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The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George’s Life
Ffion Hague
‘Men’s lives are a perpetual conflict. The life that I have mapped out will be so especially – as lawyer and politician. Woman’s function is to pour oil on the wounds – to heal the bruises of spirit…and to stimulate to renewed exertion.’Lloyd George was a man who loved women and the tale of his intertwined relationships contains many mysteries and a few unsolved intrigues. He was involved in a divorce case early in his career, fought two libel cases over his private life and had persuaded the prettiest girl in Criccieth to be his wife. Lloyd George’s life was indeed a ‘perpetual conflict’. He was a habitual womaniser and, despite his early, enduring attachment to Margaret Owen, marriage did not curb his behaviour. There were many private scandals in a life devoted to public duty.Ffion Hague illuminates his complex attitude to women. Her own interest stems from the many parallels in her own life.
The Pain And The Privilege
The Women who Loved Lloyd George
Ffion Hague
To four remarkable families:Lloyd George, George, Longford—and my own
Table of Contents
Cover (#u3d261490-95cc-5550-82b9-af50e898c2db)
Title Page (#u0196107d-4eaf-5d54-8e9c-deaa159dc399)
Dedication (#u3edf27c9-a750-5fbb-ac96-87708eb43fd6)
Introduction (#u114fcf60-084c-5c2b-9dd7-473385f7a296)
Chapter 1: Hewn from the Rock (#u60bd33ea-8bb7-5a7e-9180-097b79507b5d)
Chapter 2: The Cottage-Bred Man (#u35459e9d-3f8f-51af-b6ba-44db5d060ec7)
Chapter 3: Love’s Infatuated Devotee (#ucf9ad9b0-1286-54e9-861e-c7c770e35085)
Chapter 4: Maggie Owen (#u384360a3-e9b4-54f6-b045-e7a343b4699f)
Chapter 5: Mrs Lloyd George (#u76ddaf8d-0bb9-5459-94e4-6cdcc3d4b62a)
Chapter 6: From Wales to Westminster (#uae154267-5b68-50b3-819e-c2457c2e4f54)
Chapter 7: Kitty Edwards (#u474d52fb-d13a-538b-b5c9-ee774e26c7a4)
Chapter 8: Mrs Tim (#u308cd516-0274-5f9c-b095-511706d6aac3)
Chapter 9: Mair (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10: Frances (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11: Overloaded with Flattery (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12: Love and Libel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13: A Family in Downing Street (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14: Secrets and Smokescreens (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15: Two Wives at No. 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16: The Family at War (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17: Diverging Paths (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18: Disillusionment (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19: ‘Dame Margaret is the Star’ (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20: Alone into the Wilderness (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21: Megan (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22: New Loves (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23: Crises Public and Private (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24: Private Sorrows (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25: Till Death us do Part (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_5224d215-6af0-54f0-96fd-b69663bec64f)
No one who grows up in Wales can escape the long shadow cast by David Lloyd George. In a country that loves heroes, the ‘Welsh Wizard’ and his mythology are still a potent force. ‘Lloyd George knew my father,’ runs the old song, ‘…and my mother,’ goes the unspoken second line, with a wink. To Conservative politician Lord Boothby, Lloyd George was ‘an artist expressing himself through the medium of politics…the greatest creative force I have ever come across’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Women found him compelling in a different way: ‘He could make anyone a friend of his. He had all the gifts and he could get his charm over to anybody and they would, as you know, worship him,’ according to his mistress.
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Intrigued though I am by Lloyd George, I have always found his first wife, Margaret, equally compelling. Maggie Owen was raised a God-fearing, Calvinistic Methodist, a Welsh-speaker and patriot. My original intention was to write a biography of this Welshwoman, to explore and understand how she made the journey from rural North Wales to Downing Street. I wanted to know if she felt overawed by her aristocratic and royal acquaintances, if she enjoyed her role in public life, if she regretted leaving Wales, and, above all, what price she paid for spending her life with an extraordinary man.
I was prepared to admire Margaret: it is difficult not to. She was a woman who took every opportunity to serve her beloved Criccieth and the wider community she came to represent during the country’s darkest hour. She was in some ways a conservative woman. Raised during the reign of Queen Victoria, she claimed home and hearth as her natural territory. In the early years of marriage she considered raising her children to be her career, and she was a late convert to the cause of female suffrage. Yet because of the man she married Margaret was presented with opportunities that took her far beyond the life she had anticipated for herself. She became immersed in her husband’s political career, and proved herself to be a formidable campaigner and speech-maker. When she found herself propelled into 10 Downing Street, this daughter of a North Wales farm had the wisdom and confidence to interpret her role anew, making it her own and, in the words of her brother-in-law, ‘showing the world what a home-loving wife of a Prime Minister could do’.
