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National leadership in war and peace. A pioneer of social reform.

26 March 1945

The death of Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, which is announced on another page, marks the loss of one of the most controversial and commanding figures in British political life. Though for many years he had been out of office, he left an indelible mark on his country’s history both as a protagonist of social reform and as an indomitable leader during the war of 1914–18.

The Right Hon. David Lloyd George, pc, om, first Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and Viscount Gwynedd, of Dwyfor in the county of Caernarvon, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, was born in Hulme, Manchester, on January 17, 1863. His father, William, came of a stock of substantial farmers in South Wales, but, preferring books to the plough, left the farm and became a wandering missionary of education, teaching in many places, of which Manchester was the last. His mother was a Lloyd, daughter of a Baptist minister who lived at Llanystumdwy, near Criccieth, in Caernarvonshire. The father died when he was 42, leaving the mother to bring up David, then a baby of 18 months, a daughter, who was older, and another son, who was born posthumously. Hearing of her plight her brother, Richard Lloyd, at once left his workshop – he was a master bootmaker – and took his sister and her children back to live with him at Llanystumdwy. He treated his sister’s children as his own, and sent them to the village school. David at school is said to have been quick rather than industrious, and his best subjects were geography and mathematics.

Start as a Lawyer

The Georges had known Mr Goffey, a Liverpool solicitor, and in the family councils about the boy’s future it was finally decided, thanks mainly to his mother’s insistence, to make him a lawyer. At 16 he was articled to a firm of solicitors in Portmadoc. Five years later he had started as a solicitor on his own account at Criccieth, to which the family had by then removed, and his uncle’s back parlour was his first chambers. He began to get work, and in 1885 he and his younger brother William had offices in the main street of Portmadoc. Three years later – just after his twenty-fifth birthday – the young solicitor was doing well enough to marry Margaret Owen, who belonged to a prosperous yeoman family just outside Criccieth. The marriage was happy and helpful.

Lloyd George’s boyhood was cast in the great days of the Welsh national revival, which for tactical reasons looked to the Liberal rather than to the Conservative Party. Always a Nationalist and a Democrat, in this respect a typical Welshman, he had no part in the traditions of either party, and his politics were rooted in incidents and accidents of the early struggles of Welsh Nationalism. He said later in life that the chapel was his secondary school and university, and with the sap of the new national life rising in its services and in its institutions it was one not to be despised. ‘How the past holds you here!’ he exclaimed when he visited Oxford after the South African War, ‘I am glad I never came here.’

At an early age, when most boys are content to reflect the commonplaces of their school-books, he was the Hampden of the village politics. At 18 he was writing over the name ‘Brutus’ in a local newspaper articles showing a curious detachment of political judgment, but inclining strongly to the Radical wing of the Liberals. Early in 1886 he was on the first Irish Home Rule platform at Festiniog, and greatly impressed Michael Davitt by his speech. Two years later he was adopted as the Liberal candidate for Caernarvon Boroughs, and in 1890 was elected at a by-election by a narrow majority.

He did not speak frequently, and at first men noted chiefly the pleasant softness of his voice and his turn for personal quips. It was a platform speech on Welsh Disestablishment at the Metropolitan Tabernacle that first made him famous outside Wales, but he wisely stuck to his Parliamentary work, and presently became the most active among the Welsh Parliamentary rebels. He made an unsuccessful effort to create an independent Welsh Nationalist Party, with an organization of its own, and he used every device of the mutinous Parliamentarian to force the Rosebery Government to bring in a Welsh Disestablishment Bill and pass it through the Commons.

South African War

After the cordite vote of 1895, when the Liberal Government was defeated by a chance vote on the insufficiency of small-arm ammunition, the Liberals were in opposition for 10 years. Up to then a Welsh Nationalist, hardly interested in party controversy except in so far as it served Wales, Lloyd George in the 1896 Parliament became the leader of the Left Wing Liberals. Foiled in his ambition to be the Parnell of all Wales, he now threw himself with ardour into English politics. He opposed the Agricultural Rates Bill with such vigour that he got himself suspended. This was the opposition of the peasant, ‘cottage-bred’ man to the landlord who, he alleged, was subsidized by this measure.

