Browse content similar to Dan Snow on Lloyd George: My Great-Great-Grandfather. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
Line | From | To | |
---|---|---|---|
This is the Palace of Versailles, on the outskirts of Paris. | 0:00:07 | 0:00:12 | |
Here, on the 28th of June 1919, | 0:00:12 | 0:00:15 | |
the victors of the First World War gathered to sign the treaty | 0:00:15 | 0:00:18 | |
which would definitively end the conflict, | 0:00:18 | 0:00:21 | |
would exact revenge on Germany, | 0:00:21 | 0:00:24 | |
and redraw the map of Europe. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:25 | |
Representing Britain and her empire in the magnificent Hall of Mirrors | 0:00:32 | 0:00:37 | |
on that extraordinary day | 0:00:37 | 0:00:38 | |
was the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. | 0:00:38 | 0:00:41 | |
It was the pinnacle of a career | 0:00:41 | 0:00:44 | |
that had started as a small-town solicitor in North Wales. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:49 | |
He'd gone on to become a reforming chancellor | 0:00:49 | 0:00:51 | |
and a charismatic war leader, | 0:00:51 | 0:00:53 | |
earning himself the title "the man who won the war". | 0:00:53 | 0:00:58 | |
But he was also my great-great-grandfather. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:01 | |
Even though it's 70 years since his death, | 0:01:06 | 0:01:09 | |
he remains a controversial figure. | 0:01:09 | 0:01:12 | |
It's apt to talk about him in a hall of mirrors, | 0:01:12 | 0:01:15 | |
because the truth remains very hard to pin down. | 0:01:15 | 0:01:19 | |
He was brilliant, certainly, | 0:01:19 | 0:01:20 | |
but he was slippery, devious, | 0:01:20 | 0:01:23 | |
and he was involved in financial scandals | 0:01:23 | 0:01:25 | |
that, today, would ruin any political career. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:28 | |
He was a serial womaniser, he was nicknamed The Goat. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:40 | |
He had such a long and intense relationship with a young secretary | 0:01:40 | 0:01:44 | |
that for years he effectively had two wives. | 0:01:44 | 0:01:48 | |
I'm descended from Lloyd George's daughter by his first marriage, | 0:01:48 | 0:01:52 | |
so that side of his character we didn't talk too much about | 0:01:52 | 0:01:55 | |
within the family. | 0:01:55 | 0:01:57 | |
In this programme, | 0:02:03 | 0:02:04 | |
I want to discover more about this complex character. | 0:02:04 | 0:02:06 | |
I want to understand what motivated him. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:09 | |
How did this radical liberal go on to become an imperial overlord? | 0:02:09 | 0:02:14 | |
Why, 100 years after he was made Prime Minister, | 0:02:14 | 0:02:17 | |
is he not remembered today as a Churchillian figure? | 0:02:17 | 0:02:20 | |
Is it, perhaps, because he's the man who won the war, but lost the peace? | 0:02:20 | 0:02:26 | |
This is Lloyd George country - North West Wales. | 0:02:46 | 0:02:49 | |
There's the town of Criccieth. | 0:02:49 | 0:02:51 | |
This is pretty much the westernmost part of Britain, | 0:02:51 | 0:02:54 | |
and it's astonishingly beautiful - big skies, rugged landscape, | 0:02:54 | 0:02:59 | |
where the mountains come down to the water's edge. | 0:02:59 | 0:03:02 | |
It's where I spent lots of happy holidays as a child. | 0:03:02 | 0:03:06 | |
David Lloyd George's daughter, Olwen, was my great-nain - | 0:03:06 | 0:03:09 | |
great-grandmother. | 0:03:09 | 0:03:10 | |
She lived in a big farmhouse just over there. | 0:03:10 | 0:03:13 | |
Her husband, my great-taid - grandfather - | 0:03:13 | 0:03:16 | |
died up on his sheep farm up on the hills behind. | 0:03:16 | 0:03:18 | |
My mum was born just over this hill here. | 0:03:18 | 0:03:21 | |
And this is Moel y Gest, this was a big mountain of my youth. | 0:03:21 | 0:03:24 | |
It looks a bit smaller now. | 0:03:24 | 0:03:26 | |
If I climbed this without complaining, | 0:03:26 | 0:03:27 | |
I got an ice cream afterwards. | 0:03:27 | 0:03:29 | |
And this is, well, little changed since he was a child here | 0:03:29 | 0:03:34 | |
at the end of the 19th century. | 0:03:34 | 0:03:36 | |
I often think of him walking these hills, being inspired, | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
being shaped by the community up here, | 0:03:39 | 0:03:41 | |
but also looking out there at the sea, | 0:03:41 | 0:03:43 | |
and realising the opportunities that lay beyond the horizon. | 0:03:43 | 0:03:47 | |
David Lloyd George wasn't born in Wales, | 0:04:00 | 0:04:03 | |
but in Manchester in 1863. | 0:04:03 | 0:04:06 | |
He moved to North Wales a year later when his father died, | 0:04:07 | 0:04:10 | |
and was brought up by his uncle | 0:04:10 | 0:04:11 | |
in the Welsh-speaking village of Llanystumdwy. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:14 | |
My nain used to paint a picture of David Lloyd George's childhood | 0:04:16 | 0:04:19 | |
in the most gruesome possible terms, | 0:04:19 | 0:04:21 | |
you know, he was poor as a church mouse. Is that true? | 0:04:21 | 0:04:25 | |
Well, they were poor, | 0:04:25 | 0:04:26 | |
but they certainly weren't the poorest of the poor. His uncle, | 0:04:26 | 0:04:31 | |
who brought him up, was a cobbler. | 0:04:31 | 0:04:33 | |
He didn't make an awful lot of money from being a cobbler, | 0:04:33 | 0:04:35 | |
but his mother did have some resources. | 0:04:35 | 0:04:38 | |
So they weren't absolutely penniless. | 0:04:38 | 0:04:41 | |
His uncle read a great deal, | 0:04:41 | 0:04:44 | |
there were lots of books in the house. | 0:04:44 | 0:04:46 | |
They were also a very religious household, | 0:04:46 | 0:04:48 | |
so that had a huge influence throughout his career. | 0:04:48 | 0:04:51 | |
His relationship with this part of North Wales is interesting, | 0:04:52 | 0:04:55 | |
because on the one hand it was clear that he was excited about leaving | 0:04:55 | 0:04:59 | |
and seizing the opportunities that the world, and London, had to offer, | 0:04:59 | 0:05:02 | |
but, of course, there's also the sense in which | 0:05:02 | 0:05:04 | |
he wanted to return here | 0:05:04 | 0:05:05 | |
and eventually wanted to be buried and to die here. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:08 | |
What do you think his feelings were towards this place? | 0:05:08 | 0:05:11 | |
Without question, I think there is a tendency sometimes | 0:05:11 | 0:05:14 | |
to see this part of the world as marginal | 0:05:14 | 0:05:16 | |
to the Industrial Revolution | 0:05:16 | 0:05:17 | |
or marginal to the great developments of the 19th century. | 0:05:17 | 0:05:20 | |
That's just not the right way to see it. | 0:05:20 | 0:05:22 | |
I think this area, politically, was very, very significant for him. | 0:05:22 | 0:05:27 | |
And he never lost his belief | 0:05:27 | 0:05:29 | |
that there was something fundamentally wrong | 0:05:29 | 0:05:32 | |
with the way in which wealth was distributed in this area. | 0:05:32 | 0:05:35 | |
It wasn't a poor backwater when he was growing up. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:38 | |
This was a thriving area with a slate industry, | 0:05:38 | 0:05:41 | |
but also with tourism. | 0:05:41 | 0:05:43 | |
The railway had come here in the late 1860s, | 0:05:43 | 0:05:46 | |
there were ships trading around the world, | 0:05:46 | 0:05:48 | |
but the wealth that came out of all of that | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
was very, very unequally shared. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:54 | |
And that, I think, is probably, | 0:05:54 | 0:05:55 | |
as he perhaps would have sat somewhere like this, | 0:05:55 | 0:05:58 | |
looking around him, | 0:05:58 | 0:05:59 | |
he would have noticed how much of the land that he was surveying | 0:05:59 | 0:06:03 | |
was actually not owned by the people who worked it. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:06 | |
OK, but I mean, it's fair to say that no previous Prime Minister | 0:06:06 | 0:06:10 | |
to Lloyd George had anything like that kind of upbringing. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:12 | |
He was the first person from a humble background. | 0:06:12 | 0:06:14 | |
The trajectory that Lloyd George followed from such humble beginnings | 0:06:14 | 0:06:19 | |
to becoming Prime Minister of the British Empire | 0:06:19 | 0:06:22 | |
in its greatest hour of need, the trajectory is unparalleled - | 0:06:22 | 0:06:26 | |
there's nobody who travelled such a path. | 0:06:26 | 0:06:28 | |
Lloyd George's roots were here in North Wales, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:36 | |
but his ambitions were too big to be contained | 0:06:36 | 0:06:38 | |
in just one corner of the country. | 0:06:38 | 0:06:40 | |
This was a young man in a hurry. | 0:06:40 | 0:06:42 | |
TRAIN WHISTLES | 0:06:42 | 0:06:44 | |
David Lloyd George was a most unlikely person | 0:06:54 | 0:06:56 | |
to become Britain's First World War leader. | 0:06:56 | 0:06:59 | |
He was from an anti-war party, the Liberals, | 0:06:59 | 0:07:01 | |
from nonconformist, chapel-going Wales. | 0:07:01 | 0:07:05 | |
He was not part of the establishment. | 0:07:05 | 0:07:07 | |
He didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge, | 0:07:11 | 0:07:13 | |
and didn't have any military training. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:16 | |
TRAIN WHISTLES | 0:07:16 | 0:07:18 | |
He was the ultimate outsider. | 0:07:21 | 0:07:23 | |
This train's played a special part in our family story. | 0:07:24 | 0:07:27 | |
Not only numerous childhood holidays spent riding on this train, | 0:07:27 | 0:07:33 | |
but also my nain always said to me that when her parents were courting, | 0:07:33 | 0:07:37 | |
my great-taid would come down from the slate mines | 0:07:37 | 0:07:40 | |
and visit my great-nain on this train, as well. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:43 | |
TRAIN WHISTLES | 0:07:43 | 0:07:45 | |
And, of course, David Lloyd George used to use this train | 0:07:45 | 0:07:48 | |
when he was up visiting the slate quarries. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:50 | |
He had a roaring practice as a solicitor | 0:07:50 | 0:07:52 | |
and worked with many of the mines up there. | 0:07:52 | 0:07:54 | |
And legend has it this was his private compartment. | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
A little shelf here for him. | 0:07:57 | 0:07:59 | |
He could put out his work, and he could work here in private. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:02 | |
The rumour was that he had blinds fitted to these windows | 0:08:07 | 0:08:10 | |
so he could enjoy a bit of privacy with his secretary. | 0:08:10 | 0:08:14 | |
Rumours about his sexual promiscuity started quite early. | 0:08:14 | 0:08:18 | |
TRAIN WHISTLES | 0:08:18 | 0:08:19 | |
Whatever the truth of them, | 0:08:19 | 0:08:21 | |
