British Peers

"Lloyd George was the most effective popular advocate of Liberalism—the only man perhaps who could really fire the party and win over the masses of unorganized voters."

"He is anxious to improve labour conditions, but he is not really in sympathy with labour. As I have always said, he does not understand the point of view of the worker. Just now he is angry about the strikes and keen on putting the strikers into the Army. They stand in the way of the prosecution of the war, and so must be coerced. He says very little concerning the commercial and manufacturing classes who have been, and are, making fortunes out of the war."

"L[loyd] G[eorge] with all his powers does not understand or sympathise with working men. His point of view is that of the solicitor or shopkeeper. The general attitude of the upper and middle classes is that "you must give these fellows a lesson"."

"He is nothing if not a Radical yet circumstances have made him appear as the leader of the right wing of the party—of the "bad Liberals". I put it to him that he had really nothing in common with these people and that the only course open to him was to lead the Radicals. That is what he wants to do, but meanwhile his supporters in the party are on the Right and his opponents on the Left. Asquith who is really a Whig is accepted as a better Liberal than he."

"When I come along [to the landlords] and say, "Here, gentlemen, you have escaped long enough, it is your turn now, I want you to pay just 5 per cent. on the £10,000 odd," they reply:—"Five per cent? You are a thief; you are worse, you are an attorney; worst of all, you are a Welshman." That always is the crowning epithet. I do not apologize, and I do not mind telling you that if I could, I would not; I am proud of the little land among the hills... Whenever they hurl my nationality at my head, I say to them, "You Unionists, you hypocrites, Pharisees, you are the people who in every peroration...always talk about our being one kith and kin throughout the Empire...and yet if any man dares to aspire to any position, if he does not belong to the particular nationality which they have dignified by choosing their parents from, they have no use for him." Well, they have got to stand the Welshman now."

"If there is one thing more than another better established about the British Constitution it is this, that the Commons, and the Commons alone, have the complete control of supply and ways and means. And what our fathers established through centuries of struggles and of strife, even of bloodshed, we are not going to be traitors to. Who talks about altering and meddling with the Constitution? The Constitutional Party... As long as the Constitution gave rank and possession and power it was not to be interfered with. As long as it secured even their sports from intrusion, and made interference with them a crime; as long as the Constitution forced royalties and ground-rents and fees, premiums and fines, the black retinue of extraction; as long as it showered writs, and summonses, and injunctions, and distresses, and warrants to enforce them, then the Constitution was inviolate, it was sacred, it was something that was put in the same category as religion, that no man ought to touch, and something that the chivalry of the nation ought to range in defence of. But the moment the Constitution looks round, the moment the Constitution begins to discover that there are millions of people outside the park gates who need attention, then the Constitution is to be torn to pieces. Let them realize what they are doing. They are forcing revolution."

"I notice that L[loyd] G[eorge] is steadily veering over to the Tory point of view... He is also at heart opposed to the claims of Labour, and would like to fight the working classes if he dared. He knows they do not trust him and he dislikes their independent spirit."

"Thus ended the [Lloyd George] Coalition. And thus ended the reign of the great ones, the giants of the Edwardian era and of the war; and the rule of the pygmies, of the "second-class brains" began, to continue until 1940. Lloyd George remained in public life, admired, distrusted, unused, and stonily watched the country sink in the hopeless morass of depression and unemployment, while lesser men frittered away Britain's power in the world. "We have no one of that calibre now," sadly remarked a high official in 1938."

"We are placing burdens on the broadest shoulders. Why should I put burdens on the people? I am one of the children of the people. I was brought up amongst them. I know their trials; and God forbid that I should add one grain of trouble to the anxieties which they bear with such patience and fortitude. When the Prime Minister did me the honour of inviting me to take charge of the National Exchequer at a time of great difficulty, I made up my mind, in framing the Budget which was in front of me, that at any rate no cupboard should be barer, no lot would be harder. By that test I challenge you to judge the Budget."

"The only two men who really seem to understand that we are at war are Winston and Lloyd George. Both have faults which disgust one peculiarly at the present time, but there is a reality about them and they are in earnest, which the others aren't."

