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

Dafydd’s death was both an emotional and a practical tragedy for Rebecca. Left alone with three small children, she could not afford to grieve for long. This determined and resourceful woman refused to accept the fate of many widows, who sold their possessions to settle mounting bills before going into service or accepting charity. She chose instead to take on her husband’s shoemaking business herself. Richard was only five years old, and Rebecca knew that she would have to carry the burden alone for many years, but she had courage and stamina. Until her son was old enough to take over she employed two cobblers, Robert and Richard Morris, who lived with the family in Highgate. The overcrowding was slightly eased by the fact that Elin had left home to work as a maid at a nearby farm, but life was still hard. Rebecca rose early to set the journeymen to work and supervised their labour during the day, walking a twelve-mile round trip to the neighbouring coastal town of Pwllheli if necessary to buy materials. Late at night when the family were asleep, she would work by candlelight preparing accounts which she would deliver on foot to neighbouring houses and farms the following day, walking for miles over open countryside. Her efforts alone could not sustain the whole family, so Betsy had to leave school. After a period at home helping her mother, she followed her sister into service.

As a young woman, Betsy was a mild character, a devout Baptist like her parents, bright like her father, and attractive. She was described by her youngest son William as ‘a good looking woman of medium height, fair complexion, very dark hair and bright brown eyes giving a most winning expression to her thoughtful face’. 2 She had a kind and gentle nature, in contrast with Rebecca’s rather stern manner. Betsy suffered from episodes of asthma throughout her life, and she was never physically strong. Hard work from an early age, coupled with poor sanitation and rudimentary medical care, frequently led to some kind of chronic complaint, and her condition was not unusual.

At around sixteen Betsy found a place as a maid and lady’s companion in Pwllheli. The ports of North Wales were becoming significant centres of commerce as large sailing ships carried passengers and goods between Britain and the rest of the world. Pwllheli was a bustling, lively town. Betsy became a regular attender at the Pwllheli Baptist Chapel, and there, when she was approaching thirty years of age, she met a teacher who led an adult class in Sunday School. He was an eloquent, welleducated widower by the name of William George.

Eight years Betsy’s senior, William was handsome, with dark hair and striking blue eyes. He was a sensitive, driven man who was a good teacher and a would-be intellectual. Of average height and broadshouldered, he was described by his youngest son as ‘well knit together with a somewhat thin pale face surmounted by a thick crop of dark hair, a high broad forehead, large lively eyes indicating a quick perceptive mind, a heart full of sympathy and tenderness, and all his movements quick but firm and determined’. 3 His pupils would remember him as a passionate Baptist who was never beaten in debate.

William George was born in North Pembrokeshire in 1820, the son of staunch Baptists David and Mary George, who had a large farm called Trecoed. David died when William was very young, and the children were raised by Mary and her second husband, Benjamin Williams. From an early age William showed more interest in books than in animals. Life in an urban environment appealed to his hunger for experience and advancement, so he left home at seventeen to seek his fortune in the town of Haverfordwest.

William may have been intelligent and ambitious, but he lacked firm purpose and direction in life. First apprenticed to a pharmacist and then to a draper, he drifted from position to position, recording in his diary his dreams of becoming a great intellectual. He could not settle in any trade because he was determined to continue his studies, often reading late into the night, which made him tired and inefficient by day. His determination to study stemmed from the fact that any opportunity to improve his lot could be obtained only through education. Indeed, he had been lucky to attend school to the age of sixteen, since education would not be provided by the state until 1833.

The level of education in Wales was poor even by the standards of the nineteenth century. Children who spoke nothing but Welsh were taught in English, often by teachers who barely spoke the language themselves, and in appalling conditions. The overwhelming majority of the general population were nonconformists, but only members of the Anglican Church could become pupil-teachers. The Baptist William George nevertheless decided that teaching would be his profession, which meant that he would have to study full-time to gain a qualification.

At around the age of twenty-one William plucked up the courage to move to London and enrol in the Battersea Teachers’ Training Institute. For the first time he experienced intellectual fulfilment as he finally found the guidance he had been searching for. He described the experience as the most useful year of his life, ‘the means by which he was brought from a miserable , useless life to…a happy one and not altogether destitute of usefulness to others’. 4 After qualifying as a teacher he went on to hold several short-term teaching positions in London, recording in his diary his agonising internal debate over what he would do with his life: ‘I am still very unsettled in my mind as to my future plans and prospects. I cannot somehow make up my mind to be a schoolmaster for life…I want to occupy higher ground sometime or other. I want to increase the stock of my attainments but hardly know how to set about it.’ 5

This ‘higher ground’ was William’s secret desire to try his hand at writing. Spurred on by his ambition, he arrived in Liverpool around 1846. By then he had spent so much time away from his native land that he had all but forgotten its language. ‘I wished to say a few words to you in Welsh,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘—but I am sorry that I cannot do so, although Welsh is my mother tongue—and I knew very little English until I was nine years of age—but I have used English ever since. The English language has done with me what the English people have done with our country—taken possession of the richest and largest part of it.’ 6

The latter half of the nineteenth century was an age of emigration from rural North Wales, with the decline in agriculture driving young men and families away from their homes to seek employment in the coalfields of South Wales, the metropolis of London and, increasingly, the cities and towns of North-West England, which came to form the largest concentration of Welsh people outside Wales. Those who left often found better educational prospects and more lucrative employment. With prosperity came a new breed of Welshman—middle-class, confident and socially ambitious. In Liverpool, Welsh industrialists and philanthropists like David Hughes and Owen Elias were responsible for building large parts of the city, and the entrepreneurial industrialist Sir Alfred Lewis Jones also made his fortune there. When William George arrived, around 20,000 of Liverpool’s citizens were Welsh-born, and he found a welcoming home among the Welsh diaspora. He felt at home among his professional compatriots and made the acquaintance of fellow intellectuals, some of whom, like the lawyer Thomas Goffey, were to remain his friends for life. He also met the famous Unitarian preacher James Martineau, one of the governors of the school in which he taught, who encouraged him to further extend his intellectual horizons.

But a nineteenth-century city was no utopia, and there were outbreaks of contagious diseases in the new suburbs that threatened all but the most robust. Eventually, fears for his health forced William to move back to Haverfordwest, where he opened his own school in Upper Market Street in April 1854. On 11 April 1855 he married the thirty-five-year-old Selina Huntley, whose family owned a Bond Street engraving and printing business. It is not known how they met, but she was suffering from tuberculosis, and it is likely that she, like William, was in Pembrokeshire for her health. The marriage took place in Hanover Square, London, and on the marriage certificate the bride and groom’s residence is, puzzlingly, given as Bond Street. They must have returned to Pembrokeshire after the wedding, for on 4 December Selina died there of consumption.