From a Photograph by Miss Olive Edis, F.R.P.S.,
specially taken for this book at 10, Downing Street, October 15, 1917.
D Lloyd George (Signature)

THE

PRIME MINISTER

BY

HAROLD SPENDER

“Who, if he be called upon to face

Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined

Great issues, good or bad, for human kind,

Is happy as a Lover; and attired

With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired.”

The Happy Warrior.

NEW YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1920,

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOREWORD

My thanks are due for assistance in writing this book to Mr. Lloyd George, with regard to whom I have the privilege of drawing on the memories of twenty-seven years of unbroken friendship; to Mrs. Lloyd George; to Mr. William George, the Prime Minister’s only brother; to Mr. Philip Kerr and Miss Stevenson, C.B.E., his secretaries; and to Mr. Arthur Rhys Roberts, formerly his professional partner.

For certain chapters I owe particular thanks to Sir John Stavridi, Consul-General of Greece and Councillor of the Greek Legation; to Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, G.C.B., Permanent Secretary of the Board of Trade; and to Mr. W. T. Layton, C.B.E., formerly of the Ministry of Munitions.

I wish also to express my gratitude to all the other numerous persons who have so generously helped me in this important task.

H. S.

London, 1920.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE PRIME MINISTER

THE PRIME MINISTER

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD

“When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.”

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Act v, Sc. i.

Every school-child is familiar with that striking shape taken by North Wales on the map of Britain, so like to a human being pointing with outstretched arm down St. George’s Channel towards the Atlantic. In that shape Anglesey is the head, and Carnarvonshire is the pointed arm. On the lower side of the arm, towards the hollow of the armpit, there lie a village and two small towns. Naming from west to east they are Llanystumdwy, Criccieth, and Portmadoc.

In these three places and in the country around them the childhood and youth of David Lloyd George was entirely spent. It was there that he was trained and educated, and there that his mind first formed vivid impressions of the universe—there, on the sea-limits of Wales between the mountains and the ocean.

It is a fertile country, watered by streams from the mountains and showers from the Irish Channel, a country of deep grasses and rich woods right up to the foot of the mountains and down to the verge of the sea. From every raised point you obtain wide-stretching views. Facing you along the south-eastern horizon are the hills of Merionethshire, often shrouded in sea-mist, but on good days clear to the utmost detail of field and hedgerow. Still farther away, in the very best weather, can sometimes be seen even the outline of St. David’s Head and of the Pembrokeshire hills. Nearer home, the great stretch of Cardigan Bay sweeps round to the east in many a bend and fold of the coast. From above Criccieth you can see the famous castle of Harlech and the golden glitter of the sands at Barmouth, though you cannot hear the “moaning of the bar.” Taking it all in all, there are few finer prospects along the immense and varied sea-board of these islands.

Turn from the sea and look northwards; and you will gain glorious glimpses of the great piled mountains of the Snowdon group, sometimes hidden in cloud, sometimes clear to every wrinkle of their rugged outlines. These are “Eyri”—the “Eagle Rocks”—black in storm, blue and green in the sunshine, purple and crimson in the sunset. There is no mere prettiness in these mighty views, no soft luxury of Italian backgrounds, and yet no barren terrors of arctic solitudes. On all sides there is majesty and power—the power of the height and the storm, the majesty of the winds and the deeps.

Of these three places in which Mr. Lloyd George spent his childhood and youth, Portmadoc is the business town, Criccieth is the pleasure resort, and Llanystumdwy is the village. Portmadoc, with its straight-set streets of little grey houses, speaks of money and affairs; Criccieth is a little watering-place of lodging-houses and villas prettily placed in the innermost bend of Cardigan Bay; Llanystumdwy is just a little Welsh village drawn back from the sea and cosily hidden away in the woods, astride a little mountain river which hurries down to the sea with many a rippling murmur and many a gleam of white foam on its brown waters.

It was to this little village of Llanystumdwy—Welsh of the Welsh in name, situation, and tradition—that David Lloyd George was brought at the age of a year and a half.

Up to that time, indeed, life had not gone very well with the young child. For his father, William George, had just died in the prime of his life, at forty-four years of age. Mrs. William George, with David and his elder sister Mary, had been left but scantily provided to face an unsmiling world.

David’s father, William George, was an able, earnest man, very sociable, full of fun and humour, and very happy in his home life. Brought up on a prosperous farm in South Wales, he could easily have followed smoothly and serenely in the steps of his thriving forefathers. For there, on that fertile coast, his father and grandfather had farmed well and fared sumptuously, holding their heads high.[^[1]]

But William George was not content with farming. Early in life he fell in love with books and the things of the mind; and through his short life he wandered—a true “scholar-gipsy”—from school to school, trying to kindle the youth of Wales to the passion for knowledge in those early difficult days before the Education Acts had come to make the schoolmaster a power in the land. He taught in London and Liverpool; he opened a grammar-school of his own in Haverfordwest; he served the Free Churches and the Unitarians—any and all who felt the fire of knowledge and shared his passion to extend its power. He became the friend of that great, pure spirit, Henry Martineau[^[2]]—a fact alone sufficient to prove his high quality.

The fire of the schoolmaster’s zeal burnt him up. He was never a strong man; and a life of excessive labour had exhausted him before his time. He resolved to lay down his ferule and return to the land of his forefathers. As his last teaching task, he took a temporary headmastership at Manchester and lodged in a little house in York Place, off Oxford Road. A few years before, when teaching at Pwllheli, he had loved and wedded Elizabeth, the daughter of a Baptist minister, David Lloyd, who preached and ministered in Criccieth and the village of Llanystumdwy.

With fair skin and a wealth of dark hair, Mrs. William George was in youth and early womanhood a comely and fascinating woman. I saw her only in later life; and, though sorrows and trials had told on her frail frame, her troubles had only added to the fine charm and spirituality of her character. “Happy he with such a mother!” She proved to William George a capital housewife, and helped him to save enough to leave to her a small property even out of their hard-earned savings.

To this couple had already been born the daughter Mary. Now, on January 17th, 1863, a son was born also and named David, after his two grandfathers—David George and David Lloyd. His admiring father recorded at the time that the little David was a “sturdy, healthy little fellow” with curly hair. At any rate, his father thought so; and thus, as a last flash of happiness to his dying father, little David came into the world.

By such a chance twist of events, Manchester can claim to be the birthplace of David Lloyd George.

Before he went to Manchester, William George had already decided to give up schoolmastering; and soon after David’s birth, towards the end of 1863, he left Manchester and entered into occupation of a small farm named Bwlford, about four miles from Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire.

It was close to the home of his fathers.

But this change came too late to save his life. He was already a tired man, and he was not equal to the strain of outdoor labour. On June 7th, 1864, he died of pneumonia, due to a chill caught in gardening.

Thus little David was left fatherless before he had lived eighteen months on the earth; and on the threshold of life he was robbed of the influence which ought to be the strongest prop and stay of a young boy’s life. His father left him before the age of memory. Yet memory is a strange thing; for when Mr. Lloyd George revisited the home of his infancy some few years ago, he recalled instantly, with surprising accuracy, some features of his father’s farm.[^[3]]

The sudden death of William George left David’s mother with two small children on her hands, and another on the way to this vale of tears. The family inheritance ought to have left her in comparative security to bring up this family well. But William George, with that large-hearted generosity which had always characterised him, had allowed the family patrimony which devolved on him as heir-at-law to be enjoyed by others whom he thought to be in greater need than himself. Such savings as they had put together from a schoolmaster’s salary could not suffice to bring up a family in comfort or security. Thus to the grief of her husband’s death there was added for Mrs. William George a grave and acute anxiety for the upbringing of her children. It looked as if that little family would be driven into that wilderness of poverty which is no easy dwelling-place in these islands.

