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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 was the first Welsh Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the only Prime Minister to have spoken English as a second language, Welsh having been his first. During a long tenure of office, mainly as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was a key figure in the introduction of many reforms which laid the foundations of the modern welfare state. He was the last Liberal to
be Prime Minister, as his coalition premiership was supported more by
Conservatives than by his own Liberals, and the subsequent split was a
key factor in the decline of the Liberal Party as a serious political
force. When he eventually became leader of the Liberal Party a decade
later he was unable to lead it back to power. He is best known as the
highly energetic Prime Minister (1916 – 1922) who guided the Empire
through the First World War to victory over Germany. He was a major player at the Paris Peace Conference of
1919 that reordered the world after the Great War. Lloyd George was a
devout evangelical and an icon of 20th century liberalism as the
founder of the welfare state. He is regarded as having made a greater
impact on British public life than any other 20th century leader,
thanks to his leadership of the war effort, his postwar role in
reshaping Europe, and his introduction of the welfare state before the
war. Born in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, Lloyd George was a Welsh-speaker and of Welsh descent and upbringing, the only Welshman ever to hold the office of Prime Minister of the British government.
In March 1863 his father William George, who had been a teacher in
Manchester and other cities, returned to his native Pembrokeshire because of failing health. He took up farming but died in June 1864 of pneumonia, aged 44. His mother Elizabeth George (1828 – 1896) sold the farm and moved with her children to her native Llanystumdwy, Caernarfonshire, where she lived in Tŷ Newydd
with
her brother Richard Lloyd (1834 – 1917), a strong Liberal. Lloyd
George's uncle was a towering influence on him, encouraging him to take
up a
career in law and enter politics;
his uncle remained influential up until his death at age 83 in February
1917, by which time his nephew was Prime Minister. He added his uncle's
surname to become "Lloyd George". His surname is usually given as
"Lloyd George" and sometimes as "George." His childhood showed through
in his entire career, as he attempted to aid the common man at the
expense of what he liked to call "the Dukes". However, his biographer John Grigg has
argued that George's childhood was nowhere near as poverty-stricken as
he liked to suggest, and that a great deal of his self-confidence came
from having been brought up by an uncle who enjoyed a position of
influence and prestige in his small community. 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 and he established
branch offices in surrounding towns, taking his brother William into
partnership in 1887. By then he was politically active, having
campaigned for the Liberal Party in the 1885 election, attracted by Joseph 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 Parliamentary Party. William Gladstone's announcement of a determination to bring about Irish Home Rule later 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 Whig-like 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 Chamberlain. 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 (Bugle of Freedom) and won on appeal to the Divisional Court of Queen's 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 up to then 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 Caernarfonshire County Council which had been created by the Local Government Act 1888. 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. Lloyd George was returned as Liberal MP for Carnarvon Boroughs — by a margin of 19 votes — on 13 April 1890 at a by-election caused by the death of the former Conservative member. He was the youngest MP in the House of Commons, 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, 55 years later. As
backbench members of the House of Commons were not paid at that time,
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 practice with that of Arthur Rhys 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 on 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 William Harcourt to
press for specific assurances on Welsh issues; when those were not
provided, 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 that 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 male suffrage) was more in need of
franchise reform than the Boer republics. His second attack was on the
cost of the war, which, he argued, prevented overdue social reform in
England, such as old age pensions and workmen's cottages. As the war
progressed, he moved his attack to its conduct by the generals, who, he
said (basing his words on reports by William Burdett-Coutts in The Times),
were not providing for the sick or wounded soldiers and were starving
Boer women and children in concentration camps. He reserved his major
thrusts for Chamberlain, accusing him of war profiteering 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'; after speaking at
a meeting in Chamberlain's political base at Birmingham, he had to be
smuggled out disguised as a policeman, as his life was in danger from
the mob. At this time the Liberal Party was badly split as Herbert Henry 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 that most 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 likely future cabinet member. In 1906 Lloyd George entered the new Liberal Cabinet of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as President of the Board of Trade.
