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Great Contemporaries: The Age of Lloyd George (Part 4)
- By RAYMOND A. CALLAHAN
- | September 15, 2022
- Category: Churchill Between the Wars Churchill in WWII Explore Great Contemporaries
“Great Contemporaries: David Lloyd George,” concluded from Part 3.
The Stricken World
Martin Gilbert’s title13 well describes the uneasy scene following the Great War. As 1922 opened, Lloyd George and his Coalition were on shaky ground. He had been prime minster for five of the most tumultuous years in UK history. The war had been won and peace was made, but British and world politics remained in flux.
The rise of the Labour Party, amid the postwar “Red Scare,” had alarmed many for the future stability of British society (however odd that seems in retrospect). Lloyd George had wrecked his own party and many Tories feared he planned to do the same to them, creating from the rubble a new party that would give him a permanent political base.
The health of Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law had forced him into retirement. His successor, Austen Chamberlain (elder brother of Neville), supported the Coalition but lacked the same grip on his party. Lloyd George’s foreign and imperial policies, although successful, had left a bad taste in many mouths.
The Prime Minister accepted that the Bolshevik Revolution was irreversible and that coercion in Ireland was unsustainable. In the Middle East, Allenby was now a field marshal, with a near-vice-regal role there. Allenby and Lloyd George accepted that concessions to Egyptian nationalism were necessary, although British control remained fundamentally intact.
The 1919 Government of India Act marked an irrevocable commitment to eventual Indian independence. Lloyd George had angered die-hard Tory imperialists by supporting the forced retirement of Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, who had massacred 400 people. It was a low point in Anglo-Indian relations. Dyer’s dismissal was defended by Churchill as Secretary of State for War in a powerful speech in the House of Commons.
Turkey and Greece
Then a crisis erupted in Turkey that magnified all the fears and concerns about Lloyd George’s leadership. In 1918-19, the whole area from Turkey to the border of India was a zone of unrest. The Ottoman state had collapsed. Its Arab provinces (today’s Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq) were under British or French military government. Its Anatolian heartland remained, but the French, Italians and Greeks all had designs on bits of it. Istanbul lay under the guns of British warships. British troops policed a “neutral zone” on both sides of the Dardanelles. A sultan still sat in a palace on the Bosporus, but no longer ruled. The victors, gathered in Paris, pondered the fate of his empire.
Among those victors, Lloyd George was particularly supportive of the Greeks. He had a long-time bias toward small nations he saw as oppressed in some way by larger states. It is how he saw Wales’s relationship to England. German violation of Belgian neutrality had tipped him towards supporting British entry into the war in August 1914. As an “Easterner” early in the war, he sought to shift the focus of British strategy. His initial focus was on embattled Serbia. Greece then attracted his attention and sympathies.
Although neutral until July 1917, the Greeks acquiesced when the Allies opened a front, based on Salonika (now Thessaloniki), against Germany’s Balkan ally Bulgaria. Lloyd George was deeply impressed by the Greek prime minster Eleftherios Venizelos. Hoping to bring Greece into the war, he promised him territorial gains in Anatolia. Greece duly joined the Allies and thus was lit the fuse to the charges whose explosion brought Lloyd George’s own political demise.
The “Great Idea”
Venizelos was a proponent of what was known in Greece as the Megali, or “Great Idea.” That was the aspiration for a Greek state straddling the Aegean including parts of western Anatolia that had been historically Greek from classical times until the collapse of the Byzantium Empire in the 14th century. Here there was still a large Greek population.
The Greek Army occupied coastal Turkey and began to push into Anatolia soon after the Turkish collapse in 1918. This in turn helped create a powerful reaction in the Turkish heartland. An Ottoman general, Mustafa Kemal (later, as Kemal Ataturk, founder of today’s Turkish Republic), raised the standard of revolt against both the moribund Ottoman sultanate (which had accepted the punitive Treaty of Sevres which partitioned most of Anatolia among the victors) and the invading Greeks.
In the face of mounting irregular but effective resistance, the French and Italian contingents withdrew. The Greeks however pushed on, their supply lines growing steadily longer and their logistics ever more precarious. In the late summer of 1922 Kemal launched an offensive against the overextended Greeks. Their front collapsed and their forces retreated in disorder toward Smyrna. (More Greeks lived in this great Aegean port city than in Athens).
