The Times Great Lives

The formation of the Ministry of Munitions and the substitution of a Coalition for a Liberal Government did not exhaust Lloyd George’s energies in this wonderful first year of the war. He also had views on strategy. He saw the incipient weakness of Russia, and was one of the few who appreciated the magnitude of Hindenburg’s victories over Russia at Tannenberg and in the spring of 1915 at its true value. Mackensen’s victory over Russia at Gorlice sharpened his opinion that the chief danger was in the East, and that our sound strategy was to concentrate our offensive efforts against the weaker member of the Central Alliance. He and Mr Churchill thought alike, but whereas Mr Churchill worked for the Dardanelles enterprise, Lloyd George, as early as January, 1915, advocated the dispatch of an expedition to the Balkans to cooperate with Serbia. Briand was of the same general opinion. But the project of a French Army of the East, which it was at first intended should cooperate on the Asiatic shores of the Dardanelles, was opposed by Joffre, and by the time Briand had succeeded the military situation in Serbia was so bad, owing to the entry of Bulgaria, that our General Staff advised that there was no possibility of saving Serbia. It also advised that the employment of troops at Salonika was a dissipation of our strength. In this, however, the Cabinet was over-persuaded by Lloyd George and by the urgent appeals of the French, and the decision to land at Salonika was taken.

Prime Minister

The Change of Office

On the death of Lord Kitchener in June 1916, Lloyd George became War Minister, though it was understood that Asquith made the appointment not without reluctance. There was already widespread dissatisfaction with Asquith’s Government. It is unnecessary to consider whether or not Lloyd George now deliberately planned to supplant Asquith as Prime Minister. He did not believe that Asquith possessed the vigour and vision necessary to win the war, whereas he was confident that he himself did; and he sincerely believed, not without justification, that he was the one man best able to push the war through to victory.

The breach between the two men arose out of negotiations for the formation of a War Committee of the Cabinet, the control of which Lloyd George already wished to keep out of Asquith’s hands. On December 4, 1916, The Times published an accurate account of these negotiations in a leading article. Asquith seems to have believed that the article was inspired by Lloyd George, though in fact its contents were quite familiar in the inner circle of politics. In any case he at once wrote a letter insisting that the Prime Minister, while not a member of the Committee, must have ‘supreme and effective control of war policy’, by supervising the agenda of the Committee and having all its conclusions subject to his approval or veto. Lloyd George repudiated this interpretation of what was afoot, and accepted Asquith’s construction of the arrangement, ‘subject to personnel’, a proviso inserted partly in the interests of Carson, who shared Lloyd George’s views on Balkan strategy. In spite of this letter, Asquith, having consulted his Liberal colleagues, wrote that evening insisting that the Prime Minister must be chairman. Lloyd George then resigned. Asquith followed suit, and with the active support of Bonar Law a new Government was constituted under Lloyd George as Prime Minister, and from then on his will was practically supreme in the conduct of the war. His energy, his own buoyant confidence and courage, and his ability to impart confidence and courage to others were of immense importance.

The end of the war left Lloyd George in a position of commanding, almost dictatorial power; and that position he proceeded at once to consolidate by getting a new mandate from the constituencies for the continuance of the Coalition. The same Government which had won the war, the people were told, was necessary to reconstruct the country and make sure that the new England was to be a fit land for heroes to live in.

Whatever may have been his intention, he allowed the General Election of 1918 to degenerate into an outburst of hysteria. He returned to power with the two potential embarrassments of extravagant promises and an immense majority. They caused him moments of annoyance from the very beginning, but it was fully three years before they seriously impaired a position of personal supremacy such as no British Prime Minister had ever before enjoyed. He dominated the Government of England at a moment when, probably, England’s power in the world was greater than it had ever been.

