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David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was a British Liberal politician and statesman. As Chancellor of the Exchequer (1908–1915), Lloyd George was a key figure in the introduction of many reforms which laid the foundations of the modern welfare state. His most important role came as the highly energetic Prime Minister of the Wartime Coalition Government (1916–22), during and immediately after the First World War. He was a major player at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that reordered Europe after the defeat of Germany in the Great War. He arguably made a greater impact on British public life than any other 20th-century leader, thanks to his pre-war introduction of Britain's social welfare system, his leadership in winning the war, his post-war role in reshaping Europe, and his partitioning Ireland (between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland which remained part of the UK).〔Martin Pugh, "Lloyd George," in John Cannon, ed. ''The Oxford Companion to British History,'' (2002) 583–5〕 He was the last Liberal to serve as Prime Minister. Parliamentary support for the coalition premiership was mostly from Conservatives rather than his own Liberals. The Liberal split led to the long-term decline of that party as a serious political force. Although he became leader of the Liberal Party in the late 1920s, he was unable to regain power, and by the 1930s he was a marginalised and widely mistrusted figure. Although many Prime Ministers have been barristers, Lloyd George is to date the only solicitor to have held that office.〔A. J. P. Taylor, "Lloyd George, Rise and Fall" (1961)〕 He is also so far the only British Prime Minister to have been Welsh〔Although, in Parliament, Prime Minister James Callaghan represented a district in Wales (Cardiff), Callaghan was English by birth and language.〕 and to have spoken English as a second language.〔Harnden, Toby (2011). "Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Real Story of Britain's War in Afghanistan". p. 11. Quercus, 2011〕 He was voted the third greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of 139 academics organised by MORI, and in 2002 he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote. ==Upbringing and early life== Lloyd George was born in Chorlton-on-Medlock, near Manchester, to Welsh parents. He was brought up as a Welsh-speaker and was to become the first (and so far only) Welsh politician to hold the office of Prime Minister. His father, William George, had been a teacher in both London and Liverpool. He also taught in the Hope Street Sunday Schools, which were administered by the Unitarians, where he made the acquaintance of Unitarian minister Dr James Martineau. In March of the same year, on account of his failing health, William George returned with his family to his native Pembrokeshire. He took up farming but died in June 1864 of pneumonia, aged 44. His widow, Elizabeth George (1828–96), sold the farm and moved with her children to her native Llanystumdwy in Caernarfonshire, where she lived in Tŷ Newydd with her brother Richard Lloyd (1834–1917), who was a shoemaker, a minister (in the Scotch Baptists and then the Church of Christ),〔http://churches-of-christ.ws/Criccieth.htm〕 and a strong Liberal. Lloyd George was educated at the local Anglican school Llanystumdwy National School and later under tutors. Lloyd George's uncle was a towering influence on him, encouraging him to take up a career in law and enter politics; his uncle remained influential up until his death at age 83 in February 1917, by which time his nephew had become Prime Minister. He added his uncle's surname to become "Lloyd George". His surname is usually given as "Lloyd George" and sometimes as "George". The influence of his childhood showed through in his entire career, as he attempted to aid the common man at the expense of what he liked to call "the Dukes" (that is, the aristocracy). However, his biographer John Grigg argued that Lloyd George's childhood was nowhere near as poverty-stricken as he liked to suggest, and that a great deal of his self-confidence came from having been brought up by an uncle who enjoyed a position of influence and prestige in his small community. Brought up a devout evangelical, as a young man he suddenly lost his religious faith. Biographer Don Cregier says he became "a Deist and perhaps an agnostic, though he remained a chapel-goer and connoisseur of good preaching all his life."〔See also 〕 He kept quiet about that, however, and was hailed as "one of the foremost fighting leaders of a fanatical Welsh Nonconformity".〔Frank Owen, ''Tempestuous Journey: Lloyd George, His Life and Times'' (1955) pp 7, 31〕 It was also during this period of his life that Lloyd George became first interested in the issue of land ownership. As a young man he read books by Thomas Spence, John Stuart Mill and Henry George, as well as pamphlets written by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb of the Fabian Society on the issue of land ownership.〔http://spartacus-educational.com/PRgeorge.htm〕 By the age of twenty-one, he had already read and taken notes on Henry George's Progress and Poverty. This strongly influenced Lloyd George's politics later in life through the People's Budget which heavily drew on the georgist tax reform ideas. Articled to a firm of solicitors in Porthmadog, Lloyd George was admitted in 1884 after taking Honours in his final law examination and set up his own practice in the back parlour of his uncle's house in 1885. The practice flourished, and he established branch offices in surrounding towns, taking his brother William into partnership in 1887. By then he was politically active, having campaigned for the Liberal Party in the 1885 election, attracted by Joseph Chamberlain's "unauthorised programme" of reforms. The election resulted firstly in a stalemate with neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives having a majority, the balance of power being held by the Irish Parliamentary Party. William Gladstone's announcement of a determination to bring about Irish Home Rule later led to Chamberlain leaving the Liberals to form the Liberal Unionists. Uncertain of which wing to follow, Lloyd George carried a pro-Chamberlain resolution at the local Liberal Club and travelled to Birmingham to attend the first meeting of Chamberlain's National Radical Union, but he had his dates wrong and arrived a week too early. In 1907, he was to say that he thought Chamberlain's plan for a federal solution correct in 1886 and still thought so, that he preferred the unauthorised programme to the Whig-like platform of the official Liberal Party, and that, had Chamberlain proposed solutions to Welsh grievances such as land reform and disestablishment, he, together with most Welsh Liberals, would have followed Chamberlain. On 24 January 1888 he married Margaret Owen, the daughter of a well-to-do local farming family. Also in that year he and other young Welsh Liberals founded a monthly paper ''Udgorn Rhyddid'' (Bugle of Freedom) and won on appeal to the Divisional Court of Queen's Bench the Llanfrothen burial case; this established the right of Nonconformists to be buried according to their own denominational rites in parish burial grounds, a right given by the Burial Laws Amendment Act 1880 that had up to then been ignored by the Anglican clergy. It was this case, which was hailed as a great victory throughout Wales, and his writings in ''Udgorn Rhyddid'' that led to his adoption as the Liberal candidate for Carnarvon Boroughs on 27 December 1888. In 1889 he became an Alderman on the Carnarvonshire County Council which had been created by the Local Government Act 1888. At that time he appeared to be trying to create a separate Welsh national party modelled on Parnell's Irish Parliamentary Party and worked towards a union of the North and South Wales Liberal Federations. For the same county Lloyd George would also become a JP (1910) and chairman of Quarter Sessions (1929–38), and DL in 1921.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「David Lloyd George」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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