For his part Kemal told his troops their objective was the sea. Smyrna fell on 8 September. Greek and Armenian residents were massacred, their homes burnt. The “Great Idea” had proved a disastrous illusion for Greece. The victorious Kemalist armies closed in upon the British controlled neutral zone. The situation turned into a disaster for the Lloyd George Coalition as well.
Chanak and the End
As noted above, Lloyd George had already made his Tory Coalition partners uneasy. Another grievance was added when it became known that he had awarded peerages in return for cash donations to his political fund. He had carefully done so through an intermediary, Maundy Gregory, who gave his name to the ensuring scandal. Enough Victorian probity survived to make this abuse of office deeply shocking. Then came the Chanak crisis, named for the place on the south shore of the Dardanelles where Kemal’s troops confronted General Sir Charles Harrington’s small neutral zone garrison.14
Unlike Harrington, Lloyd George wanted to confront Kemal on the spot. Winston Churchill, moved to the Colonial Office in February 1921, strongly supported Lloyd George. But another war was a bridge too far for the Conservatives and much of the country.
Bonar Law emerged from retirement to announce that Britain alone could not be “policeman of the world.” The Dominions also balked: Canada, the senior Dominion, announced that she would not automatically support Britain in a war with Turkey.
To rally support for Lloyd George, Austen Chamberlain summoned a meeting of Tory MPs and peers at the Carlton Club, the party’s London home. It was a mistake. There on 19 October 1922, the Coalition died. Stanley Baldwin, President of the Board of Trade, made a powerful speech. Lloyd George, he said, was a “dynamic” force, but such dynamism was a “terrible thing.” The Conservatives voted to withdraw from the Coalition. Fear that Lloyd George would destroy the Tory Party, and weariness with war, had swept aside “the man who won the war.”
The long wake
The remaining 23 years of Lloyd George’s life were a long anticlimax, tinged with pathos toward the end. In the 1930s he remained a well-financed presence, his funding base healthy in part from the proceeds of the honors scandal. Baldwin’s ascent was remorseless after his Carlton Club philippic against Lloyd George. He became prime minster in 1924, succeeding Ramsay MacDonald’s brief Labour Coalition.
To Baldwin, dynamism was alien, and he was obsessed with preventing Lloyd George’s return to power. His offer of the Exchequer to Winston Churchill startled everyone. Most surprised was Churchill, who was only beginning to work himself back to the Conservatives. In fact, Baldwin was motivated largely by a desire to make Churchill’s talents unavailable to Lloyd George.
Baldwin would dominate British politics until his retirement in 1937. He handed over to Neville Chamberlain, whom Lloyd George loathed (the feeling was mutual). Although his own Welsh seat was secure, Lloyd George never returned to office. His embrace of Keynesian solutions to the Great Depression—a British version of FDR’s New Deal—was arguably more far-sighted than anything Baldwin had to offer, but it made no impact.
Germany and another war
The mid-1930s saw the beginning of Lloyd George’s sad loss of perspective. He came to believe that Germany had legitimate grievances against the Versailles settlement. He saw Hitler applying remedies to the Depression—public spending—that he had urged vainly in Britain. In 1936 he visited Germany. Hitler flattered him. Lloyd George returned the favor, comparing him to George Washington!
In 1940, the aging Welshman made one last significant intervention in the House of Commons. This was in the May 1940 “Norway Debate” that brought down Neville Chamberlain. He delivered a slashing attack on a man he despised, telling the embattled prime minster that, since he had called for sacrifice to support the war effort, he should set an example by sacrificing his seals of office. Churchill sprang to Chamberlain’s defense, but Lloyd George advised him not to make himself into “a bomb shelter” to protect his colleague.
Chamberlain fell and his successor Churchill offered his old mentor a Cabinet seat. Lloyd George declined, saying privately that he expected Winston would go “bust,” opening the way for him to lead again.15 But it was not Churchill’s “victory at all costs” that he had in mind. He did not think victory was possible. During the Battle of Britain, he spoke (passionately but privately) of a negotiated peace. His pessimism about winning became so open that in mid-1941 Churchill compared him to the capitulating French.
By then Lloyd George was a fading presence. He did however one final startling thing. In 1945 he accepted an Earldom—the man who crippled the Lords in 1911. He died in March 1945 as the Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor and Viscount Gwynedd.
