Welsh Journals

THE YEARS THAT ARE PAST. By Frances Lloyd George. Hutchinson, 1967. Pp. 296. 42s. Among the many tantalizing historical documents which the late Lord Beaverbrook made available to students of Lloyd George's career, perhaps the most intimate and revealing were the extracts from Frances Stevenson's diary. Frances Stevenson, now Frances, Countess Lloyd- George of Dwyfor, joined Lloyd George as his personal secretary in 1912. She served him in that capacity until she became his second wife in October 1943. For a large part of this period she kept a diary. This document, bought by Lord Beaverbrook in 1950, now rests under lock and key, until at least 1971, in the library built by Beaverbrook Newspapers to house the Lloyd George, Bonar Law, and other manuscript collections. In writing her memoirs, The Years that are Past, Lady Lloyd-George did not herself have access to this diary. Nor was she free to make full use of an earlier unpublished autobiography-from which Lord Beaverbrook quoted in The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George-which also is deposited in the Beaverbrook Library. It must be counted as a serious loss to historians that Lady Lloyd- George was thus separated from the documents in which her richest treasures of recollection were stored. She had been closer to Lloyd George than any other person for more than half his adult life. Though not his bride until he was eighty, 'our real marriage', she confesses with quiet candour, 'had taken place thirty years before'. The relationship had never been a secret. A. J. P. Taylor wrote in his volume of the Oxford History of England that Lloyd George was the first prime minister since the duke of Grafton to 'live openly with his mistress'. And it was possible to deduce something of the important role that Frances Stevenson played in the Lloyd George story from Frank Owen's Tempestuous Journey, a book which owed much to the papers and detailed information which she put at Owen's disposal. In Malcolm Thomson's official biography of Lloyd George there is a 22-page introduction in which, while the memory of her husband was still fresh in her mind, Lady Lloyd-George portrayed Lloyd George 'the man', as she had known him. That essay remains her best testimony on the subject. The Years that are Past contains little about Lloyd George that has not hitherto been revealed either by the writer herself or by others. What is new, and especially interesting, is the tale which she tells of her own family, childhood, and schooling. Few autobiographers have written more illuminatingly of an Edwardian upbringing in suburban London, of life on the small income and proud self-sufficiency of a lower middle class family. Even if there were nothing more in her memoirs than the too modestly brief early chapters, their publication would have been amply justified.