The Versailles Treaty

Meanwhile the Peace Conference assembled in Paris. This is not the place to examine the faults or the merits of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, but it must be noted that the longer the conference continued the more did the world lose faith in Lloyd George. All observers paid tribute to his courage in debate, his versatility, his power to win over the other negotiators and to smooth out differences between them, his extraordinary nimbleness and dialectical skill; and all alike grew to disbelieve in the fixity of his convictions or the permanence of any position which he might take up. This impression, which incidents of the next few years did little to dispel, was no less unfortunate for the reputation of Great Britain and of British diplomacy than it was for Lloyd George himself.

At home, Lloyd George attacked the problems of peace in precisely the same spirit as he had attacked those of the war. In his letter to Bonar Law of November 2, 1918, inviting the cooperation of the Unionist Party in the continuation of the Coalition, he said that the problems of peace would be ‘hardly less pressing and will require hardly less drastic action’ than those of the war itself; and for that action the unity of the Coalition was as necessary as ever.

His speeches at this time reflected a mind filled with generous visions of the new and splendid world which was to be built up on the ruins of the war. But like most men of imagination he was inclined to be contemptuous of awkward facts.

Deepening Depression

Only slowly did it become evident how completely the fabric of all societies had been shattered. Lloyd George and his colleagues were not alone in dreaming of a world turning eagerly to the pursuits of peace, and (what was of the first importance for Great Britain’s prosperity) crying hungrily for all those manufactured goods which during the war they had been compelled to deny themselves. But as month after month and year after year the financial conditions of the world grew more chaotic, and the purchasing power of the peoples of the world smaller, commercial depression in England deepened until by 1922 there were normally from 1,250,000 persons unemployed, and the burden of unemployment insurance became heavy alike upon industry and upon the taxpayer.

The Government attempted to struggle on with its schemes of national regeneration and at the same time to parry the onset of economic depression. It showed the utmost fertility in devising palliatives, and there was no branch of public effort directed towards the encouragement of trade or the relief of unemployment during the years between the two wars which did not owe its inception to the Coalition Government. But some portions of the Government’s policy, such as the Agriculture Act and the Addison Housing Scheme, had to be abandoned. Others were allowed to wither, and the general impression was created that the Government was being forced into economy, which was indeed no solution whatsoever, rather than leading the nation towards it.

Dissatisfaction with the foreign policies of the Coalition was even deeper than with its conduct of affairs at home. The costly adventure into Mesopotamia was extremely unpopular. The early encouragement of the Greeks in their operations against Turkey and the half-hearted policy – neither entire abandonment nor a continuance of active help – after King Constantine’s return showed irresolution and lack of any guiding principle. Above all, our relations with France grew less and less friendly. Neither Lloyd George nor the Coalition was to blame for the withdrawal of the United States from the pact to guarantee the security of France or for the German recalcitrancy in the matter of reparation payments, any more than they were to blame for the worldwide unrest and disorganization which followed the war.

No Prime Minister and no Government could, probably, have kept the confidence of the country through these troubled years of disillusionment and distress. All Governments must bear the blame for many things which are beyond their control, and never were Lloyd George’s better qualities more conspicuously displayed. His courage, his versatility, his buoyancy of spirit, and, almost more than all, his amazing physical energy were the wonder of his enemies and the delight of his friends. He had largely superseded the established methods of diplomatic negotiation through the recognized channels by round-table discussions by the heads or plenipotentiary representatives of the various Governments. Over each of the conferences summoned in pursuance of this plan he established an extraordinary personal ascendancy which was something more than the respect necessarily paid to the man who stood for the might of Great Britain. The conferences never attained anything like the objects for which they had been called, but, making the most of what little achievement there was, Lloyd George succeeded in representing each as better than a failure and in keeping hope alive to the next; and at critical moments his speeches in the House of Commons were triumphs. Read in print, the speeches lose much of their magic. In his treatment of France, of Germany, of Russia, of Greece, of the League of Nations, of the Treaty of Versailles itself, Lloyd George was always ready to put everything aside in favour of his own inspiration of the moment.

