The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George’s Life

Dafydd and Rebecca were devout, patriotic Welsh citizens, part of the largely self-educated, chapel-going, economically depressed but intellectually ambitious elite of mid-nineteenth-century Wales. Dafydd Llwyd may have been a working-class man who made shoes for a living, but at the same time he was a leader within his community by virtue of the fact that he was a minister and a man of learning.

Rebecca and Dafydd could not afford to indulge their children. They lived their lives in hope of reward in the next world. Rebecca’s faith was put to the test when in 1839, with Betsy only eleven years old, Dafydd fell seriously ill. He had been suffering from a stomach complaint periodically, but this time it was to prove fatal. With no money to pay for medical help, Dafydd tried to treat himself with ‘Morrison’s Universal Medicine’ pills, as advertised in one of his periodicals, but to no avail. He died on 25 October at the age of thirty-nine, and was buried in the tiny cemetery bordering Capel Ucha.

Dafydd’s death was both an emotional and a practical tragedy for Rebecca. Left alone with three small children, she could not afford to grieve for long. This determined and resourceful woman refused to accept the fate of many widows, who sold their possessions to settle mounting bills before going into service or accepting charity. She chose instead to take on her husband’s shoemaking business herself. Richard was only five years old, and Rebecca knew that she would have to carry the burden alone for many years, but she had courage and stamina. Until her son was old enough to take over she employed two cobblers, Robert and Richard Morris, who lived with the family in Highgate. The overcrowding was slightly eased by the fact that Elin had left home to work as a maid at a nearby farm, but life was still hard. Rebecca rose early to set the journeymen to work and supervised their labour during the day, walking a twelve-mile round trip to the neighbouring coastal town of Pwllheli if necessary to buy materials. Late at night when the family were asleep, she would work by candlelight preparing accounts which she would deliver on foot to neighbouring houses and farms the following day, walking for miles over open countryside. Her efforts alone could not sustain the whole family, so Betsy had to leave school. After a period at home helping her mother, she followed her sister into service.

As a young woman, Betsy was a mild character, a devout Baptist like her parents, bright like her father, and attractive. She was described by her youngest son William as ‘a good looking woman of medium height, fair complexion, very dark hair and bright brown eyes giving a most winning expression to her thoughtful face’.2 She had a kind and gentle nature, in contrast with Rebecca’s rather stern manner. Betsy suffered from episodes of asthma throughout her life, and she was never physically strong. Hard work from an early age, coupled with poor sanitation and rudimentary medical care, frequently led to some kind of chronic complaint, and her condition was not unusual.

At around sixteen Betsy found a place as a maid and lady’s companion in Pwllheli. The ports of North Wales were becoming significant centres of commerce as large sailing ships carried passengers and goods between Britain and the rest of the world. Pwllheli was a bustling, lively town. Betsy became a regular attender at the Pwllheli Baptist Chapel, and there, when she was approaching thirty years of age, she met a teacher who led an adult class in Sunday School. He was an eloquent, welleducated widower by the name of William George.

Eight years Betsy’s senior, William was handsome, with dark hair and striking blue eyes. He was a sensitive, driven man who was a good teacher and a would-be intellectual. Of average height and broadshouldered, he was described by his youngest son as ‘well knit together with a somewhat thin pale face surmounted by a thick crop of dark hair, a high broad forehead, large lively eyes indicating a quick perceptive mind, a heart full of sympathy and tenderness, and all his movements quick but firm and determined’.3 His pupils would remember him as a passionate Baptist who was never beaten in debate.

William George was born in North Pembrokeshire in 1820, the son of staunch Baptists David and Mary George, who had a large farm called Trecoed. David died when William was very young, and the children were raised by Mary and her second husband, Benjamin Williams. From an early age William showed more interest in books than in animals. Life in an urban environment appealed to his hunger for experience and advancement, so he left home at seventeen to seek his fortune in the town of Haverfordwest.