"I lay down as a proposition that most of the people who work hard for a living in the country belong to the Liberal Party. I would say, and I think, without offence, that most of the people who never worked for a living at all belong to the Tory Party."

"Lloyd George himself was then [January 1919] at the height of his powers and prestige, the "man who won the war". His appearance was striking: the fine head, piercing blue eyes, a great mane of hair, already nearly white, more than offset his small stature. "L.G." was the sort of man people admired or loathed; there were no half measures either in him or in people's opinion of him. He was above all things clever, with a mind extraordinarily quick and versatile. With this went a buoyancy and courage that were almost brazen, a tendency to ruthlessness and tyrannical behaviour, and a readiness of decision and action which terrified some, but carried others to heights they would never have scaled alone. With him, the end was more important than the means: his methods were personal, improvised, and on occasion unscrupulous; he liked to cut through the rules. There was also a sort of sixth sense, a "medium-like sensibility" to persons around him, a personal charm and intuition which anticipated thoughts and saw the quickest way to persuade an adversary or tackle a problem. He was a genius with a double dose of everything, good and bad; he could do as well with his left hand as his right. Yet it was wrong to deduce from all this, as Keynes did, that he was "rooted in nothing" and without principles. A deep patriotism was his, and a hatred of oppression."

"There followed a scene of drama when, with passionate voice and pointing finger the young Welshman assailed the Father of the House across the floor. "Better to have slightly dearer coal than cheaper colliers," flamed Bevan. "... We say that you cannot get from the already dry veins of the miners new blood to revivify the industry. Their veins are already shrunken white, and we are asking you to be, for once, decent to the miners ... not to use all your Parliamentary skill, all your rhetoric, in an act of pure demagogy to expose the mining community of this country to another few years of misery." Lloyd George sat opposite, listening intently, crossing and re-crossing his legs. It was one of the very few times that veteran journalists of the Press Gallery could ever remember having seen Lloyd George obviously disconcerted. Said one of them: "He was confronted with the ghost of his own angry youth.""

"The question will be asked, "Should 500 men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, override the judgment...of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country?""

"[H]e's got what Carlyle said of the Hindu god—he has a fire in his belly, but his weakness is looseness of mind... Principles! Do you talk to me of his principles? What are they? But he is not dishonest, he's only tricky. Some shabbiness perhaps."

"Lloyd George had a passion to win the war which none of the other members of the Cabinet seemed even to understand."

"It was during this period [c. 1929] that I grew to know Lloyd George well and to appreciate gifts unique in his generation, which at this conjunction of events at home and abroad might again have been of immeasurable benefit to our country. This was not to be allowed in any situation short of the catastrophic. All the dull people combined to get Lloyd George down. They succeeded—but they got the country further down: the epitaph of an epoch."

"A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer."

"He is a remarkable combination of forces; a poet, an orator and a man of action. His energy, power of work, and power of recuperation are remarkable. He has an extraordinary memory, imagination, and the art of getting at the root of a matter... He possess every sort of courage, daring, patience, bravery in the face of personal danger and in the face of responsibility... He has no respect for tradition or convention. He is always ready to examine, scrap, or revise established theories and practices. These qualities give him unlimited confidence in himself. He has a remarkably quick, alert and logical mind, which makes him very effective in debate. He is one of the craftiest of men, and his extraordinary charm of manner not only wins him friends, but does much to soften the asperities of his opponents and enemies. He is full of humour and a born actor. His oratory has a wide range. On the whole he is a good judge of men."

"When Lloyd George came back to the party, ideas came back to the party."

"The landlords are receiving eight millions a year by way of royalties. What for? They never deposited the coal in the earth. It was not they who planted these great granite rocks in Wales. Who laid the foundations of the mountains? Was it the landlord? And yet he, by some divine right, demands as his toll—for merely the right for men to risk their lives in hewing these rocks—eight millions a year."

"The greatest War Minister since Chatham."

"[Y]et when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords, and say to them: "Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won't you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse?" they scowl at us. We say, "Only a ha'penny, just a copper". They retort, "You thieves!" And they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who, at the risk of life, create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand."

