The Times Great Lives

Virginia Woolf

Novelist, essayist, and critic

28 March 1941

The death of Mrs Virginia Woolf, which must now be presumed, and is announced on another page, is a serious loss to English letters. As a novelist she showed a highly original form of sensitivity to mental impressions, the flux of which, in an intelligent mind, she managed to convey with remarkable force and beauty. Adeline Virginia Stephen was born at Hyde Park Gate, London, in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen (then editor of the Cornhill and later of the DNB) by his second wife, Julia Prinsep Duckworth (a widow, born Jackson). She was related to the Darwins, the Maitlands, the Symondses, and the Stracheys; her godfather was James Russell Lowell; and the whole force of heredity and environment was deeply literary. Virginia was a delicate child, never able to stand the rough-and-tumble of a normal schooling. She was reared partly in London and partly in Cornwall, where she imbibed that love of the sea which so often appears in her titles and her novels. Her chief companion was her sister Vanessa (later to become Mrs Clive Bell, and a distinguished painter). Her home studies included the unrestricted use of Sir Leslie’s splendid library, and as she grew up she was able to enjoy the conversation of distinguished visitors like Hardy, Ruskin, Morley, and Gosse. She devoured Hakluyt’s Voyages at a very juvenile age, and early acquired a love of the whole Elizabethan period that never left her. Her mother died when she was 13 and her father in 1904, when she was 22. After Sir Leslie Stephen’s death Virginia, Vanessa, and two brothers set up house together at Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and as time went on the sisters, with Mr Clive Bell, the late Lytton Strachey, Mr T. S. Eliot, and some others, formed a group with which the name of that London district was associated, sometimes with ill-natured implications. But, so far as Virginia Woolf was concerned, she would have done honour to any district. She very soon displayed a keen and catholic critical sense which found expression in those brilliant and human articles written for The Times Literary Supplement, many of which are contained in her book, The Common Reader. In 1912 she married Mr Leonard Woolf, the critic and political writer, and went to live at Richmond, Surrey.

The marriage led to much joint work, literary and in publishing; but Mrs Woolf’s private interests remained primarily artistic rather than political. Despite friendships with Mrs Fawcett, the Pankhursts, and Lady Constance Lytton, she took no active part in the movement for woman suffrage, though as she showed in A Room of One’s Own, she passionately sympathized with the movement to secure for women a proper place in the community’s life. It was not until she was 33 (in 1915) that she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, which was a recension of a manuscript dating back some nine years. It was an immature work, but very interesting prophetically, as can be seen by comparing it with To the Lighthouse. By this time Mr and Mrs Woolf had set up as publishers at Hogarth House, Richmond, calling their firm the Hogarth Press. The high level of the works published by this press is universally recognized. Among them are some of the best early works of Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, besides the works of Mrs Woolf herself. Later transferred to Bloomsbury, the Press acquired an additional reputation for the issue of books having a political trend to the Left.

In 1919 Mrs Woolf brought out a second novel, Night and Day, which was still by way of being ’prentice work, but with Jacob’s Room (1922) she became widely recognized as a novelist of subtle apprehensions and delicate reactions to life, with a method of her own and a finely wrought and musical style. Her subsequent novels, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves, rightly earned her an international reputation. These books broke away from the orderly narrative style of the traditional English novel, and are sometimes baffling to minds less agile than hers: but their subtle poetry and their power of inspiring intense mental excitement in imaginative minds are qualities which far outweigh occasional obscurity. The flux of perceptions and the inexorable movement of time were two of her chief themes; and if there is some truth in the criticism that her characters are little more than states of mind, it is also true that they are very highly individualized by the author’s remarkable power of observation. Above all, she had a perfect sense of form and of the unity – even if its expression were unattainable – underlying the whole strange process which we call human life. Mrs Woolf’s last book, published in 1940, was a profoundly interesting biography of Roger Fry.

David Lloyd George

National leadership in war and peace. A pioneer of social reform.

26 March 1945

The death of Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, which is announced on another page, marks the loss of one of the most controversial and commanding figures in British political life. Though for many years he had been out of office, he left an indelible mark on his country’s history both as a protagonist of social reform and as an indomitable leader during the war of 1914–18.

The Right Hon. David Lloyd George, pc, om, first Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and Viscount Gwynedd, of Dwyfor in the county of Caernarvon, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, was born in Hulme, Manchester, on January 17, 1863. His father, William, came of a stock of substantial farmers in South Wales, but, preferring books to the plough, left the farm and became a wandering missionary of education, teaching in many places, of which Manchester was the last. His mother was a Lloyd, daughter of a Baptist minister who lived at Llanystumdwy, near Criccieth, in Caernarvonshire. The father died when he was 42, leaving the mother to bring up David, then a baby of 18 months, a daughter, who was older, and another son, who was born posthumously. Hearing of her plight her brother, Richard Lloyd, at once left his workshop – he was a master bootmaker – and took his sister and her children back to live with him at Llanystumdwy. He treated his sister’s children as his own, and sent them to the village school. David at school is said to have been quick rather than industrious, and his best subjects were geography and mathematics.