The Irish Troubles; Discontent with Government

Among the various causes which contributed to the growing discontent with the Coalition Government were the troubles in Ireland. For some reason the Irish question seems never to have especially interested Lloyd George. Soon after the Armistice he spoke vaguely of the Government’s intention to ‘satisfy Irish aspirations’, without injury to the rights and claims of Ulster: but he seems to have been far from comprehending how far Irish sentiment had travelled since the days of 1914. Prudence demanded that the Irish question should be taken up at once and in the most liberal spirit. The Times strongly advocated a measure of self-government for Ireland, without compulsion upon Ulster, and was the first to urge this measure on a reluctant Government. But the Cabinet (certainly its hands were full) dallied and postponed action while every month made the situation more difficult. It was the old fable of the Sibylline books. The price at which Irish peace might have been bought immediately after the war was contemptuously rejected at the beginning of 1920. Then followed one of the most terrible chapters of Ireland’s terrible history, a chapter of civil war, of murder, of repression and reprisals and when the final ‘settlement’ was made it was on terms and in a spirit which would have been incredible three years earlier.

The importance of the influence of the Irish settlement on the fate of the Lloyd George Government was not so much that it aroused any especial popular disapproval as that it definitely alienated an influential section of the Unionist Party. Lloyd George, when he superseded Asquith, had split the Liberal Party in two and he had no more embittered enemies than that half of the party which still followed Asquith. In spite of the concessions which he had made to the wage-earners during and immediately after the war, he had now lost the confidence of Labour as a whole, by a policy which, as in other spheres, lacked consistent principle. The predominant partner in the Coalition was the Unionist Party. On his ability to hold Conservative support the fate of his Government rested. The antagonism aroused among Conservatives by his Irish policy, therefore, was of serious importance. Its extent, however, should not be exaggerated. The policy which culminated in the Treaty of 1922 was loyally supported and indeed largely created by Conservative Ministers; and although a certain section of Conservatives doubtless found in it justification for a revival of their traditional mistrust of Lloyd George, the malcontents would not have been strong enough to overthrow him without allies from quite a different part of the Conservative camp.

Fall of the Coalition

What precipitated Lloyd George’s fall was the crisis in the Near East, with the Kemalist victory over the Greeks, the capture of Smyrna, and the Turkish threat to Constantinople and the little British force, now deserted by its allies, on the Dardanelles. The first intimation that the general public had of the seriousness of the situation was from a clumsily worded communication from the Government to the self-governing Dominions asking them whether Great Britain could count on their military support in case of war. The country was alarmed, and inevitably turned its wrath against the Government, which, outside of Parliament, had by now few friends.

In spite of the endeavours of Austen Chamberlain to keep the party in line, a conference of the Unionist members of the House of Commons held at the Carlton Club in November, 1922, decided by a vote of 186 to 87 in favour of party independence, and Bonar Law, recently recovered from serious illness, consented to act as the party leader. The decisive nature of this vote was due to the growing belief among a number of the younger Conservatives that the choice before them was neither more nor less than whether or not Lloyd George should become the leader of the Conservative Party. They were not in close personal touch with him and not under the spell of his personality. They were repelled rather than attracted by his dramatic and dictatorial methods of doing business. Bonar Law’s emergence gave them an alternative leader and their mistrust of Lloyd George became revolt. At the General Election, which followed immediately, the Coalition Liberals (now calling themselves National Liberals) returned less than 60 members against 344 Unionists. When the new Parliament assembled Lloyd George found himself in the corner seat behind the gangway, at the head of the smallest of the four parties. The official representation of the Opposition passed to the Labour Party.

Re-entry into Party

The result of the election undoubtedly surprised and wounded Lloyd George, who appears to have expected that he would be able to assert over a vast electorate that personal supremacy which he had consistently exercised for so long over smaller bodies. He lost little time, however, in repining, and was soon buoyantly at work trying to effect his re-entry into the Liberal Party. Although he had antagonized many to whom the Coalition was anathema, he was still in a strong position. He had his own powerful organization, equipped with the Coalition Liberal share of the party funds which had been collected to finance a national campaign, and his hold on the Welsh electorate gave him a strong territorial basis for claiming the leadership of a revived Liberal Party.

