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Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor[a] (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. A Liberal Party politician from Wales, he was known for leading the United Kingdom during the First World War, for social-reform policies, for his role in the Paris Peace Conference, and for negotiating the establishment of the Irish Free State. He was the last Liberal prime minister; the party fell into third-party status towards the end of his premiership.
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David Lloyd George | |
|---|---|
Lloyd George c. 1919 | |
| Prime Minister of the United Kingdom | |
| In office 6 December 1916 – 19 October 1922 | |
| Monarch | George V |
| Preceded by | H. H. Asquith |
| Succeeded by | Bonar Law |
| Leader of the Liberal Party | |
| In office 14 October 1926 – 4 November 1931 | |
| Preceded by | H. H. Asquith |
| Succeeded by | Herbert Samuel |
| Secretary of State for War | |
| In office 6 July 1916 – 5 December 1916 | |
| Prime Minister | H. H. Asquith |
| Preceded by | The Earl Kitchener |
| Succeeded by | The Earl of Derby |
| Minister of Munitions | |
| In office 25 May 1915 – 9 July 1916 | |
| Prime Minister | H. H. Asquith |
| Preceded by | Office established |
| Succeeded by | Edwin Montagu |
| Chancellor of the Exchequer | |
| In office 12 April 1908 – 25 May 1915 | |
| Prime Minister | H. H. Asquith |
| Preceded by | H. H. Asquith |
| Succeeded by | Reginald McKenna |
| President of the Board of Trade | |
| In office 10 December 1905 – 12 April 1908 | |
| Prime Minister |
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| Preceded by | The Marquess of Salisbury |
| Succeeded by | Winston Churchill |
| Father of the House of Commons | |
| In office 31 May 1929 – 13 February 1945 | |
| Preceded by | T. P. O'Connor |
| Succeeded by | The Earl Winterton |
| Member of the House of Lords | |
| Hereditary peerage 1 January 1945 – 26 March 1945 | |
| Succeeded by | The 2nd Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor |
| Member of Parliament for Carnarvon Boroughs | |
| In office 10 April 1890 – 13 February 1945 | |
| Preceded by | Edmund Swetenham[1]: 13 |
| Succeeded by | Seaborne Davies |
| Personal details | |
| Born | David George 17 January 1863 Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, England |
| Died | 26 March 1945 (aged 82) Llanystumdwy, Wales |
| Resting place | Llanystumdwy, Wales |
| Political party |
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| Spouses | |
| Children | 5, including: |
| Relatives | William George (brother) |
| Occupation |
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| Signature |  |
Lloyd George gained a reputation as an orator and proponent of a Welsh blend of radical Liberal ideas, which included support for Welsh devolution, disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales, equality for labourers and tenant farmers, and reform of land ownership. In 1890 he won a by-election to become the Member of Parliament for Caernarvon Boroughs, in which seat he remained for 55 years. He served in Henry Campbell-Bannerman's cabinet from 1905. After H. H. Asquith succeeded to the premiership in 1908, Lloyd George replaced him as Chancellor. To fund extensive welfare reforms he proposed taxes on land ownership and high incomes in the "People's Budget" (1909), which the Conservative-dominated House of Lords rejected. The resulting constitutional crisis was only resolved after elections in 1910 and passage of the Parliament Act 1911. His budget was enacted in 1910, and the National Insurance Act 1911 and other measures helped to establish the modern welfare state. In 1913, he was embroiled in the Marconi scandal, but remained in office and secured the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales.
In 1915, Lloyd George became Minister of Munitions and expanded artillery shell production for the war. In 1916, he was appointed Secretary of State for War but was frustrated by his limited power and clashes with Army commanders over strategy. Asquith proved ineffective as prime minister and was replaced by Lloyd George in December 1916. He centralised authority by creating a smaller war cabinet. To combat food shortages caused by u-boats, he implemented the convoy system, established rationing, and stimulated farming. After supporting the disastrous French Nivelle Offensive in 1917, he had to reluctantly approve Field Marshal Haig's plans for the Battle of Passchendaele, which resulted in huge casualties with little strategic benefit. Against British military commanders, he was finally able to see the Allies brought under one command in March 1918. The war effort turned in Allied favour and was won in November. Following the December 1918 "Coupon" election, he and the Conservatives maintained their coalition with popular support.
