Of actors and Welsh politicians
Jun. 7th, 2014 01:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakI hiked these last few days, which inevitably means a lot of postings and mail to catch up with. However, I also watched a few things. The audio commentary of Thor: The Dark World told me that while I can hold out against Tom Hiddleston's characters no matter how popular - with my urgent need to see them slapped thankfully fulfilled in canon -, holding out against Tom Hiddleston himself is somewhat more difficult because he's just that charming. On the audio commentary, anyway. Completely into the MCU without any embarassment or need to emphasize he's a serious actor, etc. Full of praise for his fellow actors, not just the famous ones like Anthony Hopkins but also for the guy who plays a guard (whom he knows by name), and this fellow actor complimenting was how I found out that Josh Dallas, currently David/Prince Charming in Once Upon A Time, played Fandal in Thor (but not in The Dark World where his OuaT commitment meant he was replaced by Zach Levy). And he - Hiddleston, not Dallas - sounds distinctly smitten with Chris Hemsworth, so the internet did not lie about that one.
I also finished a miniseries from 1981 which the BBCiplayer is currently showing because of the WWI anniversary, The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, starring Philip Madoc, whom I had previously mainly associated with villainous Time Lords (I first saw him as the War Lord in the Second Doctor adventure The War Games) and Brother Cadfael (he played him in the radio dramatisations), in the title role. The series was written by Elaine Morgan, whom I must check out as a scriptwriter.
Now, here's what I knew about David Llyod George before watching: he was the British Prime Minister in the later part of WWI and thus also one of the Big Three at Versailles, and he was the most famous Welshman not an actor or writer since Wales got conquered. (I have since found out Winston Churchill put it a bit differently in his valediction after Lloyd George's death: "The greatest Welshman which that unconquerable race has produced since the age of the Tudors". This makes me wonder whether or not I count old Henry VII as a great Welshman. He certainly was a very successful one!) I didn't know anything else, which turns out to have been a big hole in my knowledge of British history. Most importantly, I did not know just how many key reforms Lloyd George was responsible for pre WWI, mostly as Chancellor of the Exchequer, laying the foundations of the British welfare system.
To borrow the summary from the internet: Lloyd George had been a long opponent of the Poor Law in Britain. He was determined to take action that in his words would "lift the shadow of the workhouse from the homes of the poor". He believed the best way of doing this was to guarantee an income to people who were to old to work. Lloyd George's measure, the Old Age Pensions Act, provided between 1s. and 5s. a week to people over seventy.
To pay for these pensions Lloyd George had to raise government revenues by an additional £16 million a year. In 1909 Lloyd George announced what became known as the People's Budget. This included increases in taxation. Whereas people on lower incomes were to pay 9d. in the pound, those on annual incomes of over £3,000 had to pay 1s. 2d. in the pound. Lloyd George also introduced a new supertax of 6d. in the pound for those earning £5000 a year. Other measures included an increase in death duties on the estates of the rich and heavy taxes on profits gained from the ownership and sale of property. Other innovations in Lloyd George's budget included labour exchanges and a children's allowance on income tax.
The Conservatives, who had a large majority in the House of Lords, objected to this attempt to redistribute wealth, and made it clear that they intended to block these proposals. Lloyd George reacted by touring the country making speeches in working-class areas on behalf of the budget and portraying the nobility as men who were using their privileged position to stop the poor from receiving their old age pensions. After a long struggle with the House of Lords Lloyd George finally got his budget through parliament.
Lloyd George seems to have had the proverbial Celtic gifts for words in full measure; some of the zingers he used against the House of Lords (which then had still the power to veto) which the series included and which according to the internet seem to be authentic quotes was the description of the Lords as "500 men randomly chosen among the umemployed", and "A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer". To continue with the summary of Lloyd George's pre war reforms:
With the House of Lords extremely unpopular with the British people, the Liberal government decided to take action to reduce its powers. The 1911 Parliament Act drastically cut the powers of the Lords. They were no longer allowed to prevent the passage of 'money bills' and it also restricted their ability to delay other legislation to three sessions of parliament.