But far away up in Carnarvonshire, in that little Welsh village which was her birthplace, Mrs. William George had a brother named Richard Lloyd.[^[4]] He was not at all like the wealthy godfather of the storybooks. He was not by any means rich or prosperous. He was just the village bootmaker at a time when boots were still made in villages. True, he was also, like his father before him, a preacher and a minister. But he possessed no rich living or easy sinecure; on the contrary, like Paul the tent-maker, he received no penny of pay for either his preaching or his ministry. He belonged to a religious community classed with the Baptists and called the “Disciples of Christ,” who held a belief, unpopular in ecclesiastical circles, that a man ought to preach the Gospel of Christ and feed His flock without pay or reward.[^[5]]

In that simple faith he then preached and taught in the plain, grey little chapel above Criccieth and baptized in the little green basin of fresh spring water ever renewed by the running stream.

Yet this preaching bootmaker did not seem to have suffered seriously in his Christianity by this strange and rare distaste for endowment. If it be still, as an Apostle once thought, “true religion and undefiled” to “visit the widow and the fatherless,” Richard Lloyd went straight to the mark. For on receiving his sister’s tragic news he put down his tools, left his workshop, and started out to help his bereaved relations. There was no railway from Criccieth to Carnarvon in those days; so for some twenty miles he journeyed on foot. Then from Carnarvon he took the train to Haverfordwest, and joined his widowed sister on her farm, a true friend and comforter. He stayed for some months helping her with the sale of her farm-lease and her stock. Then he took back the mother and the two children, Mary and David, to his own little home at Llanystumdwy. That is a plain record of a simple and heroic act.

There, in that little Welsh mountain village, without any show or fuss, the sister and her children became part of Richard Lloyd’s home. A few months later the third child was born posthumously—a second boy, William George. The little stranger was welcomed in that simple, hospitable home.

So for the next twelve years the little family lived and throve in the bootmaker’s cottage at Llanystumdwy; and there, in those village surroundings, little David grew from infancy to manhood.

Let us see what the surroundings were.

The little cottage stands to-day for all the world to visit—two-storied, four-roomed, creepered, slate-roofed; then called “Highgate,” now “Rose Cottage”—a sweet-smelling name. The front door opens on to the living-room—a warm, cosy chamber with a raftered ceiling, a big fireplace, and a floor of worn slate-slabs. It was in this room that the family had their meals and gathered in the evenings when the uncle read and talked to them. It was there that he cheered and rebuked those growing boys.

You step round a low screen into a smaller room, once a storeroom for leather, but in those years used as the boys’ study. Here the boys were “interned” during the daily hours of home work; for Uncle Lloyd was as strict as he was kind.

Between the two rooms a small cottage staircase mounts to the bedrooms—now three, in those days two. The boys slept in the little front room looking over the street.

Descend again and pass through the back door. You pass into a fair-sized cottage garden, with several fruit-trees—apple, plum, and gooseberry. Every inch of the soil is filled with vegetables. There are traces of an old pigsty that once stood against the cottage wall. Move a few steps to your left, and you can enter a little stone building that gives the impression of having been a single-roomed cottage. It is now like a capacious cave. This was Richard Lloyd’s workshop. There is a large fireplace in the corner near the garden. On the side nearer the road is a space where the benches of Richard Lloyd’s workmen ran along the wall by the small window. There by the door is the little hole in the wall where Richard Lloyd kept his papers and into which the boys pushed their books. It looks like an old spy-hole, now blocked at the farther end.

This place was not merely a workshop. It was known as “the village Parliament.” Here the “village Hampdens” poured out their grievances; hither the evicted farmers and underpaid labourers came to consult the village oracle. On wet days the place was crowded. For bootmakers are notorious storm-centres both in town and country; and this bootmaker was a prophet and priest as well.

It was always both the refuge and the guard-room of the village children. There, against the corner, looking into the sad grey wall, stood the children who had misbehaved, waiting for Richard Lloyd’s kindly word of release. Good boys would often bring bad boys to be punished; and the good boys did not always get off without a clearance of soul. Who could tell whether “Uncle Lloyd” was going to be stern or soft? It was always a fascinating mystery for children—that workshop; in any case, there were always the bootmakers’ tools to finger and handle if you were lucky. The children knew that Uncle Lloyd found it very hard to refuse a thread; and what more fascinating than beeswax? Sticky, black, and smelly! But put out your hand for the knife—then ten to one he would see you—and instantly the stern look would come into his grey eyes, his eyebrows would contract, and he would cry in the voice which thrilled you—“No! No! Not that! Not that!”

Pass out of this little crumbling old building, with the slates now sagging down as if the whole thing might collapse, but for the one upright beam which now supports the roof, and take a few steps still to your left along the stone footpath. There you find the garden divided from the street only by a low wall of rubble. Over that wall, David—like that other David, the sweet-singing psalmist of Israel[^[6]] would often leap, and head across the village on some boyish adventure.

In these buildings the Lloyds had lived for several generations. There is still (1920) living in the village of Llanystumdwy an old tailor of ninety-five years of age whose chief pride it is that he made the first pair of trousers for the Prime Minister of England. The old man can remember David Lloyd, the grandfather of the Prime Minister, cutting leather in the little room on the right of the entrance door of the cottage. He can remember this friend and neighbour, who was also a minister and preacher, breaking forth into singing verse when moved, as those bardic preachers of Wales are still wont to do.[^[7]] Bobby Jones, the son of this old tailor, was one of David’s intimate comrades of boybood; and they two carved their names together on the trees in the woods and on the village bridge.

Many legends have already grown round Richard Lloyd’s cottage and the life lived in it. There is no need to exaggerate the poverty of that home. Richard Lloyd was a master bootmaker and always employed at least two hands. He must have earned a good weekly sum. His chief fault was that he could not collect his money. It was somewhat distressing to Mrs. William George to hear her brother serenely say to customers: “I can wait—any time will do.” She, being a woman, well knew that in the matter of collecting debts there is no time like the present.

At any rate, all that he had was theirs. They were fed on simple fare—more oats and barley, as Mr. Lloyd George has since told us, than wheat—but they were well fed. Eggs were cheap in the village, and the garden was full of vegetables. There were doubtless hard times. There was little meat—perhaps they were none the worse for that. But these children were nevertheless always held up in school as models of neatness and cleanliness. There was little to spare for pleasure. There was no easy flow of “pocket-money” for these boys. But they possessed the heart of the whole matter. They loved one another, and they were happy. “It was a little paradise,” says one who stayed there often,[^[8]] and when asked to explain she adds: “there was such high talk.”

“Plain living and high thinking,” was the note of that little home. Here, indeed, was—

“Fearful innocence,

And pure religion, breathing household laws.”

There was also much kindness and humanity. Richard Lloyd could not for long be a stern uncle. The pictures handed down to us are Goldsmithian in their quaint and simple charm—the little David sitting on one of his uncle’s knees and punctuating his infant periods by beating his fist on the other; or, in later years, wheedling his uncle with some clever boyish defence of an indefensible prank; or listening for long hours, with open mouth and eyes, to the “deep sighing of the poor,” as the farmers and labourers from all the district round poured their tales of woe into the ears of the gentle village seer.

I saw much of Richard Lloyd at a later time. He was a man who always lived on the heights of thought and feeling; he was one of nature’s great men to whom goodness was a delight: he was one of God’s crusaders. Tall and bearded, but with a clean-shaven mouth and dark eyebrows, he was a man of singular dignity and strength both in bearing and expression. It is difficult to describe the impression of mingled strength and tenderness which he gave. His face had some of the vigour of the eagle; and yet with it all his voice had some of the softness of the dove. He loved children with all the strength of his large, warm heart; and yet he was never weak with them, but sometimes very stern, with the strength of those who can be “cruel only to be kind.”

“He was the most selfless man I ever knew,” is the deliberate verdict of one of his foster children to-day. “Even in illness he never spoke of himself. It was painful to him even to think of himself.”

Such was the high influence that filled that little cottage and made it a fit nursery for a ruler of men. From the moment that Richard Lloyd took over the guardianship of his sister’s bereaved family he gave to the task all his resources of money, love, and wisdom. He was not one of those who know limits to giving—

“Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore

Of nicely calculated less or more.”

He laboured for these children as if they had been his own. If money was spared it was only to save it for their better training in later years.

