The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George’s Life

Although she suffered throughout her life from ill-health, Betsy always seemed able to summon up a reserve of strength when her children were in need. Following Rebecca’s death she held the family together, and was by all accounts a skilful and resourceful housewife. Highgate was rented from David Jones, the village shopkeeper, who lived by a simple creed, ‘The rent is mine, the house is yours,’ and refrained from carrying out even the most basic repairs to his properties. For a rent of £7 per annum (£547 today) Betsy and Richard were left to their own devices in maintaining the fabric of the crumbling cottage. Betsy had to turn her hand to household repairs as well as the washing and baking. The latter was a particular challenge, since the ancient oven at Highgate was on its last legs. Every week Betsy would patch up the holes in its sides with brown paper, and pray that her handiwork would last until the bread was baked.

Betsy established an unvarying routine: Monday was washing day, Thursday was baking day. Chores and social obligations filled the other four working days of the week. Sunday was reserved for three chapel services, with a three-mile round trip to each one. This might have seemed like an additional chore to a less devout person, but it was Betsy’s main comfort in a life of unrelenting hard work. She gave no sign that she ever considered remarrying. Perhaps the strength of her feelings for her late husband prohibited it. In any case, there were not many eligible men in the village at a time when ambitious young men headed for towns or ports to earn a living.

Betsy spent her forties raising three children, keeping house for her brother, and thanking God that she was not completely alone in the world. She had matured into a kind, sympathetic and attractive woman, rather small, according to her elder son, but with a good figure and a soft, sweet voice.2 ‘She was a fine character,’ he wrote in a memoir, ‘—gentle, unselfish and courageous. She never complained and never spoke of her struggles. It was not till long after that her children fully appreciated how much they owed to her, and how fine her spirit had been in the hard task of bringing up her fatherless family.’3 Her widowhood had left its mark, and although Betsy could sometimes enjoy a joke, she was a serious woman. She was also proud, refusing to let her sons join their friends in weed-picking for sixpence a time. Rebecca had taught her to be a disciplined housekeeper, a ‘mistress of method’ in the home, a good cook and generous in giving hospitality.4 She allowed herself few pleasures, but one exception was her fondness for flowers. She grew a rose vine to cover the front of the house. Its flowers bloomed in a splendid display through the summer months, and it was not unusual for the family to overhear strangers on the road outside exclaiming at their beauty.

Betsy inherited Rebecca’s independence of spirit, if not her strength of character, and her gentle demeanour masked a strong adherence to her parents’ beliefs and values. She was proud to be part of the same Welsh-speaking, chapel-going class. The ladies of Trefan, the nearby estate, were often driven past Betsy’s door by their uniformed coachman, but Betsy did not envy them, nor did she feel inferior, and she made sure that her children took pride in their position in life too. When they were older, David and William were both offered positions as pupil-teachers in their school, one of the few ways a bright village lad could get on in the world and escape a life of manual labour. But the offer carried a sting in its tail. Because the school was sponsored by the Anglican Church, pupil-teachers were required to join the Church and renounce their nonconformism, a condition that most, willingly or under duress, fulfilled. When the idea was discussed in Highgate, Betsy exclaimed that she would rather see her boys growing up to break stones on the roadside than turn their backs on the little chapel at Pen-y-Maes. The issue was never broached again.

In common with other nonconformists of the period Betsy was a firm follower of the temperance movement, and regarded alcoholic drink as an evil influence on society. Richard Lloyd was of the same view, although, with characteristic modesty, he rarely spoke his mind on the matter or criticised others. His influence locally was such, however, that many years later, when he was helping out at his nephews’ law practice in Criccieth, the firm’s landlady was obliged to evict them. She reluctantly revealed that the public house opposite had complained that thirsty customers were afraid to enter by the front door in case Richard Lloyd spied them through the window of his office. Betsy and Richard’s influence was so strong on Lloyd George that he never set foot in a public house until adulthood, and although he drank wine and whisky in moderation in later life, he hated drunkenness, and regarded with contempt anyone who drank to excess. With Betsy though, principle would not stand in the way of kindness, and she would invite the village drunk, William Griffith, into the house to sober up by the fire before sending him home.