William may have been intelligent and ambitious, but he lacked firm purpose and direction in life. First apprenticed to a pharmacist and then to a draper, he drifted from position to position, recording in his diary his dreams of becoming a great intellectual. He could not settle in any trade because he was determined to continue his studies, often reading late into the night, which made him tired and inefficient by day. His determination to study stemmed from the fact that any opportunity to improve his lot could be obtained only through education. Indeed, he had been lucky to attend school to the age of sixteen, since education would not be provided by the state until 1833.

The level of education in Wales was poor even by the standards of the nineteenth century. Children who spoke nothing but Welsh were taught in English, often by teachers who barely spoke the language themselves, and in appalling conditions. The overwhelming majority of the general population were nonconformists, but only members of the Anglican Church could become pupil-teachers. The Baptist William George nevertheless decided that teaching would be his profession, which meant that he would have to study full-time to gain a qualification.

At around the age of twenty-one William plucked up the courage to move to London and enrol in the Battersea Teachers’ Training Institute. For the first time he experienced intellectual fulfilment as he finally found the guidance he had been searching for. He described the experience as the most useful year of his life, ‘the means by which he was brought from a miserable, useless life to…a happy one and not altogether destitute of usefulness to others’.4 After qualifying as a teacher he went on to hold several short-term teaching positions in London, recording in his diary his agonising internal debate over what he would do with his life: ‘I am still very unsettled in my mind as to my future plans and prospects. I cannot somehow make up my mind to be a schoolmaster for life…I want to occupy higher ground sometime or other. I want to increase the stock of my attainments but hardly know how to set about it.’5

This ‘higher ground’ was William’s secret desire to try his hand at writing. Spurred on by his ambition, he arrived in Liverpool around 1846. By then he had spent so much time away from his native land that he had all but forgotten its language. ‘I wished to say a few words to you in Welsh,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘—but I am sorry that I cannot do so, although Welsh is my mother tongue—and I knew very little English until I was nine years of age—but I have used English ever since. The English language has done with me what the English people have done with our country—taken possession of the richest and largest part of it.’6

The latter half of the nineteenth century was an age of emigration from rural North Wales, with the decline in agriculture driving young men and families away from their homes to seek employment in the coalfields of South Wales, the metropolis of London and, increasingly, the cities and towns of North-West England, which came to form the largest concentration of Welsh people outside Wales. Those who left often found better educational prospects and more lucrative employment. With prosperity came a new breed of Welshman—middle-class, confident and socially ambitious. In Liverpool, Welsh industrialists and philanthropists like David Hughes and Owen Elias were responsible for building large parts of the city, and the entrepreneurial industrialist Sir Alfred Lewis Jones also made his fortune there. When William George arrived, around 20,000 of Liverpool’s citizens were Welsh-born, and he found a welcoming home among the Welsh diaspora. He felt at home among his professional compatriots and made the acquaintance of fellow intellectuals, some of whom, like the lawyer Thomas Goffey, were to remain his friends for life. He also met the famous Unitarian preacher James Martineau, one of the governors of the school in which he taught, who encouraged him to further extend his intellectual horizons.

But a nineteenth-century city was no utopia, and there were outbreaks of contagious diseases in the new suburbs that threatened all but the most robust. Eventually, fears for his health forced William to move back to Haverfordwest, where he opened his own school in Upper Market Street in April 1854. On 11 April 1855 he married the thirty-five-year-old Selina Huntley, whose family owned a Bond Street engraving and printing business. It is not known how they met, but she was suffering from tuberculosis, and it is likely that she, like William, was in Pembrokeshire for her health. The marriage took place in Hanover Square, London, and on the marriage certificate the bride and groom’s residence is, puzzlingly, given as Bond Street. They must have returned to Pembrokeshire after the wedding, for on 4 December Selina died there of consumption.

At the same time, William had to accept that his school had failed. Prompted by his lack of professional success, by his bereavement, or both, he decided to leave Pembrokeshire. In 1857 he responded to an advertisement for a schoolmaster to teach at the British School at Troed-yr-Allt in Pwllheli. He took up his position in 1858, and joined the Baptist chapel, where he met the attractive, dark-haired Betsy Llwyd. They were married in St Peter’s, the parish church in Pwllheli, on 16 November 1859, Betsy’s brother Richard acting as a witness.