When the House of Lords attempted to stop this bill's passage, the Prime Minister, Henry Asquith, appealed to George V for help. Asquith, who had just obtained a victory in the 1910 General Election, was in a strong position, and the king agreed that if necessary he would create 250 new Liberal peers to remove the Conservative majority in the Lords. Faced with the prospect of a House of Lords with a permanent Liberal majority, the Conservatives agreed to let the 1911 Parliament Act to become law.
Lloyd George's next reform was the 1911 National Insurance Act. This gave the British working classes the first contributory system of insurance against illness and unemployment. All wage-earners between sixteen and seventy had to join the health scheme. Each worker paid 4d a week and the employer added 3d. and the state 2d. In return for these payments, free medical attention, including medicine was given. Those workers who contributed were also guaranteed 7s. a week for fifteen weeks in any one year, when they were unemployed.
(Depressingly, this sounds like Obama Care in the US - a century later.)
I also hadn't known he was both the last Liberal PM and regarded as one of the reasons for the party's decline into insignificance for many decades to come, and nothing whatsoever about his private life.
The Life and Times of David Lloyd George for the most part manages a good mixture of politics and personal life, perhaps only cheating in favour of the later in the last episode, covering the years in decline until death, where the biggest gaffe/embarrassment/sin/however you want to call it which a 20th century politician could make, old Lloyd George visiting Hitler in 1936 and concluding this was the German Washington, is covered (or rather, only alluded to) briefly in dialogue while the big relationship crisis with one of the two women in his life and the death of the other gets main emphasis and key scenes. In earlier episodes, however, many of the previous dramatic events which made me wonder re: their reality did turn out, as some research has shown me, to have been real, for example David Lloyd George resolutely protesting the Boer War in 1901, holding speeches against it everywhere in the country and getting almost lynched by a patriotic mob (32 people in the crowd did die that day) in Birmingham, only surviving because the politice smuggled him out in disguise as another policeman.
Crucially, the (obscured) Hitler interlude aside, I didn't have the impression the series was trying to sell me its main character as prettified. (Mind you, it is careful in the first episode not to mention that David Lloyd George is supposed to be in his early twenties when first making a splash as a young Welsh lawyer taking on the Anglican Church, because Philip Madoc, while made up to look younger, must have been in his 50s at best. But he's so good in the part I don't wish the show had picked a younger actor for the younger Lloyd George of the first two or three episodes.) It shows the two sides of his character traits - that drive and ability to talk most people into anything is great when employed to champion the poor, but he's also shown as a terrible, terrible husband when using them. By which I mean: not only did he apparantly believe fidelity was for other people while jealous himself, but he was great at pulling just about every "you know, this is really your fault" excuse of cheating husbands ever, and it takes his wife Maggie a while to become immune to this type of mindmessing.
Most importantly, the series narrative doesn't play Maggie and the other key woman in Lloyd George's life, Frances Stevenson, against each other. As so many biopics do, going for the "she just was too narrow minded/couldn't understand his genius whereas X was his soulmate" route (Walk the Line, much as I liked the film, did this, and so did the two John Lennon biopics focusing on his relationship with Yoko re: his first wife Cynthia.) Instead, the series presents both Maggie and Frances - who started out as the governess of the youngest Lloyd George daughter in 1911, then became his secretary and his lover in 1913 and remained with him for thirty years while he remained married to Maggie until Maggie's death, basically living in two households until then, whereupon after two years of fierce arguments with his children he married Frances - as sympathetic and three dimensional, and gives narrative weight to both relationships, instead of declaring one as True Love and the other as Lesser. Frances - who was one of the first female secretaries (or as we'd describe her job today, P.A. to a key cabinet member and then the first female secretary to a British Prime Minister - tends to talk more politics with him, but that doesn't mean Maggie is presented as apolitical (we see her succesfully campaign in Wales for Lloyd George when he's busy campaigning in the rest of the country) or without her own opinions (she's completely against him continuing the coalition with the Tories post WWI).
Other than Maggie and Frances, the female characters who get deeper characterisation than a few lines are two of Lloyd George's daughters, Mair (who dies young at age 17) and Megan (after finding out the truth about her father's relationship with her former governess the big Frances hater of the family, and following her father into politics). The important male supporting characters are his uncle Lloyd (Welsh shoemaker and preacher who raised him), brother William (type supportive Faithful Lieutenant) and young Winston Churchill (type Ambitious Lieutenant). It was interesting to me that a show made in 1981 chose to not only use the occasional Welsh but also doesn't subtitle it. (You can usually guess the meaning from the context.) Which is historically accurate - David Lloyd George being to date the only British PM whose first language wasn't English, and a little googling tells me Philip Madoc also had Welsh as his first language -, but that usually doesn't stop fictional depictions to avoid other languages.
