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.
Betsy succeeded on the whole in keeping her cares and worries from her children, and the three young Georges had a happy existence in Highgate. They adapted quickly to their new surroundings, which Lloyd George found ‘picturesque, beautiful and inspiring’.10 Their games were those of country children: catching songbirds in the hedgerows, playing soldiers in the woods and throwing sticks in the fast-flowing river. Climbing trees was a favourite activity, especially if it was rewarded with cherries or apples from a neighbour’s orchard. Novelty was provided by the sight of four steaming horses pulling heavy cartloads of building materials through the village to the site where the local squire, Sir Hugh Ellis-Nanney, was building his new mansion, Gwynfryn. Treats included walking to Criccieth to fetch two pennyworth of treacle in a tin can and sampling a little on the way home, and, on baking day, soaking chunks of newly baked bread in buttermilk and anticipating the delights of rice pudding.
Household chores were divided up between the children. Polly helped her mother with the housework, learning to bake, clean and attend the washing, while William was sent daily to fetch a large bucket of water from the village well. David, known as Davy or Davy Lloyd, preferred to be outdoors, and his task was to tend the garden. He had inherited his mother’s green fingers, and loved to find rare plants on his long country walks to plant in the plot of land behind the cottage. One such find was a rare ‘royal fern’. It flourished at Highgate, and was so highly prized that it was dug up and transplanted to the garden of Morvin House when the family moved to Criccieth.
Davy was also in charge of gathering firewood for the household, a task in which he took immense pride. Among the many factors that made him one of the most successful orators of his time was his ability to use details from his childhood to illustrate a point, enabling him to form a point of contact with his audience. In a defiant speech defending his controversial 1909 budget, he recalled: ‘I am not afraid of storms. It wasn’t in a period of fine weather that we used to go to the woods to gather firewood when I was a boy. Not at all; we went after a big storm had struck the wood and littered the ground with broken branches. I’m telling you that after this storm has passed, there will be plenty of firewood to warm the hearths of old people and to brighten the lives of the poor.’11
The children had a secure childhood, protected by their uncle and indulged by their mother. Yet they could not entirely escape the manifestations of injustice in the social order. Even in the quiet backwater of Llanystumdwy, landlords wielded their near-absolute power over tenants with harrowing consequences. For the children, this meant that a walk through the woods involved avoiding the estate gamekeepers at all costs. The owners of Trefan were kind individuals who allowed local children to play on the estate’s land as long as they respected the livestock and did not disturb nesting birds. Their keepers, and those of Sir Hugh Ellis-Nanney, were a different breed altogether. The George brothers escaped their clutches by a hair’s breadth on numerous occasions. They knew that a widow in the village had had to send her son away for good to escape dire punishment after being caught with a hare killed on private land.
The benign presence of the Trefan ladies in the village, and the fact that the Ellis-Nanney family sponsored the local school, did not disguise the extent of the landlords’ power. In effect, the village was controlled by the squire and the parson, two all-powerful figures whose intervention could at a stroke destroy a lifetime’s work for tenants or parishioners. In 1868, when Davy Lloyd George was five years old, that power had banished some of his schoolmates from the village in an outrageous and vindictive act of revenge. The cause was the general election of that year, when the electorate dared return a Liberal candidate, the Welsh-speaking nonconformist Love Jones-Parry, instead of the local landowner Baron Penrhyn’s son, George Douglas-Pennant. Since the ballot was public, not secret as it became in 1872, disobedient tenants were easily identified. Flying in the face of democracy, compassion and common sense, the landlords retaliated. Families were turned out of their homes and robbed of their livelihoods as farms, shops and workshops had to be left behind. It was said that eighty men who worked in the Penrhyn slate quarry lost their jobs. For a family thrown out on the streets the only options were to rely on charity—something no proud nonconformist would willingly accept—or to move away to seek employment elsewhere. Thus, at an impressionable age the young George children saw some of their playmates in Llanystumdwy forced to leave the village, their families rendered destitute by the landlords. It was an injustice that burned into their consciousnesses, and one that Lloyd George never forgot.
At the age of three, Polly was the first of the George children to leave the hearth and join the procession of girls and boys marching daily to the village school. In September 1866 she was joined by her brother Davy Lloyd, with William following in 1868. The Llanystumdwy National School was established in 1851, in a two-roomed building next to the church. The majority of the pupils were from nonconformist families and spoke nothing but Welsh, but in school they adhered to Church rituals and learned to speak and write only in English.
Girls and boys of all ages were taught together by David Evans, an excellent teacher, able to bring his subjects to life and to excite young minds, and his staff of two pupil-teachers. There were seven standards, ranging from infants upwards, and school inspectors decided when each child was ready to progress to the next. After a year in the seventh standard, at around the age of fourteen most pupils were considered ready to leave school, but for especially gifted pupils David Evans offered a year’s further teaching, which he called standard 7X. The chosen ones would sit at a table close to Evans’ own desk, and would often be offered the chance to become pupil-teachers at the end of the year.
The curriculum consisted of the three ‘R’s plus geography, history and, for the brightest, a little algebra. Naturally for a school in a coastal area, a number of school leavers went to sea each year, so navigation was taught as an extra subject for recently-departed pupils bound for the ports of Porthmadoc and Pwllheli. David Evans also indulged his own interest in jurisprudence, which opened the eyes of at least a few of his pupils to the possibilities of a career in law. Reading was encouraged, but literature was available only to the lucky few like the George children who had books at home.
Welsh literature or history played no part in children’s formal education. They were given, in effect, the same education as their contemporaries in England, with no attempt to teach them about their own country or to connect with their community. The prevailing attitude among the (English-speaking) school authorities was that the Welsh language should be beaten out of children and replaced with the English of the Empire. It did not occur to them that the English language might not be of much use to children who would grow up to be farmers,