David Lloyd George(1863–1945)

David Lloyd George was born in Manchester on 17 January 1863 and raised from infancy at Llanystumdwy in Caernarfonshire, brought up by his widowed mother and his shoemaker uncle in a Welsh-speaking, chapel-going household. He qualified as a solicitor and in 1890 was elected Member of Parliament for the Caernarvon Boroughs, a seat he would hold for fifty-five years.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer he brought in the People's Budget of 1909 and the National Insurance Act of 1911, which established the first national systems of health and unemployment insurance in Britain. These measures are reckoned among the founding stones of the modern welfare state.

He became Prime Minister in December 1916, at the darkest point of the First World War, and reorganised the direction of the war effort through a small War Cabinet and unified Allied command. Under his leadership Britain and the Allies carried the war to victory in November 1918, and he led the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference the following year.

He was the first Welsh-speaker, and the first person of genuinely modest origins, to reach the premiership. He was created Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor near the end of his life, and is remembered in Wales as the cottage-bred boy from Llanystumdwy who rose to lead the British state.

The Lloyd name comes from the Welsh llwyd, grey or hoary. Lloyd George carried it from a Caernarfonshire village to Downing Street and made it one of the great Welsh names of the modern age.