Finally, in his diary entry of 31 December, he acknowledges that he has lost the fight: ‘To my lasting shame be it said—Love can fairly record me amongst its infatuated, brain-skinned devotees.’17
Perhaps Lloyd George thought his genius invincible, but his family were growing ever more concerned that he was being distracted by his flirting. Having failed to get him to stop seeing Jennie by direct appeal, the shrewd Polly resorted to more subtle tactics. She began to widen the circle of his female acquaintance by bringing more friends home. She organised little trips: a walk to a local beauty spot, or after-service singing sessions at which teenage boys and girls could mix. Faced with a greater choice of companions, Lloyd George concluded that he should not get so serious with Jennie. He began to take his evening walks with several different girls, and eventually the references in his diary to Jennie disappear entirely.*
The family’s move from Llanystumdwy to Criccieth in 1880 had been prompted by a number of factors: Uncle Lloyd’s health broke at the age of forty-five, and he was not strong enough to keep up his shoemaking as well as his preaching. His congregation were so anxious not to lose him prematurely that they arranged for him to have Morvin House, a small terraced house in the shadow of Criccieth Castle, at a peppercorn rent, enabling him to retire from his daily grind. At the time, it was not thought likely that he would ever recover his strength, a perfectly reasonable expectation given the premature deaths of his father, Dafydd, aged thirty-nine, and his brother-in-law William, aged forty-four. In the event, after a few years of ill-health he recovered, and lived to the age of eighty-two.
The logic of the move was inescapable. Although modest, Morvin House offered far more space and privacy than the cramped rooms at Highgate. Betsy was struggling to make ends meet, and in addition she had to find £180 (£14,965 in today’s money) to pay for her younger son’s articles. Practical considerations aside, the whole family was aware of the rumours of ‘fast living’ surrounding Lloyd George, and it would suit very well to have him back home, where they could keep an eye on him. In May the family packed up its possessions, including the precious collection of books, Betsy and Lloyd George dug up their favourite plants from the garden, and they moved a mile down the road to Criccieth. They left Llanystumdwy in a positive frame of mind, their financial worries eased for the present. Lloyd George wrote in his diary: ‘Left Llanystumdwy without one feeling of regret, remorse nor longing.’18
But the move to Criccieth was to herald their bleakest years as a family, and their financial difficulties, far from being over, were about to get much worse. Disaster struck when the building society in which Betsy had invested her capital collapsed, taking her remaining savings with it.* The family was left with virtually no capital, and little income beyond the minimal earnings of the young Lloyd George on which to live.
For proud people like Betsy and Richard, this was a bitter blow. They had survived many hardships without asking for help, but this time there was simply no option. Richard was forced to swallow his pride and ask a neighbour to lend him some money, but these occasional ‘loans’ barely kept the family afloat. Richard Lloyd mended and re-mended Polly and Betsy’s shoes, and Lloyd George records in his diary how Polly was unable to attend a festival in Caernarvon for want of the four-shilling fare until he managed to scrape it together for her. Betsy’s health suffered under the strain, and Lloyd George helped care for her as best he could while keeping up his punishing schedule of studying. In 1883 he recorded in his diary: ‘Mother had a very bad attack of asthma this morning prevented my going to my books until between 10 and 11. Reading few pages of Middleton’s Settled Estates & Statutes had to get candle at 7 tho’ I had my head out through the garret window.’19
Finally, desperate to bring in a little money, it was decided that they would offer room and board at Morvin House to tourists during the summer months. This seemed like an indignity to Lloyd George, conscious of his status as a budding lawyer and more mindful of his own comfort than his siblings, but in the end he had to agree to the inconvenience, and he was a little mollified when he discovered that one of their early visitors was H. Rider Haggard, the author of King Solomon’s Mines.
While Polly and Betsy struggled to keep house and home together, Lloyd George’s mind was on other things. He had been raised by one of the best pulpit speakers in the district, and under Uncle Lloyd’s tutelage he began to speak at Baptist services in the area, sometimes even preaching. He was keen to practise his speaking skills: he needed to become a good public speaker if he was to fulfil his dreams of a political career. Among the chapels he visited regularly was that in Penmachno, near the famous beauty spot of Betws-y-Coed. Unbeknownst to his family, he had a second motive for his frequent visits there, for among the congregation was a young girl called Kate Jones.
During the summer of 1882 Lloyd George walked the twenty miles to Penmachno a good deal more frequently than was strictly necessary. Kate, then aged eighteen, lived with her parents in a house called Glasgwm Hall. Lloyd George would have had plenty of opportunities to see her, for her father was an active Liberal and would become the first Liberal member of the new Caernarvonshire County Council when it was formed in 1889. Politics and religion combined to bring the two young people together, and soon Lloyd George was smitten. This time it was no mere flirtation. He was only nineteen and yet, without his family to intervene to keep things light, he seemed serious enough about Kate to consider marriage for the first time. The young girl was certainly a ‘catch’: she was from a respectable family and from the same Liberal, Baptist stock as Lloyd George himself. Best of all, she lived at a distance from Criccieth, and for a while was blissfully unaware of his reputation as the town flirt. Her innocence in that respect could not possibly last. However well he played the part of faithful suitor, in a close-knit society, people talked. The seriousness of his love did not extend to fidelity—it never would—and he was simultaneously courting a girl in Porthmadoc. This second affair was not significant enough for him to record it in his diary, but relying on geographic distance alone to keep his two girlfriends in ignorance of each other was bound to end badly, and the news of Lloyd George’s other girlfriend soon reached Kate.
This might not necessarily have been a terminal blow to the relationship, except that at the same time, a rival suitor came on the scene. The most eligible bachelor in Penmachno, the local doctor, Michael Williams—old enough to be established, but not too old to court an eighteen-year-old—took a shine to Kate. She was torn between the two for a while, and continued to see Lloyd George whenever he could arrange to speak in chapel. He in turn became more ardent in his suit, and wrote her long letters to impress her with his brilliance. Unfortunately, these backfired spectacularly, as Kate found his thoughts to be ‘far too independent’ for her liking. In November 1882 she gave in to her parents, who preferred their neighbour and friend to the struggling young lawyer from Criccieth, and accepted Williams’ proposal. She wrote to Lloyd George to tell him of her engagement and in his diary he recorded his stoic acceptance: ‘Well—I am not sorry. I think it is better she should stick to a man who is in a position to give her a comfortable position and not to an unthinking stripling of 19.’20
The reasonableness of her decision was obvious, and Lloyd George could see that she had had a better offer. But he had regarded himself as a serious contender for her hand, much more than a casual sweetheart. Whether this stemmed from genuine love or from the competition posed by his rival, we shall never know. The rather glum tone of his diary would suggest the former, and shortly after Kate’s engagement was announced he wrote her some verses. These prove that