The Prime Minister. Harold Spender
It was an event, indeed, deemed worthy of special attention from the veteran leader of the Liberal hosts, Mr. Gladstone smiled on Wales. On May 29th Mr. Lloyd George was invited to Hawarden with a party of Welsh constituents, who sang hymns and folk-songs on that historic lawn. The young recruit was introduced to the Grand Old Man, who honoured him with a special oration. “The Carnarvon Boroughs,” he said in his stately way, “are a formidable place for the Liberal Party to fight. Penrhyn Castle is an important centre. But truth, justice, and freedom are greater than Penrhyn Castle!” Mr. Gladstone was no doubt thinking of little more than his beloved cause of Ireland; but the words echoed through Wales with a meaning that perhaps Mr. Gladstone himself little dreamed of.
Thus David Lloyd George was initiated into the sanctities of the Liberal party. But he was not always to prove an easy and obedient acolyte.
For the House of Commons had not yet had any taste of Mr. Lloyd George’s rebellious humours. The real test of this quality was yet to come.
It came on August 13th of this year (1890) when he let himself go with a touch of his own native daring on some of the items of the Estimates. He selected them from among those decorative payments which are far too easily granted by an assembly always inclined to be kind to the great and prosperous. One of the items was a payment of £439 on the installation of Prince Henry of Prussia as a Knight of the Garter. “What service,” asked Mr. Lloyd George boldly, “has Prince Henry of Prussia ever rendered to this country? He has not yet rendered any service to his own country, to say nothing of service to Great Britain.”
Then he passed to an item of £2,769—“equipage money” to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. “The Lord-Lieutenant,” said Mr. Lloyd George, “is simply a man in buttons who wears silk stockings and has a coat-of-arms on his carriage.” At this he was called severely to order by the Chairman, but that did not prevent him from a ruthless comparison of this expenditure with the recent report of a Sweating Committee and the terrible revelations of poverty contained in that document.
Here the House of Commons had a touch of the real Lloyd George whom they were to get to know so well in the future. It was for this that he had come to Westminster; not for conventional party speeches, but for plain homely utterance on the pomps and conventions and extravagances of the great world. Here we get a first hint of his mission: a difficult and even cruel mission—to tell the comfortable and wealthy that they were living on the poor—to tell the decorative that they must be decorative no longer, but must either be useful or come down from their high places. He knew that such talk was not going to be popular in the House of Commons, but he was looking to another quarter for approval. Writing in his diary the day before delivering the speech on Prince Henry of Prussia’s Garter he made the following significant entry:
“My audience is the country.”
It was to the country, indeed, that he was already making his chief appeal. His biggest efforts of this year were made outside the House of Commons. The first was made on May 7th at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, where the Liberal Party appeared in full force to support Welsh Disestablishment. He prepared his speech with the utmost care. He sent notes of it down to his uncle at Criccieth and received the comments and criticisms of the “Esgob”—the “Bishop”—as he loved to call Richard Lloyd.
Mr. Lloyd George was perhaps a little humanly disappointed when he discovered that, graded by party officialism, he had been given the lowest place in the list of speakers at the Tabernacle. But this was soon forgotten when he once got into his stride. Although the audience had been dismally thinned by a succession of dreary orations, they sat out his speech to the end. He had intended to go on for only five or ten minutes: but the cheering and laughter of his audience carried him on for twenty-five. This was the very thing—here was a man to whom Welsh Disestablishment was an actual life issue, and not a mere new item in a party programme. When at last he sat down, the audience seemed surprised. Like a wise man, he left them unsatisfied, and the result was that the public soon demanded more.
After this success he was deluged with requests for speeches in every part of England. But wisely he accepted few. He decided to stick closely to his House of Commons work, and there is no sounder course for any young Member of Parliament. The result was that at the end of this first session of 1890 he had already secured a good parliamentary footing.
It may be taken that the transition to Parliament from North Wales was by no means an easy domestic revolution for a struggling young provincial solicitor who had only just begun to earn an income.
Politics did not come to him, indeed, with such a crushing burden as it brings to many young men. The total expenses of this, his first election, were little more than £200. He definitely refused the offer of his political friends to raise a fund to cover his election expenses. But he accepted gratefully the unpaid help of several friendly lawyers at Bangor and Carnarvon as his election agents. In his later elections the Liberal Association of the Boroughs covered his expenses. The labourer is worthy of his hire; and Mr. Lloyd George had wisely accepted the offer. To that arrangement the Association adhered until the time when he entered a Ministry (1906)—thus creating one of the finest ties that can exist between a constituency and its member. Here, at any rate, was a member who was a public servant and not a public almoner.
But in spite of that great public aid the entrance of David Lloyd George into Parliament proved a great and growing strain on the young couple. Their eldest child Dick[34] was already fifteen months old when Mr. Lloyd George came into Parliament. The growing practice at Portmadoc had to be left during the Session to his brother, Mr. William George, whose splendid self-sacrifice and high public spirit have always fortified and entrenched the private fortunes of his elder brother. While profits diminished, new expenses grew. A domicile had to be secured in London. Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd George settled down first (1890) in a flat in Gray’s Inn, then (1891) in the Temple, and, later on, for six years (1893–9) Palace Mansions, Kensington. There they set up a simple house, always open to their many friends. For from the beginning Mr. Lloyd George was always the most hospitable of men.
For the first year or two of his parliamentary life he continued to practice in North Wales during the recess and to live during the autumn months at Criccieth with Mr. and Mrs. Owen, his parents-in-law.[35]
On these returns to his native soil he continued to use his legal position for those daring assertions of popular right which had become his passion. At this time, indeed, occurred one of the boldest of these incidents, when he faced Mr. Casson, the very lawyer to whom he had been articled. That able provincial attorney had concentrated in his hands all those secular offices which combine to make a genuine social tyranny. He was at once Clerk to the Justices and agent to the Tremadoc estate, which practically covered the whole district. As agent to the estate, he had allowed some of the houses in Portmadoc to fall into grave disrepair. At last the thing became a scandal. The Urban District Council had to take action; and they instructed Mr. William George.
Complaint was in vain; it was soon necessary to prosecute. But the summons against Mr. Casson the agent could only be issued by Mr. Casson the Clerk of the justices: and Mr. Casson the Clerk of the Justices refused to issue it. He seemed safely protected by his own loyalty to himself.
Not an unusual incident in our happy countryside, in England as well as in Wales; but Mr. David Lloyd George there and then determined that it should not occur again in Portmadoc.
Mr. William George reported the situation to his brother, who said, “Leave this to me.” Next day he went into court. He began by challenging the bench. For one cause or another he was able to disqualify all the magistrates except a schoolmaster and a bank manager, men of open minds. To them Mr. Lloyd George then began to denounce Mr. Casson with merciless vigour for a whole hour. He lashed him ruthlessly for his misuse of his powers. He demanded that he should sit where every other culprit had to sit—in the dock.
Mr. Casson did not remain quiet under these lashes. He protested and interrupted for a time, but was at last quelled by Mr. Lloyd George’s attack. Then he subsided into