A locked cemetery gate launched the only solicitor ever to be prime minister
A Welsh vicar locked his churchyard to keep out a Baptist funeral. A young solicitor, David Lloyd George, advised the mourners to break the gate open. The case went all the way to London, the Baptists won, and the victory made him a hero across Wales. He remains the only solicitor to become British prime minister.
Born in Manchester on 17 January 1863 to Welsh parents, he lost his father to pneumonia before he was two. His mother took the children home to Llanystumdwy, where her brother Richard, a shoemaker, lay preacher and fervent Liberal, shaped the boy. Welsh was his first language. He privately lost his religious faith as a young man but kept attending chapel and savouring good sermons all his life.
Qualifying in 1884, he set up practice in the back parlour of his uncle's house. The Llanfrothen burial case turned on an 1880 law allowing Nonconformists burial with their own rites in parish graveyards, which local clergy had ignored. A local judge misrecorded the jury's verdict for the mourners, but Lord Chief Justice Coleridge found for them on appeal. Within weeks, in December 1888, Lloyd George was chosen as Liberal candidate for Caernarvon Boroughs. He won the 1890 by-election narrowly and held the seat for 55 years. MPs were unpaid, so he kept practising law, opening a London office.
As Chancellor he proposed the 1909 People's Budget, taxing land and high incomes to pay for welfare. When the House of Lords threw it out, the resulting crisis ended with the Parliament Act 1911, which curbed the Lords. His National Insurance Act the same year helped lay the foundations of the welfare state.
He became Minister of Munitions in 1915 and prime minister in December 1916, forming a small war cabinet, introducing convoys against U-boats and rationing, and pushing for a single Allied command, achieved in March 1918. After the war he helped negotiate at Paris and agreed independence for the Irish Free State in 1921. An honours-for-sale scandal and the Conservatives' withdrawal from his coalition ended his premiership in 1922. He died on 26 March 1945, before he could take up his seat in the House of Lords.
Source: David Lloyd George