After the wedding, Betsy left her domestic position to keep house for her husband. William was badly paid even by the standards of the day, and it is likely that they could not afford to run their own household. They moved back to Highgate, from where William walked or rode on horseback daily to school. William and Richard shared the same intellectual disposition, and quickly became firm friends; the fact that William was a Baptist no doubt pleased the fervently religious Rebecca.

Highgate was also home to the son of Betsy’s elder sister Elin, who had married William Jones, a Criccieth farmer. Finally free of the upkeep of her two daughters, Rebecca had decided to ease her elder daughter’s burden by taking in one of her children. This was a fairly commonplace arrangement at a time when resources were strained and large families were the norm. The boy was named David Lloyd Jones, his Christian names the anglicised version of Dafydd Llwyd in memory of his grandfather. For Rebecca, the young David was more than another mouth to feed. He was an intelligent, bookish child who from an early age was marked out as the gifted member of the family. Rebecca devoted all her spare time to his development, much as she would to Betsy’s talented son in future years. In both name and upbringing, David Lloyd Jones was to be the precursor of his later, famous cousin. The young David was undoubtedly bright, but he was a sickly, delicate child, and William George doubted whether he had enough drive to find his way in the world. Nevertheless, he took him under his wing and acted as his mentor and teacher, encouraging him to read and take notes from his own small library of precious books. Space in the confined household was found for him to study, and candles allocated to his late-night study. As he read, others did his share of the household chores, and pennies were found to pay for paper, ink and other essentials.

When Betsy returned to Highgate after an absence of fifteen years, she took some of the burden of caring for the household from her mother’s shoulders. It was hard work: water needed to be carried daily from the village pump for cooking and washing, and the earth closet had to be tended with noisome regularity. Life did not progress smoothly for Betsy and William. William was experiencing difficulty in relearning the Welsh language, which disadvantaged him in a wholly Welsh-speaking area. Language issues apart, Llanystumdwy did not provide him with enough intellectual stimulation, and it seems that he was not entirely happy in his school in Pwllheli either. Betsy quickly fell pregnant, but the daughter born to them did not live long enough to be named. It was a crushing disappointment, and when Betsy discovered that she was pregnant again, fears of another tragedy in the cramped accommodation of Highgate were enough to drive the couple to seek better fortune elsewhere. William secured a teaching position in Newchurch, a small town near Blackburn in Lancashire, twenty miles or so from Manchester, and in 1861, only two years into their marriage, they took the stage-coach from Pwllheli to Caernarvon, from where they could travel by steamer to Liverpool. The fourteen-year-old David went with them, in the hope and expectation that he would qualify as a teacher under William’s watchful eye.

As soon as they reached their destination, Betsy and William summoned a doctor to examine David. He warned them that the boy was in danger of becoming consumptive, confirming their worst fears and reminding them of the threats to their own health. As the months passed, the restless William became increasingly disenchanted with life in Newchurch. The one piece of good news was the birth of a daughter, Mary Ellen (called Mary or Polly), in November 1861. By the following year, William had managed to get himself a temporary position in a mill-school in Manchester. The move would mean a return to unhealthy urban life, but William was desperate to leave Newchurch. He wrote to Richard Lloyd:

The place itself we could do with very well—though cold and rather damp, it is healthy—the air is much purer there than at Manchester, and neither of us could hold out long without pure air. It was the Newchurch school and the people connected with it that did not suit me; and I need not say that I did not suit them. Nearly all the ‘Directors’ are rough working men who had not the means to act liberally even if disposed to do so,—and besides my temper is such that I would rather be the master of work people than their servant.7

The little family moved to take up lodgings at 5 New York Place, Chorlton-upon-Medlock, but this time David did not go with them. Aged fifteen, he was on the brink of independence, and William remembered the wrench of leaving home himself at a similar age. He sympathised, but he knew that David would have to make his own way. William hardened his heart and left the boy behind.