he was certainly an incredibly charismatic man - | 0:08:21 | 0:08:23 | |
piercing blue eyes, a great speaker - | 0:08:23 | 0:08:26 | |
he was a natural for going into politics. | 0:08:26 | 0:08:28 | |
People have compared him to early Bill Clinton | 0:08:28 | 0:08:30 | |
or Tony Blair in that respect. | 0:08:30 | 0:08:32 | |
In 1890, he won a by-election | 0:08:38 | 0:08:40 | |
and was elected the local Liberal MP, | 0:08:40 | 0:08:43 | |
winning by just 19 votes. | 0:08:43 | 0:08:46 | |
Initially he spoke on Welsh issues, | 0:08:46 | 0:08:48 | |
on temperance, and the Welsh Church. | 0:08:48 | 0:08:51 | |
But he soon made a name for himself as an antiestablishment figure. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:54 | |
Lloyd George did feel that he was a man of the people, | 0:08:56 | 0:08:59 | |
and did feel different, and an outsider in Westminster. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:01 | |
Very much so. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:02 | |
And this is something that always marks him. | 0:09:02 | 0:09:04 | |
He's a Welsh speaker, | 0:09:04 | 0:09:06 | |
his first language is not English, | 0:09:06 | 0:09:07 | |
he's from a very ordinary background, | 0:09:07 | 0:09:10 | |
he's a very ambitious man, | 0:09:10 | 0:09:11 | |
he's on the way to the top, nothing is going to stop him getting there. | 0:09:11 | 0:09:15 | |
In terms of his broader attitudes, this is a liberal imperialist. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:20 | |
He believes in the British Empire, | 0:09:20 | 0:09:22 | |
he believes in the idea of the British Empire expanding, | 0:09:22 | 0:09:24 | |
but he has criticisms of that empire and how it is run. | 0:09:24 | 0:09:27 | |
The issue that brought Lloyd George to national attention | 0:09:28 | 0:09:31 | |
was the Boer War. | 0:09:31 | 0:09:32 | |
He thought the conflict in South Africa was a bad war, | 0:09:32 | 0:09:35 | |
as Barack Obama might have said, a dumb war. | 0:09:35 | 0:09:38 | |
When he spoke out against it in Parliament, he was in the minority, | 0:09:40 | 0:09:43 | |
a firebrand anti-war activist. | 0:09:43 | 0:09:46 | |
He caused a riot at a meeting in Birmingham | 0:09:46 | 0:09:49 | |
and had to escape disguised as a policeman. | 0:09:49 | 0:09:52 | |
But it made him a public figure of note. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:54 | |
Lloyd George was only 27 when he became an MP | 0:09:58 | 0:10:01 | |
and entered this place. | 0:10:01 | 0:10:02 | |
He quickly established himself | 0:10:02 | 0:10:04 | |
as one of the most dynamic and remarkable politicians | 0:10:04 | 0:10:07 | |
of his generation. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:09 | |
And he served here a long and extraordinary career until 1945. | 0:10:09 | 0:10:14 | |
And all that earned him, well, pride of place, | 0:10:14 | 0:10:17 | |
his statue now stands at the very entrance | 0:10:17 | 0:10:20 | |
to the House of Commons Chamber | 0:10:20 | 0:10:22 | |
alongside his old friend, Winston Churchill. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:24 | |
SHOUTING AND JEERING | 0:10:36 | 0:10:38 | |
The young MP that entered this chamber, David Lloyd George, | 0:10:41 | 0:10:45 | |
was a radical liberal. | 0:10:45 | 0:10:47 | |
He was determined to reform the system, and he did. | 0:10:47 | 0:10:51 | |
He actually managed to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:53 | |
And, in 1909, after vicious debate in here, | 0:10:53 | 0:10:57 | |
he managed to pass the People's Budget, | 0:10:57 | 0:10:59 | |
one of the most important reforming documents | 0:10:59 | 0:11:01 | |
in British history. | 0:11:01 | 0:11:02 | |
It established, for the first time, old-age pensions, | 0:11:02 | 0:11:05 | |
national insurance. It was something of a breakthrough, | 0:11:05 | 0:11:09 | |
it laid the foundations of the modern welfare state. | 0:11:09 | 0:11:12 | |
Today those achievements are still admired, | 0:11:12 | 0:11:15 | |
even by senior Labour Party figures, like his biographer, Roy Hattersley. | 0:11:15 | 0:11:20 | |
In a sense, he invented the welfare state. | 0:11:20 | 0:11:22 | |
People had talked about it before Lloyd George, | 0:11:22 | 0:11:24 | |
indeed, Asquith had announced the intention | 0:11:24 | 0:11:25 | |
of having an old-age pension, | 0:11:25 | 0:11:27 | |
but Lloyd George introduced the old-age pension, health insurance, | 0:11:27 | 0:11:30 | |
unemployment insurance. | 0:11:30 | 0:11:31 | |
And not only did he introduce the bills, | 0:11:31 | 0:11:33 | |
but he said the right things about them. | 0:11:33 | 0:11:35 | |
He talked about the community being responsible for its weakest members. | 0:11:35 | 0:11:38 | |
He talked about the rich helping the poor. | 0:11:38 | 0:11:40 | |
He was a radical in thought as well as in action. | 0:11:40 | 0:11:42 | |
There's no politician who did quite so much, in so short a time. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:45 | |
Those six years are spectacular years, | 0:11:45 | 0:11:47 | |
which no other politician can match, I think. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
Everybody comments on Lloyd George's enormous charisma, | 0:11:50 | 0:11:53 | |
particularly when it came to public speaking. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:55 | |
It's very hard for us to imagine what that was like, | 0:11:55 | 0:11:58 | |
because, unlike Churchill, who was in many ways his protege, | 0:11:58 | 0:12:02 | |
there are no recordings of Lloyd George | 0:12:02 | 0:12:04 | |
at the peak of his powers. | 0:12:04 | 0:12:06 | |
We have been able to find one from the early 1930s. | 0:12:06 | 0:12:09 | |
He is talking about unemployment, | 0:12:09 | 0:12:10 | |
and you do just get a hint of how good he was. | 0:12:10 | 0:12:15 | |
We have recently increased the dole. | 0:12:15 | 0:12:17 | |
What is needed is to find work. | 0:12:19 | 0:12:22 | |
There are plenty of jobs for all, | 0:12:24 | 0:12:27 | |
jobs which the nation needs done. | 0:12:27 | 0:12:32 | |
We must recast, remodel, and reconstruct. | 0:12:32 | 0:12:37 | |
'One of the most notable historians of the First World War | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
'is Margaret MacMillan.' | 0:12:41 | 0:12:42 | |
-Hey, Dan. -Hello, Margaret. -Nice to see you, how are you? | 0:12:42 | 0:12:45 | |
'She's also my auntie Margie, | 0:12:45 | 0:12:46 | |
'another member of the Lloyd George dynasty.' | 0:12:46 | 0:12:50 | |
Lloyd George understood the power of the word. | 0:12:50 | 0:12:52 | |
I mean, he was a great orator himself, | 0:12:52 | 0:12:54 | |
and I think he grasped, earlier than a lot of people, | 0:12:54 | 0:12:57 | |
the power of the new form of mass media, which was the mass newspaper. | 0:12:57 | 0:13:01 | |
I mean, these newspapers had circulations of a million or more, | 0:13:01 | 0:13:04 | |
his speeches were reported all over the British Empire. | 0:13:04 | 0:13:07 | |
And he was a great orator. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:09 | |
I mean, if you read them now, they still read very well. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:12 | |
By the summer of 1914, | 0:13:13 | 0:13:15 | |
Lloyd George was second only to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith | 0:13:15 | 0:13:19 | |
in the Liberal government. | 0:13:19 | 0:13:20 | |
He'd been primarily focused on domestic matters, | 0:13:20 | 0:13:24 | |
but like many British politicians since - Tony Blair, for example - | 0:13:24 | 0:13:27 | |
Lloyd George was to be defined by foreign affairs. | 0:13:27 | 0:13:31 | |
As Britain basked in that last summer of peace, | 0:13:34 | 0:13:37 | |
even senior politicians, like Lloyd George, didn't see it coming. | 0:13:37 | 0:13:40 | |
Here he is in a photograph taken just six days before | 0:13:42 | 0:13:45 | |
the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. | 0:13:45 | 0:13:48 | |
He's watching Trooping the Colour, | 0:13:48 | 0:13:50 | |
seemingly without a care in the world. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:52 | |
GUNSHOT | 0:13:52 | 0:13:53 | |
But the shooting in Sarajevo triggered a slide towards war | 0:13:53 | 0:13:57 | |
which international diplomacy was powerless to prevent. | 0:13:57 | 0:14:01 | |
During the tense discussions that led up to | 0:14:01 | 0:14:04 | |
the British government's declaration of war in 1914, | 0:14:04 | 0:14:07 | |
Lloyd George was a pivotal figure. | 0:14:07 | 0:14:09 | |
Not only was he probably the most popular member of cabinet, | 0:14:09 | 0:14:13 | |
but he still had that reputation | 0:14:13 | 0:14:15 | |
from his old anti-Boer War campaigning | 0:14:15 | 0:14:18 | |
as a bit of a pacifist. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:19 | |
So if he'd come out strongly against going to war, it's hard to see | 0:14:19 | 0:14:23 | |
how the government could have taken Britain into the struggle. | 0:14:23 | 0:14:26 | |
I think Lloyd George was a key swing member. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:28 | |
I mean, we don't know exactly what happened | 0:14:28 | 0:14:30 | |
in those crucial cabinet meetings over the weekend, | 0:14:30 | 0:14:32 | |
but we have enough diaries, and enough letters, enough reminiscences | 0:14:32 | 0:14:36 | |
to get a picture. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:37 | |
And I think the Cabinet was very badly divided, | 0:14:37 | 0:14:39 | |
but he became convinced, it appears, in the course of that weekend | 0:14:39 | 0:14:43 | |
that Britain had no choice but to enter the war. | 0:14:43 | 0:14:47 | |
And I think if he'd joined the very determined bunch - | 0:14:47 | 0:14:50 | |
the minority, but very determined - | 0:14:50 | 0:14:52 | |
who said that Britain should stay out of the war, | 0:14:52 | 0:14:54 | |
it would have split the Liberal Party. | 0:14:54 | 0:14:56 | |
And if there was anything the Liberals worried about | 0:14:56 | 0:14:58 | |
more than going to war, it was letting the Tories back in. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:01 | |
You get a real sense of the tension and of the personal toll | 0:15:01 | 0:15:04 | |
that all this decision-making was having on the participants | 0:15:04 | 0:15:07 | |
in a series of notes written by Lloyd George | 0:15:07 | 0:15:11 | |
to his wife, Margaret, back in Wales. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:13 | |
On the 27th of July 1914, he wrote, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:16 | |
"Austria, Serbia is pandemonium let loose." | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
Little did he know how true that would prove. | 0:15:19 | 0:15:22 | |
The following day, 28th, he wrote, "War trembling in the balance." | 0:15:22 | 0:15:26 | |
The day after, "Very grave Cabinet this morning." | 0:15:26 | 0:15:29 | |
