Читать книгу: «The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George’s Life», страница 2

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.

Although she suffered throughout her life from ill-health, Betsy always seemed able to summon up a reserve of strength when her children were in need. Following Rebecca’s death she held the family together, and was by all accounts a skilful and resourceful housewife. Highgate was rented from David Jones, the village shopkeeper, who lived by a simple creed, ‘The rent is mine, the house is yours,’ and refrained from carrying out even the most basic repairs to his properties. For a rent of £7 per annum (£547 today) Betsy and Richard were left to their own devices in maintaining the fabric of the crumbling cottage. Betsy had to turn her hand to household repairs as well as the washing and baking. The latter was a particular challenge, since the ancient oven at Highgate was on its last legs. Every week Betsy would patch up the holes in its sides with brown paper, and pray that her handiwork would last until the bread was baked.

Betsy established an unvarying routine: Monday was washing day, Thursday was baking day. Chores and social obligations filled the other four working days of the week. Sunday was reserved for three chapel services, with a three-mile round trip to each one. This might have seemed like an additional chore to a less devout person, but it was Betsy’s main comfort in a life of unrelenting hard work. She gave no sign that she ever considered remarrying. Perhaps the strength of her feelings for her late husband prohibited it. In any case, there were not many eligible men in the village at a time when ambitious young men headed for towns or ports to earn a living.

Betsy spent her forties raising three children, keeping house for her brother, and thanking God that she was not completely alone in the world. She had matured into a kind, sympathetic and attractive woman, rather small, according to her elder son, but with a good figure and a soft, sweet voice.² ‘She was a fine character,’ he wrote in a memoir, ‘—gentle, unselfish and courageous. She never complained and never spoke of her struggles. It was not till long after that her children fully appreciated how much they owed to her, and how fine her spirit had been in the hard task of bringing up her fatherless family.’³ Her widowhood had left its mark, and although Betsy could sometimes enjoy a joke, she was a serious woman. She was also proud, refusing to let her sons join their friends in weed-picking for sixpence a time. Rebecca had taught her to be a disciplined housekeeper, a ‘mistress of method’ in the home, a good cook and generous in giving hospitality.⁴ She allowed herself few pleasures, but one exception was her fondness for flowers. She grew a rose vine to cover the front of the house. Its flowers bloomed in a splendid display through the summer months, and it was not unusual for the family to overhear strangers on the road outside exclaiming at their beauty.

Betsy inherited Rebecca’s independence of spirit, if not her strength of character, and her gentle demeanour masked a strong adherence to her parents’ beliefs and values. She was proud to be part of the same Welsh-speaking, chapel-going class. The ladies of Trefan, the nearby estate, were often driven past Betsy’s door by their uniformed coachman, but Betsy did not envy them, nor did she feel inferior, and she made sure that her children took pride in their position in life too. When they were older, David and William were both offered positions as pupil-teachers in their school, one of the few ways a bright village lad could get on in the world and escape a life of manual labour. But the offer carried a sting in its tail. Because the school was sponsored by the Anglican Church, pupil-teachers were required to join the Church and renounce their nonconformism, a condition that most, willingly or under duress, fulfilled. When the idea was discussed in Highgate, Betsy exclaimed that she would rather see her boys growing up to break stones on the roadside than turn their backs on the little chapel at Pen-y-Maes. The issue was never broached again.

In common with other nonconformists of the period Betsy was a firm follower of the temperance movement, and regarded alcoholic drink as an evil influence on society. Richard Lloyd was of the same view, although, with characteristic modesty, he rarely spoke his mind on the matter or criticised others. His influence locally was such, however, that many years later, when he was helping out at his nephews’ law practice in Criccieth, the firm’s landlady was obliged to evict them. She reluctantly revealed that the public house opposite had complained that thirsty customers were afraid to enter by the front door in case Richard Lloyd spied them through the window of his office. Betsy and Richard’s influence was so strong on Lloyd George that he never set foot in a public house until adulthood, and although he drank wine and whisky in moderation in later life, he hated drunkenness, and regarded with contempt anyone who drank to excess. With Betsy though, principle would not stand in the way of kindness, and she would invite the village drunk, William Griffith, into the house to sober up by the fire before sending him home.

