page_title: David Lloyd George
section_title: President of the Board of Trade (1905–1908)
hierarchical_section_title: David Lloyd George / President of the Board of Trade (1905–1908)
caption_attribution_description: English: The "Terrible Twins" David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in 1907 during the peak of their "radical phase" as social reformers.
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: In 1905 Lloyd George entered the new Liberal Cabinet of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as President of the Board of Trade.
  The first priority on taking office was repeal of the 1902 Education Act. Lloyd George took the lead along with Augustine Birrell, President of the Board of Education. Lloyd George appears to have been the dominant figure on the committee drawing up the bill in its later stages, and insisted that the bill create a separate education committee for Wales. Birrell complained privately that the bill, introduced in the Commons on 9 April 1906, owed more to Lloyd George and that he himself had had little say in its contents. The bill passed the House of Commons greatly amended, but was completely mangled by the House of Lords. For the rest of the year, Lloyd George made numerous public speeches attacking the House of Lords for mutilating the bill with wrecking amendments, in defiance of the Liberals' electoral mandate to reform the 1902 Act. Lloyd George was rebuked by King Edward VII for these speeches: the Prime Minister defended him to the Kings's secretary Francis Knollys, stating that his behaviour in Parliament was more constructive but that in speeches to the public "the combative spirit seems to get the better of him". No compromise was possible and the bill was abandoned, allowing the 1902 Act to continue in effect. As a result of Lloyd George's lobbying, a separate department for Wales was created within the Board of Education.
  Nonconformists were bitterly upset by the failure of the Liberal Party to carry through on its most important promise to them, and over time their support for the Liberal Party slowly fell away.
  At the Board of Trade Lloyd George introduced legislation on many topics, from merchant shipping and the Port of London to companies and railway regulation. His main achievement was in stopping a proposed national strike of the railway unions by brokering an agreement between the unions and the railway companies. While almost all the companies refused to recognise the unions, Lloyd George persuaded the companies to recognise elected representatives of the workers who sat with the company representatives on conciliation boards—one for each company. If those boards failed to agree then an arbitrator would be called upon.
caption: David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in 1907
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