Local feeling had run very high in his election in 1892 and 1895, but his resistance to the South African War made him the most unpopular man in the country. He conducted a campaign for the conclusion of peace, and it was almost the rule for him to have his meetings broken up. But the worst riot, and one which brought him within peril of his life, was that in Birmingham in the week before Christmas, 1901, from which he only escaped under escort by dressing in the uniform of a policeman. Yet it may be doubted whether he was ever so thoroughly happy as he was at this period of his life. He took the risks quite deliberately, believing that he was right; and he had his reward in the reputation for courage and constancy acquired at this time.

The end of the South African War marked also the end of the long period during which he had bothered or opposed his own party almost as much as their rivals. The Conservative Education Bill of 1902 gave him his first real chance to emerge as a leader of the whole Liberal Party. The Bill, which proposed to give public assistance to all voluntary schools, whether sectarian or not, offended the cardinal principle of the Nonconformists that denominational teaching should not be fostered by the State, and rallied practically all Liberals against the principle of granting public funds without imposing public control. He had full scope for his gifts of industry and oratory during every stage of the Bill, and he used them to such purpose that he won a tribute during the closing stages from Balfour himself. His efforts during 1902 procured for him a position and reputation which made his inclusion in the next Liberal Government certain.

From 1906, when the Liberals came into power, he held office continuously for more than 15 eventful years. His conduct of the Board of Trade, to which office he was appointed in 1906, was a complete surprise to all his old enemies who knew him only by his agitation in the South African War and expected to find him an intransigent, unpractical extremist. On the contrary, he was accessible to argument, ingenious in compromise, and much more independent of his officials than most Ministers. Not only was he ready to hear what the interests affected had to say on a measure that he was preparing, but he made it a practice – and here his procedure was quite original – himself to seek them out, call them in conference, and embody their criticisms, if he thought them valid, while the measure was still in the drafting stage. In this way he not only secured the more rapid passage of Bills through Parliament, but when they became law he had the cooperation of the interests affected in making them a success.

The Merchant Shipping Act, the Port of London Act, and the Patents Act (which, by the way, offended the strait-laced free-traders) were all remarkable products of this new method of legislation, which completely broke with bureaucratic tradition. Broadly, it would probably be true to say that he always had an imperfect sympathy with the orthodox Civil Service habit of mind, and, while he relied on it to administer existing law, he despaired of its giving him new ideas and looked elsewhere for them. Here was the germ of what was later known as the new bureaucracy. While he was at the Board of Trade, too, he showed his ingenuity as a mediator by settling the railway strike of 1907. His industrial settlements, however, had a way of being opportunist rather than permanent. The loss of his eldest daughter a few weeks after the strike ended was a sore grief to him.

Chancellor of the Exchequer

The 1909 Budget

In 1908 Campbell-Bannerman died. Asquith succeeded him as Prime Minister and was succeeded as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Lloyd George. At this time, and for some years later, Lloyd George was in very close association with Mr Winston Churchill. Mr Churchill, who succeeded Lloyd George at the Board of Trade, contributed a minimum wage in sweated industries, a weekly half-holiday for shop workers, and the Labour Exchanges. Lloyd George, on going to the Treasury, found an Old Age Pensions Bill already drafted by his predecessor, and after he had carried this through he turned his thought towards schemes of national insurance against sickness and unemployment, and visited Germany in the autumn of 1908 to study the German insurance system. The combination in one pair of hands of responsibility for national finance and of directing a vigorous policy of social reform was unique.