Lastly: two quotes about Lloyd George not in the series but which, hungry for more after watching, I found and which struck me as capturing the personality as given by the series:
What Lloyd George failed to understand was no man, however gifted, is a major political power in himself. He can teach, he can preach, he can make a significant contribution, but power politics is a struggle between social forces, not a duel between individuals. Once the war was over the Tories had no more use for him. He was an outsider, an upstart Welsh lawyer who had got above himself. (Jennie Lee, Baroness Lee of Asheridge in My Life With Nye (1980))
David Lloyd George was the best-hated statesman of his time, as well as the best loved. The former I have good reason to know; every time I made a pointed cartoon against him, it brought batches of approving letters from all the haters. Looking at Lloyd George's pink and hilarious, head thrown back, generous mouth open to its fullest extent, shouting with laughter at one of his own jokes, I thought I could see how it was that his haters hated him. He must have been poison to the old school tie brigade, coming to the House an outsider, bright, energetic, irrepressible, ruthless, mastering with ease the House of Commons procedure, applying all the Celtic tricks in the bag, with a talent for intrigue that only occasionally got away from him.
I always had the greatest difficulty in making Lloyd George sinister in a cartoon. Every time I drew him, however critical the comment, I had to be careful or he would spring off the drawing-board a lovable cherubic little chap. I found the only effective way of putting him definitely in the wrong in a cartoon was by misplacing this quality in sardonic incongruity — by surrounding the comedian with tragedy. (Cartoonist David Low)
Also: as it turned out I knew the theme of the series already, because it was composed by Ennio Morricone and became a breakout hit:
I also finished a miniseries from 1981 which the BBCiplayer is currently showing because of the WWI anniversary, The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, starring Philip Madoc, whom I had previously mainly associated with villainous Time Lords (I first saw him as the War Lord in the Second Doctor adventure The War Games) and Brother Cadfael (he played him in the radio dramatisations), in the title role. The series was written by Elaine Morgan, whom I must check out as a scriptwriter.
Now, here's what I knew about David Llyod George before watching: he was the British Prime Minister in the later part of WWI and thus also one of the Big Three at Versailles, and he was the most famous Welshman not an actor or writer since Wales got conquered. (I have since found out Winston Churchill put it a bit differently in his valediction after Lloyd George's death: "The greatest Welshman which that unconquerable race has produced since the age of the Tudors". This makes me wonder whether or not I count old Henry VII as a great Welshman. He certainly was a very successful one!) I didn't know anything else, which turns out to have been a big hole in my knowledge of British history. Most importantly, I did not know just how many key reforms Lloyd George was responsible for pre WWI, mostly as Chancellor of the Exchequer, laying the foundations of the British welfare system.
To borrow the summary from the internet: Lloyd George had been a long opponent of the Poor Law in Britain. He was determined to take action that in his words would "lift the shadow of the workhouse from the homes of the poor". He believed the best way of doing this was to guarantee an income to people who were to old to work. Lloyd George's measure, the Old Age Pensions Act, provided between 1s. and 5s. a week to people over seventy.
To pay for these pensions Lloyd George had to raise government revenues by an additional £16 million a year. In 1909 Lloyd George announced what became known as the People's Budget. This included increases in taxation. Whereas people on lower incomes were to pay 9d. in the pound, those on annual incomes of over £3,000 had to pay 1s. 2d. in the pound. Lloyd George also introduced a new supertax of 6d. in the pound for those earning £5000 a year. Other measures included an increase in death duties on the estates of the rich and heavy taxes on profits gained from the ownership and sale of property. Other innovations in Lloyd George's budget included labour exchanges and a children's allowance on income tax.
The Conservatives, who had a large majority in the House of Lords, objected to this attempt to redistribute wealth, and made it clear that they intended to block these proposals. Lloyd George reacted by touring the country making speeches in working-class areas on behalf of the budget and portraying the nobility as men who were using their privileged position to stop the poor from receiving their old age pensions. After a long struggle with the House of Lords Lloyd George finally got his budget through parliament.
