The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  David Lloyd George, a Welsh-speaker and, in his earliest manifestations as a political being, to all intents a Welsh nationalist or at least a Welsh Home Ruler, belonged to a very different Wales from that of the pits and the valleys of the South. Though born and reared in poverty, he belonged to the tradition of teachers, preachers, dreamers and ranters who owe spiritual kinship to the Bards. Yet, such is the strangeness of David Lloyd George that he always transcended his background.

  He was actually born in England – in Manchester, on 17 January 1863. His father had been a schoolmaster, a career he abandoned in favour of farming, but he died when his son was seventeen months old. Thereafter, David and his infant brother were brought up by his mother and Uncle Lloyd – their mother’s brother, a shoemaker and pillar of the Baptist Chapel at Llanystumdwy.

  Social class in Wales was not as crudely stratified as in industrial England. A clever, literate shoemaker was poor, but not the lowest of the low. The Idealist philosopher Sir Henry Jones (1852–1922) – Fellow of the British Academy, Companion of Honour, professor at Glasgow – was born the son of the village shoemaker at Llangernyw, Denbighshire, left school aged twelve, but grew up in a world which respected learning. Lloyd George received a good education at the local school – which was a Church school. In the early part of his political career, his preoccupation was the superficially parochial one of Church tithes. Since the (Anglican) Church in Wales was not (as the Irish one had been in 1859) disestablished, all local farmers and householders were obliged to pay a tenth of their income in tax to the parson. As in Ireland, so in Wales (where the majority of the population were Christians of a different complexion), the Established Church was deeply resented. The apparently small question of whether a shoemaker or a dairyman who attended the Baptist chapel should be made to pay money to the (Anglican) parson actually encapsulated the much bigger question of the powers of the state over the small nation and the small man.

  In essence, surely, this is why Lloyd George never became a socialist. He saw the state as an enabler of private destinies, not as the paternalistic substitute for Church, mill-owner or landlord. When he was a well-established politician, in 1906, he told an audience in Birmingham that Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform ‘has focused the opera-glasses of the rich on the miseries of the poor. Once you do that, there is plenty of kindness in the human heart.’

  Dickens could have said that: and Lloyd George has strong elements of the Dickensian in his nature – the hyper-energy, the tendency to fantasize, the essential benignity. He saw the great Liberal victory of 1906 as a chance to do the decent thing by the poor without the collectivist solutions of the Independent Labour Party:

  I have one word for the Liberals – I can tell them what will make this I.L.P. movement a great and sweeping force in this country – a force that will sweep away Liberalism, amongst other things. If at the end of an average term of office it were found that the present Parliament had done nothing to cope seriously with the social condition of the people, to remove the national degradation of slums and widespread poverty and destitution in a land glittering with wealth … then a real cry will arise in this land for a new party, and many of us here in this room [he spoke in Penrhyndeudrath] will join that cry.

  That was the great Lloyd George who stood on the verge of becoming chancellor of the Exchequer, and eventually the prime minister. How utterly different from the world, social and political, in which the young Gladstone had come into prominence, was the self-driven early rise of David Lloyd George.

  There is a marvellous photograph of Gladstone standing in the drizzle on the rocky slopes of Snowdon on 13 September 1892. The ostensible occasion of the Grand Old Man’s visit was to open a footpath. In fact, it was to reassure his Welsh voters that over the vital issues of land (comparable, if less dire than in Ireland), tithes and independence of the Church, he was listening to them. Lloyd George’s brother William was surprised by Gladstone’s stockiness, and by his agility as he scrambled up the rocks to address the crowds. David Lloyd George, twenty-nine years old, was the MP for Caernarvon Boroughs, and met the G.O.M. at dinner the night before. He was thrilled by the deep vibrant tones of ‘this great figure from a past world’ – even when Gladstone spoke of such superficially prosaic subjects as corrugated-iron roofing.31