His first Budget, brought in on April 29, 1909, was described by its author as a ‘war budget’, the war being against poverty and squalor, and it dominated politics for the next two years. The speech in which it was introduced was the longest and one of the least successful that he ever made, and with its central idea of taxing the increment on land values, or at any rate with the machinery for doing this, his advisers at the Treasury are believed to have been in very imperfect sympathy, and the Bill was very badly pulled about during the eight months of unclosured debate that it consumed in passing through the Commons. Fierce as was the controversy in the Commons, it was still fiercer in the country, and rarely in our modern politics have such hard words been used on both sides. A speech at Limehouse, made by Lloyd George in July which added a new verb to the English language, is probably the best statement of his case; another at Newcastle in November described the proposals as fraught with ‘rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the multitude’.

In invective and abuse Lloyd George was surpassed by his critics, and future generations re-reading the speeches of 1909 will marvel that so much sound and fury should have been generated over taxes whose yield never approached the cost of collection and which disappeared almost unregretted 10 years later. Lloyd George undoubtedly thought that the country was with him, and when the Lords threw out the Finance Bill he is alleged to have exclaimed: ‘I have them now.’ But the comparatively small majority of 124 at the first election of 1910 was almost equivalent to a defeat, for the Liberals had lost 115 seats, or 230 votes.

Leaders’ Conference

This election had a profound effect on his future. Perhaps it was now that he was converted to coalition. At any rate, it was he who, after the death of King Edward vii, made the first suggestion of the conference of party leaders that followed. It is known that Lloyd George and Balfour were in agreement at the conference, and, had their views been accepted, something like the party truce that was concluded in 1914 would have been concluded at the end of 1910. Among the terms of the concordat it is believed that Lloyd George was willing to withdraw his opposition to McKenna’s shipbuilding programme, and even to consent to some form of compulsory service. During the General Election at the end of 1910 (the second of the year) Lloyd George had the throat trouble which impaired the early beauty and flexibility of his voice.

In the next year he introduced and carried his Insurance Bill. There could be no doubt of the genuineness of his sympathy with the trials of poverty; and he was astonished at the strength of the opposition aroused. It remains, however, the most important of his legislative achievements. He proposed in the next years to attack the problem of the reform of land tenure, but his studies were interrupted by the shadows of the coming war with Germany and of the Marconi scandal. This last was the worst trouble of his political life, but no one imputed worse to him than carelessness and an imperfect sense of what was expected from one holding his high office.

Foreign Policy

It remains to gather up the threads of Lloyd George’s views on foreign policy before war came. He entered the Liberal Government in 1906 with a violent prejudice against the Liberal League and all its works, and with some good personal reason, for it had been founded as a check on the Liberal Left, of which he was the leader. He belonged to the Campbell-Bannerman wing of the party and adopted without questioning the old Liberal objections to expenditure on armaments, and pleaded for its diversion to social reform.

On this as on other matters the conference of 1910 seems to have induced a certain change of opinion. At any rate, in 1911, after the dispatch of the Panther to Agadir, he made at the Guildhall banquet a remarkable speech, in the course of which he declared that if Germany were to treat this country as of no account in the comity of nations then peace at such a price would be an intolerable humiliation for our great country. But he remained fundamentally unconvinced of the German menace. As late as January 1, 1914, in a newspaper interview, the authenticity of which was never denied, he said that he felt convinced that if Germany ever had any idea of challenging our supremacy at sea, the exigencies of the military situation must necessarily put it out of her head. He said that our relations with her were more friendly than they had been for years, and he looked forward to the spread of a revolt against militarism all over western Europe.

When the crisis began in July Lloyd George was the leader of the peace party, which was in an actual majority as late as July 31. By August 2, after (and doubtless in consequence of) the letter from the Conservative Party leaders, the Cabinet had agreed to a limited intervention in case the German fleet came into the Channel to conduct operations against the French coasts. It was to weaken this resolve that von Kühlmann issued his statement to the Press that if Great Britain remained neutral Germany would not conduct naval operations against the French coast, and this promise made some impression on Lloyd George. He told an interviewer that after such a guarantee ‘I would not have been a party to a declaration of war had Belgium not been invaded, and I think I can say the same thing for most, if not all, of my colleagues.’ In his opinion, a poll of the electors on Saturday (August 1) would have shown 95 per cent against embroiling this country in hostilities, whereas by the Tuesday after a poll would have resulted in a vote of 99 per cent in favour of war. Equally logical and equally consistent with his reluctance to enter the war was his determination that once in the war we could not afford to come out of it except as unequivocal victors.