Lloyd George seems to have had the proverbial Celtic gifts for words in full measure; some of the zingers he used against the House of Lords (which then had still the power to veto) which the series included and which according to the internet seem to be authentic quotes was the description of the Lords as "500 men randomly chosen among the umemployed", and "A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer". To continue with the summary of Lloyd George's pre war reforms:
With the House of Lords extremely unpopular with the British people, the Liberal government decided to take action to reduce its powers. The 1911 Parliament Act drastically cut the powers of the Lords. They were no longer allowed to prevent the passage of 'money bills' and it also restricted their ability to delay other legislation to three sessions of parliament.
When the House of Lords attempted to stop this bill's passage, the Prime Minister, Henry Asquith, appealed to George V for help. Asquith, who had just obtained a victory in the 1910 General Election, was in a strong position, and the king agreed that if necessary he would create 250 new Liberal peers to remove the Conservative majority in the Lords. Faced with the prospect of a House of Lords with a permanent Liberal majority, the Conservatives agreed to let the 1911 Parliament Act to become law.
Lloyd George's next reform was the 1911 National Insurance Act. This gave the British working classes the first contributory system of insurance against illness and unemployment. All wage-earners between sixteen and seventy had to join the health scheme. Each worker paid 4d a week and the employer added 3d. and the state 2d. In return for these payments, free medical attention, including medicine was given. Those workers who contributed were also guaranteed 7s. a week for fifteen weeks in any one year, when they were unemployed.
(Depressingly, this sounds like Obama Care in the US - a century later.)
I also hadn't known he was both the last Liberal PM and regarded as one of the reasons for the party's decline into insignificance for many decades to come, and nothing whatsoever about his private life.
The Life and Times of David Lloyd George for the most part manages a good mixture of politics and personal life, perhaps only cheating in favour of the later in the last episode, covering the years in decline until death, where the biggest gaffe/embarrassment/sin/however you want to call it which a 20th century politician could make, old Lloyd George visiting Hitler in 1936 and concluding this was the German Washington, is covered (or rather, only alluded to) briefly in dialogue while the big relationship crisis with one of the two women in his life and the death of the other gets main emphasis and key scenes. In earlier episodes, however, many of the previous dramatic events which made me wonder re: their reality did turn out, as some research has shown me, to have been real, for example David Lloyd George resolutely protesting the Boer War in 1901, holding speeches against it everywhere in the country and getting almost lynched by a patriotic mob (32 people in the crowd did die that day) in Birmingham, only surviving because the politice smuggled him out in disguise as another policeman.
Crucially, the (obscured) Hitler interlude aside, I didn't have the impression the series was trying to sell me its main character as prettified. (Mind you, it is careful in the first episode not to mention that David Lloyd George is supposed to be in his early twenties when first making a splash as a young Welsh lawyer taking on the Anglican Church, because Philip Madoc, while made up to look younger, must have been in his 50s at best. But he's so good in the part I don't wish the show had picked a younger actor for the younger Lloyd George of the first two or three episodes.) It shows the two sides of his character traits - that drive and ability to talk most people into anything is great when employed to champion the poor, but he's also shown as a terrible, terrible husband when using them. By which I mean: not only did he apparantly believe fidelity was for other people while jealous himself, but he was great at pulling just about every "you know, this is really your fault" excuse of cheating husbands ever, and it takes his wife Maggie a while to become immune to this type of mindmessing.
Most importantly, the series narrative doesn't play Maggie and the other key woman in Lloyd George's life, Frances Stevenson, against each other. As so many biopics do, going for the "she just was too narrow minded/couldn't understand his genius whereas X was his soulmate" route (Walk the Line, much as I liked the film, did this, and so did the two John Lennon biopics focusing on his relationship with Yoko re: his first wife Cynthia.) Instead, the series presents both Maggie and Frances - who started out as the governess of the youngest Lloyd George daughter in 1911, then became his secretary and his lover in 1913 and remained with him for thirty years while he remained married to Maggie until Maggie's death, basically living in two households until then, whereupon after two years of fierce arguments with his children he married Frances - as sympathetic and three dimensional, and gives narrative weight to both relationships, instead of declaring one as True Love and the other as Lesser. Frances - who was one of the first female secretaries (or as we'd describe her job today, P.A. to a key cabinet member and then the first female secretary to a British Prime Minister - tends to talk more politics with him, but that doesn't mean Maggie is presented as apolitical (we see her succesfully campaign in Wales for Lloyd George when he's busy campaigning in the rest of the country) or without her own opinions (she's completely against him continuing the coalition with the Tories post WWI).
