Unit 8 David Lloyd George and the destiny of Wales

Preface (Chris Williams)

‘David Lloyd George and Wales’, by Kenneth O. Morgan, was first published in 1988 in Wales 1880–1914, a volume of the ‘Welsh History and its Sources’ series. Morgan was, at that time, a fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, although he was to go on to become Principal of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and to enter the House of Lords as Lord Morgan of Aberdyfi. Morgan is a distinguished historian of modern Wales and a leading authority on the life and times of David Lloyd George. His first book, Wales in British Politics, 1868–1922 (1980 [1963]), examined the rise of a distinctively Welsh political agenda in the wake of the Second (1867) and Third Reform Acts (1884), and the ways in which that agenda influenced the Liberal Party and Liberal governments. Subsequently he wrote two biographical studies of Lloyd George, a major work on Lloyd George’s post-war premiership and edited a volume of Lloyd George’s correspondence. In addition he has contributed many essays on late Victorian and early twentieth-century Wales and wrote the entry on David Lloyd George for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2006).

‘David Lloyd George and Wales’ concerns itself with the relationship between the politician and his homeland. It was a relationship that was rarely uncomplicated and which has been interpreted in various ways by scholars over the years. Many have felt that, from the late 1890s, Lloyd George lost interest in specifically Welsh causes unless they were to his own political advantage. Yet, in what is the latest (although surely not the last) biography, Emyr Price has argued for a continuity between the Cymru Fydd movement led by Lloyd George and the creation of the National Assembly for Wales in 1999. Price calls Lloyd George ‘the first architect of Welsh devolution and its most famous advocate’ and ‘the pioneering advocate of a powerful parliament for the Welsh people’ (2006, pp. xi, 208).

There is qualified sympathy for such a viewpoint in what Morgan has to say in this essay. Writing more than a decade before the National Assembly for Wales was established, however, at a time when the Conservative Party had won three general elections in succession, his perspective was understandably rather more sober. In fact, in paragraph 8.4, Morgan draws an explicit parallel between the fate of Cymru Fydd in 1896 and the outcome of the first (1979) devolution referendum in Wales. On both occasions, he suggests, the internal economic, social, cultural and linguistic divisions of Wales scuppered projects designed to bring the country a measure of ‘home rule’, so that ‘[i]n 1896 as in 1979, the Welsh people, when offered a prospect of some political self- determination, rejected it out of hand by a decisive margin.’

This is an interesting, if potentially misleading comparison. In 1896, unlike in 1979 (or 1997), it was not the Welsh electorate that was being consulted but rather the delegates to a conference in Newport of the South Wales Liberal Federation, the party organisation covering the southern half of Wales. The North Wales Liberal Federation had already agreed to merge its identity into that of the Cymru Fydd League and form a new ‘Welsh National Federation’, but the SWLF rejected this course of action and so the Cymru Fydd movement came to a shuddering halt. As Morgan relates, Lloyd George felt he had been ‘howled down’ at Newport, but it is important to understand that this was not the view of all. According to Newport’s daily newspaper, the South Wales Argus, the bad behaviour at the meeting came more from Lloyd George’s supporters:

The howl that went up when Mr. Robert Bird [an opponent of Cymru Fydd] said there was a large community in South Wales which would not submit to domination and dictation [by the Welsh-speaking population] was as bad as the pandemonium on a football ground when the referee decided against the home team. Some of the delegates were like raving lunatics for a time ...

(Quoted in Williams, 1997, p. 124)

Furthermore, to oppose Cymru Fydd did not necessarily mean to be in opposition to what was considered to be the Welsh national interest. According to the daughter of Lloyd George’s main opponent at Newport, the coal-owner D.A. Thomas, ‘[w]hen “Wales for the Welsh” was the great cry of the Cymru Fydd, he would laugh and say he preferred as the Welsh motto “The world is our oyster” ’ (Williams, 1997, p. 122).

Just as historians should not accept uncritically one side of the argument over the events of 1896, so it is equally important to be even-handed in considering the devolution referenda of 1979 and 1997. The heavy defeat suffered by the ‘Yes’ campaign in 1979 may be attributable in part to Wales’s internal divisions, but these were not the sole considerations, and neither should they be regarded as necessarily atavistic. By 1997 enough had changed to make devolution an acceptable prospect (just) to the majority of those who voted.

Would Lloyd George have approved of the National Assembly for Wales? In all honesty, we cannot say. One of the main arguments advanced in favour of ‘home rule’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that it would lift some of the burden from an overworked Westminster Parliament grappling not only with domestic issues but also with the management of a vast overseas empire. By the late twentieth century that empire no longer existed. Lloyd George the statesman relied on the mechanisms of the centralising British state to deliver fiscal, welfare and constitutional reforms on a scale not previously seen. When he became prime minister he made no significant effort to revive the devolutionary agenda of the 1890s – understandably, given that he had to worry about rebuilding a world political order in the wake of the First World War. What seems certain is that Lloyd George’s relationship with Wales must remain a matter for debate.

David Lloyd George and Wales (Kenneth O. Morgan)