In that position he introduced legislation on many topics, from
Merchant Shipping and Companies 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. While almost all the companies refused to recognise the
unions, Lloyd George persuaded the companies to recognise elected
representatives of the workers who sat with the company representatives
on conciliation boards — one for each company. If those boards
failed to agree then there was a central board. This was Lloyd George's
first great triumph for which he received praises from, among others, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Two weeks later, however, his great excitement was crushed by his daughter Mair's death from appendicitis. On Campbell-Bannerman's death he succeeded Asquith, who had become Prime Minister, as Chancellor of the Exchequer from
1908 to 1915. While he continued some work from the Board of
Trade — for example, legislation to establish a Port of London
authority and to pursue traditional Liberal programmes such as
licensing law reforms — his first major trial in this role was
over the 1908 – 1909 Naval Estimates. The Liberal manifesto at the 1906 general elections included a commitment to reduce military expenditure. Lloyd George strongly supported this, writing to Reginald McKenna, First Lord of the Admiralty,
"the emphatic pledges given by all of us at the last general election
to reduce the gigantic expenditure on armaments built up by the
recklessness of our predecessors." He then proposed the programme be reduced from six to four dreadnoughts. This was adopted by the government but there was a public storm when the Conservatives, with covert support from the First Sea Lord Admiral Jackie Fisher,
campaigned for more with the slogan "We want eight and we won't wait".
This resulted in Lloyd George's defeat in Cabinet and the adoption of
estimates including provision for eight dreadnoughts. This was later to
be said to be one of the main turning points in the naval arms race
between Germany and Britain that contributed to the outbreak of World War I. Although
old-age pensions had already been introduced by Asquith as Chancellor,
Lloyd George was largely responsible for the introduction of state
financial support for the sick and infirm (known colloquially as "going
on the Lloyd George" for decades afterwards) — legislation often
referred to as the Liberal reforms.
In 1909
he introduced his famous budget imposing increased taxes on luxuries,
liquor, tobacco, incomes, and land, so that money could be made
available for the new welfare programs as well as new battleships. The
nation's landowners (well represented in the House of Lords) were
intensely angry at the new taxes. In the House of Commons Lloyd George
gave a brilliant defense of the budget, which was attacked by the
Conservatives. On the stump, most famously in his Limehouse speech, he
denounced the Conservatives and the wealthy classes with all his very
considerable oratorical power. The budget passed the Commons, but was
defeated by the Conservative majority in the House of Lords. The
elections of 1910 upheld the Liberal government and the budget finally
passed the Lords. Subsequently, the Parliament Bill for social reform
and Irish Home Rule, which Lloyd George strongly supported, was passed
and the veto power of the House of Lords was greatly curtailed. In 1911
Lloyd George succeeded in putting through Parliament his National
Insurance Act, making provision for sickness and invalidism, and this
was followed by his Unemployment Insurance Act. These social reforms
began in Britain the creation of a welfare state and fulfilled in both
countries the aim of dampening down the demands of the growing working
class for rather more radical solutions to their impoverishment.
In 1913 Lloyd George, along with Attorney-General Rufus Isaacs, was involved in the Marconi scandal.
Accused of speculating in Marconi shares on the inside information that
they were about to be awarded a key government contract (which would
have caused them to increase in value), he told the House of Commons
that he had not speculated in the shares of "that company", which was
not the whole truth as he had in fact speculated in shares of Marconi's
American sister company. This scandal, which would have destroyed his
career if the whole truth had come out at the time, was a precursor to
the whiff of corruption (e.g. the sale of honours) that later
surrounded Lloyd George's premiership. Lloyd George was considered an opponent of war until the Agadir Crisis of 1911, when he had made a speech attacking German aggression. Nevertheless, he supported World War I when it broke out, not least as Belgium, for whose defence Britain was supposedly fighting, was a "small nation" like Wales or indeed the Boers. For
the first year of the war he remained chancellor of the exchequer, but
when the shortage of the English supply of munitions was revealed and
the cabinet was reconstituted as the first coalition ministry in May 1915, Lloyd George was made Minister of Munitions in
charge of the newly created Ministry of Munitions. In this position he
was a brilliant success, but he was not at all satisfied with the
progress of the war, and late in 1915 he became a strong supporter of
general conscription. He put through the conscription act of 1916, and
in June 1916 he became Secretary of State for War.