He soon emerged as the most ardent war spirit in the Government. His early war speeches lacked Asquith’s fine mastery of phrase, but were more stirring, and two speeches, one at the Queen’s Hall in September and another at the City Temple in November, are fit to be included in any anthology of militant British oratory. Lloyd George was a member of a committee formed in October to advise the War Office on the best means of providing the guns and ammunition that were required. All countries, including Germany, had under-estimated the expenditure of shells, and, though progress was made in increasing the supplies, it fell far short of our requirements, particularly after trench war had begun. Lloyd George was at first disposed to put the blame on the ‘lure of drink’. We were fighting, he said on March 17, Germany, Austria, and drink, and the greatest enemy was drink. The final result of the offensive against this antagonist was the appointment of the Liquor Control Board.

Munitions for the Troops; Policy for Ministry

But it was evident that, however hard men worked, the output of guns and shells could only be assured by relaxation of union restrictions. ‘This is an engineers’ war,’ said Lloyd George on February 28, and on March 17 he urged a conference of trade union leaders to accept certain proposals for the dilution of labour, including the admission of women to workshops. Thus early was outlined the policy which three months later led to the formation of the Ministry of Munitions and the Munitions Act.

His energy was so much valued by the Army that when French decided in May to appeal to Caesar for a better supply of munitions, and in particular of high explosives, he sent copies of his correspondence with the Government through Captain Guest, one of his adcs and formerly a Junior Whip in the Government, to Lloyd George, and also to Bonar Law and Balfour. Colonel Repington, then Military Correspondent of The Times, was the vehicle of the appeal to the nation as a whole. It is almost forgotten that Lloyd George in a speech to the House of Commons on April 21 said much the same about our manufacture of war munitions as Asquith in his much-criticized speech at Newcastle the day before, but French’s reason for choosing Lloyd George was a just one. He had, as he said, shown by his special interest in this subject that he grasped the military nature of our necessities. There may have been other reasons, too, for the choice, for Lloyd George, a coalitionist at heart since 1910, very early in the war began to doubt whether a party Government could do everything that was required for victory.

Coalition Formed

Lloyd George, who from the South African War days took a very keen interest in military campaigns, was one of the first to shed the facile optimism which was fashionable in the first year of the war, and the likelihood that conscription and grinding taxation would be necessary soon began to oppress him. How could a party Government propose such measures? Was it not necessary to form a coalition of parties if the Government was to have the requisite moral authority? This new crisis matured about the same time as the failure, attributed to lack of munitions, of the attack on the Aubers Ridge. On May 12, 1915, Mr Handel Booth – whose relations with Lloyd George had been fairly close – suggested that the time had come when leaders of the other two parties should be admitted to the Government; three days later Lord Fisher resigned, and on May 17 Asquith, in a letter to Bonar Law, consented to the formation of a Coalition Government. There can be little doubt that Lloyd George inspired this change, which was both necessary for the successful prosecution of the war and accorded with Lloyd George’s political views, and it was certainly he who quelled the Liberal opposition. In the new Ministry, completed by the end of the first week in June, Lloyd George was Minister of Munitions, and a year later we had definitely established an ascendancy over Germany in the manufacture of munitions.

