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David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, OM, PC (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was a British statesman who guided Britain and the Commonwealth of Nations through World War I and the postwar settlement as the Liberal Party Prime Minister, 1916-1922.
Upbringing and early life Although born in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, England in 1863 and therefore a Mancunian by birth, Lloyd George was a Welsh-speaking Welshman by descent and upbringing, the only Welshman ever to hold the office of Prime Minister in the British government. In March 1863 his father who had been a school teacher in Manchester and other towns returned to Wales and took up farming but died in July 1864. His mother sold the farm and moved with her children to in Llanystumdwy, North Wales, where she lived with her brother, a cobbler and later Baptist preacher who encouraged him to take up a career in law and enter politics. His childhood showed through in all of his career, as he attempted to aid the common man at the expense of what he liked to call "the Dukes". Articled to a firm of solicitors in Porthmadog, Lloyd George was admitted in 1884 after taking Honours in his final law examination and set up his own practice in the back parlour of his uncle's house in 1885. The practice flourished, he established branch offices in surrounding towns and took his brother William into partnership in 1887. By then he was politically active having campaigned for the Liberal Party in the 1885 election in which he was attracted by Chamberlain's "unauthorised programme" of reforms. The election resulted firstly in a stalemate, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives having a majority, the balance of power being held by the Irish National Party and then in Gladstone's announcement of a determination to bring about Irish Home Rule which in turn led to Chamberlain leaving the Liberals to form the Liberal Unionists. Lloyd George was uncertain of which wing to follow, carrying a pro-Chamberlain resolution at the local Liberal Club and travelling to Birmingham planning to attend the first meeting of Chamberlain's National Radical Union but he had his dates wrong and arrived a week too early. In 1907 he was to say that he thought Chamberlain's plan for a federal solution correct in 1886 and still thought so, that he preferred the unauthorised programme to the Whiggish platform of the official Liberal Party and that had Chamberlain proposed solutions to Welsh grievances such as land reform and disestablishment he, together with most Welsh Liberals, would have followed him. On 24 January 1888 he married Margaret Owen, the daughter of a well-to-do local farming family. Also in that year he and other young Welsh Liberals founded a monthly paper Udgorn Rhyddid (Trumpet of Freedom) and won on appeal to the Divisional Court of Queens Bench the Llanfrothen Burial case which established the right of Nonconformists to be buried according to their own denominational rites in parish burial grounds, a right given by the Burial Act 1880 that had hitherto been ignored by the Anglican clergy. It was this case, which was hailed as a great victory throughout Wales and his writings in Udgorn Rhyddid that led to his adoption as the Liberal candidate for Caernarfon Boroughs on 27 December 1888. In 1889 he became an Alderman on the Caernarfon County Council which had been created by the Local Government Act 1887. At that time he appeared to be trying to create a separate Welsh National Party modelled on Parnell's Irish Parliamentary Party and worked towards a union of the North and South Wales Liberal Federations. His flair quickly showed, and he was narrowly returned Liberal MP for Caernarfon Boroughs on 13 April 1890 at a byelection caused by the death of the former Conservative member, his margin being 19 votes. When entering the House of Commons he was the youngest MP in the house and he sat with an informal grouping of Welsh Liberal members with a programme of disestablishing and disendowing the Church of England in Wales, temperance reform and Welsh home rule. He would remain an MP until 1945, fifty-five years later. As at that time backbench members of the House of Commons were not paid, he supported himself and his growing family by continuing to practise as a solicitor, opening an office in London under the title of Lloyd George and Co and continuing in partnership with William George in Criccieth. In 1897 he merged his growing London practise with that of Arthur Rhyrs Roberts (who was to become Official Solicitor) under the title of Lloyd George, Roberts and Co. He was soon speaking on Liberal issues (particularly temperance, the "local option" and national as opposed to denominational education) throughout England as well as Wales. During the next decade Lloyd George campaigned in Parliament largely for Welsh issues and in particular for disestablishment and disendowment of the Church of England. He wrote extensively for Liberal papers such as the Manchester Guardian. When Gladstone retired after the defeat of the second Home Rule Bill in 1894 the Welsh Liberal members chose him to serve on a deputation to Harcourt to press for specific assurances on Welsh issues and when those were not fothcoming they resolved to take independent action if the government did not bring a bill for disestablishment. When that was not forthcoming he and three other Welsh Liberals (David Alfred Thomas, Herbert Lewis and Frank Edwards) refused the Whip on 14 April 1892 but accepted Lord Rosebery's assurance and rejoined the official Liberals on 29 May. Thereafter he devoted much time to setting up branches of Cymru Fydd (Young Wales) which, he said, would in time become a force like the Irish National Party. He abandoned this idea after being criticised in Welsh newspapers for bringing about the defeat of the Liberal Party in the 1895 election and when, at a meeting in Newport on 16 January 1896, the South Wales Liberal Federation, led by David