The Manchester school better suited William’s temperament, but his health deteriorated and he reluctantly concluded that he would have to give up his position and go back to the country. He could not act on this decision immediately, because Betsy was in the late stages of pregnancy, which meant that on 17 January 1863, Wales’ most famous politician was born in England. The new baby was named David Lloyd after his grandfather and his cousin.

Betsy was not strong, and her recovery from her third labour was slow, not helped by the difficulty of getting clean water to drink. William had decided to give up teaching altogether in favour of farming. He consoled himself with the thought that at last he might have time to fulfil his ambition of writing a book that would make his name. He still dreamed of becoming one of the foremost scholars of his generation. Sadly, like all his other dreams, it was not to be.

The family settled in South Pembrokeshire, a more naturally English-speaking area of the county, and from Bullford, a smallholding near Haverfordwest, William continued to watch over the career of the elder David. He involved his Liverpool friend Thomas Goffey in his attempts to get the boy a place as a schoolmaster, but by then David’s threatened consumption had taken hold, and his family’s hopes of a glittering career were dashed only a few years later, when he died at the age of twenty.

In the meantime, a different tragedy had engulfed the family. The move had failed to strengthen William George’s health. At the end of May 1864 he spent a day out in the fields attending to the hay harvest, and caught a chill. His condition quickly deteriorated, and Betsy took the unusual and expensive step of calling the doctor. There was nothing to be done. Pneumonia had set in, and on 7 June William died, at the age of forty-four.

Betsy was heartbroken. She was left alone with the financial burden of a smallholding as well as two small children to support. She might also have suspected, even at that early stage, that she had another baby on the way. The family’s small capital, amounting to only £640 (about £56,000 at today’s values), was invested in a Liverpool building society, but the interest was not enough to provide for their day-to-day needs. Betsy was effectively destitute. She gathered enough strength to send a telegram to her brother: ‘Tyrd Richard’ (Richard, come!). The two-word message summed up her helplessness and despair.

Richard set off at once. A journey that would take a few hours today took two and a half days, and when he reached Pembrokeshire he found his sister in a state of shock. Numbed by grief, Betsy had been unable to demonstrate any emotion since her husband had succumbed to his illness. When she saw the familiar face of her brother again, though, she dissolved into tears and threw herself into his arms. Richard immediately took the little family under his wing: he was to be their protector and guardian for the rest of his life.

Betsy was not altogether friendless in Pembrokeshire, and between them, Richard and Benjamin Williams of Trecoed made the funeral arrangements and disposed of the smallholding’s lease. The natural, and possibly only, option for Betsy was to take her children back to Llanystumdwy, and she wrote a pitiful letter to her husband’s Liverpool friend Thomas Goffey, mingling expressions of grief with requests for advice on winding up William’s affairs.

Dear Mr Goffey,

I am greatly obliged by your kind letter received the 18th inst. Indeed I cannot tell you what a source of consolation it has been to me in my deep affliction—Well I may believe that my dear husband was your ‘dearest friend’ and that he was highly esteemed by all his friends there, for such he always considered you and his respect for all his friends in Liverpool was very much. It is a comfort to me to think how much he was beloved by all his numerous friends. Oh! What a dear husband I have lost…

I cannot tell you now when I leave the South—We are trying to find a person to take the place that will pay me something for the lease—and to take the crop under valuation…Some months ago my dear husband thought he was going to lose me—When I recovered he said—I was walking about without knowing what to do. If that would be the case I was determined to leave the place at once—I couldn’t stop on a day here but it was me that was to stay and how hard it is upon me to be here after him.8

William George was laid to rest in Trewrdan Cemetery. A few days later Betsy packed up the family’s home, and a sale of surplus furniture was held to raise funds for the journey north. Betsy’s feelings on seeing her belongings dispersed and her home broken up ran so deep that she would never be able to discuss that period in her life. As they grew up, her children learned not to ask about Pembrokeshire or their father, in order to spare their mother’s feelings. One thing she did reveal was that the two toddlers, Polly and David, aged only three years and eighteen months respectively, were nevertheless old enough to share her grief. As neighbours and friends carried pieces of furniture out of the front door and down the path to the gate, the two children took the heaviest stones they could lift and rolled them across the path in a futile attempt to block the way. It was the best they could do to keep their home and possessions from disappearing.