The formation of the Ministry of Munitions and the substitution of a Coalition for a Liberal Government did not exhaust Lloyd George’s energies in this wonderful first year of the war. He also had views on strategy. He saw the incipient weakness of Russia, and was one of the few who appreciated the magnitude of Hindenburg’s victories over Russia at Tannenberg and in the spring of 1915 at its true value. Mackensen’s victory over Russia at Gorlice sharpened his opinion that the chief danger was in the East, and that our sound strategy was to concentrate our offensive efforts against the weaker member of the Central Alliance. He and Mr Churchill thought alike, but whereas Mr Churchill worked for the Dardanelles enterprise, Lloyd George, as early as January, 1915, advocated the dispatch of an expedition to the Balkans to cooperate with Serbia. Briand was of the same general opinion. But the project of a French Army of the East, which it was at first intended should cooperate on the Asiatic shores of the Dardanelles, was opposed by Joffre, and by the time Briand had succeeded the military situation in Serbia was so bad, owing to the entry of Bulgaria, that our General Staff advised that there was no possibility of saving Serbia. It also advised that the employment of troops at Salonika was a dissipation of our strength. In this, however, the Cabinet was over-persuaded by Lloyd George and by the urgent appeals of the French, and the decision to land at Salonika was taken.

Prime Minister

The Change of Office

On the death of Lord Kitchener in June 1916, Lloyd George became War Minister, though it was understood that Asquith made the appointment not without reluctance. There was already widespread dissatisfaction with Asquith’s Government. It is unnecessary to consider whether or not Lloyd George now deliberately planned to supplant Asquith as Prime Minister. He did not believe that Asquith possessed the vigour and vision necessary to win the war, whereas he was confident that he himself did; and he sincerely believed, not without justification, that he was the one man best able to push the war through to victory.

The breach between the two men arose out of negotiations for the formation of a War Committee of the Cabinet, the control of which Lloyd George already wished to keep out of Asquith’s hands. On December 4, 1916, The Times published an accurate account of these negotiations in a leading article. Asquith seems to have believed that the article was inspired by Lloyd George, though in fact its contents were quite familiar in the inner circle of politics. In any case he at once wrote a letter insisting that the Prime Minister, while not a member of the Committee, must have ‘supreme and effective control of war policy’, by supervising the agenda of the Committee and having all its conclusions subject to his approval or veto. Lloyd George repudiated this interpretation of what was afoot, and accepted Asquith’s construction of the arrangement, ‘subject to personnel’, a proviso inserted partly in the interests of Carson, who shared Lloyd George’s views on Balkan strategy. In spite of this letter, Asquith, having consulted his Liberal colleagues, wrote that evening insisting that the Prime Minister must be chairman. Lloyd George then resigned. Asquith followed suit, and with the active support of Bonar Law a new Government was constituted under Lloyd George as Prime Minister, and from then on his will was practically supreme in the conduct of the war. His energy, his own buoyant confidence and courage, and his ability to impart confidence and courage to others were of immense importance.

The end of the war left Lloyd George in a position of commanding, almost dictatorial power; and that position he proceeded at once to consolidate by getting a new mandate from the constituencies for the continuance of the Coalition. The same Government which had won the war, the people were told, was necessary to reconstruct the country and make sure that the new England was to be a fit land for heroes to live in.

Whatever may have been his intention, he allowed the General Election of 1918 to degenerate into an outburst of hysteria. He returned to power with the two potential embarrassments of extravagant promises and an immense majority. They caused him moments of annoyance from the very beginning, but it was fully three years before they seriously impaired a position of personal supremacy such as no British Prime Minister had ever before enjoyed. He dominated the Government of England at a moment when, probably, England’s power in the world was greater than it had ever been.

The Versailles Treaty

Meanwhile the Peace Conference assembled in Paris. This is not the place to examine the faults or the merits of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, but it must be noted that the longer the conference continued the more did the world lose faith in Lloyd George. All observers paid tribute to his courage in debate, his versatility, his power to win over the other negotiators and to smooth out differences between them, his extraordinary nimbleness and dialectical skill; and all alike grew to disbelieve in the fixity of his convictions or the permanence of any position which he might take up. This impression, which incidents of the next few years did little to dispel, was no less unfortunate for the reputation of Great Britain and of British diplomacy than it was for Lloyd George himself.