  If Lloyd George saw an old man with a sonorous voice and silver hair, Gladstone would have seen an eager, humorous man with bright blue eyes, raven-dark hair, and with a beautiful musical voice. Gladstone would not have approved had he known not merely how attractive Lloyd George was to women, but how shamelessly this married father of – eventually – five (legitimate) children would exploit this appeal. (He once gave a private dinner in an hotel, in which the guest-list consisted of men usually supposed to be at enmity in the public political sphere. One of them, Sir Oswald Mosley, said, ‘“This will lift the roof if it gets out.” Lloyd George replied, with his ineffable dimpling expression, “My dear boy, if everything I have done in this hotel during the last forty years had got out, you have no idea how many times I would have had to retire from politics.”’)32

  From the very beginnings, Lloyd George had a Napoleonic confidence in his own destiny. At eighteen, three years before he so much as qualified as a solicitor, he made his first visit to London to take his Intermediate Law exams and visited a House of Commons which was empty – it being a Saturday. In his diary of 12 November 1881 he wrote, ‘I will not say but that I eyed the assembly in a spirit similar to that in which William the Conqueror eyed England on his visit to Edward the Confessor, as the region of his future domain.’33 His letter to the woman he would marry, Margaret Owen, written perhaps in 1886, is chilling in its candour. ‘My supreme idea is to get on. To this idea I shall sacrifice everything – except I trust honesty. I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my Juggernaut if it obstructs the way.’ No one could say she had not been warned – though, poor woman, she could not have guessed how highly sexed he was, nor how unfaithful he was capable of being. Carlyle would have been shocked by Lloyd George’s lapses from honesty and chastity, but he would surely, had he lived to witness it, been impressed by the way in which the small-town solicitor from Criccieth would emerge, with the apparent naturalness of a Muhammad, a Cromwell or a Frederick, as a Leader of the Leaderless. Knowing the extent of Lloyd George’s virile energies it is hard not to think of them metaphorically when one considers the apparent flaccidity of Lord Rosebery and his Liberal Unionist followers in the Lords and Commons (though as a pawer of women under tablecloths and mauler of other men’s wives, Herbert Asquith was more than a rival for the seer of Criccieth).

  So long as his sphere was domestic politics, David Lloyd George could appear marginal. The Liberal Party was defeated in 1895 and would be out of office for a decade. Lord Salisbury and his government cared little for Welshmen and their local concerns. But it was as a spokesman on a much wider theme that Lloyd George was to rise to prominence.

  In South Africa Britain had annexed the territory east of the Orange Free State known as Griqualand West, in order to secure the diamonds of Kimberley. Then gold was discovered in the Transvaal, on the Witwatersrand, and a group of foreigners (Uitlanders) were threatening the old-fashioned Bible-based way of life of the Boers. Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal Republic, resisted the demands of the Uitlanders for political rights.

  In December 1895 the young prime minister of the Cape, Cecil Rhodes, tried to engineer an uprising of the Uitlanders at Johannesburg, which would be joined by a flying column of Cape Chartered Company police, under the direction of his friend Dr Jameson. The new colonial secretary in Salisbury’s government, Joseph Chamberlain, knew about this illegal, reckless scheme. The ‘Jameson Raid’, however, was an ignominious failure. Dr Jameson moved in too fast and had to be disowned; the Uitlanders did not rebel. Rhodes fell from power and the confidence he had tried to build up between Boers and British was destroyed.