The weakness of Asquith as a planner and organiser was underscored as
the war plans did not work well. Asquith, who was forced out in
December 1916 and Lloyd George unexpectedly became Prime Minister, with
the nation demanding he take charge of the war in vigorous fashion. In
1916, Asquith was replaced as Prime Minister, splitting the Liberal
Party into two factions: those who supported him and those who
supported the coalition government. His support from the Unionists was
critical. After 6 December 1916, Lloyd George was dependent on the support of Conservatives and of the press baron Lord Northcliffe (who owned both The Times and The Daily Mail)
for his continuance in power. This was reflected in the make-up of his
five-member war cabinet, which as well as himself included the
Conservative Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of
Lords, Lord Curzon; Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons, Andrew Bonar Law; and Minister without Portfolio, Lord Milner. The fifth member, Arthur Henderson, was the unofficial representative of the Labour Party.
This accounts for Lloyd George's inability to establish complete
personal control over military strategy, as Churchill did in the Second
World War, and also for his reluctance to put his foot down and demand
a halt to the Passchendaele Offensive of
autumn 1917. Nevertheless, Lloyd George engaged in almost constant
intrigues to reduce the power of the generals, including trying to
subordinate British forces in France to the French General Nivelle in spring 1917, sending forces to Italy and Palestine, and in the winter of 1917/18 securing the resignations of both the service chiefs, Admiral Jellicoe and General Robertson. In December 1917, Lloyd George remarked to C.P. Scott that:
"If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of
course they don't know, and can't know." Nevertheless the War Cabinet
was a very successful innovation. It met almost daily, with Sir Maurice Hankey as
secretary, and made all major political, military, economic and
diplomatic decisions. Rationing was finally imposed in early 1918 for
meat, sugar and fats (butter and oleo) – but not bread; the new
system worked smoothly. From 1914 to 1918 trade-union membership doubled, from a little over four million to a little over eight
million. Work stoppages and strikes became frequent in 1917–18 as the
unions expressed grievances regarding prices, liquor control, pay
disputes, "dilution," fatigue from overtime and from Sunday work, and
inadequate housing. Conscription put
into uniform nearly every physically fit man, six million out of ten
million eligible. Of these about 750,000 lost their lives and 1,700,000
were wounded. Most deaths were of young unmarried men; however, 160,000
wives lost husbands and 300,000 children lost fathers. Most of the organisations Lloyd George created during World War I were replicated with the outbreak of World War II. As Lord Beaverbrook remarked, "There were no signposts to guide Lloyd George." In 1903, after the Kishinev Pogrom, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered the Zionist Movement the possibility of settling in Uganda. Lloyd George represented the movement in drafting an agreement with the
government; however, the issue was controversial for both sides, and
the proposal was eventually voted down by the Zionist movement at a
special convention. In 1917, one of Lloyd George's first acts as Prime Minister was to order the attack on the Ottoman Empire and the conquest of Palestine. Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued his famous Declaration in favour of "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". Lloyd George played a critical role in this announcement. 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 German lemon until the pips squeak" (that was Sir Eric Geddes), 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 summarised his programme: His
"National Liberal" coalition won a massive landslide, winning 525 of
the 707 contests; however, the Conservatives had control within the
Coalition of more than two-thirds of its seats. Asquith's independent
Liberals were crushed and emerged with only 33 seats, falling behind
Labour (their parliamentary leadership was briefly taken over by the
unknown Donald Maclean until Asquith, who, like the other leading Liberals, had lost his own seat, returned to the House at a by-election).
Lloyd George represented Britain at the Versailles Peace Conference, clashing with French Premier Georges Clemenceau, U.S. 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". 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". In Poland his
position is controversial, it being believed that he had saved that
country from the Bolsheviks but he was also vilified in Poland during
1919–20 for his supposed opinion that Poles were "children who gave
trouble".
