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Articles
Great Contemporaries: Churchill in the Age of Lloyd George (Part 1)
- By RAYMOND A. CALLAHAN
- | April 21, 2022
- Category: Explore The Literary Churchill
The last great Liberal
David Lloyd George (1863-1945) is one of the most consequential British prime ministers.1 Taking office in late 1916, when victory in the 20th century’s first global conflict seemed remote, he became “the man who won the war.” In 1918 the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law, his coalition partner, said Lloyd George could be prime minister for life. Four years later he fell from power, never regaining office. His Liberal Party crashed with him, never to form another government.
After his death in 1945 the great Welshman passed into historical limbo. His multi-volume war memoirs, written in the 1930s, are hard to find outside large libraries. There has been no recent biography. John Grigg in the 1970s projected a multi-volume study, but died leaving it incomplete. (The four volumes he did write remain in print.) It is hard not to compare his slow fade from public consciousness with the memory of Churchill, who remains a towering presence.
Yet much of Churchill’s pre-1914 career was tied into that of Lloyd George. It was Lloyd George who kick-started the rebuilding of that career in 1917 by bringing him back into ministerial office. This came at some risk to himself, with the shadow of Gallipoli still hovering over Churchill. The memory of Lloyd George’s experience as war leader helped shape how Churchill structured his own position in 1940. Lloyd George’s career is worth remembering for its own sake, and for its impact on Churchill, who led Britain through a second and greater total war.
Path to power
Lloyd George was the first (and, to date, only) true outsider to reach 10 Downing Street. Educated in Welsh local schools, he was the sole prime minister for whom English was a second language. None of the “public schools” or “ancient universities” that marked Britain’s political elite were on his resume.
He apprenticed to to a local firm of solicitors which brought him into politics—particularly the drive to “disestablish” the Welsh (i.e. Anglican) Church. This was the official church in Wales, symbolic of England’s conquest. Its congregants were largely members of the anglicized Welsh gentry, but its finances were drawn from taxes on the Baptist and Methodist populace.
There was one political path for a North Wales solicitor: the Liberal Party, which Lloyd George would eventually lead and ultimately destroy. The meaning of “liberal” has shifted since those days. Before the First World War, Britain had two center-right parties, the Liberals and the slightly-farther-right Conservatives (Tories). The only genuine left-of-center group was the infant Labour Party, which had debuted at the 1906 General Election and was a small, struggling organization.
The Liberals were a coalition of landed grandees, remnants of the old Whig Party, and a dominant mass of largely middle-class businessmen and lawyers. A few Liberal MPs represented the small working class which met the property-based criteria for voting. Most of these were Trade Union officials. MPs were not paid until 1911, so only working-class men in the Trade Union movement, supported by their unions, could afford to be MPs. The new Labour Party posed a threat to this block of votes, making the Liberals more responsive to working class concerns. This would be the setting for Lloyd George’s rise.
Social reform
Britain in 1900 had a vast arrears of social issues, the legacy of 19th century industrialization and urbanization. Investigators like Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree published detailed reports on the extent of urban poverty and degradation. But what really grabbed public attention was the appalling condition of many of the men who sought to enlist during the surge of patriotic enthusiasm marking the Boer War (1899-1902). British army doctors, whose standards were not particularly lofty, rejected up to a third. When therefore the Liberals swept the 1905 general election, the time seemed right to deal with these issues. The new Labour Party to their left, courting working-class voters, was an added incentive to act.
The Liberals’ “reform wing” found a leader in Lloyd George, who became a cabinet minister—President of the Board of Trade—in 1906. In 1908, when Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman was succeeded by H.H. Asquith, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Traditionally this was the second ranking Cabinet office. His successor at the Board of Trade, a rising Liberal star named Winston Churchill, powerfully supported his reform efforts. Between them they laid the foundation of the structure completed by Attlee’s 1945 government, which changed the lives of the British working class.
There was however a limit to what Liberal reformism could accomplish. Not only was the party’s center of gravity still the middle-class business and professional MPs in the House of Commons. There was also the House of Lords. Unelected, with an inbuilt Conservative majority, it enjoyed a veto over bills emerging from the Commons. Lloyd George realized that the Lords veto would have to be broken. And, in a stroke of political genius, he found a way.
Curbing the Lords
As Chancellor he shaped the annual budget legislation. In his 1908 budget he added taxes on the increased value of land,2 accompanied by a stinging attack on Britain’s peers. “A fully equipped Duke,” he exclaimed in 1909, “costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer.”3
Tory landowners were numerous and some, like the Duke of Westminster, owned the broad acres where central London was built. By long tradition the House of Lords did not veto budgets—had not for two centuries. Nonetheless, the weakly-led Tory peers, goaded by Lloyd George, fell into his trap. They vetoed the budget.
“Terrible twins”
The resulting constitutional crisis was settled (after two general elections in 1910) by the replacement of the Lords’ absolute veto with a suspensory one: They could delay a bill, but after three sessions in which the Commons passed it, it would become law.