“He could almost talk a bird out of a tree…”
In his youth as an anti-radical Tory, Churchill once referred to Lloyd George as “a vulgar, chattering little cad.”16 Once they became colleagues in 1904, the frost melted, and young Winston was an enthusiastic disciple. Alistair Cooke compared them to “a great vaudeville team” as they stumped the country for welfare reforms and the end of the House of Lords. Again Churchill was an ally when Lloyd George brought him back into government. But as the Hitler threat rose, they grew apart again. There was enough affection left in 1931 for Churchill to pen this assessment:
At his best he could almost talk a bird out of a tree. An intense comprehension of the more amiable weaknesses of human nature; a sure gift of getting on the right side of a man from the beginning of a talk; a complete avoidance of anything in the nature of chop-logic reasoning; a deft touch in dealing with realities; the sudden presenting of positions hitherto unexpected but apparently conciliatory and attractive—all these are modes and methods in which he is a natural adept. I have seen him turn a Cabinet round in less than ten minutes, and yet when the process was complete, no one could remember any particular argument to which to attribute their change of view.17
Churchill’s eulogy
With Lloyd George’s death on the eve of victory, the recent past was forgotten. Churchill’s eulogy was a model of decency, ranking with his generous tribute to Neville Chamberlain. Almost certainly it was from the heart, because Churchill was not a hater:
His eye ranged ahead of the obvious. He was the champion of the weak and the poor….Most people are unconscious of how much their lives have been shaped by the laws for which Lloyd George was responsible. Health Insurance and Old Age Pensions were the first large-scale State-conscious efforts to set a balustrade along the crowded causeway of the people’s life, and, without pulling down the structures of society, to fasten a lid over the abyss into which vast numbers used to fall, generation after generation, uncared-for and indeed unnoticed….
[In the First World War] Lloyd George had another part to play.…Although unacquainted with the military arts, although by public repute a pugnacious pacifist, when the life of our country was in peril he rallied to the war effort and cast aside all other thoughts and aims.18
Verdict of history
David Lloyd George remains a hard person to assess. His political talent, oratorical skills, and charm (when he deployed it) were undeniable. He laid the foundation of the Welfare State. He led Britain to victory in 1918.
But questions about personal probity hung about him. He had no inherited wealth, and political life was expensive. The proceeds of the honors scandal helped finance his post-1922 career. He was accounted a “womanizer.” Certainly Frances Stevenson, his longtime secretary, was also from 1913 his mistress. (He married her after his wife’s death in 1943.) He broke still powerful Victorian norms in several directions, but his talents sustained him—until 1922.
A great British historian, A.J.P. Taylor, who admired his accomplishments, wrote of Lloyd George in 1965 that he had no friends, and possibly deserved none. A half century on, a more generous verdict seems appropriate. When History draws up a balance sheet on him, there are more credits than debits.
Certainly he powered the Liberals’ pre-1914 reform agenda. He was a better war leader than his predecessor, Asquith. Most historians now agree that his skepticism about the Haig-Robertson Western Front strategy was well merited. He quickly saw the futility of intervention in Russia and heavy-handed counterinsurgency in Ireland. At Versailles he helped shape a flawed peace, but it was, perhaps, the only kind of peace possible.
His personal failings are clear, but a historian’s verdict ought to be that, in utterly unprecedented situations, he rose very well to the challenges—and far better than any conceivable alternative leader. Overshadowed now by the memory of Churchill, he deserves respectful remembrance in his own right.
Endnotes and further reading
13 The title is from the original title of Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 4, The Stricken World 1916-1922 (1978), republished as World in Torment 1916-1922 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2008).
14 The downfall of the Coalition is covered by Kenneth O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government 1918-1922 (Oxford, 1979). Also valuable are the accounts of two participants: Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George (London and New York, 1963) and Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), The World Crisis, v 5, The Aftermath (London and New York, 1929). Beaverbrook was close to both Lloyd George and Bonar Law.
15 When he succeeded Neville Chamberlain, Churchill did two things clearly based on Lloyd George’s experience. By naming himself Minister of Defence, he took control of British strategy. There would be no challenges of the sort Haig and Robertson posed to Lloyd George. Then, when illness removed Chamberlain in late 1940, Churchill seized the leadership of the Conservative Party. Here he had the firm political base that Lloyd George never enjoyed.
16 WSC to J. Moore Bayley, 23 December 1901, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2016), 104.
17 WSC, “Personal Contacts,” in The Strand Magazine, February 1931; reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures (1932) and Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 357.
18 WSC, House of Commons, 28 March 1945, in Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 357.
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).