"Lloyd George, the hero of the First World War, had also been a lone wolf in Parliament. Baldwin hated and feared him, and the Tory Party treated him as a brilliant back number. The Labour Party deeply distrusted him because of the Black and Tans and as the author of the Versailles Treaty. Nobody I ever knew had his skill or brilliance as a natural leader in bad times and yet he could do nothing but manoeuvre... He continued to put forward schemes for economic reconstruction such as those on which he had fought the election of 1929. If he had been listened to, England would have been saved from ten years of miserable deflating. Walking in his orchard at Churt he would tell me of his plans for another New Deal."

"This wide view of his position and responsibilities is reflected throughout his career as Minister of Munitions, and his vision of the character and probable length of the conflict that lay ahead not only had a profound effect on the munitions programmes actually adopted in his period, but enabled the Ministry to meet much larger programmes later on. He laid the foundations of the Ministry's productive capacity on a scale so vast that it was almost sufficient—as far as guns, gun ammunition, rifles, machine guns, and trench warfare supplies were concerned—to carry the country to the end of the war."

"What Baldwin failed to understand was the genius of the greatest war leader that Britain had known since Chatham, only destined to be equalled and surpassed by Churchill. With Lloyd George's departure, a certain dynamic energy disappeared from Whitehall, which never returned until Churchill took control."

"Lloyd George had known tragedy with the death of a much loved daughter, as well as moments of considerable strain when personal scandals and political controversies had threatened to ruin his career. He had worked under enormous pressure during the previous four years, first as minister of munitions then as war minister. At the end of 1916 he had taken on the burden of the prime ministership, at the head of a coalition government, when it looked as though the Allies were finished. Like Clemenceau in France, he had held the country together and led it to victory. Now in 1919 he was fresh from a triumphant election but led an uneasy coalition. He was a Liberal; his supporters and key cabinet members were predominantly Conservative. Although he had a solid partnership with the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, he had to watch his back. His displaced rival, the former Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, sat brooding in his tent, ready to pounce on any slip. Many of the Conservatives remembered his radical past as the scourge of privilege and rank, and as they had with their own leader Disraeli, they wondered if he were not too clever, too quick, too foreign. Lloyd George also faced formidable enemies in the press. The press baron Lord Northcliffe, who had chosen his title because it had the same initial letter as Napoleon, was moving rapidly from megalomania to paranoia, perhaps an early sign of the tertiary syphilis that was to kill him. He had been convinced that he had made Lloyd George prime minister by putting his papers, which included The Times and the Daily Mail, behind him. Now he was angry when the man he thought his creation refused to appoint him either to the War Cabinet or to the British delegation in Paris. Lloyd George also had to deal with a country ill prepared for the peace, where the end of the war had brought huge, and irrational, expectations: that making peace would be easy; that wages and benefits would go up and taxes down; that there would be social harmony, or, depending on your point of view, social upheaval. The public mood was unpredictable: at moments vengeful, at others escapist. The most popular book of 1919 was The Young Visiters, a comic novel written by a child. While he was in Paris, Lloyd George had to take time out for labour unrest, parliamentary revolts and the festering sore of Ireland. Yet he entered into the negotiations in Paris as though he had little else on his mind."

"Everything I have said of our success is a tribute to him. He chose the great leaders of industry who formed the pivots of our machine. He formulated the needs of the moment to labour, and persuaded them to agree to meet our necessities. He realised the scope which our operations should embrace in all the essentials of the production of munitions, and his tireless energy and vigorous personality were the inspiration of the whole vast fabric."

"Who is the landlord? The Landlord is a gentleman … who does not earn his wealth. He does not even take the trouble to receive his wealth. He has a host of agents and clerks that receive it for him. He does not even take the trouble to spend his wealth. He has a host of people around him to do the actual spending for him. He never sees it until he comes to enjoy it. His sole function, his chief pride is stately consumption of wealth produced by others."

"They go on threatening that if we proceed, they will cut down their benefactions and discharge labour. What kind of labour? What is the labour they are going to choose for dismissal? Are they going to threaten to devastate rural England by feeding and dressing themselves? Are they going to reduce their gamekeepers? Ah, that would be sad! The agricultural labourer and the farmer might then have some part of the game that is fattened by their labour. Also what would happen to you in the season? No week-end shooting with the Duke of Norfolk or anyone."