And finally, on the 3rd of August, | 0:15:29 | 0:15:31 | |
"I am moving through a nightmare world these days. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:34 | |
"I am horrified at the prospect of it, | 0:15:34 | 0:15:37 | |
"but I must bear my share of the ghastly burden, | 0:15:37 | 0:15:40 | |
"though it scorches my flesh to do so." | 0:15:40 | 0:15:43 | |
On the following day, the 4th of August 1914, | 0:15:43 | 0:15:47 | |
Britain declared war against Germany. | 0:15:47 | 0:15:49 | |
Once war was declared, | 0:15:51 | 0:15:53 | |
the British Expeditionary Force was dispatched to France, | 0:15:53 | 0:15:56 | |
and the Navy deployed. | 0:15:56 | 0:15:58 | |
But this was a war that wasn't supposed to happen. | 0:15:58 | 0:16:01 | |
Britain only had a small standing army, | 0:16:01 | 0:16:03 | |
and there was an urgent need to recruit more soldiers. | 0:16:03 | 0:16:06 | |
Unlike his colleagues, | 0:16:06 | 0:16:08 | |
Lloyd George was a recognisably modern politician. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:11 | |
He was seen as crucial in appealing for volunteers | 0:16:11 | 0:16:14 | |
and setting out the case for war. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:16 | |
Lloyd George quickly became the public face of the government. | 0:16:18 | 0:16:22 | |
He would tour the country making speeches and meeting the people. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:25 | |
He gave one particularly famous speech in London | 0:16:25 | 0:16:28 | |
on the 19th of September 1914, | 0:16:28 | 0:16:31 | |
just a few weeks after the outbreak of war. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:33 | |
In that speech, he set out the government's case for war. | 0:16:33 | 0:16:37 | |
He was an incredibly gifted orator, | 0:16:37 | 0:16:39 | |
he'd learned his skills in the dissenting chapels of Criccieth, | 0:16:39 | 0:16:43 | |
but on this particular night, he was nervous. | 0:16:43 | 0:16:46 | |
He was worried that he wouldn't be able to play his audience, | 0:16:46 | 0:16:49 | |
as he so usually did, like a violin. | 0:16:49 | 0:16:51 | |
He rehearsed and rehearsed, | 0:16:51 | 0:16:53 | |
and was struggling to get the tone right. | 0:16:53 | 0:16:55 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:16:55 | 0:16:57 | |
"My Lords, ladies and gentlemen," he started, | 0:17:04 | 0:17:10 | |
"I've come here this afternoon to talk to my fellow countrymen | 0:17:10 | 0:17:13 | |
"about this great war and the part we ought to take in it." | 0:17:13 | 0:17:18 | |
And he went on to list the reasons why he thought it was correct | 0:17:18 | 0:17:21 | |
that His Majesty's government had sided with Belgium and France | 0:17:21 | 0:17:25 | |
against Germany. | 0:17:25 | 0:17:27 | |
It's full of soaring rhetoric, it's wonderful stuff, | 0:17:27 | 0:17:30 | |
but it also contains passages that would, perhaps, be more accessible | 0:17:30 | 0:17:34 | |
for the man on the street, | 0:17:34 | 0:17:35 | |
showing that he had a real grasp of communicating in that era. | 0:17:35 | 0:17:39 | |
He makes a joke, | 0:17:39 | 0:17:40 | |
he says that the Kaiser's troops are all six foot two, | 0:17:40 | 0:17:44 | |
and the Kaiser's allies are all six-foot-two nations, | 0:17:44 | 0:17:46 | |
"but, ah, the world owes much to the little five-foot-five nations." | 0:17:46 | 0:17:51 | |
A reference, of course, to places like Belgium and Wales, | 0:17:51 | 0:17:54 | |
but also, a reference to his own height - | 0:17:54 | 0:17:56 | |
he was only five foot six, | 0:17:56 | 0:17:57 | |
and the audience loved it. | 0:17:57 | 0:17:59 | |
We're told they laughed. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:00 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:18:00 | 0:18:03 | |
It's difficult now to fully grasp how good he was as a speaker. | 0:18:03 | 0:18:08 | |
Lloyd George was kind of more outgoing, more communicative, | 0:18:08 | 0:18:12 | |
more willing to listen to other people. | 0:18:12 | 0:18:14 | |
And the way that he described his experience of speaking was that | 0:18:14 | 0:18:19 | |
he felt he could actually sort of see into the minds of his audience, | 0:18:19 | 0:18:22 | |
that he could read them, | 0:18:22 | 0:18:23 | |
he could understand what their thoughts and feelings were, | 0:18:23 | 0:18:26 | |
and was then able to play back to them | 0:18:26 | 0:18:28 | |
what they really wanted to hear. | 0:18:28 | 0:18:30 | |
Towards the end of the speech, | 0:18:32 | 0:18:34 | |
one of the most powerful sections deals with the opportunity | 0:18:34 | 0:18:38 | |
for young people to get involved, | 0:18:38 | 0:18:39 | |
to enlist and fight for King, Empire, | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
and the cause of civilisation. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:44 | |
He says, "I envy you young people, your opportunity. | 0:18:44 | 0:18:48 | |
"It's a great opportunity. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:49 | |
"An opportunity that comes only once in many centuries | 0:18:49 | 0:18:53 | |
"to the children of men. | 0:18:53 | 0:18:55 | |
"For most generations, | 0:18:55 | 0:18:56 | |
"sacrifice comes in drab and weariness of spirit. | 0:18:56 | 0:18:59 | |
"It comes to you today, and it comes today to us all | 0:18:59 | 0:19:02 | |
"in the form of the glow and the thrill | 0:19:02 | 0:19:04 | |
"of a great movement for liberty. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:06 | |
"It impels millions throughout Europe to the same noble end." | 0:19:06 | 0:19:12 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:19:12 | 0:19:15 | |
The speech did the job. | 0:19:19 | 0:19:21 | |
It electrified the audience, the public, | 0:19:21 | 0:19:23 | |
and even his cabinet colleagues. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:25 | |
It was so popular that it was published as a pamphlet | 0:19:25 | 0:19:28 | |
and it sold hundreds of thousands. | 0:19:28 | 0:19:30 | |
But not for the first time, when it comes to politicians, | 0:19:30 | 0:19:33 | |
David Lloyd George's real feelings | 0:19:33 | 0:19:36 | |
didn't quite match his soaring oratory. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:39 | |
At exactly the same time that he was down here in London | 0:19:41 | 0:19:44 | |
eulogising a sacrifice of young men in the name of liberty, | 0:19:44 | 0:19:49 | |
he was also writing to his wife, who was up in North Wales, | 0:19:49 | 0:19:52 | |
about their sons, Gwilym and Richard. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:56 | |
I've got the letter here. It makes interesting reading. | 0:19:56 | 0:20:00 | |
He wrote, "They're pressing the Territorials to volunteer for war. | 0:20:00 | 0:20:03 | |
"Gwilym mustn't do that yet. | 0:20:03 | 0:20:05 | |
"I'm dead against carrying on a war of conquest to crush Germany | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
"for the benefit of Russia. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:10 | |
"I'm not going to sacrifice my nice boy for that purpose. | 0:20:10 | 0:20:13 | |
"You must write, telling him he must, on no account, | 0:20:13 | 0:20:16 | |
"be bullied into volunteering abroad." | 0:20:16 | 0:20:18 | |
Well, that is straightforward hypocrisy - | 0:20:19 | 0:20:23 | |
saying one thing in public, | 0:20:23 | 0:20:25 | |
but a very different thing in private. | 0:20:25 | 0:20:28 | |
I can understand why he didn't want his sons to go and fight in the war, | 0:20:28 | 0:20:31 | |
but it's pretty rich coming from a man who is encouraging | 0:20:31 | 0:20:33 | |
everyone else to send their sons into harm's way. | 0:20:33 | 0:20:35 | |
Eventually, the two boys did go and fight on the Western Front, | 0:20:35 | 0:20:39 | |
but I think that really shows Lloyd George to be | 0:20:39 | 0:20:42 | |
the slippery customer he definitely was. | 0:20:42 | 0:20:45 | |
I suppose he was a normal human being with frailties | 0:20:47 | 0:20:50 | |
and, I think he was always, I suspect, | 0:20:50 | 0:20:53 | |
something of a physical coward. | 0:20:53 | 0:20:54 | |
But I think he didn't like the thought of death, | 0:20:54 | 0:20:57 | |
he didn't like the thought of illness. | 0:20:57 | 0:20:58 | |
Apparently, he was the most terrible hypochondriac if he got sick. | 0:20:58 | 0:21:01 | |
Which is true, of course, of a lot of men, | 0:21:01 | 0:21:03 | |
so maybe he wasn't unusual in that! | 0:21:03 | 0:21:04 | |
But he also, I think, was probably afraid of pain and death. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:09 | |
And he was very devoted to his children. | 0:21:09 | 0:21:11 | |
So, no, it's not admirable for him to say, | 0:21:11 | 0:21:13 | |
when other people's sons are going off to fight, | 0:21:13 | 0:21:15 | |
"For God's sake, don't let our sons join up," | 0:21:15 | 0:21:17 | |
but it's a very human sort of thing to do. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:20 | |
Nothing demonstrates Lloyd George's dubious reputation more | 0:21:21 | 0:21:25 | |
than his relationship with women. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:27 | |
He married his first wife, Margaret, in 1888, | 0:21:27 | 0:21:30 | |
when they were both in their early 20s. | 0:21:30 | 0:21:32 | |
But in the years leading up to the First World War, | 0:21:32 | 0:21:35 | |
he was cited in two divorce cases. | 0:21:35 | 0:21:38 | |
Not for nothing was he nicknamed The Goat. | 0:21:38 | 0:21:41 | |
Lloyd George's private life has attracted almost as much attention | 0:21:41 | 0:21:45 | |
as his political life. | 0:21:45 | 0:21:47 | |
He was a serial womaniser. | 0:21:47 | 0:21:51 | |
His wife, Margaret, chose to spend most of her time | 0:21:51 | 0:21:53 | |
back in North Wales, | 0:21:53 | 0:21:54 | |
so when he was alone in London, he carried on a series of affairs, | 0:21:54 | 0:21:57 | |
sometimes with other politicians' wives. | 0:21:57 | 0:22:00 | |
He became infamous - | 0:22:00 | 0:22:01 | |
the marching song Lloyd George Knew My Father had a second verse - | 0:22:01 | 0:22:06 | |
Lloyd George knew my mother. | 0:22:06 | 0:22:08 | |
In 1911, though, he would meet a woman | 0:22:08 | 0:22:11 | |
who became almost his alternative wife. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:15 | |
He developed a lifelong attachment to her, | 0:22:15 | 0:22:17 | |
and would eventually marry her after his wife, Margaret, died. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:20 | |
By 1914, he basically had two wives. | 0:22:20 | 0:22:24 | |
She was Frances Stevenson. | 0:22:25 | 0:22:28 | |
When they met, she was 25 years old - half Lloyd George's age. | 0:22:28 | 0:22:33 | |
She'd been at school with his eldest daughter | 0:22:33 | 0:22:35 | |
and was now a tutor to his youngest, Megan. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
