Lloyd George
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Frank Dilnot >> Lloyd George
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9 [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:
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