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

The Women who Loved Lloyd George

To four remarkable families: Lloyd George, George, Longford—and my own

Cover

Title Page The Pain And The Privilege The Women who Loved Lloyd George

Dedication To four remarkable families: Lloyd George, George, Longford—and my own

Introduction

Chapter 1: Hewn from the Rock

Chapter 2: The Cottage-Bred Man

Chapter 3: Love’s Infatuated Devotee

Chapter 4: Maggie Owen

Chapter 5: Mrs Lloyd George

Chapter 6: From Wales to Westminster

Chapter 7: Kitty Edwards

Chapter 8: Mrs Tim

Chapter 9: Mair

Chapter 10: Frances

Chapter 11: Overloaded with Flattery

Chapter 12: Love and Libel

Chapter 13: A Family in Downing Street

Chapter 14: Secrets and Smokescreens

Chapter 15: Two Wives at No. 10

Chapter 16: The Family at War

Chapter 17: Diverging Paths

Chapter 18: Disillusionment

Chapter 19: ‘Dame Margaret is the Star’

Chapter 20: Alone into the Wilderness

Chapter 21: Megan

Chapter 22: New Loves

Chapter 23: Crises Public and Private

Chapter 24: Private Sorrows

Chapter 25: Till Death us do Part

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

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.