This Parliament Act of 1911—an important modernization—cemented Lloyd George’s status as the Tories’ Bête Noire. It also added to Tory animosity toward Churchill who, elected to Parliament as a Conservative, had “ratted” to the Liberals in 1904. Despite his ducal blood, Churchill played a prominent role in campaigning against the Lords’ power. Like a political vaudeville team, he and Lloyd George campaigned up and down the country. Conservative opponents christened them “the terrible twins.”
Lloyd George and Home Rule
Tory anger increased after a by-product of the Lords struggle: a major Irish crisis. The 1910 elections left the Liberals and Conservatives virtually tied. Asquith continued in power with the support of the Irish Nationalists, whose price was Irish Home Rule. This meant political autonomy, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and white South Africa enjoyed.
Home Rule, first promised by the great Liberal leader William Gladstone in the 1880s, had been stalled ever since. The Irish party, moreover, after nearly thirty years of effort, needed to show results to its constituents. With Irish support, the Liberals had a comfortable majority, and the Tory House of Lords could not stop them. A Home Rule bill was duly introduced in 1911. The Lords could delay it until 1914, but then it would become law. A countdown clock started to tick, accompanied by a crisis in Ulster (Northern Ireland).
The most industrialized part of Ireland, with its solid bloc of Protestants, Ulster wanted no part of a self-governing Ireland that would inevitably be dominated by the rural, Catholic south. “Ulster will fight; Ulster will be right,” a slogan coined by Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph, had defeated Gladstone. Again it was dusted off. The Conservatives, now led by the pro-Ulster Andrew Bonar Law, hoped to bring down the Liberal government over the issue. The Liberals had no option but to drive it through.
Churchill, Lloyd George and Home Rule
Lord Randolph’s son, now First Lord of the Admiralty, played a very prominent role in confronting the Tories. Though understanding Ulster’s position, he was totally behind Home Rule. This added to the grievances against him for which the Tories would later seek—and get—revenge. It seemed to many that Britain was hurtling toward civil war. Home Rule would certainly pass in 1914. In Ulster, armed resistance was planned and, in London, the Conservative Party pledged to support that resistance. Where, in all this, was Lloyd George?
Lloyd George’s great gift was as a political tactician who could find a way forward where no one else could. He had shown how to neuter the House of Lords veto. But as Ulster threatened to boil over, Lloyd George was distracted. Disestablishment of the Welsh Church (achieved in 1914) and his 1913 campaign to democratize land ownership consumed much of his time. He did however—with Churchill—suggest what would ultimately become the solution, ten years, and much bloodshed later. Why not pass Home Rule including an opt-out for Ulster? But passions were running too high; no one wanted compromise at that moment.
“The muddy byways…”
The question of what would happen when Home Rule became law was never answered. In July 1914, the Cabinet endlessly debated the boundaries of Ulster parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone. Dramatically, Churchill recalled what happened next:
The discussion had reached its inconclusive end, and the Cabinet was about to separate, when the quiet grave tones of Sir Edward Grey‘s voice were heard reading a document which had just been brought to him from the Foreign Office. It was the Austrian note to Serbia. He had been reading or speaking for several minutes before I could disengage my mind from the tedious and bewildering debate which had just closed. We were all very tired, but gradually as the phrases and sentences followed one another, impressions of a wholly different character began to form in my mind…. The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.4
A whole new set of challenges now arose for Lloyd George and Churchill, laden with limitless possibility and peril. What would have happened in Ireland without war remains one of the most tantalizing “what ifs” of modern British history.5
Continued in Part 2.
Endnotes
1 A good general history of Britain in Lloyd George’s time is Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-2000. His years at the center of British politics are brilliantly explored in A.J. P. Taylor’s classic English History 1914-45 (1965).
2 See Richard M. Langworth, “Henry George and Churchill’s The People’s Rights,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2019: Part 1 and Part 2.
3 David Lloyd George, Newcastle, 9 October 1909, as reported in the Manchester Guardian, 11 October 1909.
4 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 1, 1911-1914 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), 193.
5 The complex Irish crisis of 1911-14 can be followed in detail in Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988). An older account, still worth reading, is George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England. Originally published in 1935, still in print, and immensely readable, it first advanced the suggestion that only the outbreak of World War I saved Britain from civil war in 1914.
The author
Dr. Callahan is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware and a leading scholar of the Indian Army in the two World Wars. He taught at the University for 38 years and was director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program, where an annual student prize bears his name. Among his books are Churchill and His Generals (2007) and Churchill: Retreat from Empire (1997).
I relished Ray Callahan’s lectures when he came through to lecture at the Navy and Marine Corps colleges. As I am only beginning to understand the domestic policy work of Lloyd Geroge, this article was useful and fresh. A worthy addition to the website. thx, C. Harmon, Woodbridge VA
Although Bonar Law did have Ulster roots, he was not an “Ulsterman”—he was a Canadian.
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Bonar Law was born in New Brunswick in 1858. He was of Scottish and Ulster Scots descent. Canadian passports weren’t invented until 1862. In those days there was no legal difference between being a Canadian and an Ulsterman. Thanks for this—we have reworded his description as “pro-Ulster.” —Eds.