the effect that Lloyd George really ought to
apologize. Of course he did not do so.
It was when Lloyd George was twenty-five and was already a highly
popular figure throughout a large part of Wales that he sprang suddenly
into a wider notice and may be said to have had for the first time the
eyes of the whole country centered on him. Wales is a country of
Nonconformists who attend religious services in their own chapels and
do not--at least the great majority of them--belong to the Established
Church of England. The state Church, however, is implanted throughout
the country, and it is only to be expected that local friction should
sometimes arise.
In a village at the foot of Snowdon an old quarryman died, and before
he passed away expressed the wish that he should be laid by the side of
his daughter, who was buried in the graveyard of the Church of England.
The Church clergyman would not consent to the Nonconformist rites being
performed if the old man were buried where he desired to be. The old
man, he said, could not be placed by the side of his daughter, but must
be buried in a remote portion of the graveyard reserved for unknown
people and for suicides. The Nonconformists of the village were
outraged at the suggestion. They went to young Lloyd George and asked
his advice about the matter. Lloyd George plunged deep into legal
enactments, into the local conditions, and all the facts pertaining to
the case. Then he delivered a characteristic judgment. "You have the
right," he said, "to bury this man by the side of his daughter in the
churchyard. If the clergyman refuses you permission proceed with the
body to the graveyard. Take the coffin in by force, if necessary. If
the churchyard gates are locked against you, break them down." The
villagers faithfully followed the suggestion of the young lawyer. They
took the body to the churchyard--I believe Lloyd George accompanied
them--and they broke down the locked churchyard gates, dug a grave for
the old man by the side of his daughter, and buried him there. The
Church authorities were scandalized and an action at law was the
result. It was heard in the local county court before a judge and
jury. Lloyd George defended the villagers, and the jury, influenced by
his speech, returned a verdict in their favor. The judge, however,
said that Lloyd George was wrong on a point of law and decided the case
on the side of the Church. Lloyd George instantly said that the matter
could not rest, and on behalf of the villagers he appealed against the
decision to the Lord Chief Justice in London. The case was heard by
the Lord Chief and another judge, and they came to the conclusion that
the jury's decision was right, that the county-court judge was wrong,
and that Lloyd George was perfectly correct on the point of law in
connection with which he had been overruled.
Lloyd George was twenty-five when he secured this triumph. All the
public were interested in the case, and in the Welsh townships and
villages his name flamed out like a beacon.
III
FIGHTING THE LONE HAND
Lloyd George was twenty-five when his fight for the burial of the old
quarryman lifted him to the public notice of the country at large. The
year was a fateful one for him in other respects. For two or three
years before this he had been speaking at public meetings, securing
more and more confidence as he realized his powers. He became the
banner-bearer for the allied causes of democracy, a free Church, and
the rights of Wales as a nation. His compatriots rallied round him as
their forefathers had rallied round Owen Glendower centuries before.
Working early and late, Lloyd George united his professional
engagements with appearances on the public platform. He was already
rousing those eddies of hatred and that personal devotion on which he
has been borne to fame. Furiously he flung himself into attacks on the
classes from which his political opponents were drawn. He adopted new
methods, he heeded not convention, made always for the thickest of the
fray. All the time there was mixed with his fervor an element of
shrewdness. It was this shrewdness, for instance, which sent him to a
big gathering of his political opponents, where he sat quietly in a
back seat in order to learn what they had to say about him, and
listened to their abuse with keen satisfaction. Gleams of ambition
must have been shooting in upon him by this time. It was impossible
that he had not thoughts of a bigger future for himself, and yet it
came as a thunderclap to him when he heard that he, a youthful
free-lance, had been adopted by the Liberal associations of the
district to be their candidate for Parliament at the next election. It
may be imagined with what zest under this stimulation he carried on his
preparations for the contest whenever it should arise. The
constituency--Carnarvon Boroughs--comprised a group of towns and a
large number of villages. It included castles and mansions and great
estates; a considerable portion of the general body voters were
associated with the landowners and aristocrats. Lloyd George must have
felt it was a pretty hopeless fight, but a fight, nevertheless, which
he would enjoy.
