Lloyd George and Me

How a film lost for 80 years came back to life and helped me to do the same.

In 1995, I was ushered into the inner sanctum of a project so unexpected and historically significant that it is still difficult to recall it happening at all. Films come and go, tastes change, and, when dealing with the rediscovery of masterpieces, the world at large has a short memory. This event rocked the early film world for a while before the millennium, and now many of the new generation of cinephiles are unaware it even happened – but it did!

That year I was invited back to Aberystwyth, to the Welsh Film Archive based at the National Library of Wales, to view some footage that had recently been restored and reassembled. The images were staggeringly clear, the story gripping, and even though only 45 minutes had been screened, I was assured there were more than two hours of equally fine material, and that once it was assembled, I would be asked to accompany its first performance. Not the first performance of the restoration, its actual Premiere.

Where had it come from, and what was it?

Where it had come from was an outbuilding on the farm owned by Viscount Tenby, grandson of David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister from 1916-1922. This film was nothing less than a biopic made in 1918/19, celebrating his life. Nobody much had heard of it except for the remarkable historian of Welsh film, Dave Berry, and that was because the film, astonishing for its time, had been suppressed before it was even seen. The unassembled footage that had turned up that year was nothing less than cans and cans of reels of the original negatives of the film, and it was down to Dave and the brilliant John Reed, preservation officer at the Welsh archive, to piece them together, along with the many inter-titles. There was no script, no road map, the film had to be painstakingly assembled by ear, eye and brain, and once complete, would run two hours, thirty-two minutes.

1918, remember. Nothing like that had been seen outside of early Italian epics and DW Griffith’s twin behemoths Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, shot only a year or two earlier.

So why had it been suppressed?

All that was known was that in October 1918, word came down to the film makers, the Rowson Brothers, who had spent a year painstakingly filming in Wales, London, Birmingham and in factories and army camps the length and breadth of the country, that Lloyd George himself would not allow the release of the film to go ahead. Two days before the film was due to be screened to exhibitors (who were interested in releasing it as a serial) and a month before the end of the war itself, a man drove up to the offices of Ideal Films in a taxi, handed over £20,000 in £1,000 pound notes, and drove away with the positive and negative reels of the film. And that was the last anybody, the producers, the director Maurice Elvey, or its star, Norman Page, ever saw of it again.

The suggestion was that Lloyd George was holding together a very fragile coalition government as the war came to an end and couldn’t afford to be the centrepiece of a movie whose alternative title was The Man who Saved the Empire. Add to that that gossip in Westminster at the time suggested that twenty grand was the going price for a baronetcy if you were willing to vote Liberal, and the fact that the film turned up in Lloyd George’s estate, and now make up your own mind…

Fast forward to 1996, and The Life Story of David Lloyd George was ready for its first EVER presentation at Pwllhelli in front of distinguished guests including Lloyd George’s family (and his second family from his marriage to Frances Stephenson). Some weeks before the presentation I had been with archive administrator Jane Davies to the Lloyd George museum in Llanystumdwy (his birthplace near Criccieth) to try out the man’s own grand piano to see if it would be up to the 150minute battering it would receive – it turned out that there was a massive crack in the casing, and if there was any attempt to move it, the piano would fall in two. I was relieved – having to play WW1 on a grand piano was daunting enough without worrying about keys sticking.

What we did come away with were four hymns from LG’s own hymn book that I used as ammunition for the performance – ‘Brynteg’ , the hymn for LG’s baptism, a traditional Welsh tune ‘Gwahoddiad’, which I used extensively, it was such a gorgeous tune, ‘Hyfrydol’, which I knew with different words, and J Richards’s ‘Sanctus’. I also knew that I would use the bugle theme ‘Sunset’ for the final parade of soldiers, and I hoped that something might crop up during the performance.

And Boy did it. A muscular march emerged as I was an hour into the film, which grew and turned into a Main Title which I was to use every time I played the film from then on. The film went over a storm with that first audience, from LG’s birth, through his education and political life, his social reforms, to the coming of war, his rise through Munitions and Chancellorship to eventual Premier, and a wonderful final scene full of self-reflection, shot, like everything else, long before the armistice.