Lloyd George was a leading proponent at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, but the situation in Ireland worsened, erupting into the Irish War of Independence, which lasted until Lloyd George negotiated independence for the Irish Free State in 1921. At home, he initiated education and housing reforms, but trade-union militancy rose to record levels, the economy became depressed in 1920 and unemployment rose; spending cuts followed in 1921–22, and in 1922 he became embroiled in a scandal over the sale of honours and the Chanak Crisis. The Carlton Club meeting decided the Conservatives should end the coalition and contest the next election alone. Lloyd George resigned as prime minister, but continued as the leader of a Liberal faction. After an awkward reunion with Asquith's faction in 1923, Lloyd George led the weak Liberal Party from 1926 to 1931. He proposed innovative schemes for public works and other reforms, but made only modest gains in the 1929 election. After 1931, he was a mistrusted figure heading a small rump of breakaway Liberals opposed to the National Government. In 1940, he refused to serve in Churchill's War Cabinet. He was elevated to the peerage in 1945, very shortly before his death.
David George was born on 17 January 1863 in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, to Welsh parents William George and Elizabeth Lloyd George. William died in June 1864 of pneumonia, aged 44. David was just over one year old. Elizabeth George moved with her children to her native Llanystumdwy in Caernarfonshire, where she lived in a cottage known as Highgate with her brother Richard, a shoemaker, lay minister and a strong Liberal. Richard Lloyd was a towering influence on his nephew and David adopted his uncle's surname to become "Lloyd George".[when?] Lloyd George was educated at the local Anglican school, Llanystumdwy National School, and later under tutors.
He was brought up with Welsh as his first language;[2] Roy Jenkins, another Welsh politician, notes that, "Lloyd George was Welsh, that his whole culture, his whole outlook, his language was Welsh."[3]
Though brought up a devout evangelical, Lloyd George privately lost his religious faith as a young man. Biographer Don Cregier says he became "a Deist and perhaps an agnostic, though he remained a chapel-goer and connoisseur of good preaching all his life." He was nevertheless, according to Frank Owen, "one of the foremost fighting leaders of a fanatical Welsh Nonconformity" for a quarter of a century.[2]: 6 [4][5]
Lloyd George qualified as a solicitor in 1884 after being articled to a firm in Porthmadog and taking Honours in his final law examination. He set up his own practice in the back parlour of his uncle's house in 1885.[6] Although many prime ministers have been barristers, Lloyd George is, as of 2024, the only solicitor to have held that office.[6]
As a solicitor, Lloyd George was politically active from the start, campaigning for his uncle's Liberal Party in the 1885 election. He was attracted by Joseph Chamberlain's "unauthorised programme" of Radical reform.[7]: 43 After the election, Chamberlain split with Gladstone in opposition to Irish Home Rule, and Lloyd George moved to join the Liberal Unionists. Uncertain of which wing to follow, he moved a resolution in support of Chamberlain at a local Liberal club and travelled to Birmingham to attend the first meeting of Chamberlain's new National Radical Union, but arrived a week too early.[7]: 53 In 1907 Lloyd George would tell Herbert Lewis that he had thought Chamberlain's plan for a federal solution to the Home Rule Question correct in 1886 and still thought so, and that "If Henry Richmond, Osborne Morgan and the Welsh members had stood by Chamberlain on an agreement as regards the [Welsh] disestablishment, they would have carried Wales with them"[7]: 53
His legal practice quickly flourished; he established branch offices in surrounding towns and took his brother William into partnership in 1887.[6] Lloyd George's legal and political triumph came in the Llanfrothen burial case, which established the right of Nonconformists to be buried according to denominational rites in parish burial grounds, as given by the Burial Laws Amendment Act 1880 but theretofore ignored by the Anglican clergy. On Lloyd George's advice, a Baptist burial party broke open a gate to a cemetery that had been locked against them by the vicar. The vicar sued them for trespass and although the jury returned a verdict for the party, the local judge misrecorded the jury's verdict and found in the vicar's favour. Suspecting bias, Lloyd George's clients won on appeal to the Divisional Court of Queen's Bench in London, where Lord Chief Justice Coleridge found in their favour.[2]: 14–15 [8] The case was hailed as a great victory throughout Wales and led to Lloyd George's adoption as the Liberal candidate for Carnarvon Boroughs on 27 December 1888.[9]: 46 The same year, he and other young Welsh Liberals founded a monthly paper, Udgorn Rhyddid (Bugle of Freedom).[2]: 14–15