In undertaking the initial research for the book, I discovered that Margaret’s story would be incomplete without considering the other major player in her marriage: her husband’s mistress, Frances. Frances was as English (or, at least, non-Welsh) as Margaret was Welsh. She was a young Edwardian girl with nothing, it seemed, in common with Lloyd George. How could he share his life with two such fundamentally different women? As I learned more about Frances, I realised that she too had lived an extraordinary life. I began to appreciate that it had taken considerable courage for her to put her love of Lloyd George above conventional respectability, and to live her life according to her own interpretation of freedom and emancipation. Frances was a groundbreaking woman too. She gained a degree in Classics, became the first female Private Secretary to a British Prime Minister, was an eyewitness to some of the most momentous events of the twentieth century and the confidante of a great statesman.
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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’,
(#litres_trial_promo) 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 I describe in the early chapters shaped the late-twentieth-century Wales in which I grew up. I have always been conscious that there is a different social structure in Wales to that in England: a meritocracy based on education and culture which can be baffling to those who are used to social structures largely determined by wealth and birth. Calvinistic Methodism, nationalism, education and poetry are all vitally important factors in my Wales. Margaret, I am sure, would have shared my outrage at the nineteenth-century Encyclopaedia Britannica which baldly states, ‘For Wales—see England.’
Finally, it has been my privilege to get to know members of three families: the Lloyd George, George and Longford families. I could not have undertaken this book without their help, and their friendship is the principal reward of writing it.
Ffion Hague
April 2008
1 Hewn from the Rock (#ulink_9b497076-5283-5b4b-b2b2-705d9c094e3a)
THE SMALL VILLAGE OF Llanystumdwy lies on the south side of the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales. From the hills behind, the bay of Criccieth comes into view, with a far-distant prospect of the hills of Eifionydd. On a clear day, the outline of Harlech Castle can be seen in the distance guarding the coastline. The village is a mile and a half inland and about the same distance to the west of the coastal town of Criccieth. The fast-moving river Dwyfor emerges from the woods to meander between its houses and lanes, and is crossed by an arched stone bridge that provides the village with its focal point to the present day. On those arches, nearly 150 years ago, a schoolboy carved his rough initials: D LL. They are there still, a reminder that the village gave Wales her most famous and successful statesman.
The main village street runs parallel to the coast. Opening directly onto its narrow pavement, stands a stone cottage half-covered in ivy. It is a simple two-up, two-down structure with a scullery at the back and a single-storey extension on the left-hand side to accommodate a small, two-roomed workshop. The cottage is called Highgate, and it now bears a plaque that marks it as the boyhood home of David Lloyd George.
The cottage is entered from the road through a small, narrow passageway. To the right is the parlour, a formal room furnished with care and kept for serious activity: study and Sunday best. To the left lies the largest room, running from the front of the house to the back and containing a large hearth with table and chairs for family meals and for making the most of the dying embers on winter evenings. Behind the living room, a small scullery houses the pots and pans and leads to the back door and the garden beyond, where the earth closet sits at the furthest possible point from the house.
A wooden staircase rises from the front hall to the upper level, where the space is similarly divided into two rooms. The stairs spill out directly into the largest of the two, to the left and directly above the living room below, while the smaller bedroom, reserved for the head of the household, is enclosed and to the right above the parlour. Space is cramped, the ceilings and doorways are low and the solid stone walls form an impenetrable barrier to both wind and sun. It is a long road from Highgate to No. 10 Downing Street, yet the journey was staged in only two generations.
Llanystumdwy lies between the sea and the slate-grey rocks of Snowdonia. In the early nineteenth century its inhabitants bore a strong resemblance to the surrounding landscape: hard, weathered and stoic. The villagers belonged to the lowest of the social classes of rural Wales. They were the unlanded working class, as distinct from the landed gentry and the professional classes, entry to which could be achieved only through wealth or education; and opportunities for either were hard to come by in North Wales. The few born into wealth left, bound for expensive schools and colleges. They returned as landlords on the large estates or, in the case of younger sons, as Anglican clergy. These men formed the judiciary, owned the slate quarries and shipping companies, and elected members of their own class to Parliament. They were seen by the villagers as oppressors, people from a different ethnicity and culture.
