Читать книгу The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George’s Life - Ffion Hague - Страница 5

No one who grows up in Wales can escape the long shadow cast by David Lloyd George. In a country that loves heroes, the ‘Welsh Wizard’ and his mythology are still a potent force. ‘Lloyd George knew my father,’ runs the old song, ‘…and my mother,’ goes the unspoken second line, with a wink. To Conservative politician Lord Boothby, Lloyd George was ‘an artist expressing himself through the medium of politics…the greatest creative force I have ever come across’.¹ Women found him compelling in a different way: ‘He could make anyone a friend of his. He had all the gifts and he could get his charm over to anybody and they would, as you know, worship him,’ according to his mistress.²

Intrigued though I am by Lloyd George, I have always found his first wife, Margaret, equally compelling. Maggie Owen was raised a God-fearing, Calvinistic Methodist, a Welsh-speaker and patriot. My original intention was to write a biography of this Welshwoman, to explore and understand how she made the journey from rural North Wales to Downing Street. I wanted to know if she felt overawed by her aristocratic and royal acquaintances, if she enjoyed her role in public life, if she regretted leaving Wales, and, above all, what price she paid for spending her life with an extraordinary man.

I was prepared to admire Margaret: it is difficult not to. She was a woman who took every opportunity to serve her beloved Criccieth and the wider community she came to represent during the country’s darkest hour. She was in some ways a conservative woman. Raised during the reign of Queen Victoria, she claimed home and hearth as her natural territory. In the early years of marriage she considered raising her children to be her career, and she was a late convert to the cause of female suffrage. Yet because of the man she married Margaret was presented with opportunities that took her far beyond the life she had anticipated for herself. She became immersed in her husband’s political career, and proved herself to be a formidable campaigner and speech-maker. When she found herself propelled into 10 Downing Street, this daughter of a North Wales farm had the wisdom and confidence to interpret her role anew, making it her own and, in the words of her brother-in-law, ‘showing the world what a home-loving wife of a Prime Minister could do’.

In undertaking the initial research for the book, I discovered that Margaret’s story would be incomplete without considering the other major player in her marriage: her husband’s mistress, Frances. Frances was as English (or, at least, non-Welsh) as Margaret was Welsh. She was a young Edwardian girl with nothing, it seemed, in common with Lloyd George. How could he share his life with two such fundamentally different women? As I learned more about Frances, I realised that she too had lived an extraordinary life. I began to appreciate that it had taken considerable courage for her to put her love of Lloyd George above conventional respectability, and to live her life according to her own interpretation of freedom and emancipation. Frances was a groundbreaking woman too. She gained a degree in Classics, became the first female Private Secretary to a British Prime Minister, was an eyewitness to some of the most momentous events of the twentieth century and the confidante of a great statesman.

To my initial surprise, I found that I had empathy with Frances too. When I joined the Civil Service in 1991 as a fast-stream graduate entrant I took it entirely for granted that I could, potentially, rise to the top of my profession. I wondered what it had been like for Frances when she started working at the Treasury. She became the most senior woman in Downing Street—not entirely through her professional efforts, it must be said—but she proved to be more than capable, and was offered a permanent position as a civil servant when her ‘Chief’ left office. Frances was absolutely right when she wrote of her role as Private Secretary, ‘There is perhaps no other profession in which there are so many occasions when a woman might let her employer down…If she makes a mistake, it is probably her employer who will suffer.’³ Her job involved keeping a lot of secrets, which Frances was supremely well-equipped to do. She was a brave woman too. It took courage for her not to opt for the safe option of marriage and children in her twenties, and yet more courage for her to have a child at the age of forty, when she was still unmarried. I wanted to know how she had coped with her earlier abortions—what medical help was available to a woman in her situation—and whether late motherhood had fulfilled her expectations.

Frances paid a heavy price for her place in Lloyd George’s life. She endured loneliness, bitterness and trauma before becoming the second Mrs Lloyd George for the last seventeen months of his life, and like Margaret she never looked back. But their love of the same man meant that they could never be friends. Their rivalry injected poison into the lives of many others, and inspired a feud that outlived them both.

Lloyd George’s two wives were opposites in almost every sense, and he was faithful to neither; but as I discovered more about them, it became easier to understand why he needed them both. He loved Margaret, and she, to him, embodied Wales. She kept him in check, outwardly at least conforming to the principles of nonconformism and temperance. Margaret was intelligent in an instinctive way, but her mind was untrained and undisciplined. Her letters and articles betray her incomplete education: they are written in English but often adopt complex Welsh syntax which, when transposed directly from her first language make her style seem wordy. She moves seamlessly from English to Welsh and back again, on paper as in life, and refreshingly brings all political issues back to the same homespun common sense. Frances, by contrast, was both clever and trained—Lloyd George described her as having a ‘woman’s susceptibility with a man’s brain’,⁴ which he intended as a compliment, and in his work he could rely on her educated and discreet mind. Her instincts were not as in tune with his as Margaret’s. She was of a different generation, and did not share his empathy with small nations and international underdogs. But Frances was able to share his work in a way that Margaret could not. She was utterly loyal where her ‘Chief’ was concerned, and had a sixth sense about the people around him—Lloyd George once told Lord Riddell that Frances would be in his ideal Cabinet to ‘suss out the rogues’. He relied on Frances’ judgement when it came to politicians and statesmen, but if he wanted to speak to the general public, to convince them he had not lost touch, it was to Margaret that he turned.