The only available school at that time in Llandystumdwy was the National School provided by the Established Church of England and Wales; and to that school the children had to go. Many years afterwards, when the House of Commons was in the midst of one of its chronic wrangles over religious education, Mr. Lloyd George startled the High Churchmen by putting himself forward as a specimen of their chosen education. He was well within the letter of the fact; but I doubt whether the Llanystumdwy Voluntary School at that time could be called an average Church School; for the head master of the school—a Welshman named David Evans—was more than an average schoolmaster.[^[9]] He was a good “scholar” and mathematician, and he taught well. He gave the young boys that thorough grounding in the elements of knowledge which is really a better gift for the young than all the frills of a more dainty schooling. Richard Lloyd, at any rate, showed his confidenec in this teaching by keeping the boys on at school for two years beyond the ordinary limited time. From twelve to fourteen years of age David Lloyd George worked with a small group of boys also still remaining on at school in what would now be called an “Ex VIIth” standard. These boys carried their mathematics on as far as trigonometry, learned the elements of Latin, and were encouraged to read widely. David Evans kept a close eye on these studies, and Richard Lloyd found the fees well worth his while.

I have talked to one of the boys[^[10]] who stayed on at school with David Lloyd George, and his impressions of that time are still very vivid. His recollection is that David Lloyd George was the quickest boy of this little group. David could do twice as much work as any other boy in the same time. He still remembers the envy and annoyance which this habit used to cause among David’s companions. But little David was especially quick at higher mathematics. “He was through trigonometry,” says this witness, “by the time we started.” He was very rapid at mental arithmetic.

But perhaps the most active part of his growth came outside his school life. Most of the other boys of their age had left school and gone out to work, and those few picked ones that remained were a small company and hardly numerous enough for games on a large scale. Thus it was that they took to walking instead of play; and during these walks David began to develop that habit of keen discussion which he has loved throughout his life. His favourite subjects in those days were Baptism and Tithe. Among the little company were two pupil-teachers who were a little older than the boys themselves. Both of these teachers were destined for the Church; one of them became a rector and another became a canon of St. David’s.[^[11]] We can imagine the debates that took place within this little company of keen, honest, ardent youths!

Thus, in this varied life of work and play, the young David grew from infancy to youth, there in that distant little Welsh village, between the mountains and the sea.

[1] Here is his pedigree on the paternal side:

William George (farmer) and his wife (lived to 80 and 90 years respectively)

|

David George (farmer, died at 33)

|

William George (schoolmaster, died at 44)

|

David Lloyd George.

[2] A large engraving of Dr. Henry Martineau, signed by himself and set in a massive oak frame, is one of the treasured family heirlooms to-day.

[3] He noticed that a passage had been widened, and he asked after a green gate which was found to have been removed. He can still remember his sister putting stones under the gate to prevent the men from coming to take away his father’s goods.

[4] At this time thirty years of age. Born in July 1834.

[5] The movement had its origin in one of those great efforts after a return to simple Christianity which have from time to time stirred the surface of the Welsh Churches. This was led by Mr. J. R. Jones of Ramoth, who died in 1822. David Lloyd became one of its elders, and was largely influenced by the writings of the Campbells. The Campbellites in the United States still number some 2,000,000.

[6] See Psalm xviii. verse 29.

[7] He was ordained on May 20th, 1828, in the Baptist chapel at Criccieth and died in 1839. This singing habit it known as “hwyl.”

[8] Miss Jones, a niece of Richard Lloyd.

[9] See Mr. Lloyd George’s charming sketch of the schoolmaster in his speech at Llanystumdwy on September 8th, 1917: “He had a genius for teaching.”

[10] Mr. William Williams, who occupies a farm near Llanystumdwy.

[11] The Rev. Owen Owens and Canon Camber-Williams of St. David’s.

MR. WILLIAM GEORGE,
THE FATHER OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE.

“HIGHGATE” NOW “BOSE COTTAGE”—THE COTTAGE AT
LLANYSTUMDWY WHERE MR. LLOYD GEORGE
WAS BROUGHT UP AS A BOY.

CHAPTER II

SCHOOL DAYS

“Ye Presences of Nature in the sky

And on the earth! Ye visions of the hills

And Souls of lonely places! can I think

A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed

Such ministry?”

Wordsworth’s Prelude.

The training of a little Welsh Nonconformist child in a village Church School must lead either to submission or to revolt. In most cases it leads to submission. In this case it led to revolt. That is what makes the story of David Lloyd George worth telling.

To subject children of one faith to the religious discipline of another in a school subsidised by the State was, and still is, part of the ordinary machinery of life in this island; and it is generally acquiesced in by children, who as a rule suffer from a great fear of varying from their kind.

But in this case there were influences behind the boy which suggested the thought of injustice; and there is no more flaming thought in the mind of a young child. There was the uncle in the workshop, type of the heroic and the divine; he was against the system, and did not hesitate to say so in the presence of the boys. Then there was the village blacksmith, whose “smithy,” hard by the school, was a sort of village cave of Adullam; he said so between the clang of the hammer on the reverberant anvil, and what he said was law. No wonder that there stirred in the boy’s mind the working wonder whether he should really submit.

There was, for instance, the yearly visit of the rector, the squire, and the gentry, in full feudal state, to hear the replies to the Church Catechism—a sort of annual homage to the powers that were, not unusual in village schools.

Then there was the visit of the Bishop, who was willing to confirm as many children, Baptist or otherwise, as the rector would present for him to lay hands on.

Now David admired his schoolmaster and worked hard and steadily in the only school accessible to him. But when the Church tried to turn his necessity to such uses he remembered that he was a Nonconformist child born of Nonconformist parents. Then he became a rebel.

The tales of these school revolts have already become part of the heroic legends of Wales. They have been told in many forms. I will try to tell the simple facts as gathered from contemporary witnesses and comrades.

The most famous revolt occurred over the Catechism. We can recapture the scene. There were the three village authorities—the Squire, the Rector, and the Schoolmaster, together with the Diocesan Inspector and a bevy of fair ladies—standing in front of the little class of Welsh children in the grey little building, expecting nothing but meekness and docility. Nothing fierce about these visitors, you may be sure—rather an attitude of smiling expectancy as they waited to hear the children repeat in chorus the comforting assertion that they were ready to order themselves “lowly and reverently” to all their “betters.”

But look at the children. Their eyes look strangely bright and their lips are drawn together. There have been many whisperings on the way to school, and much flitting to and fro of the small Scotch cap with the ribbons that David wore. Some look flushed; others look grave and pale. Fear battles against resolve. Something big is struggling in those little minds.

The rector puts his questions; the squire affably awaits the reply; the schoolmaster looks stern. Little David looks unusually innocent.

There is a dead silence.

The rector raises his eyebrows and repeats the question:

“What is thy duty towards thy neighbour?”

Still, a dead silence.

And so the question is passed from child to child. The little heads are shaken. The little faces grow paler and paler. But still silence.

The rector turns to the schoolmaster questioningly. The schoolmaster is white with vexation. The squire smiles indulgently. Little David looks more innocent than ever.

But farther along the line, behind his little desk, sits a boy with a little troubled, anxious face, looking as if he were the centre of guilt in that little company. He watches with growing trouble the ashen face of the schoolmaster; for he loves his master with all his soul, and he cannot bear to see him suffer. For this is little William George—a boy of milder, quieter temperament, given to love his enemies; and when his much-distressed head master appeals to the children to recite the Apostles’ Creed it is William George who suddenly breaks the silence with a strident “I believe,” and all but two or three “infant” Die-hards join in the recital that followed. The schoolmaster turns to the class with a flush of pleasure; the rector smiles—“good boys”—the squire nods approvingly; and the scene ends as suddenly as it began.

So much for the Catechism revolt. The second revolt arose over the Church’s claim to “confirm.”[^[12]]

It was little William Williams, one of David’s intimates, who had been selected as a capture for the Bishop. His father, a Calvinistic Methodist, but with a kindly heart for the great, had surrendered the lad to the rector. William had been duly prepared and instructed. Confirmation day had arrived. William Williams, shining with soap, smart in his best clothes, was already on the road—walking to school to join the church boys. There the little catechumens, all duly marshalled, were waiting to be marched off to the church.

