To my initial surprise, I found that I had empathy with Frances too. When I joined the Civil Service in 1991 as a fast-stream graduate entrant I took it entirely for granted that I could, potentially, rise to the top of my profession. I wondered what it had been like for Frances when she started working at the Treasury. She became the most senior woman in Downing Street—not entirely through her professional efforts, it must be said—but she proved to be more than capable, and was offered a permanent position as a civil servant when her ‘Chief’ left office. Frances was absolutely right when she wrote of her role as Private Secretary, ‘There is perhaps no other profession in which there are so many occasions when a woman might let her employer down…If she makes a mistake, it is probably her employer who will suffer.’3 Her job involved keeping a lot of secrets, which Frances was supremely well-equipped to do. She was a brave woman too. It took courage for her not to opt for the safe option of marriage and children in her twenties, and yet more courage for her to have a child at the age of forty, when she was still unmarried. I wanted to know how she had coped with her earlier abortions—what medical help was available to a woman in her situation—and whether late motherhood had fulfilled her expectations.
Frances paid a heavy price for her place in Lloyd George’s life. She endured loneliness, bitterness and trauma before becoming the second Mrs Lloyd George for the last seventeen months of his life, and like Margaret she never looked back. But their love of the same man meant that they could never be friends. Their rivalry injected poison into the lives of many others, and inspired a feud that outlived them both.
Lloyd George’s two wives were opposites in almost every sense, and he was faithful to neither; but as I discovered more about them, it became easier to understand why he needed them both. He loved Margaret, and she, to him, embodied Wales. She kept him in check, outwardly at least conforming to the principles of nonconformism and temperance. Margaret was intelligent in an instinctive way, but her mind was untrained and undisciplined. Her letters and articles betray her incomplete education: they are written in English but often adopt complex Welsh syntax which, when transposed directly from her first language make her style seem wordy. She moves seamlessly from English to Welsh and back again, on paper as in life, and refreshingly brings all political issues back to the same homespun common sense. Frances, by contrast, was both clever and trained—Lloyd George described her as having a ‘woman’s susceptibility with a man’s brain’,4 which he intended as a compliment, and in his work he could rely on her educated and discreet mind. Her instincts were not as in tune with his as Margaret’s. She was of a different generation, and did not share his empathy with small nations and international underdogs. But Frances was able to share his work in a way that Margaret could not. She was utterly loyal where her ‘Chief’ was concerned, and had a sixth sense about the people around him—Lloyd George once told Lord Riddell that Frances would be in his ideal Cabinet to ‘suss out the rogues’. He relied on Frances’ judgement when it came to politicians and statesmen, but if he wanted to speak to the general public, to convince them he had not lost touch, it was to Margaret that he turned.
This story could not have been written if the women in Lloyd George’s life had not preserved and bequeathed or sold their letters, diaries and memoirs to public libraries. I make no apology for shining a spotlight on some private matters, for it was their intention that the story should be told. Nowhere does Lloyd George’s masterly understanding of the women in his life show better than in these papers. His letters to Margaret are different in tone and language to his letters to Frances. He speaks plainly to Margaret, combining Welsh and English as freely as she does, and his expressions of affection are natural without seeming sentimental: it is the language of a long-married couple who have found a way of accepting and accommodating each other’s weaknesses. Lloyd George and Frances, on the other hand, write to each other using extreme romantic language, even after more than twenty years as lovers. Frances’ daughter, Jennifer, who was privy to many of their daily conversations, finds their letters cloying and sentimental: it is not the language of everyday life, and Frances adopts a much more realistic tone in her diary.
Was the tone of these letters genuine? Commentators have taken them as proof that the passion that inspired Lloyd George to take a permanent mistress lasted for the rest of his life. It is true that the connection between him and Frances was strong and durable to the end, but it is equally possible that Lloyd George was playing the romantic hero in his letters, in full knowledge that Frances needed to feel that she was necessary to him if she was to endure her precarious and unequal position. Frances sought romance, passion and a cause to believe in, which is precisely what Lloyd George gave her in his letters. They may not have been written in the language of their day-to-day relationship—which may be why they sound false to Jennifer—but that was necessary if he was to keep Frances at his side. With an eye to posterity, Lloyd George may also have intended the letters to excuse and justify his adultery. Let the reader be the judge.
From being intrigued by Margaret and Frances it was a short step to extending my research to the other women in Lloyd George’s life. Mair, Olwen and Megan, his daughters, were important players in the life of their brilliant father, from whose spell they never fully broke free. Megan is the subject of an excellent biography by Mervyn Jones, and her groundbreaking career as female MP and political broadcaster deserves greater attention than it has been possible to give in this book. Other women, of whom there were many in Lloyd George’s life, make their appearance in the narrative but exert less influence on the man and are not permanent features in his life. Rebecca Llwyd, Betsy George and Polly—his grandmother, mother and sister—are the exceptions: profound in their influence even though they fade out of the story at an early stage.
I have become convinced that Margaret was one of the most successful Prime Minister’s wives of all time. She became famous for her dignity and her dedication. She achieved an immense amount for charity, and took to public life with ease. It was fascinating to me to reflect, not for the first time, on the ambiguous position of women married to men in public life. Margaret Lloyd George never put a foot wrong. During wartime she worked harder than anyone around her, eschewing social glitter for austerity and public service. She played a supporting role to Lloyd George in public, but never lost her own sense of identity. She was politically active, yet she never embarrassed or publicly contradicted her husband. She was a steadfast friend and a formidable foe. By the time she died she was famous throughout the world, but she remained a Criccieth girl at heart. I cannot think of a better role model for those who find themselves in this most difficult of situations. Yet she has been overlooked for reasons that are unfathomable to me, unless it is because of the fact that her voice was not preserved in a memoir or diary.
Our story begins in rural North Wales, among working men and women who suffered hardship, persecution and injustice. From this voiceless class and this unforgiving environment, one man had the talent and the opportunity to find his voice and to help shape the course of the twentieth century. His community and his family devoted their scarce resources to nurturing his talent. They were the first people to experience the pain and the privilege of smoothing the path of David Lloyd George. While his life provides the structure of this book, it is not primarily about him or about the politics he lived and breathed: I would encourage readers who wish to know more about both to read the work of John Grigg and Kenneth Morgan, whose expertise in political history far exceeds mine.
The writing of this book has been a pain and a privilege in itself. I have learned a vast amount about my country and my heritage. The nineteenth-century Wales