His efforts to reidentify himself with Liberalism continued to the end of his career with a success which was more apparent than real. He was readmitted to the fold, and, after the transference of Asquith to the House of Lords, consistently elected leader of the Liberal Parliamentary Party. But his leadership was always subject to fragmentary challenges and widespread distrust. The fund which came to be associated with his name was hated by a large section of Liberals even though it was being employed for the use of the Liberal Party. His failure to establish himself as a sectional leader was perhaps due to the same faults of character as had led to his downfall as a national leader, but it is at least doubtful whether the task would not have been beyond any man’s powers. He had to make an effective political force out of a party subject to suction both from the Right and from the Left, every item of whose policy might be claimed as its own by the one or the other of two parties, both of which had clearly a much better chance of carrying it out. The task before him was not merely to overcome prejudice against him within the Liberal Party; it was to transform a centre party into a focus of recruitment for itself rather than a source of recruitment for its rivals.

In this task he never succeeded. His committees of political research produced an agricultural and an urban policy in 1923. He himself produced an unemployment policy in 1929. In all these social and economic schemes he was undoubtedly the anticipator of the agreed and accepted policies of today, as he was the successor of the Liberal policies of the years before the war of 1914-18: but the only real electoral success – that of 1923 – was due not to new plans but to the old associations of Liberals with free trade. Between 1931 and the outbreak of the present war, he gradually retired into the position of an elder statesman, whose occasional irruptions into active politics continued to command more interest than agreement. Perhaps some of this shadow was due to the fact that his voice did not come well over the wireless. But in conversation his personality and his tongue remained as vivid as ever. For example, when asked what he thought of Mr Chamberlain’s visit to Munich, he grimly remarked: ‘In my day they came to see me.’ But it would not be unfair to say that he viewed all Governments with almost equal disfavour, and that he never felt that he himself could usefully fit into any possible team. At least he played no great part in public life either in the years immediately preceding the present war or in the war itself. He was greatly affected by the death of his first wife, Dame Margaret Lloyd George, in 1941. One source of great pleasure to him, however, was the success of his two children, Major Gwilym Lloyd George and Miss Megan Lloyd George, in their political careers. Between them and him there existed the very closest bonds of affection and devotion.

Looking back over Lloyd George’s remarkable career, it appears to fall quite clearly into three parts. In the first he appears as the crusading Radical, finding his inspiration in an ever-widening circle of problems and opportunities. In the second he is still a crusader, but a crusader on behalf of the whole nation. In the third he is trying to persuade himself that he is still a crusader, when he has become in fact a tactician. In every one of these phases his gifts of charm, of wit, of courage moved and attracted audiences, but in the last the prophetic power and hold had vanished. None the less, one of his political opponents once said of him that throughout the bitterest times of their controversy he had always felt that Lloyd George was on the side of the underdog, and this remained true to the end.

His countrymen at least will remember that he wrought greatly and daringly for them in dark times, in peace and in war, and will admit without distinction of class or party that a great man has passed away.

In 1919 he received the om, in 1920 the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour, and he was an honorary dcl of Oxford and an honorary ll.d of Edinburgh. He married, in 1888, Margaret, daughter of Richard Owen, of Mynyddednyfed, Criccieth. She was created a gbe, and died in 1941, leaving two sons and two daughters. Secondly he married, in 1943, Miss Frances Louise Stevenson, cbe, who had been his private secretary from 1913.

Earl Lloyd George’s elder son, Viscount Gwynedd, known until recently as Major Richard Lloyd George, now succeeds as second earl. In 1917 he married Roberta Ida Freeman (fifth daughter of Sir Robert McAlpine, first baronet), who divorced him in 1933, having had a son and a daughter. He married a second time, and his present wife is a line controller of the London Transport Welfare Department. The first earl’s second son is Major the Right Hon. Gwilym Lloyd George, Minister of Fuel and Power; his elder daughter is Lady Olwen Carey-Evans, wife of Major Sir Thomas Carey-Evans, mc, frcs; and his younger daughter is Lady Megan Lloyd George, mp for Anglesey.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Four times chief executive of United States.