At home, Lloyd George attacked the problems of peace in precisely the same spirit as he had attacked those of the war. In his letter to Bonar Law of November 2, 1918, inviting the cooperation of the Unionist Party in the continuation of the Coalition, he said that the problems of peace would be ‘hardly less pressing and will require hardly less drastic action’ than those of the war itself; and for that action the unity of the Coalition was as necessary as ever.

His speeches at this time reflected a mind filled with generous visions of the new and splendid world which was to be built up on the ruins of the war. But like most men of imagination he was inclined to be contemptuous of awkward facts.

Deepening Depression

Only slowly did it become evident how completely the fabric of all societies had been shattered. Lloyd George and his colleagues were not alone in dreaming of a world turning eagerly to the pursuits of peace, and (what was of the first importance for Great Britain’s prosperity) crying hungrily for all those manufactured goods which during the war they had been compelled to deny themselves. But as month after month and year after year the financial conditions of the world grew more chaotic, and the purchasing power of the peoples of the world smaller, commercial depression in England deepened until by 1922 there were normally from 1,250,000 persons unemployed, and the burden of unemployment insurance became heavy alike upon industry and upon the taxpayer.

The Government attempted to struggle on with its schemes of national regeneration and at the same time to parry the onset of economic depression. It showed the utmost fertility in devising palliatives, and there was no branch of public effort directed towards the encouragement of trade or the relief of unemployment during the years between the two wars which did not owe its inception to the Coalition Government. But some portions of the Government’s policy, such as the Agriculture Act and the Addison Housing Scheme, had to be abandoned. Others were allowed to wither, and the general impression was created that the Government was being forced into economy, which was indeed no solution whatsoever, rather than leading the nation towards it.

Dissatisfaction with the foreign policies of the Coalition was even deeper than with its conduct of affairs at home. The costly adventure into Mesopotamia was extremely unpopular. The early encouragement of the Greeks in their operations against Turkey and the half-hearted policy – neither entire abandonment nor a continuance of active help – after King Constantine’s return showed irresolution and lack of any guiding principle. Above all, our relations with France grew less and less friendly. Neither Lloyd George nor the Coalition was to blame for the withdrawal of the United States from the pact to guarantee the security of France or for the German recalcitrancy in the matter of reparation payments, any more than they were to blame for the worldwide unrest and disorganization which followed the war.

No Prime Minister and no Government could, probably, have kept the confidence of the country through these troubled years of disillusionment and distress. All Governments must bear the blame for many things which are beyond their control, and never were Lloyd George’s better qualities more conspicuously displayed. His courage, his versatility, his buoyancy of spirit, and, almost more than all, his amazing physical energy were the wonder of his enemies and the delight of his friends. He had largely superseded the established methods of diplomatic negotiation through the recognized channels by round-table discussions by the heads or plenipotentiary representatives of the various Governments. Over each of the conferences summoned in pursuance of this plan he established an extraordinary personal ascendancy which was something more than the respect necessarily paid to the man who stood for the might of Great Britain. The conferences never attained anything like the objects for which they had been called, but, making the most of what little achievement there was, Lloyd George succeeded in representing each as better than a failure and in keeping hope alive to the next; and at critical moments his speeches in the House of Commons were triumphs. Read in print, the speeches lose much of their magic. In his treatment of France, of Germany, of Russia, of Greece, of the League of Nations, of the Treaty of Versailles itself, Lloyd George was always ready to put everything aside in favour of his own inspiration of the moment.

