“How should I know,” laughed Lord Birkenhead. When he passed through Alberta the other day, the prince had not summoned him to communicate any matrimonial secret.
But what about the girl in green? Did he know anything about the girl in green? Again Lord Birkenhead laughed. He had been keeper of the Great Seal. He was not his prince’s keeper.
The reporter left the girl in green and asked: “What of the movies? What do you think of the movies?”
The ex-lord high chancellor did not frown on this frivolous inquiry. “You should ask my daughter,” said he with a laugh. “She is our family authority on the moving pictures.”
Unfortunately Lady Eleanor is not with him. She has remained behind in New York, where movies are at their best. But was it true as rumored that she was going to appear on the screen?
The thought of his daughter becoming a moving picture actress did not appear to disturb Lord Birkenhead in the least. He who is so modern in every detail is also a modern father. “She will no doubt do as she pleases,” he replied indulgently. But it was not at all likely that she would please.
Still, with all his modernity Lord Birkenhead did not seem quite to appreciate the function of women in modern journalism. A woman reporter from the Star dropped in in quest of the absent Lady Eleanor. “I do not know how I can help you,” said he. “I suppose you do fashions.” He felt inadequate to discuss fashions. Modern woman’s attire was too scant a subject for his formidable intellect.
But he was not asked to discuss fashions and in a wondering, half-admiring and possibly faintly ironical way he expressed his surprise at North American interviewers whether male or female. In England public men mostly gave formal statements. They did not sit for their portraits. But he did not seem to object to sitting for his portrait.
“In England,” said he, “the press asked me questions when I left. They will also make inquiries when I return.” It was only an occasional tribulation.
Was that true of Lloyd George?
“Lloyd George,” said he, “is well aware of the personal prestige that comes from constant appearance in the press, but he prefers to give his opinions formally. He is not too willing to throw himself on the mercies of casual interviewers.”
But Lord Birkenhead himself was not formal, not this morning at least. “I haven’t any opinions today,” said he, “formal or informal. I’m off to play tennis. Do the best you can for me.”
This interview, brief and informal as it was, serves at least to dispel three myths about this mystery man of modern English politics: that he is a Prohibitionist, that he had given up smoking and that he is blunt and ungracious to interviewers.
If Lord Birkenhead can be a mental thistle, a political nettle that cannot be interrogated too closely, particularly about Wilsonian idealism, he has nonetheless a gracious exterior. The sting of his wit and irony is well concealed by the debonair down of conversational ease and personal amiability.
But, as he said, it was too fine a day and too early in the morning to talk politics.
Last night he spoke in Massey Hall, roaming about at will through the fields of political history and even dealing to a considerable extent in futures. He was an oratorical stereopticon, exhibiting a series of views on what has taken place, is now taking place, and is about to take place in Britain, and those who have shared, are sharing, and are about to share in the responsibilities of making it happen.
Lloyd George Willing to Address 10,000
The Toronto Daily Star
October 5, 1923
NEW YORK.—Sir Alfred Cope promised the Star this morning that Lloyd George would address an overflow meeting either at the [Toronto] Arena Gardens or at the Coliseum. “A wire will be sent to the mayor to make the necessary arrangements as soon as Lloyd George arrives this morning,” Sir Alfred said. “If they can get 10,000 people in, all the better. Lloyd George will not be able to speak more than twenty minutes, but we want everyone to hear him. Voice amplifiers should be arranged for.”
The Arrival of Lloyd George
The Toronto Daily Star
October 5, 1923
NEW YORK.—While the gigantic Mauretania, tall as a cliff, lay off quarantine outside New York harbor today waiting for the early morning fog to lift, a short, thickset, ruddy faced little man with a thick patriarchal mane of white hair was dressing in his cabin before going on deck early.
No one knows what he was thinking about, but one may venture the opinion that as he thought of the new world it must have come into his mind that he, David Lloyd George, is the one great survivor of the wreck of the Old World.
