Welsh Journals

particularly good on the problems both of principle and of personality which beset the Wilson Chair in its early days. Here, as with the troubles over the principalship of Goronwy Rees, he does not muffle either the issues or the personal clashes. Altogether, he demonstrates that it is possible to write with affection of the strengths and particular qualities of an institution without masking either its defects or the muddles and idiosyncrasies of the people who compose it at any given time. Indeed, to attempt to mask these is to minimize the achievement. GILLIAN SUTHERLAND Newnham College, Cambridge LLOYD GEORGE: FAMILY LETTERS, 1885-1936. Edited by Kenneth O. Morgan. University of Wales Press and Oxford University Press, 1973. Pp. 227. £ 4.50. This book is based on over 2,000 letters written by Lloyd George to his first wife and family, purchased by the National Library of Wales in 1969. Its emphasis is clearly on Lloyd George's early career. Some two-thirds of it-by far the most interesting part-relates to the period before 1906: only about one-quarter deals with his time in office. In this respect it balances neatly the account already available in the diary of Lloyd George's one-time secretary and mistress, Frances Stevenson, after 1914. As Dr. Morgan frankly admits in his introduction, the picture of Lloyd George which emerges is not altogether attractive. The young politician made no secret of his ambition. As he wrote to Margaret Owen, his future wife: '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 Henceforward every debating triumph was recorded. But an endless repetition of boastful accounts of great speeches becomes wearisome, one suspects even-or especially, perhaps-for a wife more devoted to her life in Criccieth than to the calculation and manoeuvres of national politics. Lloyd George's inevitable divergence from the essential par- ochialism of his wife is treated sensitively, yet the editor rightly reminds us that she was herself 'within her circumscribed world at Criccieth, a shrewd judge of political personalities'. But her values and assumptions were quintessentially those of her north Wales Methodist chapel. They happened to be those which Lloyd George early on repudiated or regarded with a contempt which was not for public consumption. Not for L.G. the 'pleasure of being cramped up in a suffocating malodorous chapel listening to superstitions I had heard a thousand times before'. He was, in fact, in many ways an 'out- sider' even in Wales, and to explain Lloyd George simply in terms of his 'Welshness', that classic arrogance of Anglo-Saxon historians, is not only profoundly unhistorical but inaccurate. Lloyd George rose to fame