"Lloyd George's strengths were more remarkable than his weaknesses. For he really did try to answer the questions that mattered. He saw, more clearly than any other political leader, that Britain could survive in a changing world only if she changed herself... [H]is answers cut across the "false dichotomy" [between capitalism and socialism]. They were neither "capitalist" nor "socialist"; they were designed to use the power of the state to make capitalism work properly. As such, they were much more modern in conception than anything else on offer at the time. But in the climate generated by the struggle between "capitalism" and "socialism" they did not look modern. They looked irrelevant, opportunistic and, in an odd way, out of date. So, by a terrible paradox, the most creative and adventurous statesman of the day, who might have resolved the progressive dilemma if he had had the chance, appeared to most of his countrymen as a querulous and self-seeking voice from the past."

"I at least will never forget, and will always be ready to assert, that in my view in the greatest crisis of our history he did a service for which the nation can never be too grateful."

"Lloyd George was a wonderful orator. I have heard my father say that when he came to address meetings in Scotland you had to hold on to your seat not to be carried away. And in his early years he was deeply concerned to make life more tolerable for the poor. He fought for his social security legislation with all his boundless energy and adroitness; the only thing he was not prepared to do for the poor was to become one of them. He needed money, lots of money, to maintain a home for his wife and family in Wales and another in England for his secretary, who became his mistress. In our part of the world Lloyd George was no hero. We did not forgive or forget the Khaki Election of 1918. Nor his treatment of pacifists during the war. Nor the Marconi Scandal. Nor the way he played fast and loose with the Suffragette Movement, doing nothing to oppose forceful feeding or to undo the notorious Cat and Mouse Act. What Lloyd George failed to understand was no man, however gifted, is a major political power in himself. He can teach, he can preach, he can make a significant contribution, but power politics is a struggle between social forces, not a duel between individuals. Once the war was over the Tories had no more use for him. He was an outsider, an upstart Welsh lawyer who had got above himself."

"His political career...is now increasingly being subjected to searching revision. More and more, the criticisms hurled at him seem hard to sustain. Above all, it is difficult to see in him just the "rootless opportunist", "vampire and medium in one" portrayed by Keynes and others. In methods, certainly, he was endlessly flexible, often deliberately indirect. But opportunism of method was always linked to general consistency of objectives. Indeed, it could be argued that his career was determined by long-term objectives to a degree unusual among British politicians. He was steadfast in his sympathy for the national cause of Wales. He was consistent in his concern for social reform... He was consistent in his belief that Britain ought to be made a more democratic and egalitarian society. He was consistent in his view that British imperial and foreign policy should be linked to the search for international harmony. The architect of victory in 1918, he was essentially a conciliator, a man of peace. His objectives, then, were consistent and progressive."

"There are many cases where landlords take advantage of the needs of municipalities and even of national needs and of the monopoly which they have got in land in a particular neighbourhood in order to demand extortionate prices. Take the very well-known case of the Duke of Northumberland, when a county council wanted to buy a small plot of land as a site for a school to train the children who in due course would become the men labouring on his property. The rent was quite an insignificant thing; his contribution to the rates I think it was on the basis of 30s. an acre. What did he demand for it for a school? £900 an acre. All we say is this—if it is worth £900, let him pay taxes on £900."

"He can be Prime Minister for life if he likes."

"David Lloyd George was the best-hated statesman of his time, as well as the best loved. The former I have good reason to know; every time I made a pointed cartoon against him, it brought batches of approving letters from all the haters. Looking at Lloyd George's pink and hilarious, head thrown back, generous mouth open to its fullest extent, shouting with laughter at one of his own jokes, I thought I could see how it was that his haters hated him. He must have been poison to the old school tie brigade, coming to the House an outsider, bright, energetic, irrepressible, ruthless, mastering with ease the House of Commons procedure, applying all the Celtic tricks in the bag, with a talent for intrigue that only occasionally got away from him. I always had the greatest difficulty in making Lloyd George sinister in a cartoon. Every time I drew him, however critical the comment, I had to be careful or he would spring off the drawing-board a lovable cherubic little chap. I found the only effective way of putting him definitely in the wrong in a cartoon was by misplacing this quality in sardonic incongruity — by surrounding the comedian with tragedy."