There is one other event to chronicle during this year when he reached
the age of twenty-five. Upon the mountain slopes beyond Llanystumdwy
was a spacious old farm-house, the home of a sweetly pretty Welsh girl
named Maggie Owen. How or when Lloyd George first met her is not
recorded, but in the course of his diary we come across a significant
entry just before this time. The diary refers to a meeting of a
debating society in which he had taken part, and goes on to relate
"Took Maggie Owen home." It is hard to imagine young Lloyd George
anything but an impetuous lover. His suit progressed, and in this same
fateful year of 1888 he was married. It may be said in passing that
never was a happier union, and that in the hard and adventurous life
that lay before the young politician he found in Mrs. George a true
companion. Marriage seemed to strengthen his ambition, and his vision
began to spread over the general field of politics instead of remaining
exclusively, as hitherto, fixed upon projects of special, if not of
exclusive, interest to Wales. Nevertheless he continued the leading
figure in the fight for reforms in his native country. A good deal of
his enthusiasm, for example, was expended on Church disestablishment in
Wales--that is to say, the separation of the English Church from state
support and state endowment, in view of the fact that the majority of
the people were Nonconformists, and that it was unfair to impose upon
them an unwanted and costly church which they had to help support even
though they were Nonconformist enthusiasts. There is nothing like a
religious controversy to stir feelings strongly, and the conflicts in
the campaign for disestablishment were very bitter. Lloyd George's
chief opponent on the other side was the Bishop of St. Asaph, a prelate
of the Church of England, himself a Welshman and a very able man. He
gave the promoters of disestablishment some hard knocks, and it is
related of him that he was particularly effective in one of the
districts. Accordingly, the Nonconformists there brought down Lloyd
George to speak at a public meeting in order to counteract the bishop's
influence. Lloyd George himself tells the story of how he was
introduced at that meeting by the chairman, a leading deacon of the
village. "We have suffered much of late from misrepresentations," he
said. "The Bishop of St. Asaph has been speaking against us and we all
know that he is a very great liar. Thank God we have a match for him
here to-night in Mr. Lloyd George." In later years when Lloyd George
and the bishop became good friends in spite of their differences of
opinion, it was hard to decide which of them enjoyed this story most.
Lloyd George began to speak everywhere, at street corners, in
conventicles, in the market-places, at mass-meetings in the public
buildings, and his peculiar oratory secured him larger and larger
audiences and aroused attention, sympathetic or hostile, all over the
constituency. Many who were lukewarm and went to hear him out of
curiosity were swung by his personality into being supporters. He had
always his own natural style of talk. Possessing a musical and clear
voice, he never strained for effect, rarely used a rotund sentence, but
talked to his audiences in a red-hot conversational kind of way, his
heightened feelings finding expression in a sibilance which always
touched the nerves of his hearers. He seldom interrupted interrupters,
finding it more effective to let them speak and then to deal with them
in his own special manner when they had finished. There were
occasionally exceptions to this, however. In the course of one of his
speeches he exclaimed, "What do my opponents really want?" A husky,
hostile voice from the crowd broke in, "What I want is a change of
government." "No," said Lloyd George; "what you really want is a
change of drink." Another time he had begun a sentence with the words
"I am here," when an opponent in the crowd shouted, "So am I." "Yes,"
said Lloyd George, "but you are not all there." One of his best
retorts in his early days was to a Conservative who came to a Liberal
meeting determined to stand no nonsense. "We must give home rule,"
declared Lloyd George, "not only to Ireland, but to Scotland as well,
and to Wales." "And home rule for hell," shouted a man in the
audience. "Quite right," said Lloyd George; "let every person stick up
for his own country."