A substantive programme of social reform was introduced under his government. The Education Act 1918 raised the school leaving age to 14 and increased the powers and duties of the Board of Education. The Housing and Town Planning Act 1919 provided subsides for house building by local authorities. A total of 170000 homes were built under this Act. The Unemployment Insurance Act 1920 extended national insurance to 11 million additional workers. However, the reform was substantially rolled back by the Geddes Axe, which cut public expenditure by £76 million, including substantial cuts to education.
Lloyd
George began to feel the weight of the coalition with the Conservatives
after the war. His decision to extend conscription to Ireland in 1917 had been disastrous, leading to the wipeout of the old Irish Home Rule Party at the 1918 election, replaced by Sinn Féin MPs who immediately declared independence. Lloyd George presided over the Anglo-Irish War, 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's fall from power. In June 1922
Conservatives were able to show that he had been selling knighthoods and peerages — and the OBE which
was created at this time — for money. Conservatives were concerned
by his desire to create a party from these funds comprising moderate Liberals and Conservatives. A major attack in the House of Lords followed 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. However it was not until 19 October 1922 that the coalition was dealt its final blow. After criticism of Lloyd George over the Chanak crisis mounted, Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain summoned a meeting of Conservative Members of Parliament at the Carlton Club to
discuss their attitude to the Coalition in the forthcoming election.
They sealed Lloyd George's fate with a vote of 187 to 87 in favour of
abandoning the coalition. Chamberlain and other Conservatives such as
the Earl of Balfour argued for supporting Lloyd George, while former 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 President of the Board of Trade, 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. A motion was passed that the Conservative Party should fight
the next election on its own for the first time since the start of
World War I. Throughout
the 1920s Lloyd George remained a dominant figure in British politics,
being frequently predicted to return to office but never succeeding; this period of his life is covered in John Campbell's book The Goat in the Wilderness. Before the 1923 election, he resolved his dispute with Asquith, allowing the Liberals to run a united ticket against Stanley Baldwin's policy of tariffs (although
there was speculation that Baldwin had adopted such a policy in order
to forestall Lloyd George from doing so). At the 1924 general election, Baldwin won a clear victory, the leading coalitionists such as Austen Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead (and former Liberal Winston Churchill) agreeing to serve under Baldwin and thus ruling out any restoration of the 1916–22 coalition. In
1926 Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as Liberal leader. Although since
the disastrous election result in 1924 the Liberals were now very much
the third party in British politics, Lloyd George was able to release
money from his fund to finance candidates and ideas for public works to
reduce unemployment (as detailed in pamphlets such as the "Yellow Book"
and the "Green Book"). However, the results at the 1929 general
election were disappointing: the Liberals increased their support only
to 60 or so seats, while Labour became the largest party for the first
time. Once again, the Liberals ended up supporting a minority Labour
government. 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.
By the 1930s Lloyd George was on the margins of British politics,
although still intermittently in the public eye and publishing his War
Memoirs. In 1934 Lloyd George made a controversial statement about reserving the right to "bomb niggers" that has since been quoted by political activist Noam Chomsky and others. The
quote was originally attributed to Lloyd George in 1934 by Frances
Stevenson, his secretary and second wife, in her diary, which was
published in 1971. On page 259 of Lloyd George: A Diary by Frances Stevenson,
the 9 March 1934 diary entry includes the following passage: "Debate
last night in the House on Air — strong demonstrations in favour
of increased no. of fighting planes. D. [David Lloyd George] says it
could have been avoided but for Simon's [Sir John Simon's]
mismanagement. At Geneva other countries would have agreed not to use aeroplanes for bombing purposes,
but we insisted on reserving the right, as D. puts it, to bomb niggers!