"The ownership of land is not merely an enjoyment, it is a stewardship. It has been reckoned as such in the past, and if the owners cease to discharge their functions in seeing to the security and defence of the country, looking after the broken in their villages and in their neighbourhoods, the time will come to reconsider the conditions under which land is held in this country."

"Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite, who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?"

"He could talk about the world history of his own time and about the future with a beautiful detachment. I have always remembered one night in the great drawing-room of the Antibes hotel.... L.G. was talking of his place in history. Of how he would be regarded mainly as one of those who tried to soften the class-struggle. And people who wanted the class-struggle naked would come down against him, and others would be for. He would get some attention for his part in the Great War — the 1914-1918 war (this conversation took place in 1938). But nothing of that counted much, L.G. was saying, against the great movements in history. None of our struggles mattered much, wars or revolutions or what you will, as compared with the sheer biological and geographical facts. Whatever happened, in two hundred years, perhaps sooner, the balance of the world would have changed. The industrialization of Russia was taking place: India would follow: perhaps China, within a hundred years.... Whatever Government presided over the operations, these changes would make our local concerns look no more significant than the Wars of the Roses."

"Why don't you join the Labour Party? 'Labour and the Nation' is only Socialism reduced to everyday expedients. You are willing as an outsider to help us to put these expedients into operation. Your help would be invaluable, as one of us... People have said you are opportunist, and will take any line that suits you. At times I have thought and said so. But these past months' experience and your observations last night compel me to believe you are sincere as any of your critics... I want you in the best place for doing good work, and that I am sure is in the Labour Party... [Y]our coming would crown a progressive life."

"Now, all we say is this: "In future you must pay one halfpenny in the pound on the real value of your land. In addition to that, if the value goes up, not owing to your efforts—if you spend money on improving it we will give you credit for it—but if it goes up owing to the industry and the energy of the people living in that locality, one-fifth of that increment shall in future be taken as a toll by the State"."

"The Parliament of 1924–9 was dominated by a few leading personalities, of whom by far the most exciting to a new Member like myself was Lloyd George... When he rose to speak, the House filled up... To us young Members, who had never or seldom heard him, it was a stirring experience... [H]e kept us all enthralled. I can see him now: the wonderful head, the great mane of white hair...; the expressive features, changing rapidly from fierce anger to that enchanting smile, not confined to the mouth, but spreading to his cheeks and eyes; above all, the beautiful hands, an actor's or an artist's hands, by the smallest movement of which he could make you see the picture he was trying to paint."

"Dawson and I have often exchanged intimacies about Ll.G. whom we both regard as the most remarkable figure of our acquaintance. S. B. and J.R.M. got on together because they both hate and fear Ll.G. He is rarely for long out of their minds. The speeches they make, the times they make them, especially when the House is sitting, are largely determined in relation to the movements of Ll.G. known or guessed."

"I told S. B. of how when the other day L. G. was singing the praises of Stalin, Megan had asked her father if there were a revolution on which side would he be. He replied: "With the Revolutionists, of course." Megan asked, "Whom would you shoot?" L. G. "Well, would it be worth while shooting anybody? There are Ramsay and Baldwin—but they are such worms, such insects." Megan, "But you'd have to shoot somebody." L. G. "Well, of course, there is Montagu Norman.""

"To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's buff in that party."

"Sincere congratulations. No one has done more to bring about this splendid victory than you."

"My father took me to a dinner of the Honorable Cymmrodorion Society — a Welsh literary club — where Lloyd George, then Secretary for War, and W. M. Hughes, the Australian Prime Minister, both spoke. Hughes was perky, dry, and to the point; Lloyd George was up in the air in one of his "glory of the Welsh hills" speeches. The power of his rhetoric amazed me. The substance of the speech might be commonplace, idle and false, but I had to fight hard against abandoning myself with the rest of his audience. He sucked power from his listeners and spurted it back at them. Afterwards, my father introduced me to Lloyd George, and when I looked closely at his eyes they seemed like those of a sleep-walker."

"The iron entered into my soul, when Ll[oyd] G[eorge]'s Government after the war let down and corrupted public life at home and destroyed our credit abroad."

"How can I convey to the reader who does not know him any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?"