But on the way to school it was fated that William Williams should meet David Lloyd George. Seeing his friend so smart, David naturally asked what he was going to do. Williams told him. David’s eyes flashed; his voice rang out. He argued; he persuaded; he urged. Not that! Not that! His winged words went home. In a few moments William Williams, aged fourteen, felt thoroughly ashamed of himself. His best clothes and his clean collar became garments of shame. He was willing to follow David anywhere.

The two boys managed to get out into the school-yard; and there, in the twinkling of an eye, they were over the wall. They hid behind the hedge. In a few moments out came the schoolmaster, hurried and eager; he could see no one in sight. He blew his whistle once, twice, and yet again. There was no reply. Time pressed. The Bishop could not be kept waiting. There was nothing for it but to go back and fetch the others.

So David and William Williams stood and watched while the little procession of children, with their nicely washed faces, walked across the school-yard to the church.

Then, when all had passed by, out came the two rebels. Without a pause they jumped over the wall, leapt into the road, and made for Richard Lloyd’s workshop. Instantly, when he had heard their story, the bootmaker dropped his last and patted the boys on the back. “Well done, my boys!” he cried; “well done!”

I will suggest to any Anglican reader that he should, for the moment, try to look at the situation from the point of view of his Nonconformist neighbour. Suppose that he, an Anglican parent, were obliged by law to send his boy to a Baptist School because no other school existed in his village. Suppose then that the Baptist minister took advantage of this situation to baptize the boy up to the neck in the village stream. What would the Anglican parent do? Why, probably something much more violent than either uncle Lloyd or nephew David.

Yet the spirit of rebellion is rare, and the act is slow. Doubtless there were other boys in that school whose hearts waxed hot within them, and other parents whose blood boiled. But they did nothing. Where David Lloyd George differed from the other boys, and his uncle from the other parents and guardians, was just here—that they acted while the others merely raged. That is the startling difference.

They possessed that particular quality which explodes in deeds. There it was already—this care thing called courage, which was, in process of time, to become the driving-wheel of the whole machine.

It is not to be thought that a boy thus endowed was to prove a pattern boy in all directions. David was sound enough at heart; but he was certainly not a saint. He was not born with a halo round his curly head. In that little village he was often the leader of enterprises of pith and moment. He was not without suspicions of piracy. “It’s that David Lloyd George,” was the sure comment of the village mother when she found her fences down. Wherever those two ribbons were seen flying in the wind, you might be sure that the other boys were not far behind. You would scent mischief in the tainted breeze. There was indeed much to be done. There were fish to be caught; rabbits to be snared; dogs to be trained. There was even—alas!—at one time a privy “cache” in the woods where pipes and tobacco were stored to be fearfully tested on uncertain stomachs.

No, certainly David was no model of the boyish proprieties; no candidate for a stucco niche. He was already a Robin Hood of the woods, an adventurer of that winding, brawling stream. He led others into the adventures with him; for he was already gregarious to the finger-tips. He would draw along with him his more cautious brother; and, somehow, it always seemed to be the brother who bore the weight of the trouble that followed.

Not that David ever shirked the penalties of his youthful sins. He was ever ready to “face the music.” He would bravely stand before his uncle in his sterner moods; and many an explosive of argument and reproof had to be expended on his well-entrenched defences.

Not that his uncle ever took up that relentless attitude which drives so many children faster on the downward path. He remembered the text—“Whom He loveth He chasteneth,” or, as it has been rewritten, “lick ’im and love ’im.” But Richard Lloyd never let the stripes blot out the love. He always believed in this boy David. That was the real secret of the uncle’s influence. Beneath the rough, dusty ore he already saw the gleaming gold.

There were indeed some rare features about this boy’s character. His early companions testify to some features that still shine in memory. “He was the most kind-hearted boy I ever met,” said one who was an inseparable. “If he ever got a penny he would buy his sweets, and then divide up the whole among the other boys.” He was very fond of animals—a glorious virtue in the young. There was always a dog in his train—and a dog, being ever young, loves youth and mischief. Then David was ever full of pity for the weak. Pity and audacity met in his nature. They made him at school, as in after-life, a terror to the bully and a trial to the boaster.

His youthful companions cannot remember that he was notably ambitious. But he was from early days a lover of books; and that often held in leash his passion for adventure. He rarely, for instance, played truant from school. There is one historic dawn, still standing out in red letters in the memory of his friends. On that morning the school-bell sounded to deaf ears; all that day those spirits from prison scampered by the river-side testing a new dog.[^[13]] The deed was never repeated. That day of glowing delight was probably burnt into his memory by one of those reprimands from an uncle whose words cut deeper than another’s whips.

There is, indeed, an epic story of a holiday hunt of a hare down in the Aberkin farm between the village and the sea. The boys followed the dogs and the dogs went through the river, but an old ganger on the railway refused to allow the boys to cross the bridge. But David was not to be daunted. “Come on, boys!” he cried; and straight through the river he went almost up to his shoulders!

As the years went on he became more serious. He conceived the idea of going to see the world. He spent weeks with maps and made a plan of a journey. Boys will do such things, and the difficulty generally comes when the tickets have to be bought. That was where David Lloyd George’s plan broke down. But if he could not wander in the body, he could at any rate travel in the spirit. He read more and more as the years went on. After twelve, remaining on at school after his friends, he became rather a lonely boy. At that time he would often go off with a book into the woods; and he acquired the habit of climbing a tree and there reading for hours in some kindly fork of the branches far away from his romping friends.

There, alone in the woods, his mind formed; and the shadowy whims of youth—perhaps influenced, like Wordsworth’s, by the surrounding mountains and sea—steeled into firmer stuff. When he was a very small boy he would say, boy-like, to his uncle, “I am going to be a giant, like that tree.” This infantile yearning after something larger than his natal fate seemed to grow upon him. A sense of power seemed to be working within him. Strange, when you consider the cramping conditions of his life. Here was a boy living in a little cottage in a remote Welsh village; talking a despised language; an obscure member of a race scoffed at by the powerful of this earth. He had already proclaimed himself faithful to a religion contemned by all who wished to rise in life. He was surrounded by a peasantry long trained to humility; living in houses that belonged to others; with few rights in their own land—excluded from their own woods and fields by laws of trespass, and menaced with dire penalties if they killed the wild animals of their own land. He found himself born with little freedom beyond the liberty of the village street. There were few adventures for him that were not crimes in the eye of the law. In such a life there seemed enough to quell any growing spirit and to crush any latent ambition. For in those days the social power of the Welsh squires was still scarcely challenged; their claims shadowed all the large spaces in the world around him.

Yet this boy began to look at all this with candid, unprejudiced eyes. He began to grasp the fact that what was required was daring, and still daring.

In this vision he was by no means alone. It was a perception dimly stirring in the minds of all those multitudes of youth who were then, during those years, the first to pass through the new schools of the nation and to win the franchise of the mind. Again, where he was alone was in the courage to pursue this vision—the courage to act as well as to see.

At the age of fourteen (1877) it became necessary to choose a life-calling for David Lloyd George. The village National School had finished its work for the boy. The extra two years’ schooling had brought him as far as that training could take him.

Richard Lloyd was not indeed compelled by any law, human or divine, to carry the boy’s education any further. He would certainly have achieved as much as most men consider due to a sister’s child if he had now taken David from school and apprenticed him to his own honourable handicraft of bootmaking.

But Uncle Lloyd knew only too well the carking cares of a workman’s life. He knew what it was to feel a mind-hunger which cannot be sated. Those who saw much of the preacher-bootmaker in those days tell how eager he was for books—how in this eagerness he struck up a very admirable friendship with the kindly village curate; how, after his long day’s work, he would read half through the night, and how the village doctor, going on some errand of midnight or dawn, would still see the light of his candle shining through his bedroom window.

Such a life is often filled with an aching regret. The hardly tasked body yearns for a fuller freedom—the freedom to follow, undisturbed, the clear call of the mind.

It was such a life that he dreamed of for his boys when he decided to send them, at all costs, into one of those learned professions which Britons hold in so much honour. His eager aim was to free them, at any sacrifice, from the great burden of manual drudgery.

That being decided, it was not so easy to make a choice between the professions. Richard Lloyd was not one of those men who think it a sign of strength to force children into careers against their own will. Above all, he wished to have the following wind of their free consent and help.