In 1889, Lloyd George became an alderman on Carnarvonshire County Council (a new body which had been created by the Local Government Act 1888) and would remain so for the rest of his life.[2]: 15 [7]: 65–66 Lloyd George would also serve the county as a Justice of the Peace (1910), chairman of Quarter Sessions (1929–38), and Deputy Lieutenant in 1921.[10][11]
Lloyd George married Margaret Owen, the daughter of a well-to-do local farming family, on 24 January 1888.[2]: 15–16
Lloyd George's career as a member of parliament began when he was returned as a Liberal MP for Caernarfon Boroughs (now Caernarfon), narrowly winning the by-election on 10 April 1890, following the death of the Conservative member Edmund Swetenham.[12] He would remain an MP for the same constituency until 1945, 55 years later.[9] Lloyd George's early beginnings in Westminster may have proven difficult for him as a radical liberal and "a great outsider".[9] Backbench members of the House of Commons were not paid at that time, so Lloyd George supported himself and his growing family by continuing to practise as a solicitor. He opened an office in London under the name of "Lloyd George and Co." and continued in partnership with William George in Criccieth. In 1897, he merged his growing London practice with that of Arthur Rhys Roberts (who was to become Official Solicitor) under the name of "Lloyd George, Roberts and Co."[13]
Kenneth O. Morgan describes Lloyd George as a "lifelong Welsh nationalist" and suggests that between 1880 and 1914 he was "the symbol and tribune of the national reawakening of Wales", although he is also clear that from the early 1900s his main focus gradually shifted to UK-wide issues.[14][15] He also became an associate of Tom Ellis, MP for Meirionydd, having previously told a Caernarfon friend in 1888 that he was a "Welsh Nationalist of the Ellis type".[16][17]
One of Lloyd George's first acts as an MP was to organise an informal grouping of Welsh Liberal members with a programme that included; disestablishing and disendowing the Church of England in Wales, temperance reform, and establishing Welsh home rule.[9]: 50 He was keen on decentralisation and thus Welsh devolution, starting with the devolution of the Church in Wales saying in 1890: "I am deeply impressed with the fact that Wales has wants and inspirations of her own which have too long been ignored, but which must no longer be neglected. First and foremost amongst these stands the cause of Religious Liberty and Equality in Wales. If returned to Parliament by you, it shall be my earnest endeavour to labour for the triumph of this great cause. I believe in a liberal extension of the principle of Decentralization."[18]
During the next decade, Lloyd George campaigned in Parliament largely on Welsh issues, in particular for disestablishment and disendowment of the Church of England. When Gladstone retired in 1894 after the defeat of the second Home Rule Bill, the Welsh Liberal members chose him to serve on a deputation to William Harcourt to press for specific assurances on Welsh issues. When those assurances were not provided, they resolved to take independent action if the government did not bring a bill for disestablishment. When a bill was not forthcoming, he and three other Welsh Liberals (D. A. Thomas, Herbert Lewis and Frank Edwards) refused the whip on 14 April 1894, but accepted Lord Rosebery's assurance and rejoined the official Liberals on 29 May.[19]
Historian Emyr Price referred to Lloyd George as "the first architect of Welsh devolution and its most famous advocate" as well as "the pioneering advocate of a powerful parliament for the Welsh people".[20] Lloyd George himself stated in 1880 "Is it not high time that Wales should the powers to manage its own affairs" and in 1890, "Parliament is so overweighted that it cannot possibly devote the time and trouble necessary to legislate for the peculiar and domestic retirement of each and every separate province of Britain". These statements would later be used to advocate for a Welsh assembly in the 1979 Welsh devolution referendum.[21] Lloyd George felt that disestablishment, land reform and other forms of Welsh devolution could only be achieved if Wales formed its own government within a federal imperial system.[15] In 1895, in a failed Church in Wales Bill, Lloyd George added an amendment in a discreet attempt at forming a sort of Welsh home rule, a national council for appointment of the Welsh Church commissioners. Although not condemned by Tom Ellis MP, this was to the annoyance of J. Bryn Roberts MP and the Home Secretary H. H. Asquith MP.[22][23][24]