This story could not have been written if the women in Lloyd George’s life had not preserved and bequeathed or sold their letters, diaries and memoirs to public libraries. I make no apology for shining a spotlight on some private matters, for it was their intention that the story should be told. Nowhere does Lloyd George’s masterly understanding of the women in his life show better than in these papers. His letters to Margaret are different in tone and language to his letters to Frances. He speaks plainly to Margaret, combining Welsh and English as freely as she does, and his expressions of affection are natural without seeming sentimental: it is the language of a long-married couple who have found a way of accepting and accommodating each other’s weaknesses. Lloyd George and Frances, on the other hand, write to each other using extreme romantic language, even after more than twenty years as lovers. Frances’ daughter, Jennifer, who was privy to many of their daily conversations, finds their letters cloying and sentimental: it is not the language of everyday life, and Frances adopts a much more realistic tone in her diary.

Was the tone of these letters genuine? Commentators have taken them as proof that the passion that inspired Lloyd George to take a permanent mistress lasted for the rest of his life. It is true that the connection between him and Frances was strong and durable to the end, but it is equally possible that Lloyd George was playing the romantic hero in his letters, in full knowledge that Frances needed to feel that she was necessary to him if she was to endure her precarious and unequal position. Frances sought romance, passion and a cause to believe in, which is precisely what Lloyd George gave her in his letters. They may not have been written in the language of their day-to-day relationship—which may be why they sound false to Jennifer—but that was necessary if he was to keep Frances at his side. With an eye to posterity, Lloyd George may also have intended the letters to excuse and justify his adultery. Let the reader be the judge.

From being intrigued by Margaret and Frances it was a short step to extending my research to the other women in Lloyd George’s life. Mair, Olwen and Megan, his daughters, were important players in the life of their brilliant father, from whose spell they never fully broke free. Megan is the subject of an excellent biography by Mervyn Jones, and her groundbreaking career as female MP and political broadcaster deserves greater attention than it has been possible to give in this book. Other women, of whom there were many in Lloyd George’s life, make their appearance in the narrative but exert less influence on the man and are not permanent features in his life. Rebecca Llwyd, Betsy George and Polly—his grandmother, mother and sister—are the exceptions: profound in their influence even though they fade out of the story at an early stage.

I have become convinced that Margaret was one of the most successful Prime Minister’s wives of all time. She became famous for her dignity and her dedication. She achieved an immense amount for charity, and took to public life with ease. It was fascinating to me to reflect, not for the first time, on the ambiguous position of women married to men in public life. Margaret Lloyd George never put a foot wrong. During wartime she worked harder than anyone around her, eschewing social glitter for austerity and public service. She played a supporting role to Lloyd George in public, but never lost her own sense of identity. She was politically active, yet she never embarrassed or publicly contradicted her husband. She was a steadfast friend and a formidable foe. By the time she died she was famous throughout the world, but she remained a Criccieth girl at heart. I cannot think of a better role model for those who find themselves in this most difficult of situations. Yet she has been overlooked for reasons that are unfathomable to me, unless it is because of the fact that her voice was not preserved in a memoir or diary.

Our story begins in rural North Wales, among working men and women who suffered hardship, persecution and injustice. From this voiceless class and this unforgiving environment, one man had the talent and the opportunity to find his voice and to help shape the course of the twentieth century. His community and his family devoted their scarce resources to nurturing his talent. They were the first people to experience the pain and the privilege of smoothing the path of David Lloyd George. While his life provides the structure of this book, it is not primarily about him or about the politics he lived and breathed: I would encourage readers who wish to know more about both to read the work of John Grigg and Kenneth Morgan, whose expertise in political history far exceeds mine.

The writing of this book has been a pain and a privilege in itself. I have learned a vast amount about my country and my heritage. The nineteenth-century Wales I describe in the early chapters shaped the late-twentieth-century Wales in which I grew up. I have always been conscious that there is a different social structure in Wales to that in England: a meritocracy based on education and culture which can be baffling to those who are used to social structures largely determined by wealth and birth. Calvinistic Methodism, nationalism, education and poetry are all vitally important factors in my Wales. Margaret, I am sure, would have shared my outrage at the nineteenth-century Encyclopaedia Britannica which baldly states, ‘For Wales—see England.’

Finally, it has been my privilege to get to know members of three families: the Lloyd George, George and Longford families. I could not have undertaken this book without their help, and their friendship is the principal reward of writing it.

Ffion Hague

April 2008