The shoemaking business and Betsy’s savings provided enough of an income for the family to live on. They were certainly not well off, but the children did not want for anything either. ‘Comfortable, but thrifty and pinched’ was Lloyd George’s description of Highgate.5 The children never had both butter and jam on their bread—it was one or the other—and the great treat on Sundays was half an egg each at breakfast. The family only felt the sting of real hardship after moving to Criccieth in 1880, when Richard had to give up the shoemaking business and the financial demands of giving the boys a good start in the world increased. At Highgate, Betsy’s careful husbandry made sure that there was enough to go around. She would spend hours mending the children’s clothes or altering her elder son’s cast-offs for William. Her pride demanded that her children were well dressed, and she was rewarded when Mrs Evans, the well-born wife of the local schoolmaster, remarked that ‘William George and his brother are the best-dressed children in school.’6

Even in these years, however, the family encountered hard times when Betsy’s investment income fluctuated or the shoemaking business dipped. These difficulties were enough to drive the already highlystrung Betsy to despair. Her asthmatic attacks were often severe, terrifying her young children, who watched helplessly as their mother struggled for breath. Richard knelt by her side rubbing her hand and muttering soothing words, but comfort came only in the form of religion. Once, Betsy was in tears after failing to make ends meet, when she caught sight of an article in a periodical. The transformation that came over her face was so striking that more than half a century later, William set out to see what it contained. The article, by one D. Morris, was headed ‘The Bible, the Destitute and the Widow’, and listed thirty passages from the Bible offering hope and comfort to those in Betsy’s situation. Her faith had come to her rescue yet again.

Betsy’s strength and vitality were slowly sapped by years of raising children under the constant shadow of financial hardship. She was never a strong woman, and her health held out just long enough for her to see her family grow to maturity. The children were in their teens before she became too ill to carry on. From then on the main responsibility for guiding her children was passed to Richard Lloyd, who, fortunately, was temperamentally and intellectually ideally suited to the task. Richard Lloyd was a stern taskmaster who earned his nephews’ obedience and respect, but like many men of the time, he left the task of disciplining the children to Betsy. She could never bring herself to punish David Lloyd. She spoiled him: he was never made to dress himself or even find his own socks, something that had ‘a marked effect’ on him in later life, according to his mistress.7 He grew to rely on his mother’s approval and unconditional love, and took an interest in every detail of her daily life even when he was married and living largely in London. Lloyd George’s last letter to her, two days before she died in 1896, reveals his anxious concern:

My dearest Mother,

…What you ought to do as long as the heat lasts is to take absolute rest…You must not try to be housekeeper, housemaid, cook and maid of all work in one. Just you sit down in the coolest room of the house and boss the lot of them. Give orders. I know they will all be pleased to obey and if they do not just you give them that tongue a bit of which your eldest son has inherited from you…Go out in the cool of the evening but don’t walk in this hot weather. It is more than anyone can do with any comfort. Let them get you a bathchair with Woodhart or someone else to wheel it. The approach to [the house] is so steep that it is most tiring for anyone, even in the best of weathers to walk it. You should not do so on any account as long as this terrible heat lasts. I am sure William will see to that…

It is a good thing that you have such a store of pluck to bear you up…I will back my good old Mother against the whole lot of them…

Your fond boy,

Dei8

As an invalid, Betsy would play an increasingly marginal role in her son’s life, but she was still able to take pride in his achievements, and in particular his growing fame. ‘I am glad that ‘rhen wraig [the old woman] got some satisfaction from her parentage of her eldest son,’ Lloyd George wrote to his brother in 1895. ‘She had a good deal of trouble with him in his younger days & I know of no one who made a braver & a more heroic fight to bring up her children respectably & to give them a fair start. She deserves all the feeling of elation which a contemplation of their success affords her.’9 Betsy lived to see Lloyd George elected to Parliament three times before her death at the age of sixty-eight.