Service in freedom’s cause.

12 April 1945

The death of President Roosevelt from cerebral haemorrhage on Thursday afternoon at Warm Springs, Georgia, as announced in the later editions of The Times yesterday, robs the United States of its Chief Executive within less than six months of his election to serve a fourth term of office at the White House – a term without precedent in American history. Throughout yesterday the people of the United States, of the United Nations, and of all peace-loving States mourned the passing of a leader whose influence for good had extended far beyond his national boundaries.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-first President of the United States, was, as his whole life attested, a man of destiny. From one fate to another he was called. Through two great and prolonged crises in his country’s history he set its course and steered it through. Each of them provided a searching test of character and statecraft, and each made its own demands upon the Chief Executive. In both of them, however, he retained the confidence and was upheld by the support of an immense majority of his fellow-countrymen. The place in history which he will fill in relation to the greatest of his predecessors has yet to be decided but one of the determining factors in regard to it will be that he alone of them was invested by his fellow-countrymen with a fourth term of office and at his elections secured more decisive votes than any Presidential candidate before him. It will be remembered also that his pre-eminence was by no means due to lack of opposition, for many of his policies were carried in the teeth of a resistance by powerful and vocal sections of the American public. He was in fact during his first three terms master of Congress for only one comparatively brief period, and after that was opposed as strongly by some important groups in his party as by the Republicans. He had often, therefore, to use outside opinion to force his own supporters to follow him. His ability to do so was one of the truest measures of his stature. His like can, indeed, only be sought among those whose idealism made a comparable appeal to his people, and whose actions were equally justified in the event.

Rights of Democracy

The world was first to hear of Franklin Roosevelt, the second of his blood and familiar name to occupy the White House, as a champion of the rights of democracy. In this he was a true heir to the traditions of his country. Sensitive as he always was to the feelings of those near him he seemed able to enlarge the range of his sympathy and understanding until it embraced a huge and diversified nation. To him, a man of generous though sometimes hasty instincts, distress, suffering, and insecurity were standing challenges. He had an aristocrat’s magnanimity and angry inability to see unnecessary pain inflicted, and the ‘New Deal’ was a supreme assertion of the claim of all mankind to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ‘Every man has the right to live; and this means that he has the right to a comfortable living’ was both the expression of a genuine belief and a continuing directive of policy. To many millions of Americans it became a sufficing and unquestioned gospel. Even if the Fates had had no more to ask of him than the mighty struggle against the depression of the early 1930s which it inspired, his place in the first rank of Presidents would be secure. At the end of four years of it faith in his leadership had actually increased, and even after four more survived in a remarkable degree.

Roosevelt was required, however, not only to protect the fruits of his advanced Liberalism from internal enemies, but also against a far more formidable menace from without. His aims demanded that he should be a man of peace. Peace, however, was not to continue in his time. He did within the limitations of his position all he could to avert the calamity of war, and both before and after its outbreak displayed, in addition to an astonishing gift of judging his own people, almost as remarkable a one for seeing deep into the Axis leaders. Totalitarianism was the antithesis of all he stood for. He never concealed his personal hatred of it; but he determined with cautious statesmanship to move only as fast as his own countrymen could be led to travel with him. There were in the early stages of the war cross currents in American opinion, and it was not until Pearl Harbour that he had a united people behind him. In foresight he was from the first far ahead of most of them: but he understood the American temper much too well to force the pace, and in this way he succeeded in maintaining the position of a trusted interpreter of world events. When, therefore, Japan struck and he was free from the restrictions which had fettered him, he moved instantaneously into that not merely of a commander-in-chief in war, but of a national war-leader as well. He had, moreover, by this time not only armed his country, but had insured the capacity of Great Britain to hold Germany. It was, in fact, in the years immediately before Japan’s attack no less than in the years after it that his life’s battle for democracy was won.