Lloyd George was not the only one to be caught out by Swetenham’s death. The Conservatives had to find a new candidate at once, and luckily for Lloyd George, the best candidate they could field at such short notice was the Llanystumdwy squire, Hugh Ellis-Nanney. There was rich irony in the battle between the Highgate lad and the living embodiment of the social system he hated so much.
As the campaign began, the outcome was far from certain. Lloyd George was in many ways the perfect candidate for the constituency: local born, Welsh-speaking and eloquent. He had also been making himself known to the electorate for over a year. Ellis-Nanney on the other hand was affable, well-meaning and an experienced candidate, having stood for Caernarvonshire Division in 1880, and for South Caernarvonshire Division in 1885. But he had lost both times, and was not in good health when he was persuaded to try again in 1890. He was also not Welsh-speaking, which was becoming more of an issue with the electorate. With little time to prepare, Ellis-Nanney played the strongest card in his hand, depicting his opponent as a radical firebrand and, less advisedly, as a young man who was more interested in the wider world than in Caernarvon Boroughs. The slurs only emphasised the unflattering contrast between the squire and his brilliant young opponent.
Lloyd George had two tireless campaigners at his side in Uncle Lloyd and his brother William. The three set out to attend to every possible detail during the election period, and Lloyd George consulted them on his every move, even enlisting his brother’s help in writing his election address. In it, he held back his most radical views in order not to frighten off the more moderate Liberal voters. His address ‘To the Free and Independent Electors of the Carnarvonshire District Boroughs’ was resolutely Gladstonian. He declared early on: ‘I come before you as a firm believer in and admirer of Mr. Gladstone’s noble alternative of Justice to Ireland,’ before making a brief reference to Wales’ own claims, not to Home Rule, since that was still controversial, but to the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, which would end the dominance of the Church over the Welsh nonconformist majority, and which was the Liberals’ main campaign in the late 1880s and 1890s. He said:
I am deeply impressed with the fact that Wales has wants and aspirations of her own which have too long been ignored, but which must no longer be neglected. First and foremost among these stands the cause of Religious Liberty and Equality in Wales. If returned to Parliament by you, it shall be my earnest endeavour to labour for the triumph of this great cause. Wales has for many a year yearned in her heart for the attainment of that religious equality and freedom which is impossible whilst the English Church as by law established is imposed upon us as the National Religion of Wales, and is maintained by Welsh national endowments, and whilst clerical bigotry dominates over our Churchyards.11
The reference to churchyards was a none-too-subtle reminder of the candidate’s personal triumph at Llanfrothen.
The Tories bitterly opposed Welsh disestablishment, and William George described in his diary how fierce the battle became: ‘We are in the thick of the fight. Personal rather than party feeling runs high. The Tories began by ridiculing D’s candidature; they have now changed their tune. Each party looks upon it as a stiff fight…The struggle is not so much a struggle of Tory v Liberal or Radical even; the main issue is between country squire and the upstart democrat.’12
Lloyd George was not afraid of being tagged ‘an upstart democrat’. He rejoiced in being a new breed of politician. By virtue of his education and legal qualifications he belonged more truly to the professional middle classes than to the ‘gwerin’ or peasant class, but he emphasised his humble origins in a speech that came to be recognised as prophetic:
I see that one qualification Mr Nanney possesses…is that he is a man of wealth, and that the great disqualification in my case is that I am possessed of none…I once heard a man wildly declaiming against Mr Tom Ellis as a Parliamentary representative; but according to that man Mr Ellis’s disqualification consisted mainly in the fact that he had been brought up in a cottage. The Tories have not yet realised that the day of the cottage-bred man has at last dawned.13
Indeed it had.
On 10 April 1890 the 4,000 voters in Caernarvon Boroughs went to the polls. Lloyd George spent the day with his supporters in Pwllheli before meeting up with Uncle Lloyd at Avonwen. The following day he made his way to the Guildhall in Caernarvon, where the votes were being counted. It was going to be a close-run thing. The votes piled up in two equal-looking heaps, and then Lloyd George was given the bad news: he had been defeated. But the returning officer had spoken prematurely. Lloyd George’s supporters had been primed to be on the lookout for any irregularity or skulduggery, since they (rightly) suspected that their opponents would do anything to secure victory. At the eleventh hour, Lloyd George’s electoral agent, J.T. Roberts, spotted a sheaf of twenty Liberal votes in the Conservative pile. He demanded a recount, and the result was overturned. By the skin of his teeth—only eighteen votes—Lloyd George had been elected to Parliament.
A large crowd was waiting as he emerged onto the balcony of the Guildhall, his brother at his side, and it greeted the new Member with half-crazed enthusiasm. After making a short speech in Welsh, Lloyd George travelled to Bangor, where he hailed the result as ‘a victory of democracy over the aristocracy’14 before dashing off a telegram to Uncle Lloyd. His message combined the rhetoric of victory—‘Have triumphed against enormous influences’—with engaging practicality: ‘home six; they must not engage band as rumoured, illegal; ask Maggie down’.15
Uncle Lloyd was overjoyed. He was not an excitable man, nor one given to exaggeration, but he wrote in his diary that night that the result was ‘almost a miracle’16—a word he did not use lightly. At 6 p.m. the newly elected Lloyd George returned to Criccieth, where he was greeted by crowds, bonfires and bunting—but no wife. Five months pregnant and with a fourteen-month-old baby to nurse, Maggie had decided that it was not sensible to leave Mynydd Ednyfed, despite her husband’s request. Lloyd George was rather prone to make unreasonable demands of her, ignoring her physical condition when she was pregnant and the practical difficulties of looking after young children. Although she occasionally ignored his pleas, it did not cause much friction between them, at this stage at least.
The celebrations in Criccieth lasted well into the night, and when, finally, Lloyd George was escorted home by an elated and noisy crowd he was met, not by an adoring and excited wife, but by a furious nursemaid charged with looking after the infant Dick. The new MP was brought quickly down to earth. He was subjected to a stern telling off, and his supporters were ordered to stop their shouting immediately for fear of waking the baby. It was a sharp reminder of his wife’s priorities.
*The word ‘child’ was added as an afterthought by the expectant mother.
*Lloyd George’s brother William would be elected Chairman of Caernarvonshire County Council in 1911, and in 1917 he too was co-opted as Alderman, a position he held until his death in 1967.
WHEN MARGARET HEARD THAT HER husband had been elected to Parliament, she wept. Lloyd George later recalled that they were ‘tears of regret for the ending of her hopes for a quiet, untroubled existence in the country’.1 However unrealistic her expectations of a quiet country life had been when she married, they were, it seems, genuine, and were now dashed