page_title: David Lloyd George
section_title: Upbringing and early life
hierarchical_section_title: David Lloyd George / Upbringing and early life
caption_attribution_description: Cropped and retouched copy of 1 negative&#160;: glass, dry plate, b&amp;w&#160;; 16.5 x 21.5 cm.
context_page_description: David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, OM, PC was a Welsh statesman who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. He was the final Liberal to hold the post of Prime Minister, but his support increasingly came from the Conservatives who finally dropped him.
  Lloyd George was a first language Welsh speaker, born on 17 January 1863 in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, to Welsh parents. He was raised in Wales from around 3 months old, first briefly in Pembrokeshire, South West Wales, and then in Llanystumdwy, Carnarvonshire. He is so far the only British Prime Minister to have been Welsh and to have spoken English as a second language. His father, a schoolmaster, died in 1864 and he was raised in Wales by his mother and her shoemaker brother, whose Liberal politics and Baptist faith strongly influenced Lloyd George; the same uncle helped the boy embark on a career as a solicitor after leaving school.
context_section_description: Lloyd George was born on 17 January 1863 in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, to Welsh parents. He was brought up as a Welsh-speaker. His father, William George, had been a teacher in both London and Liverpool. He also taught in the Hope Street Sunday Schools, which were administered by the Unitarians, where he met Unitarian minister James Martineau. In March of the same year, on account of his failing health, William George returned with his family to his native Pembrokeshire. He took up farming but died in June 1864 of pneumonia, aged 44. His widow, Elizabeth George (1828–96), sold the farm and moved with her children to her native Llanystumdwy in Caernarfonshire, where she lived in a cottage known as Highgate with her brother Richard Lloyd (1834–1917), who was a shoemaker, a minister (in the Scottish Baptists and then the Church of Christ), and a strong Liberal. Lloyd George was educated at the local Anglican school Llanystumdwy National School and later under tutors. Lloyd George's uncle was a towering influence on him, encouraging him to take up a career in law and enter politics; his uncle remained influential up until his death at age 83 in February 1917, by which time his nephew had become Prime Minister. He added his uncle's surname to become "Lloyd George". His surname is usually given as "Lloyd George" and sometimes as "George". The influence of his childhood showed through in his entire career, as he attempted to aid the common man at the expense of what he liked to call "the Dukes" (that is, the aristocracy); however, biographer John Grigg argued that Lloyd George's childhood was nowhere near as poverty-stricken as he liked to suggest.
  Brought up a devout evangelical, as a young man he suddenly lost his religious faith. Biographer Don Cregier says he became "a Deist and perhaps an agnostic, though he remained a chapel-goer and connoisseur of good preaching all his life". He kept quiet about this, and was, according to Frank Owen, for 25 years "one of the foremost fighting leaders of a fanatical Welsh Nonconformity".
  It was also during this period of his life that Lloyd George first became interested in the issue of land ownership. As a young man he read books by Thomas Spence, John Stuart Mill and Henry George, as well as pamphlets written by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb of the Fabian Society on the issue of land ownership. By the age of twenty-one, he had already read and taken notes on Henry George's Progress and Poverty. This strongly influenced Lloyd George's politics later in life; the People's Budget drew heavily on Georgist tax reform ideas.
  Articled to a firm of solicitors in Porthmadog, Lloyd George was admitted in 1884 after taking Honours in his final law examination and set up his own practice in the back parlour of his uncle's house in 1885. The practice flourished, and he established branch offices in surrounding towns, taking his brother William into partnership in 1887. Although many Prime Ministers have been barristers, Lloyd George is to date the only solicitor to have held that office.
  By then he was politically active, having campaigned for the Liberal Party in the 1885 election, attracted by Joseph Chamberlain's "unauthorised programme" of reforms. The election resulted firstly in a stalemate with neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives having a majority, the balance of power being held by the Irish Parliamentary Party. William Gladstone's proposal to bring about Irish Home Rule split the party, with Chamberlain eventually leading the breakaway Liberal Unionists. Uncertain of which wing to follow, Lloyd George moved a resolution in support of Chamberlain at a local Liberal Club and travelled to Birmingham to attend the first meeting of Chamberlain's National Radical Union, but he had his dates wrong and arrived a week too early. In 1907 he told Herbert Lewis that he thought Chamberlain's plan for a federal solution correct in 1886 and still thought so, that he preferred the unauthorised programme to the Whig-like platform of the official Liberal Party, and that "If Henry Richmon
caption: Lloyd George circa 1890
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