He was also a co-leader of Cymru Fydd, a national Welsh party with liberal values with the goals of promoting a "stronger Welsh identity" and establishing a Welsh government.[25][26][27] He hoped that Cymru Fydd would become a force like the Irish National Party. He abandoned this idea after being criticised in Welsh newspapers for bringing about the defeat of the Liberal Party in the 1895 election. In an AGM meeting in Newport on 16 January 1896 of the South Wales Liberal Federation, led by D. A. Thomas, a proposal was made to unite the North and South Liberal Federations with Cymru Fydd to form The Welsh National Federation. This was a proposal which the North Wales Liberal Federation had already agreed to. However, the South Wales Liberal Federation rejected this. According to Lloyd George, he was shouted down by "Newport Englishmen" in the meeting, although the South Wales Argus suggested the poor crowd behaviour came from Lloyd George's supporters.[19][28][29][30] Following difficulty in uniting the Liberal federations along with Cymru Fydd in the South East and thus, difficulty in gaining support for Home Rule for Wales, Lloyd George shifted his focus to improving the socio-economic environment of Wales as part of the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Although Lloyd George considered himself a "Welshman first", he saw the opportunities for Wales within the UK.[19][31]
In 1898, Lloyd George created the Welsh National Liberal Council, a loose umbrella organisation covering the two federations, but with very little power. In time, it became known as the Liberal Party of Wales.[32]
Lloyd George had a connection to or promoted the establishment of the National Library of Wales, the National Museum of Wales and the Welsh Department of the Board of Education.[30] He also showed considerable support for the University of Wales, that its establishment raised the status of Welsh people and that the university deserved greater funding by the UK government.[33]
Lloyd George had been impressed by his journey to Canada in 1899. Although sometimes wrongly supposed—both at the time and subsequently—to be a Little Englander, he was not an opponent of the British Empire per se, but in a speech at Birkenhead (21 November 1901) he stressed that it needed to be based on freedom, including for India, not "racial arrogance".[34]: 61 Consequently, he gained national fame by displaying vehement opposition to the Second Boer War.[35]
Following Rosebery's lead, he based his attack firstly on what were supposed to be Britain's war aims—remedying the grievances of the [italicno] Error: {{Lang}}: invalid parameter: |3= (help) and in particular the claim that they were wrongly denied the right to vote, saying "I do not believe the war has any connection with the franchise. It is a question of 45% dividends" and that England (which did not then have universal male suffrage) was more in need of franchise reform than the Boer republics. A second attack came on the cost of the war, which, he argued, prevented overdue social reform in England, such as old-age pensions and workmen's cottages. As the fighting continued his attacks moved to its conduct by the generals, who, he said (basing his words on reports by William Burdett-Coutts in The Times), were not providing for the sick or wounded soldiers and were starving Boer women and children in concentration camps. But his major thrusts were reserved for the Chamberlains, accusing them of war profiteering through the family company Kynoch Ltd, of which Chamberlain's brother was chairman. The firm had won tenders to the War Office, though its prices were higher than some of its competitors. After speaking at a meeting in Birmingham Lloyd George had to be smuggled out disguised as a policeman, as his life was in danger from the mob. At this time the Liberal Party was badly split as H. H. Asquith, R. B. Haldane and others were supporters of the war and formed the Liberal Imperial League.