He has been spared for something. Perhaps it is to save the world. He tried that once at an old seaport town called Genoa. All the nations who hate each other met and sat down to the conference table together. When they snarled and refused to discuss world problems, Lloyd George calmed them and brought them together. When France or Russia threatened to go away, Lloyd George talked and they stayed.
I heard him talk there in times of crisis and he was very wonderful. But he could not stay. He had to get back to London and finally “the ship of Genoa,” as he always called it, went on the rocks and all the nations went away.
They say that Genoa and the Near East gave him his death blow in politics. But talking with him on the Mauretania today I could see that nothing could ever give him a death blow. The political sword that will kill him has not yet been forged. Not yet.
Genoa was a tragic conference. The last of the great conferences. The conference that he dominated. Of the men who sat with Lloyd George there, Walther Rathenau, cold and idealistic, was shot in the back in his town motorcar as he drove to the foreign office in Berlin.
Vorovsky, the Russian, scholarly and kindly, was murdered at the table as he drank his after-dinner coffee in a hotel in Lausanne.
Stambouliski, a roaring bull of a man who worked only for the good of Bulgaria, was hunted down and killed in a field by his own soldiers while he tried to hide in a straw stack.
Gounaris, the Greek premier, was carried from his bed sick with typhoid to stand before the firing squad in a drizzling rain in the courtyard of the military hospital.
All this within a year.
But Lloyd George carries not one scar from that conference. He is the great survivor.
There was Lord Northcliffe too. Northcliffe, who had been a friend of Lloyd George and then hated him and swore to drive him from office.
“I’ve been in the government for sixteen years,” Lloyd George told George Adam one night at Genoa. “I’ve had a long time of it. But I will not be driven from office by that man Northcliffe.”
Adam has written of the incident. That was when the attacks on Lloyd George were at their bitterest. But Lord Northcliffe was dead and buried before Lloyd George ever relinquished the premiership.
He is a fighter, Lloyd George. But he knows the truth of what Gabriele D’Annunzio says, “Morire non basta.” “It is not enough to die.” You must survive to win.
The Little Welshman Lands
The Toronto Daily Star
October 6, 1923
NEW YORK.—The first sight of Lloyd George was standing high up on the top deck of the Mauretania with Dame Margaret and Megan. The Mauretania lay at anchor under the bluffs of Staten Island with a tug along each side snuggling close. Then the revenue cutter touched and after a minute’s parleying a crowd of newspapermen went over the side like a boarding party.
Lloyd George had disappeared. The pack hunted from deck to deck and finally his secretary appeared. There was a shout “He’s coming,” and then he came into the after saloon. About fifty newspapermen were standing. One chair had been reserved. Lloyd George seated himself. He smiled. “Ah, so this is the electrocuting chair,” he said.
Lloyd George looks older. He is short, thickset, rather heavy with a double chin and that flowing mane of white hair that is getting thin on the very top. When he smiles his face is the face of Puck. A rising sun of wrinkles goes o
ut from each eye. Everyone laughs with him. But he is older. As you stand close to him you see that when he stops smiling the laugh wrinkles remain. Today he wore an old gray four-in-hand tie, a fur-lined black ulster, and a silk hat that sat incongruously on his thick hair.
“Have you any message for Canada?” I asked him.
“No. I have a message that I am most anxious to deliver, but I will not deliver it until we reach Montreal.” Lloyd George smiled. “I’ve been in Canada, you know. I crossed all the way to Vancouver, but they tell me there are great changes now. I am most anxious to visit Canada, and look forward to Toronto.
“I am not coming to the United States to say anything, but to see a good deal,” Lloyd George continued. “I’ve been anticipating this visit for many years but I’ve been a busy man. I want especially to see the country. That is why I am going to travel as far as I can by daylight.”
“What do you think about the European situation?” asked a reporter.