Before long, Lloyd George asked her to become his private secretary. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:41 | |
An unusual job for a woman. | 0:22:41 | 0:22:44 | |
Frances is a very remarkable, feminist pioneer in her own right, | 0:22:44 | 0:22:49 | |
at a time when there were no female senior civil servants in Whitehall, | 0:22:49 | 0:22:53 | |
and nobody questioned that she was not up to the job | 0:22:53 | 0:22:57 | |
or she was there for ornamental or decorative or sexual reasons. | 0:22:57 | 0:23:01 | |
And she did a very efficient and very discreet job. | 0:23:01 | 0:23:04 | |
And, as he had done years earlier with Margaret, | 0:23:04 | 0:23:07 | |
he made it absolutely clear that his career was sacrosanct. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:12 | |
He wasn't going to have any scandal, any divorce, | 0:23:12 | 0:23:14 | |
any question of leaving his wife, | 0:23:14 | 0:23:16 | |
but he made her the offer to become his mistress-come-secretary | 0:23:16 | 0:23:20 | |
on, what she called, his terms, and she accepted those terms. | 0:23:20 | 0:23:24 | |
It was a very explicit relationship | 0:23:24 | 0:23:27 | |
and I think, actually, his wife, Margaret, understood it as well. | 0:23:27 | 0:23:31 | |
I used to go and see him when I had an afternoon off. | 0:23:34 | 0:23:36 | |
I very often went up to the House of Commons | 0:23:36 | 0:23:39 | |
and I would get a ticket for the latest gallery. | 0:23:39 | 0:23:41 | |
Then I would go and see him in his room afterwards | 0:23:43 | 0:23:46 | |
and have a cup of tea with him. | 0:23:46 | 0:23:47 | |
And from that time on, there wasn't anybody else but LG. | 0:23:49 | 0:23:53 | |
One of the reasons that no-one suspected the relationship, really, | 0:23:57 | 0:24:01 | |
was that Frances was no-one's idea of a mistress. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:05 | |
She did look very demure and proper, | 0:24:05 | 0:24:08 | |
as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. | 0:24:08 | 0:24:10 | |
And the press, in those days, did not write about affairs | 0:24:10 | 0:24:13 | |
unless they reached the divorce court. | 0:24:13 | 0:24:15 | |
There was a genuine thing, | 0:24:15 | 0:24:16 | |
scandals of this sort simply were not reported. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:20 | |
If Lloyd George had certain vices, drink wasn't one of them. | 0:24:22 | 0:24:26 | |
He'd campaigned for temperance, | 0:24:26 | 0:24:28 | |
and now he saw alcohol as a serious threat to the war effort. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
# ..is Lloyd George's beer. # | 0:24:31 | 0:24:36 | |
Thank you very much. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:37 | |
The single worst thing about being | 0:24:37 | 0:24:39 | |
David Lloyd George's great-great-grandson | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
was knowing that whenever me and my mates were thrown out of the pub | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
at 11 o'clock every single night, | 0:24:45 | 0:24:48 | |
it was my great-great-grandfather's fault! | 0:24:48 | 0:24:50 | |
Lloyd George became convinced during the war | 0:24:50 | 0:24:53 | |
that booze was a greater threat than the Kaiser. | 0:24:53 | 0:24:56 | |
And he did what he could to cut down the alcohol consumption | 0:24:56 | 0:24:59 | |
of the British public. | 0:24:59 | 0:25:01 | |
He was very concerned about days lost in munitions production | 0:25:01 | 0:25:04 | |
because of hungover workers or people not turning up. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:07 | |
As a result, he managed to bring in | 0:25:07 | 0:25:09 | |
the strictest licensing laws in British history. | 0:25:09 | 0:25:12 | |
He forced pubs to close at 9.30 at night, | 0:25:12 | 0:25:15 | |
and the British government even watered down beer. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:19 | |
This, as you can imagine, was wildly unpopular. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:22 | |
There was a song, very current at the time, | 0:25:22 | 0:25:25 | |
which went, "It's a pub-stitute, it's a substitute, | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
"the worst thing that's happened in this war is Lloyd George's beer!" | 0:25:29 | 0:25:35 | |
# But the worst thing that's ever happened in this war | 0:25:35 | 0:25:39 | |
# Is Lloyd George's beer. # | 0:25:39 | 0:25:44 | |
But drink was the least of their problems, | 0:25:49 | 0:25:51 | |
the war was going badly, | 0:25:51 | 0:25:52 | |
the British had been driven back | 0:25:52 | 0:25:54 | |
through France and Belgium by the Germans, | 0:25:54 | 0:25:56 | |
and only a last-gasp defence of Paris had saved the French capital. | 0:25:56 | 0:26:02 | |
By Christmas 1914, it was becoming a stalemate, | 0:26:02 | 0:26:06 | |
both sides had dug in. | 0:26:06 | 0:26:08 | |
Lloyd George visited British troops in France at the end of 1914, | 0:26:14 | 0:26:18 | |
he was appalled by what he found. | 0:26:18 | 0:26:20 | |
The British Army hadn't been expecting | 0:26:20 | 0:26:22 | |
to fight large-scale European warfare in 1914, | 0:26:22 | 0:26:25 | |
so some of its equipment was inappropriate, | 0:26:25 | 0:26:28 | |
and it just didn't have enough stuff. | 0:26:28 | 0:26:30 | |
The factories back in the UK were swamped, overwhelmed by the demand. | 0:26:30 | 0:26:35 | |
That meant that, particularly, there wasn't enough guns | 0:26:35 | 0:26:38 | |
or ammunition, and what there was was often defective - | 0:26:38 | 0:26:42 | |
half the shells were failing to explode. | 0:26:42 | 0:26:44 | |
Back in Britain, Lloyd George used his PR skills to highlight the issue | 0:26:46 | 0:26:51 | |
and used it as an opportunity to criticise Kitchener and the army. | 0:26:51 | 0:26:54 | |
With friends like the press baron Lord Northcliffe pumping out | 0:26:54 | 0:26:58 | |
tub-thumping headlines, it was dubbed the Shell Crisis, | 0:26:58 | 0:27:02 | |
and it was made very clear | 0:27:02 | 0:27:03 | |
that Lloyd George was the man to solve it. | 0:27:03 | 0:27:06 | |
On one occasion, rather cheekily, | 0:27:06 | 0:27:08 | |
he brought a piece of a shell right in here to this chamber. | 0:27:08 | 0:27:10 | |
He held it up and he said in a speech, | 0:27:10 | 0:27:12 | |
"I do not know whether I'm in order, Mr Speaker, in showing this, | 0:27:12 | 0:27:16 | |
"but it is one of the greatest difficulties of all | 0:27:16 | 0:27:18 | |
"in turning out shells. | 0:27:18 | 0:27:20 | |
"It is the fuse of a high explosive. | 0:27:20 | 0:27:22 | |
"This is supposed to be simple, | 0:27:22 | 0:27:25 | |
"but it takes 100 different gauges to turn it out." | 0:27:25 | 0:27:29 | |
With that flourish, | 0:27:29 | 0:27:31 | |
he finished off a piece of consummate parliamentary theatre. | 0:27:31 | 0:27:34 | |
The Shell Crisis of 1915 is a real crisis | 0:27:36 | 0:27:38 | |
and it's one that hits every belligerent state. | 0:27:38 | 0:27:41 | |
Russia starts running out of shells, the French run out of shells, | 0:27:41 | 0:27:44 | |
nobody had anticipated | 0:27:44 | 0:27:45 | |
that the First World War would last so much longer | 0:27:45 | 0:27:47 | |
and that they would require such huge amounts of armaments. | 0:27:47 | 0:27:51 | |
There was a real situation | 0:27:52 | 0:27:53 | |
where one looks at some of the battles that are being waged | 0:27:53 | 0:27:56 | |
in the spring of 1915 by both the French and the British, | 0:27:56 | 0:27:58 | |
and the men do not have enough shells. | 0:27:58 | 0:28:00 | |
There is a very real crisis there, | 0:28:03 | 0:28:04 | |
and it is not a case that this was manufactured | 0:28:04 | 0:28:06 | |
or leaked to the press artificially, | 0:28:06 | 0:28:08 | |
it was leaked to the press because there was a sense of anger | 0:28:08 | 0:28:11 | |
that the situation's got so bad, and that men are dying | 0:28:11 | 0:28:14 | |
because, as it seemed, Britain hasn't prepared adequately. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:17 | |
The furore in the press did the job. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:21 | |
A new Ministry of Munitions was created | 0:28:21 | 0:28:24 | |
with Lloyd George as the boss. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:26 | |
Some office space was found | 0:28:26 | 0:28:27 | |
in Whitehall Gardens, in Central London. | 0:28:27 | 0:28:29 | |
When Lloyd George strode in, | 0:28:29 | 0:28:31 | |
removal men were still emptying the place | 0:28:31 | 0:28:34 | |
of the furniture of the previous occupants. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:36 | |
Lloyd George was in his element - | 0:28:36 | 0:28:38 | |
he had a blank sheet of paper, and sweeping powers. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:42 | |
The first thing he did was get on the telephone | 0:28:42 | 0:28:45 | |
to try and recruit captains of industry - | 0:28:45 | 0:28:47 | |
men who had, as he put it, push and go. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:50 | |
They may not have known anything about armaments production, | 0:28:50 | 0:28:53 | |
but they knew how to get stuff done. | 0:28:53 | 0:28:55 | |
When you are in a national crisis, you can't afford to say, | 0:28:55 | 0:28:58 | |
"Oh, we must go through the proper channels." | 0:28:58 | 0:29:00 | |
What you need to do is get the very best brains, | 0:29:00 | 0:29:02 | |
the very best talents, the most energetic people in. | 0:29:02 | 0:29:04 | |
And what Lloyd George did is he brought in businesspeople, | 0:29:04 | 0:29:07 | |
he brought in scientists, he brought in advisers, | 0:29:07 | 0:29:09 | |
he was very flexible in how he did it. | 0:29:09 | 0:29:11 | |
And, of course, he did sometimes bypass the normal channels, | 0:29:11 | 0:29:14 | |
but I think it was absolutely necessary. | 0:29:14 | 0:29:15 | |
His realisation that there had to be | 0:29:15 | 0:29:18 | |
some kind of fundamental shake-up was right. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:22 | |
If you think that fighting World War I was a good idea, | 0:29:22 | 0:29:25 | |
then, certainly, the qualities which Lloyd George brought | 0:29:25 | 0:29:28 | |
in terms of his energy, in terms of his inventiveness, | 0:29:28 | 0:29:31 | |
his innovative approach to government, | 0:29:31 | 0:29:33 | |
was certainly very much what was needed. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:36 | |
And it worked. | 0:29:37 | 0:29:39 | |
By the end of the war, | 0:29:39 | 0:29:40 | |
the Ministry of Munitions had a staff of 65,000 people, | 0:29:40 | 0:29:44 | |
and controlled an army of 3 million workers. | 0:29:44 | 0:29:48 | |
Many members of that huge workforce were women. | 0:29:50 | 0:29:54 | |
Before the war, Lloyd George had been seen as | 0:29:54 | 0:29:56 | |
an enemy of the Women's Suffrage Movement. | 0:29:56 | 0:29:58 | |
In 1913, it even attempted to blow up his house in Surrey. | 0:29:58 | 0:30:02 | |