Start as a Lawyer

The Georges had known Mr Goffey, a Liverpool solicitor, and in the family councils about the boy’s future it was finally decided, thanks mainly to his mother’s insistence, to make him a lawyer. At 16 he was articled to a firm of solicitors in Portmadoc. Five years later he had started as a solicitor on his own account at Criccieth, to which the family had by then removed, and his uncle’s back parlour was his first chambers. He began to get work, and in 1885 he and his younger brother William had offices in the main street of Portmadoc. Three years later – just after his twenty-fifth birthday – the young solicitor was doing well enough to marry Margaret Owen, who belonged to a prosperous yeoman family just outside Criccieth. The marriage was happy and helpful.

Lloyd George’s boyhood was cast in the great days of the Welsh national revival, which for tactical reasons looked to the Liberal rather than to the Conservative Party. Always a Nationalist and a Democrat, in this respect a typical Welshman, he had no part in the traditions of either party, and his politics were rooted in incidents and accidents of the early struggles of Welsh Nationalism. He said later in life that the chapel was his secondary school and university, and with the sap of the new national life rising in its services and in its institutions it was one not to be despised. ‘How the past holds you here!’ he exclaimed when he visited Oxford after the South African War, ‘I am glad I never came here.’

At an early age, when most boys are content to reflect the commonplaces of their school-books, he was the Hampden of the village politics. At 18 he was writing over the name ‘Brutus’ in a local newspaper articles showing a curious detachment of political judgment, but inclining strongly to the Radical wing of the Liberals. Early in 1886 he was on the first Irish Home Rule platform at Festiniog, and greatly impressed Michael Davitt by his speech. Two years later he was adopted as the Liberal candidate for Caernarvon Boroughs, and in 1890 was elected at a by-election by a narrow majority.

He did not speak frequently, and at first men noted chiefly the pleasant softness of his voice and his turn for personal quips. It was a platform speech on Welsh Disestablishment at the Metropolitan Tabernacle that first made him famous outside Wales, but he wisely stuck to his Parliamentary work, and presently became the most active among the Welsh Parliamentary rebels. He made an unsuccessful effort to create an independent Welsh Nationalist Party, with an organization of its own, and he used every device of the mutinous Parliamentarian to force the Rosebery Government to bring in a Welsh Disestablishment Bill and pass it through the Commons.

South African War

After the cordite vote of 1895, when the Liberal Government was defeated by a chance vote on the insufficiency of small-arm ammunition, the Liberals were in opposition for 10 years. Up to then a Welsh Nationalist, hardly interested in party controversy except in so far as it served Wales, Lloyd George in the 1896 Parliament became the leader of the Left Wing Liberals. Foiled in his ambition to be the Parnell of all Wales, he now threw himself with ardour into English politics. He opposed the Agricultural Rates Bill with such vigour that he got himself suspended. This was the opposition of the peasant, ‘cottage-bred’ man to the landlord who, he alleged, was subsidized by this measure.

Local feeling had run very high in his election in 1892 and 1895, but his resistance to the South African War made him the most unpopular man in the country. He conducted a campaign for the conclusion of peace, and it was almost the rule for him to have his meetings broken up. But the worst riot, and one which brought him within peril of his life, was that in Birmingham in the week before Christmas, 1901, from which he only escaped under escort by dressing in the uniform of a policeman. Yet it may be doubted whether he was ever so thoroughly happy as he was at this period of his life. He took the risks quite deliberately, believing that he was right; and he had his reward in the reputation for courage and constancy acquired at this time.

The end of the South African War marked also the end of the long period during which he had bothered or opposed his own party almost as much as their rivals. The Conservative Education Bill of 1902 gave him his first real chance to emerge as a leader of the whole Liberal Party. The Bill, which proposed to give public assistance to all voluntary schools, whether sectarian or not, offended the cardinal principle of the Nonconformists that denominational teaching should not be fostered by the State, and rallied practically all Liberals against the principle of granting public funds without imposing public control. He had full scope for his gifts of industry and oratory during every stage of the Bill, and he used them to such purpose that he won a tribute during the closing stages from Balfour himself. His efforts during 1902 procured for him a position and reputation which made his inclusion in the next Liberal Government certain.