A hard-working young professional man, Lloyd George was in for a heavy
fight and, in the opinion of many, a hopeless fight, when the election
came two years later. It was a dramatic chance that selected for his
Conservative opponent the squire of his native village, the dignitary
to whom Lloyd George as a village lad used to touch his hat. Fierce
excitement ranged throughout the election fight. In the result Lloyd
George snatched victory by just a handful of votes, his poll being one
thousand nine hundred sixty-three against the Conservative total of one
thousand nine hundred forty-five. Lloyd George was twenty-seven at the
time of this triumph and became known as "the boy politician." There
were many sneers among his opponents, who pointed out that this fluent
young demagogue had now reached the end of his tether. In the
environment of the House of Commons, among really clever men, he would
sink to the natural inconsequence from which a series of fortunate
accidents had lifted him. And indeed it was not unnatural for even the
sympathetic observer to feel that perhaps this was the end of Lloyd
George, that the ability which he undoubtedly possessed and which had
carried him a considerable distance was not the ability which could do
any more for him. He had projected himself out of the congenial
surroundings wherein his talents had proved of avail, but, like a spent
rocket, he would now rapidly come to earth.
It would have been inconceivable to many of his friends and to all of
his opponents that this twenty-seven-year-old M. P. should have
regarded himself as but on the threshold of his work, should have
looked upon what he had achieved merely as preliminaries to his rarely
serious efforts in life. They would have smiled indulgently or
ironically if they had been told at this period the story of Lloyd
George's diary entry after his first visit to the House of Commons at
seventeen. Probably no person on earth but his wife knew the steely
determination behind her husband's impetuosity.
The young M.P. took his seat in the House of Commons on April 17, 1890.
A Liberal Government was in power. Gladstone, over eighty years of
age, was at the head of it. Political giants whose reputation had
reached young Lloyd George through the newspapers were scattered along
the two front benches. He sat himself down on one of the back seats
and proceeded to look at these men in action and to weigh them up. He
formed some judgments about them. Here is what he wrote about Mr.
Asquith in the course of some work for a Welsh newspaper a little later
on: "A short, thick-set, rather round-shouldered man with a face as
clean shaven as that of the most advanced curate, keen eyes and a
broad, intellectual forehead--he speaks clearly and emphatically. He
sets out his arguments with great brilliancy and force." Little did
the young M. P. think that in the years to come he would be supplanting
this man as Prime Minister of the country.
Right from the start Lloyd George set himself to acquire the methods
and fashions of the House of Commons, with all the involved procedure.
He wanted to avoid the obvious pitfalls. Presently he essayed a
speech, and though he confessed himself as nervous, he did well, and
members spoke highly of his first effort. It is as well to say here
that the House of Commons quickly cuts short the ambitions and hopes of
many young men who on the strength of platform popularity look for
triumph at Westminster. The House of Commons, whatever may be its
drawbacks, has some human qualities, is kindly to beginners, has a
respect for sincerity, an undisguised yawn for bores, and a cold
contempt for swollen-headed young members who try to impress it with
their capacity. When once a member has passed the stage of initial
forbearance due to a new-comer, there grows upon him the fact that the
House of Commons is indeed the most critical assembly in the world.
There are always within it many who have secured their places by money
or influence, but they are in the minority, and the House, as a whole,
including even these rich men, has never any respect for moneyed men as
such, pays no special deference to the person of lordly birth within
its walls. A member is judged absolutely on what he is himself. The
two most popular and respected members in the strangely mixed House of
Commons I watched for years were Mr. Thomas Burt, the father of the
House, who had been a working miner, and that ardent and lovable Irish
Nationalist, Mr. Willie Redmond--both men having secured in
extraordinary measure the personal affection of the whole House. In
some respects, therefore, the House is like a big public school, and
Conservatives and Liberals, notwithstanding their political
differences, are welded together by a common instinct so far as the
domestic character of the Chamber is concerned.
The peculiar atmosphere was not lost upon Lloyd George, and he
diligently attuned himself to the new medium. This would have been
unavailing if there had been nothing in his speeches, but it was soon
realized that here was an interesting new member, a man inexperienced
in some directions, but with bold thoughts, apt phrases, and an almost
unpleasant sincerity. He did not take the House by storm, but still he
was listened to. He quickly developed. Within a year his name was
frequently in the newspapers as one of the guerrilla fighters below the
gangway who gave the Government no peace.