The Irish Troubles; Discontent with Government

Among the various causes which contributed to the growing discontent with the Coalition Government were the troubles in Ireland. For some reason the Irish question seems never to have especially interested Lloyd George. Soon after the Armistice he spoke vaguely of the Government’s intention to ‘satisfy Irish aspirations’, without injury to the rights and claims of Ulster: but he seems to have been far from comprehending how far Irish sentiment had travelled since the days of 1914. Prudence demanded that the Irish question should be taken up at once and in the most liberal spirit. The Times strongly advocated a measure of self-government for Ireland, without compulsion upon Ulster, and was the first to urge this measure on a reluctant Government. But the Cabinet (certainly its hands were full) dallied and postponed action while every month made the situation more difficult. It was the old fable of the Sibylline books. The price at which Irish peace might have been bought immediately after the war was contemptuously rejected at the beginning of 1920. Then followed one of the most terrible chapters of Ireland’s terrible history, a chapter of civil war, of murder, of repression and reprisals and when the final ‘settlement’ was made it was on terms and in a spirit which would have been incredible three years earlier.

The importance of the influence of the Irish settlement on the fate of the Lloyd George Government was not so much that it aroused any especial popular disapproval as that it definitely alienated an influential section of the Unionist Party. Lloyd George, when he superseded Asquith, had split the Liberal Party in two and he had no more embittered enemies than that half of the party which still followed Asquith. In spite of the concessions which he had made to the wage-earners during and immediately after the war, he had now lost the confidence of Labour as a whole, by a policy which, as in other spheres, lacked consistent principle. The predominant partner in the Coalition was the Unionist Party. On his ability to hold Conservative support the fate of his Government rested. The antagonism aroused among Conservatives by his Irish policy, therefore, was of serious importance. Its extent, however, should not be exaggerated. The policy which culminated in the Treaty of 1922 was loyally supported and indeed largely created by Conservative Ministers; and although a certain section of Conservatives doubtless found in it justification for a revival of their traditional mistrust of Lloyd George, the malcontents would not have been strong enough to overthrow him without allies from quite a different part of the Conservative camp.

Fall of the Coalition

What precipitated Lloyd George’s fall was the crisis in the Near East, with the Kemalist victory over the Greeks, the capture of Smyrna, and the Turkish threat to Constantinople and the little British force, now deserted by its allies, on the Dardanelles. The first intimation that the general public had of the seriousness of the situation was from a clumsily worded communication from the Government to the self-governing Dominions asking them whether Great Britain could count on their military support in case of war. The country was alarmed, and inevitably turned its wrath against the Government, which, outside of Parliament, had by now few friends.

In spite of the endeavours of Austen Chamberlain to keep the party in line, a conference of the Unionist members of the House of Commons held at the Carlton Club in November, 1922, decided by a vote of 186 to 87 in favour of party independence, and Bonar Law, recently recovered from serious illness, consented to act as the party leader. The decisive nature of this vote was due to the growing belief among a number of the younger Conservatives that the choice before them was neither more nor less than whether or not Lloyd George should become the leader of the Conservative Party. They were not in close personal touch with him and not under the spell of his personality. They were repelled rather than attracted by his dramatic and dictatorial methods of doing business. Bonar Law’s emergence gave them an alternative leader and their mistrust of Lloyd George became revolt. At the General Election, which followed immediately, the Coalition Liberals (now calling themselves National Liberals) returned less than 60 members against 344 Unionists. When the new Parliament assembled Lloyd George found himself in the corner seat behind the gangway, at the head of the smallest of the four parties. The official representation of the Opposition passed to the Labour Party.

Re-entry into Party

The result of the election undoubtedly surprised and wounded Lloyd George, who appears to have expected that he would be able to assert over a vast electorate that personal supremacy which he had consistently exercised for so long over smaller bodies. He lost little time, however, in repining, and was soon buoyantly at work trying to effect his re-entry into the Liberal Party. Although he had antagonized many to whom the Coalition was anathema, he was still in a strong position. He had his own powerful organization, equipped with the Coalition Liberal share of the party funds which had been collected to finance a national campaign, and his hold on the Welsh electorate gave him a strong territorial basis for claiming the leadership of a revived Liberal Party.