The circumstances of her life and the age in which she was born led Betsy to live her life for and through her children. She accepted her situation stoically and, like Rebecca, kept her eyes firmly fixed on the rewards of the next life. Betsy inspired great devotion among those who appreciated her gentle, kind nature. She doted on her children, and indulged them as far as she could within the limits of her resources. They loved her deeply in return. In later life, Lloyd George prized liveliness and independence of mind in his female companions, yet he looked for different things in his domestic life: comfort, serenity and steadfastness. Betsy was the first woman who provided him with the domestic nurturing and adoration he needed.

Betsy succeeded on the whole in keeping her cares and worries from her children, and the three young Georges had a happy existence in Highgate. They adapted quickly to their new surroundings, which Lloyd George found ‘picturesque, beautiful and inspiring’.10 Their games were those of country children: catching songbirds in the hedgerows, playing soldiers in the woods and throwing sticks in the fast-flowing river. Climbing trees was a favourite activity, especially if it was rewarded with cherries or apples from a neighbour’s orchard. Novelty was provided by the sight of four steaming horses pulling heavy cartloads of building materials through the village to the site where the local squire, Sir Hugh Ellis-Nanney, was building his new mansion, Gwynfryn. Treats included walking to Criccieth to fetch two pennyworth of treacle in a tin can and sampling a little on the way home, and, on baking day, soaking chunks of newly baked bread in buttermilk and anticipating the delights of rice pudding.

Household chores were divided up between the children. Polly helped her mother with the housework, learning to bake, clean and attend the washing, while William was sent daily to fetch a large bucket of water from the village well. David, known as Davy or Davy Lloyd, preferred to be outdoors, and his task was to tend the garden. He had inherited his mother’s green fingers, and loved to find rare plants on his long country walks to plant in the plot of land behind the cottage. One such find was a rare ‘royal fern’. It flourished at Highgate, and was so highly prized that it was dug up and transplanted to the garden of Morvin House when the family moved to Criccieth.

Davy was also in charge of gathering firewood for the household, a task in which he took immense pride. Among the many factors that made him one of the most successful orators of his time was his ability to use details from his childhood to illustrate a point, enabling him to form a point of contact with his audience. In a defiant speech defending his controversial 1909 budget, he recalled: ‘I am not afraid of storms. It wasn’t in a period of fine weather that we used to go to the woods to gather firewood when I was a boy. Not at all; we went after a big storm had struck the wood and littered the ground with broken branches. I’m telling you that after this storm has passed, there will be plenty of firewood to warm the hearths of old people and to brighten the lives of the poor.’11

The children had a secure childhood, protected by their uncle and indulged by their mother. Yet they could not entirely escape the manifestations of injustice in the social order. Even in the quiet backwater of Llanystumdwy, landlords wielded their near-absolute power over tenants with harrowing consequences. For the children, this meant that a walk through the woods involved avoiding the estate gamekeepers at all costs. The owners of Trefan were kind individuals who allowed local children to play on the estate’s land as long as they respected the livestock and did not disturb nesting birds. Their keepers, and those of Sir Hugh Ellis-Nanney, were a different breed altogether. The George brothers escaped their clutches by a hair’s breadth on numerous occasions. They knew that a widow in the village had had to send her son away for good to escape dire punishment after being caught with a hare killed on private land.