The “ministry” was practically closed to them by that rule of their uncle’s Church which forbade Christian service as a means of livelihood. The Established Church, indeed, was an open road for them; there “Welcome!” was written over the door for every clever Welsh village boy. If David had consented to follow the lead of some of his village friends, who can say that he might not have ended as an Archbishop? The thought never took serious shape at Highgate Cottage. I scarcely dare to think of what would have been said in the village “smithy” or the uncle’s workshop if David had turned his steps towards that primrose path—as both he and his brother were more than once invited to do.

Richard Lloyd’s own desire was that David should be a doctor. But the lad had an instinctive, physical shrinking from disease and death. Richard Lloyd, being a wise man, sorrowfully agreed that David’s temperament was unfitted for the hospital ward and the sick-room.

His mother, Mrs. William George, pondering the future in her heart, and watching the boy with a fond mother’s eyes, desired him to be a lawyer.

The mother won.

In those old days when Mrs. William George was in the depths of sorrow and distress, through the long agony of her husband’s illness, she had received much help and kindness from an old friend of her husband’s, one of those tender-hearted family lawyers who are the crown and salvation of their profession—Mr. Thomas Goffey of Liverpool. The boys had heard much of this man at an impressionable age; and the effect left on David was a great desire to go and do likewise. “To be a lawyer like Mr. Goffey!” That was the shining quest before him.

At this critical moment the memory of this helper acted as a magnet to them all; and it was this lode-stone that drew on first David, and then his brother William.

In such pleasant guise did that useful calling present itself; in such Christian fashion came to the youth this summons. The lawyer’s gown appeared to him as the robe of the Samaritan.

So far, so good. But the career of the law requires a long apprenticeship; and apprenticeship means money. The examination fees alone for a solicitor amount to a good sum, and there was a substantial premium on apprenticeship to a good firm to be paid in addition. Then there would be over five years without earnings. Where would they obtain the resources to face the strain?

At this point Richard Lloyd turned to the pooled family savings of himself and his sister, Mrs. William George, and dipped deep. Little was left when sufficient for this purpose had been drawn, and even so the supply was precariously meagre. Could they find enough to start the two boys on their careers?

It was clear, on a survey, that they could not send the boys either to a higher school or to a University. How, then, were they to acquire that considerable store of general knowledge required of the legal apprentice?

David had done well under Evans’s faithful tuition. He had advanced into the higher mathematics; he had read a certain amount of history; he had now mastered the elements of French and Latin.

But much more was required if he was to pass that first obstruction in the great obstacle race set before the novice in the law—the Preliminary Examination. He must, for instance, know more French. He must read Cæsar and Sallust. The village dominie could not carry David as far as that.

Here seemed a formidable gulf to bridge. Less formidable barriers have closed careers to others and driven them back into the workshop.

But human love can leap over great obstacles; and Richard Lloyd was no ordinary man. He knew neither French nor Latin. Very well, he would set out to learn them.

So together the uncle and the nephew started into the unexplored. Hand in hand, they tackled the Latin and the French grammars, and thumbed the dictionaries. For this great-hearted man knew that if both be ignorant of the way it is better to go together. Company gives courage. So in the dark winter evenings, with the light of a candle, they together spelt out the sentences of Cæsar and Sallust and laboriously read Æsop in French. I will warrant that those lessons in Latin and French were not wasted. I even doubt sometimes whether the class-rooms of Eton or Harrow, with their picked teachers, can show anything so inspiring as this little village study—the uncle and nephew struggling along that unknown path, lit only by zeal and affection. May it not be, perhaps, that the accident of this laborious schooling gave a special nourishment to the boy’s instinct of self-confidence, proved more potent than the spoon-feeding of some well-endowed college?

At any rate, this common struggle for knowledge gave the uncle a new insight into his nephew’s powers. From this time onward the boy became his very special “Di”—the darling of his heart—the apple of his eye. He began to perceive that there were few things impossible for this boy to achieve.

At last this astonishing experiment in coaching came to an end. But his uncle was determined to stand by the nephew to the end in the first great trial of his life.

In December, 1877, he accompanied him to Liverpool, where the examination was to take place. Every morning—as he often told in later life—Richard Lloyd accompanied the youth to the examination room in St. George’s Hall; and every evening, after the day’s work, he met him on the steps of the hall and went home with him.

The examination lasted a week. Suspense was followed by triumph. David passed.

The young hopeful who had set out from Llanystumdwy with the good wishes and fervent prayers of friends and neighbours, returned on December 8th with the first flush of achievement on his cheek.

Nowhere was there a happier Christmas in that year of 1877 than at “Highgate.”

There was only one man as happy as the uncle and the mother—and that was the village schoolmaster. It was a proud day when he could solemnly record the fact of David’s passing in the Log Book of the Llanystumdwy National School.

[12] Implying a belief in Infant Baptism, “Confirmation” is regarded as inconsistent with the creed of the Baptists.

[13] “Bismarck”—a dog snatched from the streets of Hamburg and brought home by a sailor from the village—a bold and unscrupulous poacher.

CHAPTER III

YOUTH

“Who, with a natural instinct to discern

What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;”

Wordsworth’s The Happy Warrior.

Portmadoc is a little provincial business town lying on the coast some five miles to the west of Criccieth in the very heart of Cardigan Bay. It stands at the mouth of the Glaslyn, one of those little mountain rivers which flow southward through wild valleys from the Snowdon range. The river broadens to a port at its mouth and the town spreads on both banks. A hundred years ago the land here was below high-water mark. It was redeemed by an enterprising man who has given his name to the town and the estate.[^[14]] The old high-water mark can be seen far up the valley, and it is an actual fact that every building in Portmadoc itself stands on land snatched from the sea.

Here in Portmadoc, just east of the Town Hall, stood the office of Messrs. Breese, Jones, and Casson, the firm to which David Lloyd George was articled after he had passed his Preliminary Law Examination. There the square-built, airy chambers still stand. Here, in this building, young David Lloyd George, aged sixteen, took his seat at the window on one of those high stools where the clerks of to-day still sit; and doubtless the young David’s eyes sometimes glanced anxiously at the same old clock that still measures out the limits of work and play. The preliminaries of this articling took some time; but within six months—at the opening of 1879—David had been fully articled by his uncle as clerk to Mr. Casson, the junior partner.

Portmadoc itself stands in prim straight rows of slate-roofed houses built at right-angles to the long main street. The great thing about the town is that from every corner of its streets you can see the mighty mountains of Snowdon on the horizon. It was still under those Eagle Rocks that David’s life-work was to be carried on for the next few years.

It was no longer possible for him to live in the little cottage at Llanystumdwy, which was over seven miles from Portmadoc and two miles from Criccieth railway-station.

So it was arranged that the lad should spend the week at Portmadoc and go back to his uncle’s home at week-ends.

During the week he lodged with some good people whose children had gone out into the world[^[15]] and who looked after him for several years as if he had been their own child. Like many another young Welshman he was also taken into the kindly fraternity of the chapel folk, who looked after him on behalf of his uncle. He soon began to find friends. On Wednesdays he would attend the little chapel; and he was especially fond of frequenting the little candle-making workshop behind the main street, where the workmen can still be seen ingeniously contriving the special illuminant candles for the slate quarries of North Wales. There, as in the smithy at Llanystumdwy, he found much congenial company for discussion and debate; for it was a significant fact that in youth David Lloyd George was always drawn to the places where men assemble and discuss their affairs.

Here was a youth at the age of sixteen taken out of his village and thrown into the larger turmoil of the world’s affairs. The solicitors’ firm to which he was articled was an important legal centre in Carnarvonshire. The solicitors were Clerks to the Petty Sessional Division, and Mr. Breese was also Clerk to the Lieutenant of the County, besides being the Liberal agent for Merionethshire. Finding that the youth was handy and smart, they soon began to use him as deputy in their various functions. So David found himself immersed into all the affairs of a great county, besides being in constant touch with the stirring life of a little port. The ships and sailors were ever coming and going, and all the murmur of larger interests flowed in from outside. There, in that little corner of Wales, they could constantly hear “the great wave which echoes round the world.”