Now the suffragettes suspended their campaign | 0:30:04 | 0:30:07 | |
and joined the war effort. | 0:30:07 | 0:30:09 | |
If anything justifies Lloyd George's reputation | 0:30:10 | 0:30:13 | |
as the man who won the war, | 0:30:13 | 0:30:14 | |
it has to be the fact that he helped to put the British economy | 0:30:14 | 0:30:17 | |
on a wartime footing. | 0:30:17 | 0:30:19 | |
And around the country there is still a little bit of evidence | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
of that enormous transformation. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:24 | |
Take this place near Lloyd George's hometown in North Wales - | 0:30:24 | 0:30:29 | |
it was, and still is, a locomotive workshop, | 0:30:29 | 0:30:33 | |
but in 1916, it was repurposed to making shells. | 0:30:33 | 0:30:38 | |
Women were a crucial part of the war effort. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:47 | |
And of course, what happened is men went off to fight, | 0:30:47 | 0:30:49 | |
the jobs that they'd been doing had to be filled somehow | 0:30:49 | 0:30:51 | |
and the women came in to fill them. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:52 | |
And so the old arguments that women shouldn't be able to vote | 0:30:52 | 0:30:55 | |
because they couldn't cope with difficult things | 0:30:55 | 0:30:57 | |
and they couldn't drive things like tractors or railways | 0:30:57 | 0:30:59 | |
or they couldn't make things, simply fell down. | 0:30:59 | 0:31:01 | |
That is the key reason why women got the vote at the end of the war. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:04 | |
Because it was seen that they had played a huge part in the war, | 0:31:04 | 0:31:06 | |
you couldn't argue any more that they weren't capable | 0:31:06 | 0:31:09 | |
of participating in society. | 0:31:09 | 0:31:10 | |
And Lloyd George, I think, like a lot of people, changed his mind. | 0:31:10 | 0:31:13 | |
Wow, this is great. | 0:31:18 | 0:31:20 | |
Look at all this machinery. Oh, look up there. | 0:31:20 | 0:31:22 | |
That's a shaft. | 0:31:22 | 0:31:23 | |
That would have been connected to a giant steam engine out there, | 0:31:23 | 0:31:25 | |
and belts would have powered all of the lathes in here. | 0:31:25 | 0:31:29 | |
There were about 50 women working here, apparently, | 0:31:29 | 0:31:32 | |
recruited from local farms and homes. | 0:31:32 | 0:31:34 | |
They made the shells, | 0:31:34 | 0:31:36 | |
and then those shells were sent off elsewhere | 0:31:36 | 0:31:38 | |
to be filled with explosives, | 0:31:38 | 0:31:39 | |
also by female munitions workers. | 0:31:39 | 0:31:42 | |
This relatively small space, I think, | 0:31:44 | 0:31:46 | |
gives you a sense of the scale of what Lloyd George achieved. | 0:31:46 | 0:31:49 | |
Imagine timesing this workshop by about 20,000 | 0:31:49 | 0:31:53 | |
and you get an idea of how he transformed Britain | 0:31:53 | 0:31:57 | |
into a society and an economy able to wage total war. | 0:31:57 | 0:32:01 | |
But at exactly the same time as Lloyd George was solving | 0:32:12 | 0:32:15 | |
the munitions problem, | 0:32:15 | 0:32:17 | |
in secret he was facing a crisis of his own | 0:32:17 | 0:32:20 | |
involving his mistress, Frances Stevenson. | 0:32:20 | 0:32:23 | |
What documents have you got for me here? | 0:32:23 | 0:32:25 | |
This affair is incredibly well documented, | 0:32:25 | 0:32:29 | |
because Frances, very efficiently, kept a diary | 0:32:29 | 0:32:32 | |
from quite early in the relationship. | 0:32:32 | 0:32:35 | |
She's still living at home with her parents, | 0:32:35 | 0:32:37 | |
who disapprove, understandably, when they realise what is happening. | 0:32:37 | 0:32:41 | |
So she is worried, in this diary extract here, | 0:32:41 | 0:32:44 | |
about upsetting her parents. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:46 | |
"The long and the short of it is, as much as I love Mamma and Dada, | 0:32:46 | 0:32:49 | |
"I hate to cause them pain. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:51 | |
"But the idea of our love child will have to go for the time being." | 0:32:51 | 0:32:55 | |
And this is important, | 0:32:55 | 0:32:56 | |
because in early 1915, she discovered that she was pregnant. | 0:32:56 | 0:33:01 | |
Really? I didn't know that. | 0:33:01 | 0:33:02 | |
And so, Lloyd George, in the crisis of the war, | 0:33:02 | 0:33:05 | |
was possibly distracted by the fact that Frances was pregnant. | 0:33:05 | 0:33:10 | |
There was clearly... She accepted, he accepted. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:12 | |
She says, "The idea of our love child will have to go | 0:33:12 | 0:33:15 | |
"for the time being." | 0:33:15 | 0:33:16 | |
So she had an abortion. | 0:33:16 | 0:33:17 | |
-This was her pregnant... -This was her pregnancy in early 1915. | 0:33:17 | 0:33:20 | |
..coming to terms with the fact she's going to have an abortion | 0:33:20 | 0:33:23 | |
-for his career. -Yes, for his career. | 0:33:23 | 0:33:24 | |
And, she writes here, "I do not think I can ever repay him | 0:33:24 | 0:33:27 | |
"for his goodness to me the last fortnight or three weeks. | 0:33:27 | 0:33:30 | |
"He has been husband, lover and mother to me. | 0:33:30 | 0:33:33 | |
"I never knew a man could be so womanly and tender. | 0:33:33 | 0:33:35 | |
"He has watched and waited on me devotedly | 0:33:35 | 0:33:38 | |
"until I cursed myself for being ill and causing him all this worry. | 0:33:38 | 0:33:42 | |
"There was no little thing that he did not think of for my comfort. | 0:33:42 | 0:33:45 | |
"No tenderness that he did not lavish on me. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:47 | |
"I have, indeed, known the full extent of his love." | 0:33:47 | 0:33:50 | |
So at this moment during the war, | 0:33:50 | 0:33:53 | |
when he had all these other things to think of, | 0:33:53 | 0:33:55 | |
he was still taking enormous care of Frances | 0:33:55 | 0:34:01 | |
and making sure she was looked after and recovered. | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
I... | 0:34:03 | 0:34:04 | |
-I'd never heard that story. That's incredible. -Yeah. | 0:34:04 | 0:34:07 | |
What other surprises and secrets have you got for me here? | 0:34:07 | 0:34:09 | |
Well, there's a nice little token of their love here, | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
which is this little pocketbook that Lloyd George had made. | 0:34:12 | 0:34:15 | |
So that he could carry Frances' picture around with him. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:19 | |
Looking very demure and proper. | 0:34:19 | 0:34:21 | |
Who is this letter from over here? | 0:34:21 | 0:34:22 | |
This is Lloyd George to Frances. | 0:34:22 | 0:34:24 | |
-Ah, so that's his handwriting? -Yes, yes. | 0:34:24 | 0:34:25 | |
He wrote in a stubby pencil, and it's very difficult to read, | 0:34:25 | 0:34:29 | |
but this is in 1915. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:31 | |
"Now, Pussy, I have made up my mind to disappoint myself, and you. | 0:34:31 | 0:34:36 | |
"I have two days of most important and trying work in front of me. | 0:34:36 | 0:34:40 | |
"Conferences and decisions | 0:34:40 | 0:34:42 | |
"upon which the success of the department depends, | 0:34:42 | 0:34:45 | |
"and I must reserve all my strength for them. | 0:34:45 | 0:34:49 | |
"Meanwhile, help me to restrain myself, | 0:34:51 | 0:34:54 | |
"as I am lost for my passion for you in a consuming flame, | 0:34:54 | 0:35:00 | |
"and it burns up all wisdom and prudence and judgment in my soul. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:05 | |
"Help me, cariad bach. | 0:35:05 | 0:35:07 | |
"You are everything to me now. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:09 | |
"My failure or success will depend entirely on you, | 0:35:09 | 0:35:13 | |
"you possess my soul entirely. | 0:35:13 | 0:35:16 | |
"Your own D, forever." | 0:35:16 | 0:35:18 | |
-You know, it's quite passionate stuff. -That is passionate stuff. | 0:35:19 | 0:35:21 | |
He was as persuasive in his writing as he was in his oratory. | 0:35:21 | 0:35:24 | |
Oh, he... | 0:35:24 | 0:35:26 | |
-JOHN LAUGHS -He was irresistible, I think. | 0:35:26 | 0:35:28 | |
That was his... You know, they said he could charm the birds off a tree, | 0:35:28 | 0:35:31 | |
and he was a very powerful personality. | 0:35:31 | 0:35:33 | |
Well, that was a strange experience. | 0:35:34 | 0:35:37 | |
Because on one level, as a family member, | 0:35:37 | 0:35:39 | |
it's pretty distressing reading about | 0:35:39 | 0:35:42 | |
your great-great-grandfather's love affairs | 0:35:42 | 0:35:44 | |
and his aborted love child, | 0:35:44 | 0:35:48 | |
and an incredible self-obsession and ambition | 0:35:48 | 0:35:55 | |
that seemed to have crowded out the feelings of anybody else. | 0:35:55 | 0:36:00 | |
He may have been a great man, | 0:36:00 | 0:36:01 | |
but he's one who is clearly not that compassionate. | 0:36:01 | 0:36:05 | |
So on another level, you do find yourself attracted to him | 0:36:05 | 0:36:08 | |
as a lover, as a human, | 0:36:08 | 0:36:10 | |
and you almost feel yourself wishing him all the best | 0:36:10 | 0:36:13 | |
in that relationship, cos he clearly loved her very much. | 0:36:13 | 0:36:16 | |
He clearly felt, at that time of his life, he couldn't live without her. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:20 | |
I feel a bit conflicted. | 0:36:20 | 0:36:21 | |
There was also conflict in the government. | 0:36:25 | 0:36:27 | |
After the Shell Crisis, and the failure of the Gallipoli landings, | 0:36:27 | 0:36:30 | |
Asquith's Liberals had been forced into coalition | 0:36:30 | 0:36:33 | |
with the Conservatives. | 0:36:33 | 0:36:35 | |
But by late 1916, | 0:36:35 | 0:36:37 | |
all sides were losing patience with the leadership of the government - | 0:36:37 | 0:36:40 | |
a change had to come. | 0:36:40 | 0:36:42 | |
The Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, well, he wasn't up to the job. | 0:36:43 | 0:36:47 | |
He was an ageing, distracted Edwardian gentleman. | 0:36:47 | 0:36:50 | |
He was not the man to prosecute total war in the industrial age. | 0:36:50 | 0:36:56 | |
He refused to get out of bed before 8.30 in the mornings, | 0:36:56 | 0:36:58 | |
his cabinets had too many people in them, | 0:36:58 | 0:37:00 | |
no minutes were taken, | 0:37:00 | 0:37:02 | |
and decisions rarely got made. | 0:37:02 | 0:37:05 | |
When his son was killed on the Western Front | 0:37:05 | 0:37:08 | |
in September 1916, | 0:37:08 | 0:37:10 | |
any enthusiasm he had for the job seemed to drain away. | 0:37:10 | 0:37:13 | |
It was widely regarded | 0:37:13 | 0:37:15 | |
that Lloyd George should be the man to take over. | 0:37:15 | 0:37:18 | |
The characteristic phrase | 0:37:21 | 0:37:23 | |
that was always associated with Asquith was "wait and see", | 0:37:23 | 0:37:27 | |