Those who could not pay for education and who did not have any land to inherit worked on the land, dug slate or coal out of the ground, became domestic servants, or worked as fishermen, tradesmen, craftsmen and labourers in the docks of Porthmadoc and Caernarvon. The adventurous sailed away on the majestic ships that appeared from over the horizon to empty their holds and restock. There was nothing much to tempt those who remained to travel overland, since the roads were no more than rough turnpike tracks, and the railways that would bring industry and tourism to the area did not reach the north-west coast of Wales until 1867. The lucky few with aptitude and access to education rose to the top of the unlanded society, escaping manual work by becoming lawyers, doctors and teachers. Still, the social divide between them and the gentry was unbridgeable, underlined by the fact that the latter did not commonly speak the Welsh of the people, preferring English. Within the same square mile they spoke different languages and lived in different worlds.
Elizabeth Llwyd, known as Betsy, was born in Highgate in 1828. Her parents, Dafydd Llwyd and his wife Rebecca, were pillars of village society. Dafydd Llwyd, the highly skilled village shoemaker, was a tall, fair-haired man, profoundly religious and with an air of natural nobility. He had broad shoulders and a straight back, and spoke in a quiet but dignified manner.
(#litres_trial_promo) Dafydd was born in the parish of Llanystumdwy, and belonged to a generation of craftsmen who served a seven-year indentured apprenticeship with an established cobbler, made their own tools, and perfected their craft with years of patient toil. His son Richard was to carry on the trade, but he would be the last shoemaker in the family as the use of machine tools replaced their handiwork and produced cheaper products for a mass market.
Dafydd earned his living from making shoes, but regarded himself primarily as a man of religion. Religion was of paramount importance in Wales during the nineteenth century, with tensions between the established Anglican Church and the dissenting followers of Calvin, Wesley and the Baptists reaching a climax in 1811. In that year, Thomas Charles and his followers parted company with the Church of England to establish the nonconformist Church of the Methodistiaid Calfinaidd (Calvinistic Methodists), the only new Church ever to be established in Wales. A frenzy of chapel-building followed: between 1801 and 1851 it is thought that on average a chapel was completed in Wales every eight days. By the middle of the century there were over 2,800 nonconformist chapels in Wales, serving a total population of only 1,163,139, giving rise to a multitude of itinerant preachers. Men like John Elias, Christmas Evans and William Williams conducted preaching tours within Wales, speaking to mass congregations of hundreds if not thousands of the faithful.
Dafydd and Rebecca Llwyd were unusual in their community in being Baptists. More unusually still, they were Scotch Baptists. Baptists were most commonly found in South Wales, but even there were outnumbered by the Calvinistic Methodists and the Congregationalists, or Independents (Annibynwyr), who were numerous throughout Wales, particularly in the north and the west. The Established (Anglican) Church formed part of the archdiocese of Canterbury, and was to be the only official form of worship in Wales until the Disestablishment Act was finally implemented in 1920. This caused great tension in communities where devout nonconformists could not legally be married and buried in their own places of worship according to their own rites.
Naturally enough, since freedom of conscience was one of the reasons why the nonconformists broke away from the Church, Baptists placed a considerable emphasis on individual interpretation of gospels. This led to the breaking away of smaller groups. One of these was the Scotch Baptists, followers of the Scottish theologian Archibald McLean. Scotch Baptist chapels, scattered across a broad area, had tiny congregations: Rhuthun had only six members, Llanufydd twenty-five, Llanfairalthaiarn thirty-six and Llaneilian twelve. Members believed in living life as simply as possible according to the teachings of the primitive Church, and like the Quakers they did not have full-time ministers or priests. They differed from mainstream Baptists in two respects: they met to break bread in Holy Communion every Sunday rather than every month, and they placed a greater emphasis on baptism by total immersion, which generally happened at fourteen or fifteen years of age. The faithful were expected to attend services at least twice on a Sunday, sometimes three times. Dafydd Llwyd led the small Scotch Baptist community who worshipped in the simple stone chapel called Capel Ucha (High Chapel) in Pen-y-Maes, Criccieth. He was ordained in 1830, and for the rest of his life he served the small congregation there while working daily in his shoemaking workshop.
Dafydd married Rebecca Samuel in 1824, when he was twenty-four and she was twenty-one. Rebecca was a practical, hard-working and capable woman, the perfect foil to her husband, who was an intellectual and a bit of a dreamer. They shared the same religious outlook; indeed, it is highly likely that their religion brought them together since it was uncommon to marry interdenominationally, the consequences of which could be as harsh as total exclusion from chapel and community life. Their daughter Elin was born in 1826, Betsy two years later. Each birth was proudly inscribed in the family Bible, as was that of Rebecca and Dafydd’s only son, Richard, in 1834.
