Ffion Hague - The Pain and the Privilege - The Women in Lloyd George’s Life

It was thanks to the good nature of his lover, and perhaps also to William George’s legal skills, that the young Liberal candidate survived to fight his first general election. Domestic harmony was also preserved, although the family later ‘tacitly acknowledged’, as Olwen put it, that they had a half-brother living in Caernarvon. Dick made extensive enquiries when he first heard the rumours as an adult, and concluded that the story was true. He avoided being seen with his half-brother in public because the physical resemblance between them was so strong. Due to the speed with which the settlement was arranged, Maggie never came to hear the rumours. As Olwen commented, she was spared this time, but was not to be so fortunate in the years to come.

Unaware of her husband’s behaviour, Maggie continued to play little part in Lloyd George’s professional and social worlds. Her life revolved around her baby, and she was preparing to leave Mynydd Ednyfed to move to the new house in town. She was also pregnant again, with Dick barely nine months old.

On 20 March 1890 Maggie had arranged to meet Lloyd George at Criccieth station. He had gone to Porthmadoc early in the morning on business, and the two of them planned to spend the rest of the day together in Caernarvon. As she arrived on the platform Maggie was handed a telegram addressed to ‘Lloyd George’. Assuming that it was for her, she opened it and read the four-word message that was to change her life: ‘Swetenham died last night.’ Maggie was thus the first to receive the shocking news that Edmund Swetenham, Caernarvon Boroughs’ Conservative MP, was dead of a heart attack at the age of sixty-eight. Maggie knew what the news meant: there would be a byelection in Caernarvon Boroughs, and instead of enjoying the next two years quietly with his wife, Lloyd George was facing the first major battle of his political life immediately, and with no time to prepare.

Struggling to take in the unexpected news, Maggie did not know what to do and held back from buying her ticket to Caernarvon in case Lloyd George wanted to cancel the trip. But when he arrived on the Porthmadoc train they decided to go ahead as planned, perhaps sensing that this would be their last outing together for the foreseeable future. They did not have a happy time. As Maggie later put it, ‘The sunshine seemed to have gone from the day…The shadow of the coming election spoiled everything.’ 10

Lloyd George was not the only one to be caught out by Swetenham’s death. The Conservatives had to find a new candidate at once, and luckily for Lloyd George, the best candidate they could field at such short notice was the Llanystumdwy squire, Hugh Ellis-Nanney. There was rich irony in the battle between the Highgate lad and the living embodiment of the social system he hated so much.

As the campaign began, the outcome was far from certain. Lloyd George was in many ways the perfect candidate for the constituency: local born, Welsh-speaking and eloquent. He had also been making himself known to the electorate for over a year. Ellis-Nanney on the other hand was affable, well-meaning and an experienced candidate, having stood for Caernarvonshire Division in 1880, and for South Caernarvonshire Division in 1885. But he had lost both times, and was not in good health when he was persuaded to try again in 1890. He was also not Welsh-speaking, which was becoming more of an issue with the electorate. With little time to prepare, Ellis-Nanney played the strongest card in his hand, depicting his opponent as a radical firebrand and, less advisedly, as a young man who was more interested in the wider world than in Caernarvon Boroughs. The slurs only emphasised the unflattering contrast between the squire and his brilliant young opponent.

Lloyd George had two tireless campaigners at his side in Uncle Lloyd and his brother William. The three set out to attend to every possible detail during the election period, and Lloyd George consulted them on his every move, even enlisting his brother’s help in writing his election address. In it, he held back his most radical views in order not to frighten off the more moderate Liberal voters. His address ‘To the Free and Independent Electors of the Carnarvonshire District Boroughs’ was resolutely Gladstonian. He declared early on: ‘I come before you as a firm believer in and admirer of Mr. Gladstone’s noble alternative of Justice to Ireland,’ before making a brief reference to Wales’ own claims, not to Home Rule, since that was still controversial, but to the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, which would end the dominance of the Church over the Welsh nonconformist majority, and which was the Liberals’ main campaign in the late 1880s and 1890s. He said:

I am deeply impressed with the fact that Wales has wants and aspirations of her own which have too long been ignored, but which must no longer be neglected. First and foremost among these stands the cause of Religious Liberty and Equality in Wales. If returned to Parliament by you, it shall be my earnest endeavour to labour for the triumph of this great cause. Wales has for many a year yearned in her heart for the attainment of that religious equality and freedom which is impossible whilst the English Church as by law established is imposed upon us as the National Religion of Wales, and is maintained by Welsh national endowments, and whilst clerical bigotry dominates over our Churchyards. 11

The reference to churchyards was a none-too-subtle reminder of the candidate’s personal triumph at Llanfrothen.

The Tories bitterly opposed Welsh disestablishment, and William George described in his diary how fierce the battle became: ‘We are in the thick of the fight. Personal rather than party feeling runs high. The Tories began by ridiculing D’s candidature; they have now changed their tune. Each party looks upon it as a stiff fight…The struggle is not so much a struggle of Tory v Liberal or Radical even; the main issue is between country squire and the upstart democrat.’ 12

Lloyd George was not afraid of being tagged ‘an upstart democrat’. He rejoiced in being a new breed of politician. By virtue of his education and legal qualifications he belonged more truly to the professional middle classes than to the ‘gwerin’ or peasant class, but he emphasised his humble origins in a speech that came to be recognised as prophetic:

I see that one qualification Mr Nanney possesses…is that he is a man of wealth, and that the great disqualification in my case is that I am possessed of none…I once heard a man wildly declaiming against Mr Tom Ellis as a Parliamentary representative; but according to that man Mr Ellis’s disqualification consisted mainly in the fact that he had been brought up in a cottage. The Tories have not yet realised that the day of the cottage-bred man has at last dawned. 13

Indeed it had.

On 10 April 1890 the 4,000 voters in Caernarvon Boroughs went to the polls. Lloyd George spent the day with his supporters in Pwllheli before meeting up with Uncle Lloyd at Avonwen. The following day he made his way to the Guildhall in Caernarvon, where the votes were being counted. It was going to be a close-run thing. The votes piled up in two equal-looking heaps, and then Lloyd George was given the bad news: he had been defeated. But the returning officer had spoken prematurely. Lloyd George’s supporters had been primed to be on the lookout for any irregularity or skulduggery, since they (rightly) suspected that their opponents would do anything to secure victory. At the eleventh hour, Lloyd George’s electoral agent, J.T. Roberts, spotted a sheaf of twenty Liberal votes in the Conservative pile. He demanded a recount, and the result was overturned. By the skin of his teeth—only eighteen votes—Lloyd George had been elected to Parliament.

A large crowd was waiting as he emerged onto the balcony of the Guildhall, his brother at his side, and it greeted the new Member with half-crazed enthusiasm. After making a short speech in Welsh, Lloyd George travelled to Bangor, where he hailed the result as ‘a victory of democracy over the aristocracy’ 14 before dashing off a telegram to Uncle Lloyd. His message combined the rhetoric of victory—‘Have triumphed against enormous influences’—with engaging practicality: ‘home six; they must not engage band as rumoured, illegal; ask Maggie down’. 15