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

There has been much speculation about Maggie’s attitude towards living in London. Her visits there were so infrequent during 1894, when she was expecting their fourth child, that Lloyd George arranged for the flat to be let for six months, and it was again sub-let in 1896, when she was pregnant a fifth time (the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage). It does not appear that she was in London very often during the remainder of 1896, in 1897 (although she was there when she suffered another miscarriage in the spring) or 1898, until, finally, with the marriage at crisis point, she consented to let their Criccieth home and move to a family house near Wandsworth Common. Even then she delayed making the move for as long as possible.

The overwhelming consensus among Lloyd George’s biographers is that Maggie simply preferred Criccieth to London. In this way, the blame for the difficulties in their marriage has been divided between the philandering husband and the absent wife. The evidence, though, strongly suggests that, her preference apart, Maggie’s decision not to join Lloyd George in London at the beginning of his parliamentary career was based on practical considerations. After all, when the children were older she did—albeit reluctantly—move to London, and she was mostly at her husband’s side through his years as Chancellor and Prime Minister.

The conventional view is largely based on Lloyd George’s pleas in his letters home for Maggie to join him, although the possibility exists that he was exaggerating his loneliness to divert attention from his active socialising in her absence. Nevertheless, the love between him and Maggie was strong, and he was clearly anxious to have his family with him more often during these early years. This was the first time in his life that he had had to fend for himself without women to take care of his needs, and he did not enjoy it. He was not temperamentally equipped to look after himself. He had been spoiled as a child by the devoted Betsy and Polly, and cared for latterly by the servants at Mynydd Ednyfed. For the pampered young man, who to the end of his life was never able to tie his own shoelaces, it was a shock to the system to come home to an empty room with no food to eat and no clean collars for his shirts. In some ways, as we shall see, his solitary existence in London suited him, and he made the most of the opportunity to enjoy his new social circle, but the loneliness was not entirely faked, and his domestic helplessness was a real problem.

Lloyd George was not a systematic man, especially when it came to correspondence. Despite writing regularly and frequently to Maggie, William George and Uncle Lloyd, he never kept track of the letters he received, and the majority of theirs to him have been lost. Consequently, Maggie’s views on living in London and her reasons for her undisguised preference for Criccieth have not received similar attention.

There are many facts that would have affected her decision. Travel between Criccieth and London involved an uncomfortable and expensive nine-hour train journey via Bangor, Shrewsbury and Crewe. Money was desperately short, and when Lloyd George was elected, the twenty-three-year-old Maggie had a baby of fourteen months with another on the way. When Mair Eluned was born the practical difficulties doubled. It was far from clear in 1890 that Lloyd George would hold on to his seat for more than a couple of years, when the next general election was expected. Also, in the 1890s the parliamentary timetable was less regular and less frantic than it is now: sessions ran, typically, from January to late summer, with a short break at Easter, but Members were then free to return to their constituencies for the rest of the year, unless they were in office with government departments to run. Life as a backbencher involved having one foot in Westminster and the other in the constituency. It may have seemed utterly reasonable to Maggie that she and the family should stay where they were, with Lloyd George returning as often as he could.

The family’s health was another major factor. Lloyd George wrote to Maggie in June 1890:

You can’t imagine how glad I was to get such a long and interesting letter from you. I read it with avidity and delight. I went out for a stroll before breakfast to the Embankment Gardens & read your letter there. It made me quite happy. There is a sort of pleasure even in ‘hiraeth’ [homesickness] itself. I am sorry that they are cutting the hay so soon. Were it next week I might come then. I would so like to scent the hay. It would be such a contrast to this infernal sooty stinky [city]. 13

London was not a healthy place to live in the 1890s. Country people had long feared the contagion and ‘bad air’ of the rapidly growing cities—one of the reasons for Betsy and William George’s return to Wales from Lancashire in 1864. In subsequent years things had got worse. Some of the richest men in London were brewers, who provided an alternative to drinking the city’s dirty water, which posed a very real danger: a House of Commons cleaner died of cholera as late as 1893. City doctors were widely mistrusted, especially with regard to childbirth: infant mortality in the cities was 30 per cent higher than in the country. Maggie was happy to visit London before she became a mother, but with young children it was a different matter. The prospect of looking after two babies in a cramped set of rooms was a real deterrent. No wonder she thought it best for the children to stay in their comfortable house by the sea in Criccieth, with her parents on hand and servants to look after them.

In later life, Maggie declared with seeming sincerity that ‘a wife must put her husband first, her children second, and herself last. That is the way to take couples happily to their golden wedding.’ 14 It is difficult to reconcile that view though with her actions when her children were young. From the moment she first fell pregnant in 1888, the children filled her world, and although she loved her husband passionately, there is not much evidence to support the view that she put his needs above theirs. All in all, this was the worst time in her life to ask Maggie to live for long periods in London. During the first seven years of their marriage, she was pregnant for a total of thirty-six months, gave birth four times, *and assuming she nursed each child for six months after birth (a conservative estimate for the period), there were only fourteen months during the years 1888-95 when she was not either pregnant or nursing. After 1895 Maggie’s health was not strong, and she miscarried twice before giving birth to the couple’s last child, Megan Arvon, in April 1902.

Maggie’s life was centred around her children, her family and chapel. In London, she had none of the support systems she needed to make a home. Her social circle was small and scattered across the city, and getting about with small children was not easy. Lloyd George was wholly preoccupied with the intoxicating world of politics, and kept highly irregular hours. Yes, it was her duty to look after her husband, but did she not have an equal duty to look after her children? In the years ahead, this question was to cause increasing tension between them.

In the early 1890s, however, their relationship was warm and close, and Lloyd George’s affection for the children fills his letters: ‘When am I going to get little Dickie’s photo? I want it badly. I can’t stand this solitude much longer.’ 15 But while he was missing Maggie, he was not missing Criccieth. He had found life there, with gossips monitoring his movements, too confining and he never grew to like the town. He complained about the weather (very wet), and the fact that as his fame grew he was never left in peace. As the years wore on he came to regard time spent in Criccieth as a matter of duty, not respite. Early on in his parliamentary career he was making excuses to Maggie instead of returning to the family home at weekends. The truth was that, in his early thirties, he was relishing his freedom and enjoying the more cosmopolitan life in London. Maggie’s absence gave him plenty of time, and the incentive, to make the most of the social opportunities that were open to a young star in the Welsh Liberal Party. He made friends with his fellow Welsh MPs and with members of the flourishing Welsh community in the capital.