The benign presence of the Trefan ladies in the village, and the fact that the Ellis-Nanney family sponsored the local school, did not disguise the extent of the landlords’ power. In effect, the village was controlled by the squire and the parson, two all-powerful figures whose intervention could at a stroke destroy a lifetime’s work for tenants or parishioners. In 1868, when Davy Lloyd George was five years old, that power had banished some of his schoolmates from the village in an outrageous and vindictive act of revenge. The cause was the general election of that year, when the electorate dared return a Liberal candidate, the Welsh-speaking nonconformist Love Jones-Parry, instead of the local landowner Baron Penrhyn’s son, George Douglas-Pennant. Since the ballot was public, not secret as it became in 1872, disobedient tenants were easily identified. Flying in the face of democracy, compassion and common sense, the landlords retaliated. Families were turned out of their homes and robbed of their livelihoods as farms, shops and workshops had to be left behind. It was said that eighty men who worked in the Penrhyn slate quarry lost their jobs. For a family thrown out on the streets the only options were to rely on charity—something no proud nonconformist would willingly accept—or to move away to seek employment elsewhere. Thus, at an impressionable age the young George children saw some of their playmates in Llanystumdwy forced to leave the village, their families rendered destitute by the landlords. It was an injustice that burned into their consciousnesses, and one that Lloyd George never forgot.

At the age of three, Polly was the first of the George children to leave the hearth and join the procession of girls and boys marching daily to the village school. In September 1866 she was joined by her brother Davy Lloyd, with William following in 1868. The Llanystumdwy National School was established in 1851, in a two-roomed building next to the church. The majority of the pupils were from nonconformist families and spoke nothing but Welsh, but in school they adhered to Church rituals and learned to speak and write only in English.

Girls and boys of all ages were taught together by David Evans, an excellent teacher, able to bring his subjects to life and to excite young minds, and his staff of two pupil-teachers. There were seven standards, ranging from infants upwards, and school inspectors decided when each child was ready to progress to the next. After a year in the seventh standard, at around the age of fourteen most pupils were considered ready to leave school, but for especially gifted pupils David Evans offered a year’s further teaching, which he called standard 7X. The chosen ones would sit at a table close to Evans’ own desk, and would often be offered the chance to become pupil-teachers at the end of the year.

The curriculum consisted of the three ‘R’s plus geography, history and, for the brightest, a little algebra. Naturally for a school in a coastal area, a number of school leavers went to sea each year, so navigation was taught as an extra subject for recently-departed pupils bound for the ports of Porthmadoc and Pwllheli. David Evans also indulged his own interest in jurisprudence, which opened the eyes of at least a few of his pupils to the possibilities of a career in law. Reading was encouraged, but literature was available only to the lucky few like the George children who had books at home.

Welsh literature or history played no part in children’s formal education. They were given, in effect, the same education as their contemporaries in England, with no attempt to teach them about their own country or to connect with their community. The prevailing attitude among the (English-speaking) school authorities was that the Welsh language should be beaten out of children and replaced with the English of the Empire. It did not occur to them that the English language might not be of much use to children who would grow up to be farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen and labourers in a wholly Welsh-speaking area, or that bilingualism was in itself a good thing. Instead, the use of Welsh was fiercely discouraged, and the use of severe force to punish children caught speaking their natural language was widespread. Polly and her brothers did not have to leave their home to hear of one: Richard Lloyd had been caught speaking Welsh to a schoolmate one day at school. The teacher struck him on the side of the head with such force that he permanently lost the hearing in one ear.

In addition to the National Schools, Sunday Schools were run by both churches and chapels. The nature and quality of the instruction given was very different. Church Sunday Schools were attended mainly by children, and concentrated on scriptural study. Inspired teaching could make these sessions enjoyable and rewarding, but in most places they descended into mere rote-learning. The Welsh-language, nonconformist Sunday Schools were attended by the whole congregation, either after the main morning service or in a separate afternoon session. They began with Bible readings, hymns and prayers before the congregation divided into classes, each occupying a separate area among the pews in chapel. Classes were sometimes single-sex, and were divided according to age. Each had its own teacher, and although these were occasionally professional teachers, like William George senior, they came mostly from the ranks of the better-educated adult members. Teachers would read passages of the Bible and discuss doctrinal issues like ‘The Fall of Man’ and ‘The Universality of the Flood’, according to the age and understanding of class members. Children were taught more than the Bible in these sessions: they were taught to read, to debate, to sing solfa and to engage in question-and-answer sessions with the adults. Sessions would close with a simultaneous catechising of the whole congregation, prayers and hymn-singing. For those without any other access to education, Sunday Schools provided a level of basic skills that was, literally, a godsend.