His efforts to reidentify himself with Liberalism continued to the end of his career with a success which was more apparent than real. He was readmitted to the fold, and, after the transference of Asquith to the House of Lords, consistently elected leader of the Liberal Parliamentary Party. But his leadership was always subject to fragmentary challenges and widespread distrust. The fund which came to be associated with his name was hated by a large section of Liberals even though it was being employed for the use of the Liberal Party. His failure to establish himself as a sectional leader was perhaps due to the same faults of character as had led to his downfall as a national leader, but it is at least doubtful whether the task would not have been beyond any man’s powers. He had to make an effective political force out of a party subject to suction both from the Right and from the Left, every item of whose policy might be claimed as its own by the one or the other of two parties, both of which had clearly a much better chance of carrying it out. The task before him was not merely to overcome prejudice against him within the Liberal Party; it was to transform a centre party into a focus of recruitment for itself rather than a source of recruitment for its rivals.

In this task he never succeeded. His committees of political research produced an agricultural and an urban policy in 1923. He himself produced an unemployment policy in 1929. In all these social and economic schemes he was undoubtedly the anticipator of the agreed and accepted policies of today, as he was the successor of the Liberal policies of the years before the war of 1914-18: but the only real electoral success – that of 1923 – was due not to new plans but to the old associations of Liberals with free trade. Between 1931 and the outbreak of the present war, he gradually retired into the position of an elder statesman, whose occasional irruptions into active politics continued to command more interest than agreement. Perhaps some of this shadow was due to the fact that his voice did not come well over the wireless. But in conversation his personality and his tongue remained as vivid as ever. For example, when asked what he thought of Mr Chamberlain’s visit to Munich, he grimly remarked: ‘In my day they came to see me.’ But it would not be unfair to say that he viewed all Governments with almost equal disfavour, and that he never felt that he himself could usefully fit into any possible team. At least he played no great part in public life either in the years immediately preceding the present war or in the war itself. He was greatly affected by the death of his first wife, Dame Margaret Lloyd George, in 1941. One source of great pleasure to him, however, was the success of his two children, Major Gwilym Lloyd George and Miss Megan Lloyd George, in their political careers. Between them and him there existed the very closest bonds of affection and devotion.

Looking back over Lloyd George’s remarkable career, it appears to fall quite clearly into three parts. In the first he appears as the crusading Radical, finding his inspiration in an ever-widening circle of problems and opportunities. In the second he is still a crusader, but a crusader on behalf of the whole nation. In the third he is trying to persuade himself that he is still a crusader, when he has become in fact a tactician. In every one of these phases his gifts of charm, of wit, of courage moved and attracted audiences, but in the last the prophetic power and hold had vanished. None the less, one of his political opponents once said of him that throughout the bitterest times of their controversy he had always felt that Lloyd George was on the side of the underdog, and this remained true to the end.

His countrymen at least will remember that he wrought greatly and daringly for them in dark times, in peace and in war, and will admit without distinction of class or party that a great man has passed away.

In 1919 he received the om, in 1920 the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour, and he was an honorary dcl of Oxford and an honorary ll.d of Edinburgh. He married, in 1888, Margaret, daughter of Richard Owen, of Mynyddednyfed, Criccieth. She was created a gbe, and died in 1941, leaving two sons and two daughters. Secondly he married, in 1943, Miss Frances Louise Stevenson, cbe, who had been his private secretary from 1913.

Earl Lloyd George’s elder son, Viscount Gwynedd, known until recently as Major Richard Lloyd George, now succeeds as second earl. In 1917 he married Roberta Ida Freeman (fifth daughter of Sir Robert McAlpine, first baronet), who divorced him in 1933, having had a son and a daughter. He married a second time, and his present wife is a line controller of the London Transport Welfare Department. The first earl’s second son is Major the Right Hon. Gwilym Lloyd George, Minister of Fuel and Power; his elder daughter is Lady Olwen Carey-Evans, wife of Major Sir Thomas Carey-Evans, mc, frcs; and his younger daughter is Lady Megan Lloyd George, mp for Anglesey.