Rebecca Llwyd had exceptional strength of character and was known for her independence of mind, her fierce protection of her family and her strict, almost puritanical views on religion. She was the matriarch, and took care of the practical, day-to-day care of the family. She believed in hard work, discipline and self-improvement, as did her husband. Dafydd set his family a stern example, putting in long hours at his shoemaking by day and sitting up until the early hours working on his sermons by candlelight. In 1820, Dafydd and his fellow local intellectuals set up a debating society in Criccieth. The ‘Cymreigyddion’ (the Welsh Scholars) gathered regularly to discuss religious and political issues.
Dafydd and Rebecca were devout, patriotic Welsh citizens, part of the largely self-educated, chapel-going, economically depressed but intellectually ambitious elite of mid-nineteenth-century Wales. Dafydd Llwyd may have been a working-class man who made shoes for a living, but at the same time he was a leader within his community by virtue of the fact that he was a minister and a man of learning.
Rebecca and Dafydd could not afford to indulge their children. They lived their lives in hope of reward in the next world. Rebecca’s faith was put to the test when in 1839, with Betsy only eleven years old, Dafydd fell seriously ill. He had been suffering from a stomach complaint periodically, but this time it was to prove fatal. With no money to pay for medical help, Dafydd tried to treat himself with ‘Morrison’s Universal Medicine’ pills, as advertised in one of his periodicals, but to no avail. He died on 25 October at the age of thirty-nine, and was buried in the tiny cemetery bordering Capel Ucha.
Dafydd’s death was both an emotional and a practical tragedy for Rebecca. Left alone with three small children, she could not afford to grieve for long. This determined and resourceful woman refused to accept the fate of many widows, who sold their possessions to settle mounting bills before going into service or accepting charity. She chose instead to take on her husband’s shoemaking business herself. Richard was only five years old, and Rebecca knew that she would have to carry the burden alone for many years, but she had courage and stamina. Until her son was old enough to take over she employed two cobblers, Robert and Richard Morris, who lived with the family in Highgate. The overcrowding was slightly eased by the fact that Elin had left home to work as a maid at a nearby farm, but life was still hard. Rebecca rose early to set the journeymen to work and supervised their labour during the day, walking a twelve-mile round trip to the neighbouring coastal town of Pwllheli if necessary to buy materials. Late at night when the family were asleep, she would work by candlelight preparing accounts which she would deliver on foot to neighbouring houses and farms the following day, walking for miles over open countryside. Her efforts alone could not sustain the whole family, so Betsy had to leave school. After a period at home helping her mother, she followed her sister into service.
As a young woman, Betsy was a mild character, a devout Baptist like her parents, bright like her father, and attractive. She was described by her youngest son William as ‘a good looking woman of medium height, fair complexion, very dark hair and bright brown eyes giving a most winning expression to her thoughtful face’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She had a kind and gentle nature, in contrast with Rebecca’s rather stern manner. Betsy suffered from episodes of asthma throughout her life, and she was never physically strong. Hard work from an early age, coupled with poor sanitation and rudimentary medical care, frequently led to some kind of chronic complaint, and her condition was not unusual.
At around sixteen Betsy found a place as a maid and lady’s companion in Pwllheli. The ports of North Wales were becoming significant centres of commerce as large sailing ships carried passengers and goods between Britain and the rest of the world. Pwllheli was a bustling, lively town. Betsy became a regular attender at the Pwllheli Baptist Chapel, and there, when she was approaching thirty years of age, she met a teacher who led an adult class in Sunday School. He was an eloquent, welleducated widower by the name of William George.
Eight years Betsy’s senior, William was handsome, with dark hair and striking blue eyes. He was a sensitive, driven man who was a good teacher and a would-be intellectual. Of average height and broadshouldered, he was described by his youngest son as ‘well knit together with a somewhat thin pale face surmounted by a thick crop of dark hair, a high broad forehead, large lively eyes indicating a quick perceptive mind, a heart full of sympathy and tenderness, and all his movements quick but firm and determined’.
(#litres_trial_promo) His pupils would remember him as a passionate Baptist who was never beaten in debate.
William George was born in North Pembrokeshire in 1820, the son of staunch Baptists David and Mary George, who had a large farm called Trecoed. David died when William was very young, and the children were raised by Mary and her second husband, Benjamin Williams. From an early age William showed more interest in books than in animals. Life in an urban environment appealed to his hunger for experience and advancement, so he left home at seventeen to seek his fortune in the town of Haverfordwest.