Other than Maggie and Frances, the female characters who get deeper characterisation than a few lines are two of Lloyd George's daughters, Mair (who dies young at age 17) and Megan (after finding out the truth about her father's relationship with her former governess the big Frances hater of the family, and following her father into politics). The important male supporting characters are his uncle Lloyd (Welsh shoemaker and preacher who raised him), brother William (type supportive Faithful Lieutenant) and young Winston Churchill (type Ambitious Lieutenant). It was interesting to me that a show made in 1981 chose to not only use the occasional Welsh but also doesn't subtitle it. (You can usually guess the meaning from the context.) Which is historically accurate - David Lloyd George being to date the only British PM whose first language wasn't English, and a little googling tells me Philip Madoc also had Welsh as his first language -, but that usually doesn't stop fictional depictions to avoid other languages.
Lastly: two quotes about Lloyd George not in the series but which, hungry for more after watching, I found and which struck me as capturing the personality as given by the series:
What Lloyd George failed to understand was no man, however gifted, is a major political power in himself. He can teach, he can preach, he can make a significant contribution, but power politics is a struggle between social forces, not a duel between individuals. Once the war was over the Tories had no more use for him. He was an outsider, an upstart Welsh lawyer who had got above himself. (Jennie Lee, Baroness Lee of Asheridge in My Life With Nye (1980))
David Lloyd George was the best-hated statesman of his time, as well as the best loved. The former I have good reason to know; every time I made a pointed cartoon against him, it brought batches of approving letters from all the haters. Looking at Lloyd George's pink and hilarious, head thrown back, generous mouth open to its fullest extent, shouting with laughter at one of his own jokes, I thought I could see how it was that his haters hated him. He must have been poison to the old school tie brigade, coming to the House an outsider, bright, energetic, irrepressible, ruthless, mastering with ease the House of Commons procedure, applying all the Celtic tricks in the bag, with a talent for intrigue that only occasionally got away from him.
I always had the greatest difficulty in making Lloyd George sinister in a cartoon. Every time I drew him, however critical the comment, I had to be careful or he would spring off the drawing-board a lovable cherubic little chap. I found the only effective way of putting him definitely in the wrong in a cartoon was by misplacing this quality in sardonic incongruity — by surrounding the comedian with tragedy. (Cartoonist David Low)
Also: as it turned out I knew the theme of the series already, because it was composed by Ennio Morricone and became a breakout hit:
no subject
Date: 2014-06-07 01:29 pm (UTC)Golly, it must have toned him down by a factor of about ten. I've always assumed that the song "Lloyd George knew my father" was hinting at "It's a wise child that knows its own father."
Also, did it mention his implacable hostility to women's suffrage and his involvement in the large-scale sale of honours?
no subject
Date: 2014-06-07 04:06 pm (UTC)Honours: yes. Also the Marconi scandal.
Women's suffrage: actually it was more complicated than "implacable hostility", and yes, they did address it. In a scene where Frances asks him about why he didn't support the 1908 (don't hold me on the date, I'm going by memory) act which would have allowed partial votes for women, he says that such an act would have given votes only to women wealthy and already franchised, who'd vote overwhelmingly Tory ("ask Sylvia Pankhurst; she is the only one of that family who isn't a snob"), so of course, he said, he was against it, but that he would support a wide extension of the suffrage to women on the same term as men. I later checked and the factual basis of that scene seems to be found to be based on a speech he held in Bath in 1911, which he in rl sent to Frances via letter (i.e. the series made it a dialogue but didn't invent the argument). Btw, the series never implies Lloyd George was in any way a feminist. Just that he was pragmatic on the voting issue, and couldn't understand why he was singled out by the militants as opposed to Asquith or other cabinet members who were competely against female votes. The bombing of his house makes it into the series, but we also get a mid war meeting with Emmeline Pankhurt where they negotiate as two wily political professionals.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-07 04:16 pm (UTC)