From the vantage-post of his firm the boy could gradually gain an insight into the whole machinery of county administration.

In law, as in journalism, provincial experience is a far better school for a young man than that of London; for in the provinces work is less specialised, and the young clerk in a busy lawyer’s office has a chance of such varied work as his powers show him capable of. David Lloyd George, for instance, now found himself often called upon to undertake responsible tasks; to watch the interests of his firm in the Police Court or in the Quarter Session; to collect rates and taxes; to find his way through that complicated network of wire entanglements which British wisdom had thrown around the exercise of the suffrage. The canvassing work which he did for his firm in their capacity as Liberal agents stood him in very good stead later on which he had to do the same work for himself. It was during this period that he acquired, too, that intimate mastery of the details of rural rating with which he afterwards astonished the House of Commons. During the same years he achieved an insight into the surprising affairs of many county families. There is no surer way of finding out the secrets of the English land system than to look at them through the peep-holes of a good lawyer’s office.

No doubt the young Lloyd George lost much by being plunged so early in life into the urgencies of practical work. But he also gained. For it would have been difficult to devise a training more suitable for a coming statesman.

For a time the young man was absorbed by his new work; and, indeed, it was enough to take up his energy. David Lloyd George was from the beginning a keen lawyer. He was not content with practical experience; he read hard at the law; but in his case law did not take form in his mind as a fixed dead thing, but as a vital function of growth, with possibilities of perpetual change and reform.

Thus his apprenticeship began to feed and stimulate his instinctive interest in public affairs. His daily experience led him back at every turn into larger public interests and speculations. He had his week evenings free; and so gradually among the young men of Portmadoc he was led into that life of debate which has always been his very life-blood.

In 1880 his uncle, his mother, his brother, and his sister gave up the little cottage at Llanystumdwy and moved to “Morvin House” in Criccieth. Richard Lloyd and Mrs. William George, their mother, had now saved enough to enable Uncle Lloyd to give up the bootmaking; and his interest was now so much centred round David that he decided to make a move that would enable the youth to live at home. The little house where David was to live for the next ten years was just beneath the walls of that shattered Norman castle which crowns a precipitous cliff on the very edge of the sea. Now battered and worn by the assaults of man and the ravages of the ocean, that castle was once a strong link in that scheme of blockhouse fortresses which the Normans built to keep down North Wales. The ruins typify to-day the valour of this land of bards, and prove the power of a little nation over a mighty conqueror. At its strongest, the rule of the Normans extended very few feet beyond those castle walls. Now this fortress is in ruins; and all around the very portals of that ancient blockhouse you will hear few words of any language except the very tongue which the Normans tried to ban and to bar.[^[16]]

To this house David Lloyd George now came home every evening and he was able to give up his kindly lodgings in Portmadoc. This return to the strongest influence in his youth perhaps explains a certain deepening of purpose which now becomes visible in his diaries[^[17]]; but there emerges also a new independence of spirit. Somewhat to the alarm of the uncle, the youth was beginning to exhibit a rambling interest that went far outside that still lagoon of puritanism which was the home of that high, simple spirit. There was already a touch of that defiant self-confidence which has so often since puzzled and troubled both the followers and the counsellors of Mr. Lloyd George. The young man was reading widely and daringly—not merely sermons, but plays, histories, and novels. He was going through crises of spiritual doubt unknown to the securely anchored soul of his foster-father. He was catching the malady of his age, and finding its remedy, as so many others of that time found it, in the vague anodyne of books like Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.

His growing spirit was finding outlets in every direction. He was attending political meetings and listening eagerly and critically to such gospel as his elders preached. He had begun writing regularly for the newspapers; and over the challenging name of “Brutus,” the North Wales Express was producing a series of articles,[^[18]] vigorous and combative—a little young and flamboyant, but always arresting and stimulating to the audience of young Wales.

Already in the 1880 Election those articles, written by a boy not yet 18 years of age, played no insignificant part in North Wales: and now the people of Carnarvonshire were beginning to ask of the young David, as in the old days another people asked of a greater prophet—“Who art thou? What sayest thou of thyself?”

To these questions the daring youth soon began to give an answer with both speech and action. In 1881, the third year of his apprenticeship, he was elected a member of one of those little centres of intellectual energy which were growing up all over Wales in the dawn of this new time. The Portmadoc Debating Society may have meant little to the world; but it meant a great deal to itself and to the town of Portmadoc. This little assembly met weekly in a room over a shop in the Portmadoc High Street. There came together an eager throng of young Welshmen determined to discuss for themselves all the problems of the day. Their debates covered every great question of the eighties. David Lloyd George, now eighteen years of age, did not intend to be a silent member. He soon began to speak often. He took part in debates on all the great problems that occupied his later life—Franchise and Free Trade, Trade Unionism and Irish Land, even the Channel Tunnel. On all these subjects he expressed bold and progressive opinions, and in this little school he began to train his power of speech.

Such a passion for debate is a common disease of youth, and often passes like a fitful fever. But with the young Lloyd George it was not to be so. It was soon clear that the power of speech was with him a very special gift, and he threw into it a great deal of care and industry. Men at Portmadoc will still describe how he could be seen walking along the high-road gesticulating as he practised his speeches; and there is no doubt that at this moment of his life he already had some dim perception that he possessed the magic gift of oratory.

There are those in Portmadoc to-day who can still remember some of these youthful orations, and especially remember the wonderful speech which he made in 1881 on the Egyptian crisis of that year. At that moment conflicting opinions swirled round the figure of Arabi Pasha—the Egyptian Nationalist leader. Was he a hero or a villain? History has not even yet quite decided.[^[19]] But the young Lloyd George was in no doubt. He saw in Arabi a hero of romance rightly struggling for the freedom of a small nation. The impassioned speech in which he defended Arabi gained for him the first attentions of the Welsh press. It revealed to his hearers that deep enthusiasm for freedom among the little nations which afterwards became his leading public characteristic. Men who heard the speech still speak of it as a remarkable event in Portmadoc.

At that time young Lloyd George was slim of body and pale of face; the portraits that exist possess none of that twinkling gaiety which came to him in later years. Youth with him, as with many, seemed to be the gravest period of his life; and indeed it happened that very heavy tasks were laid upon these young Welshmen at the opening of their lives.

For these were perilous years in Wales. The power of the old order had been shaken, but not shattered. The constituencies indeed could no longer be divided up by the squires at a private meeting in Carnarvon; it was not quite so easy now to woo a seat through a Welsh interpreter. The General Election of 1868 had revealed the power of the new order; but the day of Welsh Nationalism was still to come. The older men stood aloof; there was much of the old cringing humility still left in the social life. The squires had punished the Welsh farmers of Carnarvonshire for their votes in 1868 by ruthless, widespread evictions, and a certain fear had been spread through the county. It was clear to the young Lloyd George that this fear could only be destroyed by a new dose of daring and defiance. Thus beneath the shadow of Snowdon the new spirit of young Wales was working up to a storm.

It is not to be wondered at if his debating achievements caused in the mind of this eager young man certain stirrings of ambition that began to belie the opinion of his old schoolmates. In November, 1881, he visited London for the first time: and, like most young men with kindly London friends, he was taken to see the House of Commons. At this time he was keeping a fairly full diary; and the entry of this date (November 12th) is rather remarkable in view of subsequent events:

“I will not say but that I eyed the assembly in a spirit similar to that in which William the Conqueror eyed England on his visit to Edward the Confessor, as the region of his future domain. Oh, vanity!”

Perhaps it is scarcely fair to intrude on such self-communings of early aspiring adolescence—easily forgivable for their naïve boyish pride. But in the same diaries, a year or two later, this young articled clerk jots down another reflection rather strangely prophetic of what was to come. A quotation appeared in the Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald which signified that David Lloyd George was already in the public eye:

“When first the college rolls receive his name,

The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame,

Resistless burns the fever of renown,

Caught from the strong contagion of the gown.”[^[20]]

Young Lloyd George makes a curiously level-headed comment on this reference to his thirst for renown:

“Perhaps (?) it will be gratified. I believe it depends entirely on what forces of pluck and industry I can muster.”

Strangely sober reflection for the eighteenth year!