Alfred Thomas and Robert Bird moved that he be not heard. He gained national fame by his vehement opposition to the Second Boer War. He based his attack firstly on what were supposed to be the war aims – remedying the grievances of the Uitlanders and in particular the claim they were wrongly denied the right to vote saying "I do not believe the war has any connection with the franchise. It is a question of 45% dividends" and that England (which then did not have universal manhood suffrage) was more in need of franchise reform then the Boer republics. His second attack was on the cost of the war which prevented overdue social reform in England, such as old age pensions and workmans cottages. As the war progressed he moved his attack to its conduct by the generals, who he said (basing his words on reports by Burdett Coutt in The Times) were not providing for the sick or wounded soldiers and were starving Boer women and children in concentration camps. But he reserved his major thrusts for Chamberlain accusing him of directly profiteering from the war through the Chamberlain family company Kynochs Ltd of which Chamberlain's brother was Chairman and which had won tenders to the War Office though its prices were higher than some of its competitors. His attacks almost split the Liberal Party as H. H. Asquith, Richard Burdon Haldane and others were supporters of the war and formed the Liberal Imperial League. His attacks on the government's Education Act which provided that County Councils would fund church schools helped reunite the Liberals, his successful amendment that the County need only fund those schools where the buildings were in good repair served to make the Act a dead letter in Wales where the Counties were able to show most of the Church of England schools were in poor repair. Having already gained national recognition for his anti Boer War campaigns, his leadership of the attacks on the Education Act gave him a strong parliamentary reputation and marked him as a future cabinet member. Cabinet Minister (1905- 1916) In 1905, he entered the new Liberal Cabinet of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as President of the Board of Trade. In that position he brought legislation on many topics, from Merchant Shipping to Railway regulation but his main achievement was in stopping a proposed national strike of the railway unions by brokering an agreement between the unions and the railway companies. On Campbell-Bannerman's death he succeeded Asquith, who had become Prime Minister, as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908 to 1915. In this role, he was largely responsible for the introduction of old age pensions, unemployment benefit and state financial support for the sick and infirm. These social benefits were met with great hostility in the House of Lords where his Budget to introduce and finance them was rejected because it angered the landed gentry. These social reforms began in Britain the creation of a welfare state that had been preceded in Germany some 20 years earlier. They fulfilled in both countries the aim of dampening down the demands of the growing working class for rather more radical solutions to their impoverishment. Considered a pacifist until 1914, Lloyd George changed his stance when World War I broke out. When the Liberal government fell as a result of the Shell Crisis of 1915 and was replaced with a coalition government dominated by Liberals still under the Premiership of Asquith, Lloyd George became the first Minister of Munitions in 1915 and then war secretary in 1916. War leader (1916-1918)
Postwar Prime Minister (1918-1922) At the end of the war Lloyd George's reputation stood at its zenith. A leading Conservative said He can be dictator for life if he wishes. In the "Coupon election" of 1918 he declared this must be a land "fit for heroes to live in." He did not say, "We shall squeeze the orange until the pips squeak" but he did express that sentiment about reparations from Germany to pay the entire cost of the war, including pensions. At Bristol, he said that German industrial capacity "will go a pretty long way." We must have "the uttermost farthing," and "shall search their pockets for it." As the campaign closed, he summarized his program: Lloyd George represented Britain at the Versailles Peace Conference, clashing with French Premier Georges Clemenceau, American President Woodrow Wilson and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando. Lloyd George wanted to punish Germany politically and economically for devastating Europe during the war, but did not want to utterly destroy the German economy and political system the way Clemenceau and many other people of France wanted to do with their demand for massive reparations. Memorably, he replied to a question as to how he had done at the peace conference, "Not badly, considering I was seated between Jesus Christ and Napoleon" (Wilson and Clemenceau). The British economist, John Maynard Keynes attacked Lloyd George's stance on reparations in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace calling the Prime Minister a "half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity". Lloyd George began to feel the weight of the coalition with the Conservatives after the war. His decision to extend conscription to Ireland was nothing short of disastrous, indirectly leading a majority of Irish MPs to declare independence. He presided over a war of attrition in Ireland, which led to the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty with Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins and the formation of the Irish Free State. At one point, he famously declared of the IRA, "We have murder by the throat!" However he was soon to begin negotiations with IRA leaders to recognise their authority and end the conflict. Lloyd George's coalition was too large, and deep fissures quickly emerged. The more traditional wing of the Unionist Party had no intention of introducing these reforms, which led to three years of frustrated fighting within the coalition both between