From 1906, when the Liberals came into power, he held office continuously for more than 15 eventful years. His conduct of the Board of Trade, to which office he was appointed in 1906, was a complete surprise to all his old enemies who knew him only by his agitation in the South African War and expected to find him an intransigent, unpractical extremist. On the contrary, he was accessible to argument, ingenious in compromise, and much more independent of his officials than most Ministers. Not only was he ready to hear what the interests affected had to say on a measure that he was preparing, but he made it a practice – and here his procedure was quite original – himself to seek them out, call them in conference, and embody their criticisms, if he thought them valid, while the measure was still in the drafting stage. In this way he not only secured the more rapid passage of Bills through Parliament, but when they became law he had the cooperation of the interests affected in making them a success.

The Merchant Shipping Act, the Port of London Act, and the Patents Act (which, by the way, offended the strait-laced free-traders) were all remarkable products of this new method of legislation, which completely broke with bureaucratic tradition. Broadly, it would probably be true to say that he always had an imperfect sympathy with the orthodox Civil Service habit of mind, and, while he relied on it to administer existing law, he despaired of its giving him new ideas and looked elsewhere for them. Here was the germ of what was later known as the new bureaucracy. While he was at the Board of Trade, too, he showed his ingenuity as a mediator by settling the railway strike of 1907. His industrial settlements, however, had a way of being opportunist rather than permanent. The loss of his eldest daughter a few weeks after the strike ended was a sore grief to him.

Chancellor of the Exchequer

The 1909 Budget

In 1908 Campbell-Bannerman died. Asquith succeeded him as Prime Minister and was succeeded as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Lloyd George. At this time, and for some years later, Lloyd George was in very close association with Mr Winston Churchill. Mr Churchill, who succeeded Lloyd George at the Board of Trade, contributed a minimum wage in sweated industries, a weekly half-holiday for shop workers, and the Labour Exchanges. Lloyd George, on going to the Treasury, found an Old Age Pensions Bill already drafted by his predecessor, and after he had carried this through he turned his thought towards schemes of national insurance against sickness and unemployment, and visited Germany in the autumn of 1908 to study the German insurance system. The combination in one pair of hands of responsibility for national finance and of directing a vigorous policy of social reform was unique.

His first Budget, brought in on April 29, 1909, was described by its author as a ‘war budget’, the war being against poverty and squalor, and it dominated politics for the next two years. The speech in which it was introduced was the longest and one of the least successful that he ever made, and with its central idea of taxing the increment on land values, or at any rate with the machinery for doing this, his advisers at the Treasury are believed to have been in very imperfect sympathy, and the Bill was very badly pulled about during the eight months of unclosured debate that it consumed in passing through the Commons. Fierce as was the controversy in the Commons, it was still fiercer in the country, and rarely in our modern politics have such hard words been used on both sides. A speech at Limehouse, made by Lloyd George in July which added a new verb to the English language, is probably the best statement of his case; another at Newcastle in November described the proposals as fraught with ‘rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the multitude’.

In invective and abuse Lloyd George was surpassed by his critics, and future generations re-reading the speeches of 1909 will marvel that so much sound and fury should have been generated over taxes whose yield never approached the cost of collection and which disappeared almost unregretted 10 years later. Lloyd George undoubtedly thought that the country was with him, and when the Lords threw out the Finance Bill he is alleged to have exclaimed: ‘I have them now.’ But the comparatively small majority of 124 at the first election of 1910 was almost equivalent to a defeat, for the Liberals had lost 115 seats, or 230 votes.

Leaders’ Conference

This election had a profound effect on his future. Perhaps it was now that he was converted to coalition. At any rate, it was he who, after the death of King Edward vii, made the first suggestion of the conference of party leaders that followed. It is known that Lloyd George and Balfour were in agreement at the conference, and, had their views been accepted, something like the party truce that was concluded in 1914 would have been concluded at the end of 1910. Among the terms of the concordat it is believed that Lloyd George was willing to withdraw his opposition to McKenna’s shipbuilding programme, and even to consent to some form of compulsory service. During the General Election at the end of 1910 (the second of the year) Lloyd George had the throat trouble which impaired the early beauty and flexibility of his voice.

In the next year he introduced and carried his Insurance Bill. There could be no doubt of the genuineness of his sympathy with the trials of poverty; and he was astonished at the strength of the opposition aroused. It remains, however, the most important of his legislative achievements. He proposed in the next years to attack the problem of the reform of land tenure, but his studies were interrupted by the shadows of the coming war with Germany and of the Marconi scandal. This last was the worst trouble of his political life, but no one imputed worse to him than carelessness and an imperfect sense of what was expected from one holding his high office.

Foreign Policy

It remains to gather up the threads of Lloyd George’s views on foreign policy before war came. He entered the Liberal Government in 1906 with a violent prejudice against the Liberal League and all its works, and with some good personal reason, for it had been founded as a check on the Liberal Left, of which he was the leader. He belonged to the Campbell-Bannerman wing of the party and adopted without questioning the old Liberal objections to expenditure on armaments, and pleaded for its diversion to social reform.