The journey back to Criccieth was nightmarish. The family—Richard, Polly, David and a now obviously pregnant Betsy—carrying their entire worldly goods, travelled by rail as far as Caernarvon, and then journeyed on to Llanystumdwy by carriage. Betsy had to decide which possessions to leave behind, but one thing was certain: she was not going to give up her husband’s treasured book collection. The little library was carefully packed up, carried all the way to Highgate and put back in the parlour they had left only three years previously. Physically weakened and emotionally distraught, Betsy sank back onto the family hearth, lucky to have avoided the workhouse misery of many other widows.

It soon became apparent that young David had all the talent of the first David Lloyd, and added to it his father’s dreams of greatness. He also had a robust constitution, and this time Rebecca, Richard and Betsy were determined that the story would not end in tragedy. The tale of David Lloyd George’s upbringing, and his family’s nurturing of his prodigious talent, was to be one of the most remarkable of any politician of his time.

2 The Cottage-Bred Man

HOME AGAIN IN LLANYSTUMDWY, Betsy finally gave way to grief and ill-health. She had been deeply in love with her husband, and although she had been concerned about his health, there had been no major alarms to prepare her for his sudden death. The change in her circumstances overwhelmed her sensitive nature and rendered her physically and emotionally incapacitated. After a few months her second son was born, and was named William after his father. Betsy was too weakened to share the burden of housework or even to look after her baby: William recalled being bathed by his grandmother in a large earthenware basin on the kitchen floor because his mother was too ill to look after him.1

Into the breach stepped the redoubtable Rebecca. She was already running the household and the shoemaking business, which she had kept going during her son’s four-month mercy dash to Pembrokeshire. Now she took on the care of her invalid daughter, two young children and a newborn. Fortunately, Rebecca had enough practicality and stamina for all of them. She also understood what her daughter was going through, since she too had been widowed at an early age and had struggled to make ends meet. Rebecca was over sixty by this time, but she kept the reins firmly in her capable hands, and remained the head of the household until the day she died.

In order to provide for her family Rebecca had to make a success of the shoemaking business, and at times she surprised her family with her diplomatic skills. She would often take her young grandson David Lloyd George with her on long walks in the hills surrounding Llanystumdwy, and he inherited her love of walking, together with her belief in fresh air as the cure for all ills. They would often call at remote farms where, not entirely coincidentally, a shoemaking account was overdue. Rebecca would never mention it herself, but the embarrassed farmer’s wife inevitably did. A copy of the bill would then be produced from Rebecca’s pocket, where it had lain, by chance of course, and the account would be settled with friendly relations maintained.

Living quarters were cramped in the small cottage. Rebecca took Betsy and little Mary Ellen to sleep with her in the larger of the upstairs rooms, while Richard shared his quarters with David and William, who slept together in a narrow wainscot bed. The small inheritance that Betsy had invested in the Liverpool building society gave her a modest, fluctuating income of up to £46 (£4,039 today) a year. She could at least pay her way—for now. This was important to bolster her pride, for dependence on family was only one step away from charity, and both her upbringing and her religion, with their emphasis on selfreliance, led her to shrink from accepting handouts.

Eventually Betsy grew stronger, and she was able to take over more of the running of the house, with its never-ending demands of fires to tend, rooms to clean and bread to bake. She had not been well for very long, though, when a second unexpected blow took away her main support. In 1868, Rebecca died at the age of sixty-five. The head of the family, whose unwavering faith and unrelenting selfdiscipline had been its bedrock, followed her husband to the grave after twenty-nine years of widowhood. The family rallied round once more—indeed, they had very little choice. Richard took charge of the business, and Betsy ran the house. All three children were deemed old enough to take on their share of the chores, and life took on a new rhythm.