the National Liberals and the Unionists and between factions within the Conservatives themselves. It was this fighting, coupled with the increasingly differing ideologies of the two forces in a country reeling from the costs of war that led to Lloyd George fall from power. In June 1922 Conservatives were able to show that he had been selling knighthoods and peerages for money. This led to a major attack in the House of Lords on his corruption resulting in the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. The Conservatives also attacked Lloyd George as lacking any executive accountability as Prime Minister, claiming that he never turned up to Cabinet meetings and banished some government departments to the gardens of 10 Downing Street. His government was brought down by the Chanak Crisis during which on 12 October 1922 at a meeting called by Austen Chamberlain as the leader of the Conservatives in the House of Commons, the frustrated and underused coalition backbenchers sealed Lloyd George's fate. Chamberlain and other prominent Conservatives such as Lord Birkenhead argued for supporting Lloyd George, while prospective party leader Andrew Bonar Law argued the other way, claiming that breaking up the coalition "wouldn't break Lloyd George's heart". The main attack came from Stanley Baldwin, then a junior treasury minister, who spoke of Lloyd George as a "dynamic force" who would break the Conservative Party. Baldwin and many of the more progressive members of the Conservative Party fundamentally opposed Lloyd George and those who supported him on moral grounds. The motion that the Conservative Party should fight the next election (then due in a matter of months) on its own, rather than co-operating with the Coalition Liberals was carried 187 to 86. Later political career (1922-1945) Throughout the next two decades Lloyd George remained on the margins of British politics, being frequently predicted to return to office but never succeeding. Before the 1923 election, he made up his dispute with Asquith, allowing the Liberals to run a united ticket, and in 1926 he succeeded Asquith as Liberal leader. In 1929 Lloyd George became Father of the House, the longest serving member of the Commons. In 1931 an illness prevented his joining the National Government when it was formed. Later when the National Government called a General Election he tried to pull the Liberal Party out of it but succeeded in taking only a few followers, most of whom were related to him; the main Liberal party remained in the coalition for a year longer, under the leadership of Sir Herbert Samuel. In 1935 he sought to promote a radical programme of economic reform, called "Lloyd George's New Deal" after the American New Deal. However the programme did not find favour in the mainstream political parties. Later that year Lloyd George and his family reunited with the Liberal Party in Parliament. Lloyd George met Hitler and offered some public comments that were surprisingly favorable to the German dictator. Despite this embarrassment, however, as the 1930s progressed Lloyd George became more clear-eyed about the German threat and joined Winston Churchill, among others, in fighting the government's policy of appeasement. In the late 1930s he was sent by the British government to try to dissuade Adolf Hitler from his plans of Europe-wide expansion. In perhaps the last important parliamentary intervention of his career, which occurred during the crucial Norway Debate of May 1940, Lloyd George made a powerful speech that helped to undermine Chamberlain as Prime Minister and to pave the way for the ascendency of Churchill as Premier. During the Second World War there was speculation about Lloyd George returning to government, but these came to nothing. Churchill offered Lloyd George a position in his cabinet as Minister for Agriculture, but was refused because Lloyd George felt he was too old. He was pessimistic about Britain's prospects, however, and perhaps he wished to avoid being too closely identified with his former protege in the event of a German conquest. In early 1945 he was raised to the peerage as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor and Viscount Gwynedd, of Dwyfor in the County of Caernarvonshire. He died shortly afterwards at the age of 82 without ever taking up his seat in the House of Lords. His perceived double-dealing on many issues alienated many of his former supporters, but there is no doubt that he was a brilliant politician, hence his nickname: The Welsh Wizard. He had a reputation as a womaniser. Family Following the death of his wife, he married his secretary and mistress, Frances Stevenson (who had been with Lloyd George for over 30 years at the time of his death and became Countess Lloyd George of Dwyfor), a cultivated, beautiful woman now largely remembered for her extensive, insightful diaries that dealt with the issues and statesmen that were a part of her lover's life. His son, Gwilym, and daughter, Megan, both followed him into politics and were elected members of parliament. They were politically faithful to their father throughout his life but following their father's death each drifted away from the Liberal Party, with Gwilym finishing his career as a Conservative Home Secretary, whilst Megan became a Labour MP in 1957, perhaps symbolising the fate of much of the old Liberal Party. The Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan is his great-granddaughter, and is currently an active professor and provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. War cabinet, December 1916&January 1919 Changes Other members of Lloyd Georges war government Peacetime government, January 1919&October 1922 The War Cabinet was formally maintained for much of 1919, but as Lloyd George was out of the country for many months this did not noticeably make much of a difference. In October 1919 a formal Cabinet was reinstated. Changes Bibliography Primary sources Offices held | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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