On this as on other matters the conference of 1910 seems to have induced a certain change of opinion. At any rate, in 1911, after the dispatch of the Panther to Agadir, he made at the Guildhall banquet a remarkable speech, in the course of which he declared that if Germany were to treat this country as of no account in the comity of nations then peace at such a price would be an intolerable humiliation for our great country. But he remained fundamentally unconvinced of the German menace. As late as January 1, 1914, in a newspaper interview, the authenticity of which was never denied, he said that he felt convinced that if Germany ever had any idea of challenging our supremacy at sea, the exigencies of the military situation must necessarily put it out of her head. He said that our relations with her were more friendly than they had been for years, and he looked forward to the spread of a revolt against militarism all over western Europe.

When the crisis began in July Lloyd George was the leader of the peace party, which was in an actual majority as late as July 31. By August 2, after (and doubtless in consequence of) the letter from the Conservative Party leaders, the Cabinet had agreed to a limited intervention in case the German fleet came into the Channel to conduct operations against the French coasts. It was to weaken this resolve that von Kühlmann issued his statement to the Press that if Great Britain remained neutral Germany would not conduct naval operations against the French coast, and this promise made some impression on Lloyd George. He told an interviewer that after such a guarantee ‘I would not have been a party to a declaration of war had Belgium not been invaded, and I think I can say the same thing for most, if not all, of my colleagues.’ In his opinion, a poll of the electors on Saturday (August 1) would have shown 95 per cent against embroiling this country in hostilities, whereas by the Tuesday after a poll would have resulted in a vote of 99 per cent in favour of war. Equally logical and equally consistent with his reluctance to enter the war was his determination that once in the war we could not afford to come out of it except as unequivocal victors.

He soon emerged as the most ardent war spirit in the Government. His early war speeches lacked Asquith’s fine mastery of phrase, but were more stirring, and two speeches, one at the Queen’s Hall in September and another at the City Temple in November, are fit to be included in any anthology of militant British oratory. Lloyd George was a member of a committee formed in October to advise the War Office on the best means of providing the guns and ammunition that were required. All countries, including Germany, had under-estimated the expenditure of shells, and, though progress was made in increasing the supplies, it fell far short of our requirements, particularly after trench war had begun. Lloyd George was at first disposed to put the blame on the ‘lure of drink’. We were fighting, he said on March 17, Germany, Austria, and drink, and the greatest enemy was drink. The final result of the offensive against this antagonist was the appointment of the Liquor Control Board.

Munitions for the Troops; Policy for Ministry

But it was evident that, however hard men worked, the output of guns and shells could only be assured by relaxation of union restrictions. ‘This is an engineers’ war,’ said Lloyd George on February 28, and on March 17 he urged a conference of trade union leaders to accept certain proposals for the dilution of labour, including the admission of women to workshops. Thus early was outlined the policy which three months later led to the formation of the Ministry of Munitions and the Munitions Act.

His energy was so much valued by the Army that when French decided in May to appeal to Caesar for a better supply of munitions, and in particular of high explosives, he sent copies of his correspondence with the Government through Captain Guest, one of his adcs and formerly a Junior Whip in the Government, to Lloyd George, and also to Bonar Law and Balfour. Colonel Repington, then Military Correspondent of The Times, was the vehicle of the appeal to the nation as a whole. It is almost forgotten that Lloyd George in a speech to the House of Commons on April 21 said much the same about our manufacture of war munitions as Asquith in his much-criticized speech at Newcastle the day before, but French’s reason for choosing Lloyd George was a just one. He had, as he said, shown by his special interest in this subject that he grasped the military nature of our necessities. There may have been other reasons, too, for the choice, for Lloyd George, a coalitionist at heart since 1910, very early in the war began to doubt whether a party Government could do everything that was required for victory.

Coalition Formed

Lloyd George, who from the South African War days took a very keen interest in military campaigns, was one of the first to shed the facile optimism which was fashionable in the first year of the war, and the likelihood that conscription and grinding taxation would be necessary soon began to oppress him. How could a party Government propose such measures? Was it not necessary to form a coalition of parties if the Government was to have the requisite moral authority? This new crisis matured about the same time as the failure, attributed to lack of munitions, of the attack on the Aubers Ridge. On May 12, 1915, Mr Handel Booth – whose relations with Lloyd George had been fairly close – suggested that the time had come when leaders of the other two parties should be admitted to the Government; three days later Lord Fisher resigned, and on May 17 Asquith, in a letter to Bonar Law, consented to the formation of a Coalition Government. There can be little doubt that Lloyd George inspired this change, which was both necessary for the successful prosecution of the war and accorded with Lloyd George’s political views, and it was certainly he who quelled the Liberal opposition. In the new Ministry, completed by the end of the first week in June, Lloyd George was Minister of Munitions, and a year later we had definitely established an ascendancy over Germany in the manufacture of munitions.