William may have been intelligent and ambitious, but he lacked firm purpose and direction in life. First apprenticed to a pharmacist and then to a draper, he drifted from position to position, recording in his diary his dreams of becoming a great intellectual. He could not settle in any trade because he was determined to continue his studies, often reading late into the night, which made him tired and inefficient by day. His determination to study stemmed from the fact that any opportunity to improve his lot could be obtained only through education. Indeed, he had been lucky to attend school to the age of sixteen, since education would not be provided by the state until 1833.
The level of education in Wales was poor even by the standards of the nineteenth century. Children who spoke nothing but Welsh were taught in English, often by teachers who barely spoke the language themselves, and in appalling conditions. The overwhelming majority of the general population were nonconformists, but only members of the Anglican Church could become pupil-teachers. The Baptist William George nevertheless decided that teaching would be his profession, which meant that he would have to study full-time to gain a qualification.
At around the age of twenty-one William plucked up the courage to move to London and enrol in the Battersea Teachers’ Training Institute. For the first time he experienced intellectual fulfilment as he finally found the guidance he had been searching for. He described the experience as the most useful year of his life, ‘the means by which he was brought from a miserable, useless life to…a happy one and not altogether destitute of usefulness to others’.
(#litres_trial_promo) After qualifying as a teacher he went on to hold several short-term teaching positions in London, recording in his diary his agonising internal debate over what he would do with his life: ‘I am still very unsettled in my mind as to my future plans and prospects. I cannot somehow make up my mind to be a schoolmaster for life…I want to occupy higher ground sometime or other. I want to increase the stock of my attainments but hardly know how to set about it.’
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This ‘higher ground’ was William’s secret desire to try his hand at writing. Spurred on by his ambition, he arrived in Liverpool around 1846. By then he had spent so much time away from his native land that he had all but forgotten its language. ‘I wished to say a few words to you in Welsh,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘—but I am sorry that I cannot do so, although Welsh is my mother tongue—and I knew very little English until I was nine years of age—but I have used English ever since. The English language has done with me what the English people have done with our country—taken possession of the richest and largest part of it.’
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The latter half of the nineteenth century was an age of emigration from rural North Wales, with the decline in agriculture driving young men and families away from their homes to seek employment in the coalfields of South Wales, the metropolis of London and, increasingly, the cities and towns of North-West England, which came to form the largest concentration of Welsh people outside Wales. Those who left often found better educational prospects and more lucrative employment. With prosperity came a new breed of Welshman—middle-class, confident and socially ambitious. In Liverpool, Welsh industrialists and philanthropists like David Hughes and Owen Elias were responsible for building large parts of the city, and the entrepreneurial industrialist Sir Alfred Lewis Jones also made his fortune there. When William George arrived, around 20,000 of Liverpool’s citizens were Welsh-born, and he found a welcoming home among the Welsh diaspora. He felt at home among his professional compatriots and made the acquaintance of fellow intellectuals, some of whom, like the lawyer Thomas Goffey, were to remain his friends for life. He also met the famous Unitarian preacher James Martineau, one of the governors of the school in which he taught, who encouraged him to further extend his intellectual horizons.
But a nineteenth-century city was no utopia, and there were outbreaks of contagious diseases in the new suburbs that threatened all but the most robust. Eventually, fears for his health forced William to move back to Haverfordwest, where he opened his own school in Upper Market Street in April 1854. On 11 April 1855 he married the thirty-five-year-old Selina Huntley, whose family owned a Bond Street engraving and printing business. It is not known how they met, but she was suffering from tuberculosis, and it is likely that she, like William, was in Pembrokeshire for her health. The marriage took place in Hanover Square, London, and on the marriage certificate the bride and groom’s residence is, puzzlingly, given as Bond Street. They must have returned to Pembrokeshire after the wedding, for on 4 December Selina died there of consumption.
At the same time, William had to accept that his school had failed. Prompted by his lack of professional success, by his bereavement, or both, he decided to leave Pembrokeshire. In 1857 he responded to an advertisement for a schoolmaster to teach at the British School at Troed-yr-Allt in Pwllheli. He took up his position in 1858, and joined the Baptist chapel, where he met the attractive, dark-haired Betsy Llwyd. They were married in St Peter’s, the parish church in Pwllheli, on 16 November 1859, Betsy’s brother Richard acting as a witness.
After the wedding, Betsy left her domestic position to keep house for her husband. William was badly paid even by the standards of the day, and it is likely that they could not afford to run their own household. They moved back to Highgate, from where William walked or rode on horseback daily to school. William and Richard shared the same intellectual disposition, and quickly became firm friends; the fact that William was a Baptist no doubt pleased the fervently religious Rebecca.