The shoemaking business and Betsy’s savings provided enough of an income for the family to live on. They were certainly not well off, but the children did not want for anything either. ‘Comfortable, but thrifty and pinched’ was Lloyd George’s description of Highgate.⁵ The children never had both butter and jam on their bread—it was one or the other—and the great treat on Sundays was half an egg each at breakfast. The family only felt the sting of real hardship after moving to Criccieth in 1880, when Richard had to give up the shoemaking business and the financial demands of giving the boys a good start in the world increased. At Highgate, Betsy’s careful husbandry made sure that there was enough to go around. She would spend hours mending the children’s clothes or altering her elder son’s cast-offs for William. Her pride demanded that her children were well dressed, and she was rewarded when Mrs Evans, the well-born wife of the local schoolmaster, remarked that ‘William George and his brother are the best-dressed children in school.’⁶

Even in these years, however, the family encountered hard times when Betsy’s investment income fluctuated or the shoemaking business dipped. These difficulties were enough to drive the already highlystrung Betsy to despair. Her asthmatic attacks were often severe, terrifying her young children, who watched helplessly as their mother struggled for breath. Richard knelt by her side rubbing her hand and muttering soothing words, but comfort came only in the form of religion. Once, Betsy was in tears after failing to make ends meet, when she caught sight of an article in a periodical. The transformation that came over her face was so striking that more than half a century later, William set out to see what it contained. The article, by one D. Morris, was headed ‘The Bible, the Destitute and the Widow’, and listed thirty passages from the Bible offering hope and comfort to those in Betsy’s situation. Her faith had come to her rescue yet again.

Betsy’s strength and vitality were slowly sapped by years of raising children under the constant shadow of financial hardship. She was never a strong woman, and her health held out just long enough for her to see her family grow to maturity. The children were in their teens before she became too ill to carry on. From then on the main responsibility for guiding her children was passed to Richard Lloyd, who, fortunately, was temperamentally and intellectually ideally suited to the task. Richard Lloyd was a stern taskmaster who earned his nephews’ obedience and respect, but like many men of the time, he left the task of disciplining the children to Betsy. She could never bring herself to punish David Lloyd. She spoiled him: he was never made to dress himself or even find his own socks, something that had ‘a marked effect’ on him in later life, according to his mistress.⁷ He grew to rely on his mother’s approval and unconditional love, and took an interest in every detail of her daily life even when he was married and living largely in London. Lloyd George’s last letter to her, two days before she died in 1896, reveals his anxious concern:

My dearest Mother,

…What you ought to do as long as the heat lasts is to take absolute rest…You must not try to be housekeeper, housemaid, cook and maid of all work in one. Just you sit down in the coolest room of the house and boss the lot of them. Give orders. I know they will all be pleased to obey and if they do not just you give them that tongue a bit of which your eldest son has inherited from you…Go out in the cool of the evening but don’t walk in this hot weather. It is more than anyone can do with any comfort. Let them get you a bathchair with Woodhart or someone else to wheel it. The approach to [the house] is so steep that it is most tiring for anyone, even in the best of weathers to walk it. You should not do so on any account as long as this terrible heat lasts. I am sure William will see to that…

It is a good thing that you have such a store of pluck to bear you up…I will back my good old Mother against the whole lot of them…

Your fond boy,

Dei⁸

As an invalid, Betsy would play an increasingly marginal role in her son’s life, but she was still able to take pride in his achievements, and in particular his growing fame. ‘I am glad that ‘rhen wraig [the old woman] got some satisfaction from her parentage of her eldest son,’ Lloyd George wrote to his brother in 1895. ‘She had a good deal of trouble with him in his younger days & I know of no one who made a braver & a more heroic fight to bring up her children respectably & to give them a fair start. She deserves all the feeling of elation which a contemplation of their success affords her.’⁹ Betsy lived to see Lloyd George elected to Parliament three times before her death at the age of sixty-eight.

The circumstances of her life and the age in which she was born led Betsy to live her life for and through her children. She accepted her situation stoically and, like Rebecca, kept her eyes firmly fixed on the rewards of the next life. Betsy inspired great devotion among those who appreciated her gentle, kind nature. She doted on her children, and indulged them as far as she could within the limits of her resources. They loved her deeply in return. In later life, Lloyd George prized liveliness and independence of mind in his female companions, yet he looked for different things in his domestic life: comfort, serenity and steadfastness. Betsy was the first woman who provided him with the domestic nurturing and adoration he needed.