because what he was very good at was manipulating party divisions, | 0:37:27 | 0:37:32 | |
using the kind of policy of delay | 0:37:32 | 0:37:35 | |
in order to wait and see what happened. | 0:37:35 | 0:37:37 | |
Now, fine when you're talking about an issue of domestic politics, | 0:37:37 | 0:37:40 | |
but when you're fighting the greatest war | 0:37:40 | 0:37:42 | |
that history has ever seen, | 0:37:42 | 0:37:44 | |
then it becomes much more problematic. | 0:37:44 | 0:37:46 | |
Lloyd George absolutely jumps on the bandwagon here. | 0:37:46 | 0:37:49 | |
He is an incredibly ambitious man. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:51 | |
This was someone who said he will sacrifice everything, | 0:37:51 | 0:37:53 | |
even love, to get to the top. | 0:37:53 | 0:37:54 | |
Although, he will not sacrifice honesty, he claims. | 0:37:54 | 0:37:56 | |
This is someone who was absolutely determined to get the top job, | 0:37:56 | 0:38:00 | |
and who sees Asquith, very early on, | 0:38:00 | 0:38:02 | |
as someone who's potentially a lame duck. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:04 | |
Had Lloyd George not taken over in 1916, | 0:38:04 | 0:38:06 | |
nobody can be sure how the war would have gone. | 0:38:06 | 0:38:09 | |
Asquith was out of his depth. He was past it. | 0:38:09 | 0:38:11 | |
He was always rather a ditherer, | 0:38:11 | 0:38:13 | |
but he was dithering particularly strongly in 1916. | 0:38:13 | 0:38:16 | |
And I've no doubt at all | 0:38:16 | 0:38:17 | |
that Lloyd George wanted to do the right thing for Britain. | 0:38:17 | 0:38:19 | |
Initially, he was prepared to take over | 0:38:19 | 0:38:21 | |
without the title of Prime Minister. | 0:38:21 | 0:38:23 | |
He offered Asquith the right to remain titular Prime Minister | 0:38:23 | 0:38:25 | |
while he ran the war. | 0:38:25 | 0:38:26 | |
Lloyd George's own interest was running the war, winning the war. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:30 | |
'Asquith tried to cling on to power in the coalition, | 0:38:33 | 0:38:36 | |
'but without the support of the Conservatives, he was doomed.' | 0:38:36 | 0:38:40 | |
Thank you. | 0:38:41 | 0:38:43 | |
'On the 7th of December 1916, | 0:38:43 | 0:38:45 | |
'David Lloyd George became Prime Minister.' | 0:38:45 | 0:38:49 | |
If you love history, it doesn't get better than this. | 0:38:52 | 0:38:54 | |
This is the staircase in 10 Downing Street. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:56 | |
The men and women who have made the modern world | 0:38:56 | 0:38:59 | |
walked up and down these stairs for generations. | 0:38:59 | 0:39:01 | |
And on the walls, | 0:39:01 | 0:39:03 | |
pictures of all the former prime ministers. | 0:39:03 | 0:39:05 | |
You've got Wellington down there, there's Palmerston there, Gladstone, | 0:39:05 | 0:39:08 | |
the titanic figures of the 19th century. | 0:39:08 | 0:39:10 | |
Moving into the 20th century here. | 0:39:10 | 0:39:12 | |
And it's a special moment for me because right here | 0:39:12 | 0:39:15 | |
is my great-great-grandfather, David Lloyd George. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:18 | |
Even though I'm aware of his failings, and try and be critical, | 0:39:21 | 0:39:25 | |
it's always a very special moment passing this photograph for me, | 0:39:25 | 0:39:27 | |
because, unlike all the previous holders of this office, | 0:39:27 | 0:39:32 | |
he made it through talent alone. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:35 | |
He wasn't born into an aristocratic family, | 0:39:35 | 0:39:37 | |
he didn't have a huge amount of money or connections. | 0:39:37 | 0:39:40 | |
And therefore, I can't help looking at this picture without... | 0:39:40 | 0:39:44 | |
a twinge of excitement and pride. | 0:39:44 | 0:39:47 | |
As soon as Lloyd George was installed here at Number Ten, | 0:39:57 | 0:40:00 | |
he made a key decision. | 0:40:00 | 0:40:02 | |
It seems obvious to us now, but it was controversial at the time. | 0:40:02 | 0:40:04 | |
He formed a team of just five people - | 0:40:04 | 0:40:07 | |
his war cabinet. | 0:40:07 | 0:40:08 | |
They met every day, their meetings were minuted, | 0:40:08 | 0:40:11 | |
decisions were made. | 0:40:11 | 0:40:13 | |
Now, that was something that's been emulated by war leaders ever since - | 0:40:13 | 0:40:16 | |
Churchill in the Second World War, Thatcher and the Falklands - | 0:40:16 | 0:40:20 | |
but at the time, | 0:40:20 | 0:40:21 | |
some people thought he was gathering too much power to himself, | 0:40:21 | 0:40:24 | |
he was looking too presidential. | 0:40:24 | 0:40:26 | |
He is projecting a very dynamic image. | 0:40:26 | 0:40:29 | |
He's trying very much to present himself as | 0:40:29 | 0:40:30 | |
somebody who is everywhere all at once, | 0:40:30 | 0:40:32 | |
who's involved in directing all kinds of things. | 0:40:32 | 0:40:34 | |
He admired Napoleon Bonaparte, | 0:40:34 | 0:40:36 | |
who worked famously long hours and was very bureaucratic. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:39 | |
He often talks about appealing to the people during the war, | 0:40:39 | 0:40:41 | |
going over the heads of government, going over the heads of parliament, | 0:40:41 | 0:40:44 | |
to go and talk directly to the people. | 0:40:44 | 0:40:46 | |
He's very much aware that he needs to be seen. | 0:40:46 | 0:40:48 | |
And he has a great relationship with the media. | 0:40:48 | 0:40:50 | |
He's also very good friends with big business. | 0:40:50 | 0:40:52 | |
So he's very much a radical moderniser, | 0:40:52 | 0:40:54 | |
and he's someone who's, I think, dynamic, | 0:40:54 | 0:40:56 | |
and trying to give that impression of being everywhere at once. | 0:40:56 | 0:41:00 | |
In power, Lloyd George's energy and sense of improvisation | 0:41:01 | 0:41:05 | |
infused the government with a sense of urgency. | 0:41:05 | 0:41:08 | |
Right across London, temporary buildings were thrown up | 0:41:08 | 0:41:11 | |
to house the new bureaucrats needed to run the rejuvenated war effort. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:15 | |
Downing Street was no exception. | 0:41:15 | 0:41:17 | |
I'm here in the garden, | 0:41:17 | 0:41:18 | |
and under Lloyd George, this became known as the Garden Suburb. | 0:41:18 | 0:41:21 | |
Huts were built here | 0:41:21 | 0:41:22 | |
and in those huts would have been special advisers, | 0:41:22 | 0:41:25 | |
all overseen by someone today we would refer to as a tsar - | 0:41:25 | 0:41:29 | |
someone brought in from the outside world, | 0:41:29 | 0:41:31 | |
from industry, to run a government department. | 0:41:31 | 0:41:34 | |
This was Lloyd George the outsider shaking up how things were done. | 0:41:34 | 0:41:38 | |
Another thing that Lloyd George did was reach out to the Empire, | 0:41:43 | 0:41:46 | |
because the Empire, it's often forgotten, was enormously important | 0:41:46 | 0:41:49 | |
in the British war effort in the First World War. | 0:41:49 | 0:41:51 | |
Without the soldiers coming from India, | 0:41:51 | 0:41:53 | |
a million soldiers from India, | 0:41:53 | 0:41:54 | |
without the soldiers coming from Canada, Australia, | 0:41:54 | 0:41:57 | |
New Zealand, South Africa, | 0:41:57 | 0:41:59 | |
from all over the world, from Newfoundland, | 0:41:59 | 0:42:01 | |
the British would not have been able to keep the armies | 0:42:01 | 0:42:03 | |
they kept on the field, | 0:42:03 | 0:42:04 | |
and without the resources and money coming from the Empire. | 0:42:04 | 0:42:07 | |
And the Empire was beginning to feel really neglected. | 0:42:07 | 0:42:09 | |
It was one of the big complaints that they had against Asquith, | 0:42:09 | 0:42:11 | |
that he just wasn't consulting them, he was taking them for granted. | 0:42:11 | 0:42:14 | |
And Lloyd George said, almost the moment he became Prime Minister, | 0:42:14 | 0:42:17 | |
I'm going to go and talk to all the Empire leaders. | 0:42:17 | 0:42:19 | |
And I think this was important. | 0:42:19 | 0:42:20 | |
I think he gave a sense that we're all in this together. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:23 | |
Lloyd George's biggest legacy, in general, | 0:42:29 | 0:42:33 | |
is the impact upon the British state. | 0:42:33 | 0:42:36 | |
What he does is, actually, changes the machinery of government | 0:42:36 | 0:42:39 | |
and reforms it | 0:42:39 | 0:42:41 | |
in such a way as to make sure that the instructions | 0:42:41 | 0:42:44 | |
that are going down from the top are actually getting implemented. | 0:42:44 | 0:42:47 | |
But when it came to actual military matters, | 0:42:47 | 0:42:51 | |
he was not particularly well-informed, | 0:42:51 | 0:42:53 | |
and essentially didn't really have a strategy | 0:42:53 | 0:42:55 | |
for what was going to be done to replace | 0:42:55 | 0:42:57 | |
what he thought was the failed strategy of the generals. | 0:42:57 | 0:43:00 | |
By this stage of the war, | 0:43:06 | 0:43:08 | |
Lloyd George had hit the pinnacle of his power. | 0:43:08 | 0:43:11 | |
He was untouchable in the political sphere. | 0:43:11 | 0:43:15 | |
But his relationship with the military wasn't quite as simple. | 0:43:15 | 0:43:20 | |
He was becoming increasingly frustrated | 0:43:20 | 0:43:22 | |
by the lack of progress on the Western Front, | 0:43:22 | 0:43:24 | |
and the terrible casualties that were building up. | 0:43:24 | 0:43:27 | |
Now, he had been able to wrangle the Navy, | 0:43:27 | 0:43:30 | |
but with the army, it was a different matter. | 0:43:30 | 0:43:32 | |
There the unstoppable force of David Lloyd George | 0:43:32 | 0:43:36 | |
hit the immovable object of Sir Douglas Haig. | 0:43:36 | 0:43:40 | |
Lloyd George's relationship with the generals | 0:43:40 | 0:43:43 | |
during the First World War has come under immense scrutiny, | 0:43:43 | 0:43:45 | |
and there's a long-running historical debate about it. | 0:43:45 | 0:43:47 | |
But what seems very clear is that a bad relationship | 0:43:47 | 0:43:49 | |
between your prime minister and your commander-in-chief, | 0:43:49 | 0:43:52 | |
while your state is engaged in total war, | 0:43:52 | 0:43:54 | |
is a bad situation for everybody. | 0:43:54 | 0:43:56 | |
I think Lloyd George is correct that Haig has many flaws | 0:43:56 | 0:43:59 | |
and actually, possibly, isn't the best commander-in-chief | 0:43:59 | 0:44:02 | |
for the British war effort. | 0:44:02 | 0:44:03 | |
Ultimately, Lloyd George is someone who, I think, sees through Haig. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:07 | |
He has this famous quote where he says, | 0:44:07 | 0:44:09 | |
"Haig was brilliant to the top of his boots," | 0:44:09 | 0:44:12 | |
but Lloyd George is scared to go very public, I think, | 0:44:12 | 0:44:15 | |
about his dislike of Haig | 0:44:15 | 0:44:17 | |
and his belief that Haig isn't winning the war. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:18 | |