  The British Imperialists h
ad been made a laughing-stock, and the rest of the world did not restrain its ridicule. A Welshman who had witnessed decades of English interference in his province (Welsh-speaking children were forced to carry a large letter W on their back in the schools where English was enforced) could not but be pleased. The Boers, Bible Protestants, hill farmers, were a more stolid lot than the Welsh, but there were obviously areas in common. ‘In South Africa, a small republic, with an army the size of that of an ordinary German principality, has been able to defy the power of Great Britain,’ Lloyd George could tell an audience at Penarth, on 28 November 1896. In the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign, all British eyes now turned towards South Africa.

  fn1 Asked by a rich American visiting Eaton Hall if he could buy the champion, the Duke of Westminster replied, ‘There is not enough money in the great American Republic to buy Bend ’Or.’16

  42

  The Boer War

  DURING THE FIRST World War, Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout Movement, hero of the siege of Mafeking (14 October 1899–17 May 1900), peer of the realm and pillar of manly rectitude, was suffering badly from sleeplessness and headaches. He consulted a Harley Street physician, Dr F.D.S. Jackson, who suggested to him that he should keep a dream diary. Jackson was a medical doctor, not an analyst, but he clearly knew that the good Baden-Powell’s troubles had an emotional origin.

  On 3 April 1917 Baden-Powell dreamed that he was looking at a shop window in a small country town. Several men were standing beside him. ‘One, on my left, whom I took to be a soldier without looking at him, pressed rather closely to me. As I turned away, suddenly I found his hand in my pocket … I thought of a ju-jitsu grip for holding him but finally put my arm around his neck to make it look as if we were good friends and yet to have a hold on him as we marched to the police station … Through his coat I could feel that he had little on under his coat and a sort of lump on his chest, and I felt great pity for him.’1

  In 1919, two years after the birth of his third and last child, he began to sleep apart from his wife and his headaches vanished.

  As an army officer – he left the army in 1910 – Baden-Powell had often had ‘private chats’ with his men, urging upon them the virtues of emotional and sexual restraint. For instance, in cases of bereavement, there was the hideous danger of tears. One highly suspect man in his regiment had made eye-contact with Baden-Powell. ‘Something in the twinkle of his eye had pre-possessed me. I had a private talk with him, and from that day to this, he never gave a moment’s trouble.’ When this ‘blackguard’s’ mother died, he came to Baden-Powell and wept. He ‘sent him out with a “don’t-be-a-fool” pat on the shoulder, but my right hand was richer for a hot and grimy tear-splash’.2

  Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) made no secret of preferring to surround himself with male servants and underlings. One secretary recalled that when Rhodes was prime minister of the Cape, ‘he invariably called me into his office every afternoon to go through his private letters with him. I looked with the greatest pleasure to the half-hour or hour with him every afternoon. He was exceedingly kind and tender towards me. He made me draw up my chair quite close to him, and frequently placed his hand on my shoulder …’ The closest of such relationships perhaps was that enjoyed between Rhodes and Neville Pickering, with whom Rhodes lived ‘as a boy among boys’ and at whose death he was desolated.3

  To some minds, it would seem ‘obvious’ what was going on in the hearts of Baden-Powell or Cecil Rhodes. Frank Harris liked to gossip about Rhodes’s ‘erotic tendencies’, claiming them to be ‘worthy of Oscar Wilde’, but nothing specific was ever substantiated, and even Harris had to admit that while enjoying repeating such rumours he did not actually believe them.

  Of course in the manly world of the British Empire where soldiers and servants of all races and sizes were to be encountered across five continents, there were opportunities for all manner of behaviour. One of the biographers of Lord Kitchener, for example,4 finds no evidence for his erotic preferences. Another book, dealing with Kitchener’s relationship with Lord Curzon, contrasts his marked, if masochistic, fondness for women with Kitchener’s allegedly different taste.5 He quotes ‘a lady who moved in the same social circles as he before the 1914–1918 war’ who said that she had wanted to marry a young man. He told her he had no fondness for women, having been ‘initiated’ into a different practice by Lord Kitchener.

  I wonder who this lady was. When I was a young man, Lady Diana Cooper, daughter of the Duchess of Rutland and Harry Cust, told me that she had been placed next to Mr Asquith at table. He had taken her hand and placed it inside his trousers under the tablecloth. When she complained to her mother, the Duchess allegedly replied that she could count herself lucky not to have attracted Lord Kitchener. When the great field marshal stayed in aristocratic houses, the well-informed young would ask servants to sleep across their bedroom threshold to impede his entrance. Rather than discriminating on grounds of sex, the hero of Omdurman had a compulsion – whether with men or women it did not matter – of a kind which Lord Queensberry had so unsuccessfully attempted to spell on that calling card left for Wilde at the Albemarle Club.

