The Prime Minister. Harold Spender
in their own land—excluded from their own woods and fields by laws of trespass, and menaced with dire penalties if they killed the wild animals of their own land. He found himself born with little freedom beyond the liberty of the village street. There were few adventures for him that were not crimes in the eye of the law. In such a life there seemed enough to quell any growing spirit and to crush any latent ambition. For in those days the social power of the Welsh squires was still scarcely challenged; their claims shadowed all the large spaces in the world around him.
Yet this boy began to look at all this with candid, unprejudiced eyes. He began to grasp the fact that what was required was daring, and still daring.
In this vision he was by no means alone. It was a perception dimly stirring in the minds of all those multitudes of youth who were then, during those years, the first to pass through the new schools of the nation and to win the franchise of the mind. Again, where he was alone was in the courage to pursue this vision—the courage to act as well as to see.
At the age of fourteen (1877) it became necessary to choose a life-calling for David Lloyd George. The village National School had finished its work for the boy. The extra two years’ schooling had brought him as far as that training could take him.
Richard Lloyd was not indeed compelled by any law, human or divine, to carry the boy’s education any further. He would certainly have achieved as much as most men consider due to a sister’s child if he had now taken David from school and apprenticed him to his own honourable handicraft of bootmaking.
But Uncle Lloyd knew only too well the carking cares of a workman’s life. He knew what it was to feel a mind-hunger which cannot be sated. Those who saw much of the preacher-bootmaker in those days tell how eager he was for books—how in this eagerness he struck up a very admirable friendship with the kindly village curate; how, after his long day’s work, he would read half through the night, and how the village doctor, going on some errand of midnight or dawn, would still see the light of his candle shining through his bedroom window.
Such a life is often filled with an aching regret. The hardly tasked body yearns for a fuller freedom—the freedom to follow, undisturbed, the clear call of the mind.
It was such a life that he dreamed of for his boys when he decided to send them, at all costs, into one of those learned professions which Britons hold in so much honour. His eager aim was to free them, at any sacrifice, from the great burden of manual drudgery.
That being decided, it was not so easy to make a choice between the professions. Richard Lloyd was not one of those men who think it a sign of strength to force children into careers against their own will. Above all, he wished to have the following wind of their free consent and help.
The “ministry” was practically closed to them by that rule of their uncle’s Church which forbade Christian service as a means of livelihood. The Established Church, indeed, was an open road for them; there “Welcome!” was written over the door for every clever Welsh village boy. If David had consented to follow the lead of some of his village friends, who can say that he might not have ended as an Archbishop? The thought never took serious shape at Highgate Cottage. I scarcely dare to think of what would have been said in the village “smithy” or the uncle’s workshop if David had turned his steps towards that primrose path—as both he and his brother were more than once invited to do.
Richard Lloyd’s own desire was that David should be a doctor. But the lad had an instinctive, physical shrinking from disease and death. Richard Lloyd, being a wise man, sorrowfully agreed that David’s temperament was unfitted for the hospital ward and the sick-room.
His mother, Mrs. William George, pondering the future in her heart, and watching the boy with a fond mother’s eyes, desired him to be a lawyer.
The mother won.
In those old days when Mrs. William George was in the depths of sorrow and distress, through the long agony of her husband’s illness, she had received much help and kindness from an old friend of her husband’s, one of those tender-hearted family lawyers who are the crown and salvation of their profession—Mr. Thomas Goffey of Liverpool. The boys had heard much of this man at an impressionable age; and the effect left on David was a great desire to go and do likewise. “To be a lawyer like Mr. Goffey!” That was the shining quest before him.
At this critical moment the memory of this helper acted as a magnet to them all; and it was this lode-stone that drew on first David, and then his brother William.
In such pleasant guise did that useful calling present itself; in such Christian fashion came to the youth this summons. The lawyer’s gown appeared to him as the robe of the Samaritan.
So far, so good. But the career of the law requires a long apprenticeship; and apprenticeship means money. The examination fees alone for a solicitor amount to a good sum, and there was a substantial premium on apprenticeship to a good firm to be paid in addition. Then there would be over five years without earnings. Where would they obtain the resources to face the strain?
At this point Richard Lloyd turned to the pooled family savings of himself and his sister, Mrs. William George, and dipped deep. Little was left when sufficient for this purpose had been drawn, and even so the supply was precariously meagre. Could they find enough to start the two boys on their careers?
It was clear, on a survey, that they could not send the boys either to a higher school or to a University. How, then, were they to acquire that considerable store of general knowledge required of the legal apprentice?
David had done well under Evans’s faithful tuition. He had advanced into the higher mathematics; he had read a certain amount of history; he had now mastered the elements of French and Latin.
But much more was required if he was to pass that first obstruction in the great obstacle race set before the novice in the law—the Preliminary Examination. He must, for instance, know more French. He must read Cæsar and Sallust. The village dominie could not carry David as far as that.
Here seemed a formidable gulf to bridge. Less formidable barriers have closed careers to others and driven them back into the workshop.
But human love can leap over great obstacles; and Richard Lloyd was no ordinary man. He knew neither French nor Latin. Very well, he would set out to learn them.
So together the uncle and the nephew started into the unexplored. Hand in hand, they tackled the Latin and the French grammars, and thumbed the dictionaries. For this great-hearted man knew that if both be ignorant of the way it is better to go together. Company gives courage. So in the dark winter evenings, with the light of a candle, they together spelt out the sentences of Cæsar and Sallust and laboriously read Æsop in French. I will warrant that those lessons in Latin and French were not wasted. I even doubt sometimes whether the class-rooms of Eton or Harrow, with their picked teachers, can show anything so inspiring as this little village study—the uncle and nephew struggling along that unknown path, lit only by zeal and affection. May it not be, perhaps, that the accident of this laborious schooling gave a special nourishment to the boy’s instinct of self-confidence, proved more potent than the spoon-feeding of some well-endowed college?
At any rate, this common struggle for knowledge gave the uncle a new insight into his nephew’s powers. From this time onward the boy became his very special “Di”—the darling of his heart—the apple of his eye. He began to perceive that there were few things impossible for this boy to achieve.
At last this astonishing experiment in coaching came to an end. But his uncle was determined to stand by the nephew to the end in the first great trial of his life.
In December, 1877, he accompanied him to Liverpool, where the examination was to take place. Every morning—as he often told in later life—Richard Lloyd accompanied the youth to the examination room in St. George’s Hall; and every evening, after the day’s work, he met him on the steps of the hall and went home with him.
The examination lasted a week. Suspense was followed by triumph. David passed.
The young hopeful who had set out from Llanystumdwy with