“Well, it is not very good, is it?” Lloyd George answered. His accent is not English but thicker with a Welsh burr.
“I should like very much to have a game of golf on this trip, but—” Lloyd George’s face went into that complete smile again. “I’ll take jolly good care the press is not around when I have it.”
“Do you think the Labour party has about reached its limit?” Lloyd George was asked. “That depends on how it behaves.” He shook his head and spoke very considerately. “I think it will have to behave better.”
“The anti-Semitic propagandists are remarkably stupid, remarkably stupid,” Lloyd George told a Jewish reporter, who asked him what he thought of anti-Semitism as a danger spot.
“Do you think the League of Nations was weakened by the Italian action?” I asked. Lloyd George answered immediately: “Yes, I think it was.”
“Mr. George, do you think the world is any better for the Versailles treaty?” a reporter asked. Lloyd George was emphatic. “I don’t think the mischief is with the Versailles treaty but rather with the way it is carried out.” He paused and considered, then smiled. “That is a long story, a very long story.”
A cartoonist brought forward a picture for Lloyd George to sign. Lloyd George took the pencil and then looked at the cartoon. Then he was swept with laughter. He laughed and laughed, holding the picture in his hand. “Hello, hello,” he laughed. “Do I really look like that?”
We went up the deck. Down in the harbor below the steep sides of the Mauretania was a tug gaily decorated with white and blue, against which was a great banner “Welcome to Lloyd George, great friend of the Greeks” and the band on the tug was playing, “Yes, we have no bananas.”
I pointed the boat out to him. “Yes, I have been a great friend to them,” Lloyd George said under his breath.
On the top deck the photographers and movie men were massed. Photographers shoved and jostled Sir Alfred Mond, Secretary of Labor Davis, Melville Stone of the Associated Press, Charles Schwab and other notables. It was a jam with all the photographers shouting, “Mr. George, Mr. George, just this way, Mr. George. Look up, Mr. George. Mr. George, just once more. Look this way. Hey you in the gray hat [Mr. Schwab], get out of the way. Now, Mr. George.” Finally it was over. But he has been christened. To Americans he is Mr. George.
“Do you think the League of Nations can be a going concern without the United States?” a reporter shouted at Lloyd George as he walked along the deck. “No,” Lloyd George said over his shoulder.
His secretaries, the official welcomers, including Acting Mayor Hulbert, who is substituting for Mayor Hylan, who is sick at his home in Brooklyn, got him off the Mauretania on to the mayor’s boat of welcome, where the reporters who had not got up at five o’clock to be sure and be aboard the revenue cutter were still waiting.
The Greek boat of welcome followed just behind the mayor’s boat, bands playing, people waving and with Mr. Lloyd George and his wife and daughter in the pilot house, the mayor’s boat steamed down the bay. The little boat forged through the choppy harbor past the anchored ships until on the left the oxidized green Statue of Liberty came in sight. An old four stacker was riding at anchor and a row of coal barges that had once been white-sailed ships slipped along. On the right were the low sheds of Governors Island and through the smoke the great town looking high and dim and ghostly.
Lloyd George watched it all with eager interest. Various volunteer guides gave him information of various degrees of accuracy. Then the smoke and mist cleared and the buildings became harder and clearer. New York from the harbor is as beautiful as Constantinople but with a hard, high, white cubic beauty of its own. The bands played. There was a great crowd of people massed on shore. It was the greatest welcome any Britisher has ever received in America. The Battery was black with people.
Through a solid mass of people, held back by cordons of police, Lloyd George and his party in motorcars rode up the sunless canyon of lower Broadway to the city hall, where he was met by Acting Mayor Hulbert and given the proverbial keys of the city. All the way along the route the white streamers of ticker tape that are Manhattan’s accolade shot down from the tall buildings.