Instead he intrigues against him, | 0:44:18 | 0:44:20 | |
and it's something that, really, the generals don't like, | 0:44:20 | 0:44:22 | |
and there's a sense of Lloyd George not being trustworthy. | 0:44:22 | 0:44:24 | |
And they don't like that lack of straight talking. | 0:44:24 | 0:44:27 | |
I think, with the military, | 0:44:27 | 0:44:28 | |
you always get a sort of very strong sense | 0:44:28 | 0:44:31 | |
of esprit de corps, which is absolutely understandable. | 0:44:31 | 0:44:33 | |
They're doing something that others don't have to do. | 0:44:33 | 0:44:35 | |
It's a bit like the police and firemen as well. | 0:44:35 | 0:44:37 | |
They're risking their lives, they're dealing with issues | 0:44:37 | 0:44:40 | |
that most of us don't ever have to deal with. | 0:44:40 | 0:44:42 | |
And I think one of their strengths is they stick by each other, | 0:44:42 | 0:44:45 | |
but, of course, it's also a weakness | 0:44:45 | 0:44:46 | |
when it comes to dealing with civilian society, | 0:44:46 | 0:44:48 | |
because they don't like to be told what to do | 0:44:48 | 0:44:50 | |
and they don't like to be questioned. | 0:44:50 | 0:44:51 | |
And I suspect in the case of Lloyd George, | 0:44:51 | 0:44:53 | |
they would like it even less. | 0:44:53 | 0:44:54 | |
He couldn't sack Haig | 0:44:54 | 0:44:56 | |
because the conditions of the Tories joining the coalition | 0:44:56 | 0:44:58 | |
was that Haig should remain commander-in-chief | 0:44:58 | 0:45:01 | |
for the duration of the war. | 0:45:01 | 0:45:03 | |
And Lloyd George knew the coalition would collapse | 0:45:03 | 0:45:05 | |
if he tried to get rid of Haig. | 0:45:05 | 0:45:06 | |
Haig was a very established figure, a friend at court. | 0:45:06 | 0:45:08 | |
He couldn't do anything about replacing him, | 0:45:08 | 0:45:10 | |
so he tried to get round him in various ways. | 0:45:10 | 0:45:12 | |
They hated each other, | 0:45:12 | 0:45:13 | |
but Lloyd George couldn't get rid of him. | 0:45:13 | 0:45:15 | |
Do you think some members of the establishment, | 0:45:15 | 0:45:17 | |
and including the King himself, | 0:45:17 | 0:45:19 | |
did they think that Lloyd George was | 0:45:19 | 0:45:20 | |
potentially dangerous, revolutionary? | 0:45:20 | 0:45:22 | |
I think they thought Lloyd George was a danger to the establishment, | 0:45:22 | 0:45:26 | |
to the settled order, the established order of things. | 0:45:26 | 0:45:29 | |
They didn't think he was likely to be part of a putsch, | 0:45:29 | 0:45:31 | |
or anything as extreme as that, | 0:45:31 | 0:45:32 | |
but they thought he was a man they had to keep an eye on. | 0:45:32 | 0:45:35 | |
In wartime, there's always a risk for the royal family | 0:45:35 | 0:45:38 | |
that a particular political leader, or military figure, | 0:45:38 | 0:45:41 | |
might become more popular than the monarch himself. | 0:45:41 | 0:45:43 | |
There's a fear that Lloyd George is accruing too much power to himself, | 0:45:43 | 0:45:46 | |
and that perhaps he might threaten British democracy | 0:45:46 | 0:45:49 | |
and the constitutional order. | 0:45:49 | 0:45:50 | |
So, in many ways, a dislike for him. | 0:45:50 | 0:45:53 | |
However, some of this is also, I think, partially class-based, | 0:45:53 | 0:45:56 | |
and also the fact that he's Welsh, | 0:45:56 | 0:45:58 | |
and he's coming from a Welsh nationalist background as well. | 0:45:58 | 0:46:00 | |
So there are many reasons why Lloyd George doesn't quite fit in. | 0:46:00 | 0:46:04 | |
In contrast, Haig is incredibly respectful of the monarch, | 0:46:04 | 0:46:07 | |
his wife is a lady-in-waiting, | 0:46:07 | 0:46:09 | |
he has the ear of the King, | 0:46:09 | 0:46:10 | |
and is in constant correspondence with him. | 0:46:10 | 0:46:12 | |
So there's quite a different approach here. | 0:46:12 | 0:46:15 | |
I suppose I know most about | 0:46:18 | 0:46:20 | |
Lloyd George's military, diplomatic and strategic role | 0:46:20 | 0:46:24 | |
during and after the war, | 0:46:24 | 0:46:26 | |
so it was really interesting to hear about Lloyd George's successes | 0:46:26 | 0:46:31 | |
on the home front as a domestic politician. | 0:46:31 | 0:46:33 | |
It did sound like he really did galvanise the nation | 0:46:33 | 0:46:36 | |
to win World War I. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:37 | |
So much so that the King was jealous that he might be setting himself up | 0:46:37 | 0:46:40 | |
as a dictator - fascinating. | 0:46:40 | 0:46:42 | |
It's not surprising that the King began to feel a little threatened | 0:46:46 | 0:46:49 | |
by Lloyd George's popularity. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:52 | |
His image was everywhere - | 0:46:52 | 0:46:53 | |
he was on the front page of newspapers and magazines, | 0:46:53 | 0:46:56 | |
he was always in the newsreels. | 0:46:56 | 0:46:57 | |
This is Walton Heath Golf Club in Surrey. | 0:47:09 | 0:47:12 | |
He loved playing golf here. | 0:47:12 | 0:47:13 | |
He was always being photographed playing golf. | 0:47:13 | 0:47:15 | |
It was very near his country house, | 0:47:15 | 0:47:17 | |
and he played here alongside leading figures | 0:47:17 | 0:47:21 | |
of the British establishment - | 0:47:21 | 0:47:22 | |
newspaper editors, aristocrats, and high-ranking politicians. | 0:47:22 | 0:47:27 | |
Lloyd George was always an intensely image-conscious politician | 0:47:29 | 0:47:33 | |
and by being photographed here playing golf in Surrey, | 0:47:33 | 0:47:37 | |
I believe he was saying to the British people | 0:47:37 | 0:47:39 | |
that all was essentially well with their world, | 0:47:39 | 0:47:41 | |
and even during the darkest days of the war, | 0:47:41 | 0:47:44 | |
he had supreme confidence that victory would be theirs. | 0:47:44 | 0:47:48 | |
Oh! | 0:47:52 | 0:47:53 | |
There's some quality in some leaders which speaks to people, | 0:47:54 | 0:47:58 | |
and it's very hard to define, | 0:47:58 | 0:47:59 | |
and I don't think it can be learned or can be taught, | 0:47:59 | 0:48:02 | |
but I think Lloyd George had something of that. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:04 | |
I mean, what's really interesting, | 0:48:04 | 0:48:05 | |
if you look at the cartoons of the time, | 0:48:05 | 0:48:07 | |
they show this little bouncy Lloyd George, | 0:48:07 | 0:48:08 | |
and I think people felt, "Here's someone in charge. | 0:48:08 | 0:48:11 | |
"Thank goodness, he knows what he's doing. | 0:48:11 | 0:48:12 | |
"He's going to take us in the right direction." | 0:48:12 | 0:48:14 | |
But in early 1917, | 0:48:18 | 0:48:20 | |
Britain needed all of Lloyd George's energy and determination. | 0:48:20 | 0:48:24 | |
The British Isles are surrounded by the sea, | 0:48:28 | 0:48:31 | |
and Britain was dependent on maritime trade | 0:48:31 | 0:48:34 | |
for its wealth, its food and its war supplies. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:38 | |
The Germans knew this, | 0:48:38 | 0:48:39 | |
and in 1917 they decided to get their U-boats to sink | 0:48:39 | 0:48:43 | |
every single ship they could find in British waters. | 0:48:43 | 0:48:47 | |
The Germans thought that if they could sink 600,000 tonnes | 0:48:47 | 0:48:51 | |
of shipping a month, | 0:48:51 | 0:48:52 | |
the British would be forced to sue for peace. | 0:48:52 | 0:48:55 | |
Now, in April 1917, they hit that target, | 0:48:55 | 0:48:58 | |
and there were food and fuel shortages in the UK. | 0:48:58 | 0:49:02 | |
But the following month Lloyd George struck back | 0:49:02 | 0:49:06 | |
with a system that would help stop the rot. | 0:49:06 | 0:49:08 | |
The idea of convoy was actually nothing new. | 0:49:13 | 0:49:17 | |
Basically, you gather lots of ships together, | 0:49:17 | 0:49:19 | |
they travel as a pack, | 0:49:19 | 0:49:20 | |
and you give them a naval escort to protect them. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:23 | |
But the Admiralty didn't really like the idea, | 0:49:23 | 0:49:25 | |
because they thought it was providing the Germans | 0:49:25 | 0:49:27 | |
with, actually, a bigger target. | 0:49:27 | 0:49:28 | |
And also, they didn't trust | 0:49:28 | 0:49:30 | |
the merchant captains would be able to stay on station. | 0:49:30 | 0:49:33 | |
But Lloyd George championed it. | 0:49:33 | 0:49:35 | |
He believed that travelling together would be strength in numbers, | 0:49:35 | 0:49:38 | |
and that naval escort would help to make a difference. | 0:49:38 | 0:49:41 | |
And it worked. | 0:49:44 | 0:49:45 | |
Of the nearly 9,000 ships that travelled in convoy, | 0:49:45 | 0:49:48 | |
only 27 were lost through the rest of the war. | 0:49:48 | 0:49:52 | |
And in that time, | 0:49:52 | 0:49:53 | |
300 ships travelling by themselves were sunk by U-boats. | 0:49:53 | 0:49:57 | |
For the rest of the war, | 0:49:57 | 0:49:58 | |
the German fleet was unable to seriously threaten | 0:49:58 | 0:50:02 | |
Britain's lifeline. | 0:50:02 | 0:50:03 | |
But if the war at sea was won, | 0:50:06 | 0:50:08 | |
on the Western Front, things were still desperate. | 0:50:08 | 0:50:11 | |
In spring 1918, the Germans broke through | 0:50:13 | 0:50:16 | |
and almost reached Paris. | 0:50:16 | 0:50:19 | |
But this is where Lloyd George's war machine took over. | 0:50:19 | 0:50:22 | |
Helped by vast numbers of guns, | 0:50:22 | 0:50:24 | |
huge amounts of ammunition, | 0:50:24 | 0:50:26 | |
and tens of thousands of fresh American troops, | 0:50:26 | 0:50:28 | |
the Allies halted the German advance and pushed them back. | 0:50:28 | 0:50:32 | |
At 11am, on the 11th of November 1918, | 0:50:34 | 0:50:38 | |
the guns on the Western Front fell silent | 0:50:38 | 0:50:41 | |
as the Armistice came into effect. | 0:50:41 | 0:50:44 | |
Lloyd George addressed the nation. | 0:50:51 | 0:50:54 | |
He said, "Thus, at 11 o'clock this morning, | 0:50:54 | 0:50:56 | |
"came to an end the cruellest, and most terrible war | 0:50:56 | 0:50:58 | |
"that has ever scourged mankind. | 0:50:58 | 0:51:01 | |
"I hope we may say that, thus, this fateful morning | 0:51:01 | 0:51:06 | |
"came an end to all wars." | 0:51:06 | 0:51:09 | |
Well, sadly, we know that wasn't to be. | 0:51:09 | 0:51:11 | |
But Lloyd George was wildly popular, he was hailed as a hero. | 0:51:11 | 0:51:15 | |
His friend, the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law, said | 0:51:15 | 0:51:19 | |
that if he wished, he could be Prime Minister for life. | 0:51:19 | 0:51:22 | |
Well, we know now that that too would not come to pass. | 0:51:22 | 0:51:28 | |
Here's Lloyd George's portrait | 0:51:36 | 0:51:37 | |
in one of the corridors in the Palace of Westminster. | 0:51:37 | 0:51:40 | |
Hanging alongside some of the most celebrated and famous statesmen | 0:51:40 | 0:51:44 | |
of British history. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:46 | |
In 1918, Lloyd George reached rock-star levels | 0:51:46 | 0:51:50 | |
of fame and adulation. | 0:51:50 | 0:51:52 | |