The desire for fame—that “last infirmity of noble minds”—was already there. But it had not turned the head of the young man. Already he seemed to have some measure of the task before him, and of the effort that would be required to achieve it.

[14] Mr. A. Maddocks. One of the men who was interested in this project was the poet Shelley.

[15] Mr. and Mrs. D. Lloyd Owen, Auctioneer, High Street, Portmadoc.

[16] After writing this I came across the following passage in a speech of Mr. Lloyd George’s made in the House of Commons: “Two thousand years ago the great Empire of Rome came with its battalions and conquered that part of Carnarvonshire in which my constituency is situated. They built walls and fortifications as the tokens of their conquest, and they proscribed the use of the Cymric tongue. The other day I was glancing at the ruins of those walls. Underneath I noted the children at play, and I could hear them speaking, with undiminished force and vigour, the proscribed language of the conquered nation. Close by, there was a school where the language of the Roman conquerors was being taught, but taught as a dead language.”

[17] These diaries are very fully published in Herbert Du Parcq’s excellent Life of David Lloyd George, London; Caxton Publishing Company Limited, 1912.

[18] A large selection of these articles can be read in the pages of Mr. Du Parcq.

[19] Lord Cromer always called him an adventurer. Mr. Wilfrid Blunt has always regarded him as a great patriot.

[20] From Dr. Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes” (135-138), an early poem, based on Juvenal’s Tenth Satire. The third and fourth lines should run—

“Thro’ all his veins the fever of renown

Burns from the strong contagion of the gown.”

The poem was popular with such different judges as Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Cardinal Newman, and Matthew Arnold.

“UNCLE LLOYD”: MR. RICHARD LLOYD,
THE UNCLE OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE.

THE SMITHY AT LLANYSTUMDWY:
THE OLD “VILLAGE PARLIAMENT.”

CHAPTER IV

EARLY MANHOOD

“Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of Noble Mind)

To scorn delights, and live laborious days”

Milton’s Lycidas.

During these years of the early eighties (1880-4) that great Government of Mr. Gladstone’s which opened so triumphantly in 1880 was rapidly drawing towards its downfall. Checked in Ireland and stagnant at home, the Whigs who dominated the Cabinet had been gradually drawn abroad into enterprises for which they lacked both heart and capacity. Mr. Gladstone was losing the middle class, and not winning the manual workers. Meanwhile that astonishing young man from Birmingham, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, had swiftly perceived the decline of the old Liberalism, and was building up a new and daring programme of social and political reform. He was speaking with a new voice. He was uttering his mind in simple language, and calling things by very plain names.

The heart of the young Lloyd George went out to this newcomer with a frank enthusiasm. It is quite clear from his diaries and newspaper-writings during these years that he was at the beginning a vehement supporter of Mr. Chamberlain.

In an article on Mr. Chamberlain written by David Lloyd George for the North Wales Observer of October 17th, 1884, there is a remarkable passage which is worth while recalling to-day as a flashing revelation of the mind of the young writer:

“Mr. Chamberlain is unquestioningly the future leader of the people. Any one who reads his speeches will know the reason why. . . . He understands the sympathies of his countrymen. It is therefore that he speaks intelligibly and straightforwardly, like a man who is proud of the opinions which he holds. He is a Radical, and doesn’t care who knows it as long as the people do.”

So strongly was he attracted by Mr. Chamberlain’s personality that the young Lloyd George was always inclined to take his side. He supported him, for instance, in that struggle with the Whigs over his Radical Programme which, by the strangest possible twist, led later on to that great misunderstanding over the tactics of Home Rule and ended in splitting the old Liberal party. Mr. Lloyd George had perhaps some temperamental sympathy with that spirit of impatience which made Mr. Chamberlain resent so deeply the snubs and checks he received at the hands of the Whigs.

Although a fervent Nationalist and Home Ruler, Mr. Lloyd George was always inclined to sympathise with Mr. Chamberlain’s methods of approaching the Home Rule problem. Looking at it from the view-point of Wales, he liked Mr. Chamberlain’s feeling for federalism. It is a curious fact that if Mr. Lloyd George had stood for Parliament in 1886, he would probably have been drawn by his sympathy for Mr. Chamberlain into the ranks of that small section of Radical Unionists who followed Mr. Chamberlain in his opposition to Gladstonian Home Rule, but afterwards, recoiling from open reaction, rejoined the Liberal party—men like Sir George Trevelyan and Mr. W. S. Caine, a small, afflicted, but deeply interesting group.

In 1884 David Lloyd George went up to London to pass his Final Law Examination in order to enable him to be admitted on to the roll of practising solicitors. His comment in his diary on the admission ceremony shows his growing freshness and independence of outlook. He was not at all cheered by that atmosphere of dusty dullness which envelops the ritual of our law:

“The ceremony disappointed me. The Master of the Rolls, so far from having anything to do with it, was actually listening to some Q.C. at the time, and some fellow of a clerk swore us to a lawyerly demeanour at the back of the court, and off we shambled to the Petty Bag Office to sign the Rolls.”

On the occasion of this visit to London, he again attended the House of Commons, and for the first time listened to a debate. He was fortunate enough to be present at a lively skirmish between Lord Randolph Churchill and Mr. Gladstone. “It was a clever piece of comedy,” he said some years afterwards, recalling the scene. “I thought Churchill an impudent puppy, as every Liberal was bound to do—but I thoroughly enjoyed his speech.” Then, as now, he could never sufficiently express his admiration for courage in any field of life and on any side.

He could now (1884) leave the high desk in the square room at the office by the Town Hall. He had served during the past five years (1879-1884) a faithful apprenticeship. He had allowed few diversions to draw him from his work. In those days the Puritan tradition of a little Welsh township held the young people in a fairly tight grip, and there were few light distractions. Portmadoc held no theatre or opera within its boundaries. The “Moving Pictures” had not yet taken Puritanism on the flank. Football was beginning to seize the Celtic fancy; but David had little taste or time for violent sports. In 1882 he became a Volunteer, and went into camp at Conway. But it is not recorded that he secured any promotion, or at any time suffered from the pangs of military ambition. Otherwise his amusements took that sober form of the Portmadoc debating society speeches, or essays for the Eisteddfod, for which the two brothers wrote a discourse on the “Cash and Credit System.” They spoke of credit with a scorn unhappily rare in young men!

He was no longer any master’s man. He could, if he liked, set up for himself. The firm for which he had worked all these years had, indeed, a high opinion of his powers; and they did not wish to lose him wholly. Mr. Breese, the head-partner, “a kind master and a thorough man,” as David described him in his diary, had died in 1881; but the other partners did their best to give him a start. They secured him an offer of a managing clerkship in an old county firm at Dolgelly. It would have been a most attractive opening for a man who wished to follow the safe course in life. But David Lloyd George was one who preferred risks. He wished to be the ruler of his own fate.

He had now practically no one behind him. The long period of examination and apprenticeship had exhausted the slender stores of his mother and his uncle. He had even to wait for his first cases before he could purchase the robes required of a Welsh solicitor before he could plead in the County Court.

But he still preferred a small independence to a big dependence. Perhaps he was right. Probably he had ideas as to the way of conducting a legal business which would not have always gratified any old-fashioned firm of country solicitors.

The young solicitor started quite simply by putting a brass name-plate on the door of Morvin House, their little dwelling at Criccieth. He then began to practise in his uncle’s back parlour.

It was a daring venture for an unknown village youth; but after a few months he began to get under way. His diaries of 1885 punctuate with thrilling eagerness the opening steps in his professional career—his first case in the Police Court, his first service of an order, his first plea in the County Court. On June 24th he records with glee that he won all his cases. “Never had a more successful field-day.” On July 9th he is attending Penrhyn Sessions for the first time, opposing the transfer of a license. On September 8th he is in the Revision Courts. “Came off better than Liberals ever did.” In fact, he marches in these first skirmishes from victory to victory.

So successful was he, in fact, that in this year (1885) he opened an office in the High Street at Portmadoc, not far from the building in which he had been articled. He began in a very small house, and remained there for some years before moving to the corner house where the legend “Messrs. Lloyd George and George” is still prominent in the window. This corner house was previously a public-house known as “The Fox Inn.” There the brothers—for now William had joined David in practice—took the end of the lease, and finally secured the freehold. There, in that dispossessed hostelry, William George practises to-day (1920).