A few paraders with signs and banners branding Lloyd George as an undesirable alien and objecting to his presence in New York were arrested by police and their signs taken away. Just before the Lloyd George party reached the old brown City Hall that stands in a green square in the heart of the new city, incongruous with its brown striped awnings and its wide porch in the midst of the great buildings, another rush was made by members of an Irish society to get their banners into position before the hall, but the banners were seized and torn up by the police. Meanwhile on the pavement boys were selling big stacks of German marks at five cents the thousand-mark bill and doing a thriving trade.
From the City Hall Lloyd George went to the Waldorf to rest a moment before going to the Biltmore, where he is being entertained by the United Press at a luncheon.
Seeing the three of them together, it is impossible to say who look the most alike. For they all look alike. Lloyd George, Dame Margaret and Megan. Lloyd George is the tallest and Megan the shortest but Dame Margaret is the only one in the family with a title.
Megan Lloyd George is twenty-one years old and a very pretty girl. She is petite, smiles shyly, talks very low, very softly and very intelligently. She does not photograph well because her features are small, but that is a family trait. Neither her father nor her mother takes good pictures.
“I’m so glad to be here in New York and to be going to Canada,” she told the Star on the Mauretania this morning. Asked if she would take up a political career, she said: “I love the life, but I am much too young to decide.”
“How do you like being a sidelight to your father?” asked the Star.“Oh, I don’t feel like a sidelight at all,” Megan answered.
Miss Megan does not smoke, “but,” she told the Star, “I don’t care if other people do. I adore going with my father and love seeing the different cities. At the different conferences I have had such a good time dancing. I love to dance.”
“How do you like American girls?” asked the Star. “I know several American girls,” Megan answered, “and like them tremendously, and I don’t believe they have a bit too much freedom.”
Miss Megan was dressed in a black velvet suit with a white blouse with red buttonholes and a red collar, a tight-fitting black hat, light stockings and black strapped slippers. Her hair is not bobbed but she wears it as though it were.
She told the Star she had been to two schools in London and one in Paris and is glad she doesn’t have to go to any more. She does not use cosmetics. She is a good sailor and did not miss a meal on the boat in spite of a moderate gale.
“How about marriage?” asked the Star. “Oh, I am much too young to think about that,” Megan answered.
Miss Megan had been her father’s constant companion on all his conferences—Cannes, Spa, Genoa and at Versailles—and has probably seen the making of more history
than any girl in the world.
“Is it very good?” she asked the Star when told that it had been arranged for all the Lloyd George family to go to Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue tonight.
Dame Margaret Lloyd George is very motherly, very wholesome, and very Welsh. “I am most anxious to come to Canada,” Dame Margaret told the Star. “I know and like so many Canadian people and I look forward to meeting the many Welsh people that I know are there.”
While the Star was talking with Dame Margaret, Secretary of Labor Davis came up and greeted her in Welsh. The Star could not follow this conversation but the secretary explained that he was trying to get a maid to travel with Dame Margaret. There are no servants in the Lloyd George retinue.
Dame Margaret told the Star she has five children, three sons and a married daughter living in India, and Megan. Dame Margaret smiled at this. Everybody in the Lloyd George family smiles when Megan’s name is mentioned. And by the way Megan is pronounced Maygin.
“Of course I have no impressions yet,” she told the Star, “but with the sun out and the beautiful day, everything is in our favor, isn’t it? We have planned to do no shopping in New York and we have no social program outside of traveling with Mr. Lloyd George. That will keep us occupied, rather.”
Dame Margaret wore a black moiré silk hat with a pleated ruffle in the front, a black coat of pressed fur looking like seal, with a kolinsky stole and a string of pearls. Her dress was black.
Lloyd George’s Wonderful Voice
The Toronto Daily Star
October 6, 1923
NEW YORK.—Yesterday afternoon in the banquet hall on the nineteenth floor of the Biltmore, the Star heard Lloyd George make his first real speech in America.
Dateline- Toronto Page 36