The importance of Sunday Schools emerged even in the government’s disastrous review of education in Wales in 1847. The review was prompted by Welshmen like William Williams MP who were concerned about standards, and three commissioners were appointed to investigate and report. The commissioners—none of whom was Welsh or had ever lived in Wales—reported that the conditions in which Welsh children were taught were ‘dreadful’ even by contemporary standards: only just over half of Welsh bridegrooms could sign their names. In some areas Sunday Schools were the only form of education available. The report was coloured throughout by the commissioners’ lack of understanding. It neglected to point out that children who spoke only Welsh received their entire education through the medium of English, which even their teachers barely spoke. Such was the travesty of the report that it came to the conclusion that nonconformism encouraged immorality. As anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Calvinistic Methodism could attest, nothing could have been further from the truth.

The furore over the report increased the sectarian and linguistic differences between English—and Welsh-speakers. Thirty years later, the obvious disconnect between the Welsh nonconformist chapels and the English-language, Church-ritualised school in Llanystumdwy still jarred. Torn between the two, the pupils were close to open rebellion. In the young Davy Lloyd, they found their natural leader.

The occasion was the visit of the school inspectors, regarded as an opportunity for the schoolmaster to demonstrate the good behaviour and academic prowess of his charges. The inspectors, the Misses Evans of Trefan and Sir Hugh Ellis-Nanney, visited the school every year. The children were marched in single file in front of them, and made to recite the catechism in English, but in 1875 the twelve-year-old Davy Lloyd decided that the event would not go smoothly. He had been brought up at the knee of a Baptist preacher in a devout and proud family. Nonconformists had fought hard to be allowed to worship according to their faith: it was not long since persecution had been commonplace, with dissenters forced to attend church services or face dire consequences.

Young Davy Lloyd was already a leader among his schoolmates, one of whom remembered him as a child of three or four standing on the stairs at home, ‘preaching’ to his assembled friends below. For a determined, independent boy, it made no sense to have to memorise and recite the Church text. Furthermore, it was an insult to have to pretend to be an Anglican, and worst of all for a Baptist boy, to have to attest that he was given his name at christening, which was against the most specific teaching of his denomination. Having suffered the indignity every year, he now decided to organise a rebellion, and persuaded every child in the school to turn mute when invited to recite the catechism. When Mr Evans stepped forward and indicated to the children that it was time to begin, his prompt was met with stony expressions and silence. The utterly bewildered schoolmaster tried again. ‘I believe…’ he repeated hopefully, but to no avail. It was a tense moment, for the visitors behind him were not only inspectors but also his employers. Finally, after what seemed like an age, William George could not bear to see the well-liked Mr Evans get into trouble, and shouted ‘I believe!’ One by one his classmates joined in, and the catechism was given in full.

This incident is rightly famous, and much has been made of the evidence it provides of the young Lloyd George’s precociousness and refusal to conform. The protest was entirely successful: the children were never again asked to recite the catechism at school, and while legend has it that Davy gave his brother a good thrashing afterwards—which William George always denied—there is no record of the ringleader himself having been punished at all. It may be that Mr Evans never came to know who had led the rebellion, but it certainly proved that Davy Lloyd George was a boy who got away with things. He had guts and a great deal of charm, and he used both to the full. This combination, even during his school years, was particularly effective with women, and got him out of all kinds of trouble. One of many incidents occurred when an Irish labourer working on the Ellis-Nanney mansion took offence at the way in which a group of village boys were teasing his daughter. He was a big man, and known to have a violent temper. As he approached the boys, they wisely scattered and he grabbed at the nearest, who happened to be Davy. ‘Not that one!’ cried the little girl anxiously, ‘Not that one!’ Davy was spared a thrashing because of a susceptible female supporter. He also had two adoring female supporters at home in Rebecca and Betsy, both of whom indulged and spoiled him. He grew up to expect the admiration of women and to rely on their loyalty.