Whereupon the whole thing fell through, & we add 5 millions to our
air armaments expenditure." British
historian V.G. Kiernan wrote that Lloyd George and others in the
British government had argued during that period for the right to bomb
British colonies as they deemed it necessary. On
17 January 1935 Lloyd George 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. In March 1936 Lloyd George met Adolf Hitler at the Berghof in Berchtesgaden and offered some public comments that were surprisingly favourable to the German dictator,
expressing warm enthusiasm both for Hitler personally and for Germany's
public works schemes (upon returning, he wrote of Hitler in the Daily Express as "the greatest living German", "the George Washington of Germany"). Despite this embarrassment, however, as the 1930s progressed Lloyd George became more clear-eyed about the Nazi 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
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 Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister and to pave the way for the ascendancy of Churchill as Premier. Churchill
offered Lloyd George a place in his Cabinet but he refused, citing his
dislike of Chamberlain. Lloyd George also thought that Britain's
chances in the war were dim, and he remarked to his secretary: "I shall
wait until Winston is bust". He wrote to the Duke of Bedford in September 1940 advocating a negotiated peace with Germany after the Battle of Britain. A pessimistic speech by Lloyd George on 7 May 1941 led Churchill to compare him with Philippe Pétain.
On 11 June 1942 he made his last-ever speech in the House of Commons,
and he cast his last vote in the Commons on 18 February 1943 as one of
the 121 MPs (97 Labour) condemning the Government for its failure to
back the Beveridge Report. Fittingly, his final vote was in defence of the welfare state which he had helped to create. He enjoyed listening to the broadcasts of William Joyce.
Increasingly in his late years his characteristic political courage
gave way to physical timidity and hypochondria. He continued to attend
Castle Street Baptist Chapel in London, and to preside over the national eisteddfod at
its Thursday session each summer. At the end, he returned to Wales. In
September 1944, he and Frances left Churt for Tŷ Newydd, a farm near
his boyhood home in Llanystumdwy. He was now weakening rapidly and his
voice failing. He was still an MP but had learned that wartime changes
in the constituency meant that Caernarfon Boroughs might go
Conservative at the next election. On New Years Day 1945 Lloyd George was raised to the peerage as Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor and Viscount Gwynedd, of Dwyfor in the County of Caernarvonshire.
Under the rules governing titles within the peerage, Lloyd George's
name in his title was hyphenated even though his surname was not. He died of cancer on 26 March 1945, aged 82, without ever taking up his seat in the House of Lords, his wife Frances and his daughter Megan at the bedside. Four days later, on Good Friday, he was buried beside the River Dwyfor in Llanystumdwy. A great boulder marks his grave; there is no inscription. However a monument designed by the architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis was subsequently erected around the grave, bearing an englyn (strict-metre
stanza) engraved on slate in his memory composed by his nephew Dr
William George. Nearby stands the Lloyd George Museum, also designed by
Williams-Ellis and opened in 1963. On
20 January 1941, his wife died; Lloyd George was deeply upset by the
fact that bad weather prevented him from being with her when she died.
In October 1943, aged 80, and to the disapproval of his children, he
married his secretary and mistress, Frances Stevenson. He had been involved with Stevenson for three decades by then. The
first Countess Lloyd-George is now largely remembered for her diaries,
which dealt with the great issues and statesmen of Lloyd George's
heyday. A volume of Lloyd George's letters to her, "My Darling Pussy", has also been published, the editor A.J.P. Taylor pointing
out that Lloyd George's nickname for Frances referred to her gentle
personality. The 2nd marriage caused severe tension between Lloyd
George and his children by his first wife. He
had five children by his first wife — Richard (1889 – 1968), Mair
(1890 – 1907), Olwen (1892 – 1990), Gwilym (1894 – 1967) and Megan
(1902 – 1966) — and one child by Stevenson, a daughter named
Jennifer (born 1929). 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, Gwilym finishing his career as a Conservative Home Secretary while Megan became a Labour MP in 1957, perhaps symbolising the fate of much of the old Liberal Party. Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, who detailed Lloyd George's role in the 1919 peace conference in her book, Paris 1919, is his great-granddaughter. The British television presenter Dan Snow is his great-great-grandson, as is the Internet usability
guru Bryn Williams. Other descendants include Owen, 3rd Earl
Lloyd-George, who is his grandson, and his son Robert (the chairman of
Lloyd George Management). |