  When Rhodes was the most famous British Imperialist, he would exclaim, ‘I am a boy! Of course I shall never grow old.’6

  It would be very easy to make sense of the Imperialists if we could attribute the whole phenomenon of the British Empire to repression of, or failure to understand, sexuality. How nearly one could argue that the careers of Rhodes, Kitchener, Baden-Powell and many another manly, knobbly-kneed son of Empire reached their zenith at the very moment Wilde confronted his nemesis. Empires are male phenomena. They presumably come about in conjunction with an excess of testosterone. The Emperor Claudius alone among the great Caesars excited derisive gossip to observe his unusual taste for women. All the others liked not merely men, but boys. The same could be said for the empires of Alexander the Great or the Ottomans at their apogee of strength. Nor need it be seen as accidental, at the time when the United States of America knows no rival as a global superpower, that it has witnessed the phenomenon of gay politics, the assertion that to discriminate against a man or woman on the grounds of sexual orientation is as wicked as to do so on grounds of race or class.

  But here we enter into the whole difficulty of discussing the British Imperial past. Of course, it is easy for a modern person when revisiting the past to be quite certain of all the mistakes they made, and to be able, or think oneself able, to understand them better than they understand themselves. The repressive attitude to homosexuality, for instance, is bound to seem, to a later generation reared on therapy and ‘talk cures’ and letting everything out, to be tragic and unnecessary.

  The first British soldier to rise from the ranks and become a senior officer was Sir Hector Macdonald (1853–1903). The youngest of five sons of a Scottish crofter, he enlisted in the Gordon Highlanders at seventeen. He fought as a common soldier in the Afghan War of 1879, earning the nickname ‘Fighting Mac’ on the march to Kabul with General Sir Frederick Sleigh Roberts (1832–1914). On his way home he fought in the First South African War and was present at the disastrous defeat at Majuba. Then in the late Eighties and early Nineties he took part with Kitchener in the reconquest of the Sudan, commanding a brigade and becoming very popular. He had ‘a rare gift for handling troops’. By the time he returned to England, Fighting Mac was a popular hero, an aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria. During the Boer War he was a major-general, and given a knighthood. After the war he was posted to Ceylon, becoming the general in charge of the island, but a complaint – an ‘opprobrious accusation’ – was made against him. He set out for London to explain himself to the War Office, but never reached home. He shot himself in the Hotel Regina in Paris, at the age of forty-nine.7

  Many of us would find this a much sadder story than that of the exhibitionistic Wilde. George V’s innocent remark when told of someone’s homosexuality (‘I thought men like that shot themselves’) was literally
true.

  Knowing as we do that the cult of Imperialist manliness was played out against a background of emotional repression might lead us to suppose that we would be closer to understanding the Imperialists if we were to ‘out’ as many as plausible as gays. Rudyard Kipling, for example, had thick moustaches and round spectacles; worn at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they made him look like the ‘gay clone’ cohorts of the 1970s and 1980s. It is not surprising that he should have been claimed as a gay – conscious and crypto,8 or unconscious.9

  Most reviewers, and subsequent biographers, have pooh-poohed the notion of Kipling as a homosexual. In a sense it is a fruitless inquiry, since what is so difficult for a modern to come to terms with, in confronting the heyday of the British Empire, is what is obvious, not what is hidden. The unashamed and undiluted masculinity of this world needs ‘explaining’ to a generation where it seems desirable for both sexes to run the world. In the 1890s even the movement for women’s suffrage went off the boil. Women as intelligent as Mrs Humphry Ward and Mrs Sidney Webb actually went public with their view that women should not be given the vote.