This year and the years that followed in David’s life were crammed with intense activities. The diaries show that day after day he rose between five and six o’clock. He devoted the cream of his energies to the active pursuit of the law. But he could never be a man of one interest. He was also, during these same months, fiercely energetic both in religion and politics. He was constantly reading sermons and listening to sermons. He often spoke from the pulpit, after that liberal fashion encouraged in the Free Churches.

But gradually in these diaries the political interest begins to loom larger. When the autumn General Election of 1885 comes on, he takes an active part with pen and voice. On October 17th he goes to the Tory member’s meeting, and is with difficulty restrained from taking part. On November 18th he makes an impassioned speech in defence of Mr. Chamberlain, and is tremendously cheered. On November 24th he goes to a Tory meeting and finds that he is the chief butt of their attack. He shows his precocious political shrewdness by the satisfaction he feels in thus drawing the enemy’s fire.

Instead of injuring the practice of his profession by these public displays of courage, he soon found that he was really attracting to his house and office a new class of client, the discontented farmers of the county. First one and then another began coming to him, at first privily and then confidently. They came on tithes, and on rents, and on rates. He took up some of these cases and scored successes which resounded through the county. The result was that other men came who had never before been to lawyers, and he began to open up a new vein of business. Law, after all, can sometimes pay, even as a remedy for injustice.

He was, indeed, now becoming a very busy solicitor of the kind which in the provinces is not easily distinguished from a barrister. The fact that a solicitor can address a County Court and a Petty Sessional Court gives him, outside the great centres of English life, a practical command of both branches of the law and abolishes that rather absurd pedantry of divided function. This power of speech suited young Lloyd George very well. It gave him a new training in public address, and it provided him with a new weapon for asserting public rights. From the time of that great nation of lawyers—the Romans—the Law Court has always been second only to the Senate House as an instrument of popular power. Mr. Lloyd George showed to the Welsh people that, in the integrity of the British law, they had a new resource for the recovery of their ancient rights.

But never at any time did he allow the call of the law to divert him from politics. Day by day his diaries reflect his passionate interest in the struggle of 1885. When the first results come in he is profoundly disappointed. “There is no cry for the towns,” he writes on November 26th. “Humdrum Liberalism won’t win elections.” Then, on December 4th:

“Great Liberal victories in counties. Very glad of it. Am convinced that this is all due to Chamberlain’s speeches. Gladstone had no programme that would draw at all.”

Throughout we can see his ardour for the forward course and the vigour in attack. “Humdrum Liberalism won’t win elections”—that was to be the gist of his political teaching in later years: it almost summed up his political strategy.

Certainly young Lloyd George was not himself inclined to be “humdrum.” Just at this moment, when the old and the new Liberalism in Wales, as in England, were wrestling for the mastery, he definitely took the forward side. It was significant of this that he first came out as a notable public speaker in a sphere beyond his own district at a great public meeting held at Festiniog on February 12th, 1886, and addressed by the famous Irishman, Michael Davitt.

The Liberal Party was not at that moment fully committed to Home Rule, and among the elder men there had been grave head-shakings over this invitation to Michael Davitt. Rebellion was more seriously regarded in those days; and Michael Davitt had both rebelled and paid the penalty. The law had laid its finger on him and marked him with its broad arrow; and respectable people whispered the word “felon.”

Young Lloyd George was invited to the Davitt meeting. There were grave doubts in the family circle as to whether he ought to go. But he was urged on by one who had already a great and growing influence over him, a certain Maggie Owen living at a farmhouse about a mile from Criccieth and more and more mentioned in the diaries of this time. This young lady already had her definite views, and she had no patience with this attempt to make a pariah of Michael Davitt. “Of course you must go,” she said simply; “why not?” And that seemed to settle the matter.

The difficulty was to persuade any one to move a vote of thanks to Michael Davitt at this meeting; all the prudent people stood aside. But there sat in a chair a brave and stalwart man—Mr. Michael Jones of Bala—and at the last moment he persuaded young Lloyd George to move the vote of thanks. The young David rose, and he instantly made a speech which was largely reported and which electrified North Wales. In this speech there are already some of those daring, flashing phrases with which he afterwards familarised the world. There was already that fearless touch which has since made the speaker a perpetual storm-centre.

Michael Davitt, always a shrewd judge of men, was deeply impressed with the speech. He advised Mr. Lloyd George to think of Parliament, and the other Michael—Jones of Bala—urged the same advice. From that time forward the young man’s thoughts began to turn towards Westminster.

And yet his first approach to Parliament was not easy. Some of the young enthusiasts who now gathered round him wanted him to stand for Merionethshire in the General Election that soon followed in 1886. But here there was another son of young Wales already in the field with stronger local claims. This was none other than the man always known afterwards as “Tom” Ellis, son of a Merionethshire farmer. Ellis was four years older than Lloyd George; and young David readily and instantly stood aside in favour of the elder man. They met soon after; and a great friendship struck up between them which lasted until the premature death of Tom Ellis in 1899. It was a wonderful friendship between two men of common aspirations but utterly different character. Tom Ellis was by no means the “Welsh Parnell”—no description could have been further from the truth. He was a man of high enthusiasms and noble integrity. He was a real Welsh Nationalist. But, by going to Oxford, he had come within the governing English circle; he was touched with that Saxonism which tempers the native zeal of the Celt. He was no longer “racy of the soil.” It was no mere chance that he was afterwards drawn before his due season into the circle of British power, and was fated to stand aloof from his friend when Lloyd George was asserting the rugged and relentless claims of Welsh Nationalism.

Thus David Lloyd George was for the moment delayed in his progress to Parliament. Perhaps this was a fortunate accident, because it gave him a breathing time in which to master the needs of his own people and to train himself more thoroughly for the public stage.

CHAPTER V

MARRIAGE

“A Daniel come to judgment! Yea, a Daniel!

O wise young judge, how I do honour thee!”

Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Act I, Sc. iv.

Cut off from Parliament for the moment (1886) David Lloyd George spent no time in vain regrets. He resumed that life of combined public and private activity which was rapidly becoming his second nature. His diaries during the following years show that he was now absorbed in his growing “practice.” But that did not prevent him from continuing his eager and active interest in public affairs. Then, as ever after, the two interests developed together.

From this time forward he steadily directed his energies to work on behalf of his own beloved little nation. Perhaps never did he quite lose sight of that high ambition to command “listening senates” which had come to him when he first sat in the Gallery at Westminster and looked down on the combats of the great parliamentary gladiators. But for the moment there was urgent work to do nearer to hand; and David Lloyd George knew the wisdom of Carlyle’s great law of conduct—“Do the Duty that lies nearest thee.”[^[21]]

So he plunged into the great work for Wales which was already on foot at his own doors.

In 1886 he joined eagerly in the great Anti-Tithe campaign which was being carried on throughout North Wales by those remarkable men, Mr. Thomas Gee and Mr. John Parry. David Lloyd George became the Secretary of that League in South Carnarvonshire, and he addressed meetings throughout the district. He accompanied Mr. Gee and Mr. Parry on many of their most daring raids. He drove long distances in a small governess cart and addressed meetings in little villages away in remote districts.

It was characteristic of David that he actually provoked and promoted hostility. He would hold his meetings by preference in the neighbourhood of the Parish Church or of the National School. He would regard it as his greatest triumph if he could draw the parson or the curate to come out and meet him in open warfare. One of the visions of him at this period handed down is that of a day in June 1887, when he was seen coatless and in his shirt-sleeves arguing against the curate in the open green at the village fair of Sarn Melltcyrn. He did not shrink from passive sympathy with the mild rioting which began to take place at the tithe sales resulting from the distraints that followed. His whole heart went out in sympathy to Welsh farmers compelled by law to contribute from their pocket to what they regarded as an alien Church.

The “Tithe War” gave David Lloyd George that best of training for a young public speaker—the training of public controversy in the open air. It made him quick and resourceful. Here was the best possible whetstone for his natural gift of courage. These speeches made him already a rising public champion.