And it seems to me that compared to that high, | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
he's now faded into obscurity. | 0:51:55 | 0:51:57 | |
Back then, he was a powerful presence on the world stage. | 0:52:03 | 0:52:08 | |
Re-elected in 1918 by a landslide | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
at the head of a Conservative-dominated coalition, | 0:52:11 | 0:52:13 | |
he was a key mover at the Paris Peace Conference. | 0:52:13 | 0:52:16 | |
This is when Lloyd George earned the famous title | 0:52:17 | 0:52:20 | |
"the man who won the war", | 0:52:20 | 0:52:22 | |
but did he lose the peace? | 0:52:22 | 0:52:24 | |
For the first half of 1919, Lloyd George was here in Paris, | 0:52:24 | 0:52:27 | |
negotiating what would become the Treaty of Versailles. | 0:52:27 | 0:52:30 | |
Dealing with the post-war German settlement, | 0:52:30 | 0:52:33 | |
thinking about things, for example, | 0:52:33 | 0:52:34 | |
like how much the defeated Germans would have to pay in reparations. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:37 | |
The question is, how successful was he? | 0:52:37 | 0:52:41 | |
I think Lloyd George did play an important role. | 0:52:41 | 0:52:44 | |
He believed very strongly in the British Empire, | 0:52:44 | 0:52:46 | |
and he believed strongly in promoting | 0:52:46 | 0:52:47 | |
the power and influence of the British Empire. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:49 | |
But he was pragmatic. | 0:52:49 | 0:52:51 | |
And he knew that a continent which had | 0:52:51 | 0:52:53 | |
a disaffected, perhaps revolutionary Germany at its heart, | 0:52:53 | 0:52:56 | |
would not be a happy place. | 0:52:56 | 0:52:57 | |
He also knew that Britain's prosperity, in the end, | 0:52:57 | 0:53:00 | |
depended on trade, and one of its great trading partners | 0:53:00 | 0:53:03 | |
before the First World War was Germany. | 0:53:03 | 0:53:05 | |
So you have a peace settlement which, I think, wasn't that bad, | 0:53:05 | 0:53:09 | |
but the German public thought it was deeply unfair, | 0:53:09 | 0:53:11 | |
and so did the German elites, pretty much right across the board. | 0:53:11 | 0:53:14 | |
And so the treaty was never accepted, | 0:53:14 | 0:53:16 | |
it was always seen as unfair, | 0:53:16 | 0:53:17 | |
and that was going to be, of course, an absolutely poisonous issue | 0:53:17 | 0:53:21 | |
in between the wars, | 0:53:21 | 0:53:22 | |
and one of the things that Hitler used to get himself into power. | 0:53:22 | 0:53:24 | |
There are issues in Lloyd George's character | 0:53:24 | 0:53:27 | |
that I think we do see recurring in leaders across the 20th century | 0:53:27 | 0:53:32 | |
in terms of overconfidence. | 0:53:32 | 0:53:34 | |
And when you look at Lloyd George in the post-war moment, | 0:53:34 | 0:53:37 | |
he is a very good diplomat, | 0:53:37 | 0:53:39 | |
but the skills that you have as a wartime leader | 0:53:39 | 0:53:42 | |
are not the skills you need for, necessarily, making the best peace. | 0:53:42 | 0:53:45 | |
And actually, he continues to play the war leader | 0:53:45 | 0:53:47 | |
right into the post-war period, | 0:53:47 | 0:53:48 | |
and it's an absolutely fatal mistake. | 0:53:48 | 0:53:50 | |
Here in Versailles, Lloyd George dominated the international scene, | 0:53:50 | 0:53:53 | |
one of the most powerful men in the world, | 0:53:53 | 0:53:56 | |
literally redrawing the map of the world. | 0:53:56 | 0:53:59 | |
Back home, things weren't going so well. | 0:53:59 | 0:54:02 | |
As we know from recent history, | 0:54:02 | 0:54:04 | |
a coalition between the Liberals and the Conservatives... | 0:54:04 | 0:54:08 | |
was always going to end in tears. | 0:54:08 | 0:54:09 | |
One of the problems with the First World War | 0:54:11 | 0:54:14 | |
is that it was so massive, and so costly, | 0:54:14 | 0:54:15 | |
that when it ended, people thought, "The world's got to be better now." | 0:54:15 | 0:54:18 | |
And of course, what happened after the war, | 0:54:18 | 0:54:20 | |
there was almost immediate slump | 0:54:20 | 0:54:21 | |
and a lot of people were thrown out of work, | 0:54:21 | 0:54:23 | |
and the world certainly didn't look that better. | 0:54:23 | 0:54:25 | |
And I think, what a lot of people said in Britain was, | 0:54:25 | 0:54:27 | |
"Where was all this we were promised?" | 0:54:27 | 0:54:29 | |
And I think Lloyd George had to deal with the disappointments. | 0:54:29 | 0:54:33 | |
There was a burden of expectations | 0:54:33 | 0:54:35 | |
which was way beyond what anyone, or any institution | 0:54:35 | 0:54:39 | |
or any country could satisfy. | 0:54:39 | 0:54:41 | |
And so I think there was widespread disillusionment. | 0:54:41 | 0:54:43 | |
His image, particularly in the early 1920s, | 0:54:43 | 0:54:47 | |
as Prime Minister is somebody who likes to swan around the world, | 0:54:47 | 0:54:50 | |
spending a lot of time in the sunshine. | 0:54:50 | 0:54:52 | |
More congenial to talk to your fellow world leaders | 0:54:52 | 0:54:55 | |
than to deal with the nitty-gritty retailer of domestic politics. | 0:54:55 | 0:54:59 | |
At one of these official visits is an amazing glimpse, on film, | 0:54:59 | 0:55:03 | |
of Lloyd George's love triangle. | 0:55:03 | 0:55:06 | |
Here, caught for a second on the right, is Frances Stevenson. | 0:55:06 | 0:55:09 | |
Then walking into shot, Lloyd George's wife, Margaret. | 0:55:09 | 0:55:13 | |
This all remained secret, | 0:55:13 | 0:55:15 | |
what did become public was a cash for honours scandal | 0:55:15 | 0:55:19 | |
which dwarfs any more recent examples. | 0:55:19 | 0:55:22 | |
There was a lot of personal corruption about him. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:25 | |
He once sold shares in a South American gold mine, | 0:55:25 | 0:55:29 | |
knowing there wasn't a gold mine, there wasn't any gold. | 0:55:29 | 0:55:31 | |
He was personally, undoubtedly corrupt, | 0:55:31 | 0:55:33 | |
there's no question about that. | 0:55:33 | 0:55:34 | |
Sold peerages in a way they've never been sold before, | 0:55:34 | 0:55:36 | |
apart from the reign of Henry VIII. | 0:55:36 | 0:55:38 | |
But it's not surprising that Lloyd George had double standards, | 0:55:38 | 0:55:41 | |
cos he did. | 0:55:41 | 0:55:42 | |
One thing which the establishment did resent, | 0:55:42 | 0:55:45 | |
and was a contribution to him being forced out of Downing Street, | 0:55:45 | 0:55:48 | |
was his blatant way in which Lloyd George went about it, | 0:55:48 | 0:55:54 | |
and also, the fact that he started selling honours to people | 0:55:54 | 0:55:57 | |
who the Conservatives thought | 0:55:57 | 0:55:58 | |
they ought to have been selling honours to. | 0:55:58 | 0:56:00 | |
You know, first of all, what he was doing wasn't actually illegal. | 0:56:00 | 0:56:03 | |
It was subsequently made illegal. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:05 | |
And secondly, | 0:56:05 | 0:56:06 | |
this was not something that he was doing for his own personal benefit. | 0:56:06 | 0:56:10 | |
He wasn't spending the money on luxury houses for himself, | 0:56:10 | 0:56:13 | |
he was spending it on building up a political fund, | 0:56:13 | 0:56:16 | |
because he knew that he was politically vulnerable. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:19 | |
He only had a small number of MPs in the House of Commons. | 0:56:19 | 0:56:23 | |
So, what he was doing was flogging off knighthoods | 0:56:23 | 0:56:25 | |
in order to fund his future political strategy. | 0:56:25 | 0:56:29 | |
The honours scandal enraged the Conservative Party, | 0:56:29 | 0:56:32 | |
and he was finally kicked out of office in 1922. | 0:56:32 | 0:56:36 | |
He hoped to return to power, but he never did, | 0:56:36 | 0:56:38 | |
remaining in the political wilderness for about 20 years | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
until his death in 1945. | 0:56:41 | 0:56:44 | |
He'd achieved a huge amount, | 0:56:44 | 0:56:46 | |
both as a reforming chancellor, | 0:56:46 | 0:56:48 | |
and as a wartime leader, | 0:56:48 | 0:56:50 | |
and yet, today he's not really remembered. | 0:56:50 | 0:56:53 | |
Certainly not on the same plain as someone like Winston Churchill. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:56 | |
The establishment never embraced Lloyd George, | 0:56:56 | 0:56:59 | |
and Lloyd George never embraced the establishment. | 0:56:59 | 0:57:01 | |
He took their money, he slept with their wives, | 0:57:01 | 0:57:04 | |
he used them to come to power, | 0:57:04 | 0:57:05 | |
but he never felt a member of the establishment, | 0:57:05 | 0:57:07 | |
and they never embraced him and never wanted him. | 0:57:07 | 0:57:09 | |
And yet the lesson of British history - | 0:57:09 | 0:57:11 | |
if you look at William Pitt the Elder, Churchill - | 0:57:11 | 0:57:13 | |
win the war, and then don't stick around | 0:57:13 | 0:57:15 | |
-to try and sort the peace out. -Absolutely. | 0:57:15 | 0:57:16 | |
Trying to sort the peace out undermines your reputation forever. | 0:57:16 | 0:57:20 | |
-MARGARET MACMILLAN: -Yes, he did make mistakes, | 0:57:22 | 0:57:24 | |
and I'm certainly not going to defend him for those. | 0:57:24 | 0:57:26 | |
And there are bits in his later career which are not edifying | 0:57:26 | 0:57:29 | |
and we tend to remember those. | 0:57:29 | 0:57:30 | |
He went off to see Hitler, his wife refused to go with him. | 0:57:30 | 0:57:33 | |
She said, "I'm not going anywhere near that man, you're mad to go." | 0:57:33 | 0:57:36 | |
And sadly, he didn't listen to her. | 0:57:36 | 0:57:38 | |
And I think he probably was, in 1939, he was an old man, | 0:57:38 | 0:57:42 | |
he was getting sick, | 0:57:42 | 0:57:43 | |
he was going to die in the course of the war, | 0:57:43 | 0:57:45 | |
and I think he probably was on the side of those | 0:57:45 | 0:57:47 | |
who didn't want to go to war, | 0:57:47 | 0:57:48 | |
who didn't want to stand up to Hitler. | 0:57:48 | 0:57:50 | |
Does that make him a wicked man? | 0:57:50 | 0:57:52 | |
No, I think it just, again, makes him very human. | 0:57:52 | 0:57:54 | |
Making this programme and meeting the historians has convinced me | 0:58:02 | 0:58:04 | |
that David Lloyd George did make a substantial contribution | 0:58:04 | 0:58:08 | |
to Allied victory in the First World War. | 0:58:08 | 0:58:10 | |
But he had terrible shortcomings - | 0:58:10 | 0:58:12 | |
he was deceitful, he was corrupt. | 0:58:12 | 0:58:14 | |
And all that means he's not a classic hero, | 0:58:14 | 0:58:17 | |
but one-dimensional heroes belong in mythology, not in history. | 0:58:17 | 0:58:21 | |
And I think, maybe, my great-great-grandfather, | 0:58:21 | 0:58:23 | |
like all the powerful men and women that ruled in the past, | 0:58:23 | 0:58:26 | |
perhaps like all of us, was capable of greatness, | 0:58:26 | 0:58:30 | |
but also of failure. | 0:58:30 | 0:58:32 |