LG is in his study, thinking how to avoid ‘the next time’, to be more prepared, to try to guess ahead… then he turns, looks straight at the camera, breaking the fourth wall, and silently intones the words ‘There must be NO ‘next time’!’

Bang. Final credits, Big March up and over the final credits, then a terrific response from the audience, I take my bow and stagger off sweating to the dressing room, Plaid Cymru MP Dafydd Wigley is first through the dressing room door.

I played the film ten or more times in the following years, most memorably as part of a big Welsh retrospective at the Sydney Film Festival in 1998. My father, who was eighty, had had heart issues in the weeks before I was due to go and was in hospital. He told me I had to go as I had signed a contract. “I’ll go if you get better.” I told him. “I’ll do my best.” he said.

I had been several times to play in New Zealand, this was my first time to Australia and the airmiles I acquired meant I could afford an overnight trip Sydney to Auckland to see Jonathan Dennis, great archivist and firm friend. On the trip back I rang home from Auckland airport (it was 6pm in the UK) and Mum said, “Oh, your father’s here. Do you want a word?” It was true. I spoke to Dad who had come out of hospital the day before, my brother was there too. I put down the phone feeling the luckiest man alive, and that I would fly back to see Dad after the job was finished.

The following day I went exploring round Manly, and got back to the hotel in the afternoon to find messages to call home. Dad had died, swiftly and painlessly in Mum’s arms, only hours after I had spoken to him. My brother called, the family knew what Dad had said to me – they would hold the funeral until I could get back. The Film Festival were quite prepared to fly me straight home, but I felt that would be a waste of everything, even of going out in the first place. Above all, it would be the opposite of my father’s exhortation to go.

I stayed. The film the following day was The Life Story of David Lloyd George.

The Sydney Film Festival had a subscription model, whereby they played films in the main auditorium from morning to night, and you could get a day ticket subscription that entitled you to stay all day and see every film. Many did, bringing lunches, sometimes deciding a few minutes in if the film was worth staying for, and if not, vacating into the fresh air until retaking the same seat when the next one started. It was as brutal a vote with the audience’s feet as Cannes, and I was under no illusions as to how a 150-minute silent film might fare. I swallowed hard on hearing that there were 2000 people in the auditorium for the start of the film at 10am, but I would lay money there wouldn’t be that many when it ended at 12.30. I was also aware that I was in a state of shock and mourning, and about to play a film full of emotion, including war scenes and evocations of national mourning, which, at the time, would have included my grandfather, Fred Edwards, killed in Picardy in 1917.

Something happened that day which taught me a very great deal, and which has fascinated me ever since as an element of creativity, whatever the art form may be. I knew the film so well that I could foretell scenes coming that would be dangerous in my emotional state – a widow woman losing everything she owned because her husband had died (before LG’s welfare reforms kicked in), a widow waving sadly to returning troops, the scenes of death and carnage on the western front.

But as I hit those scenes and started to well up, the most beautiful music flooded the keys, which I didn’t recognise, but knew instinctively I was creating on the spot. It felt warm, profound and deeply soothing, as if both the pain and its anesthetic took over the music in a way that bypassed the intellect and became pure emotional response. The same thing happened again and again throughout the performance, I seemed to be channelling my deepest emotional reservoirs in a way that had never happened before, and although I would have given anything not to have lost my dad on the other side of the world, if there was something good to come of it for me, this was it.

At the end of the performance I played the ‘There must be NO next time!’, played through two minutes of credits with my Lloyd George March and finished with the final chords.

I had my back to the audience. You could hear a pin drop. ‘That’s it’, I thought, ‘they’ve ALL gone.’

Then I stood up and turned round, and it was like an elastic band snapping – a roar from two thousand people, many in tears, many standing, all moved hugely by an extraordinary eighty-year-old film. Same age as my dad.

I couldn’t believe it. Festival director Paul Byrnes came out onto the stage and hugged me, murmuring “Well I think we all know who that was for…”

Now I was in tears, but there was joy, sorrow and a curious, deep acceptance in my heart over what had happened. I had spent most of my life editing what I said, who I was, apologising for myself, doing what Ken Tynan said Olivier did – “He would observe you closely, then turn immediately into the person you wanted him to be”. Despite my training in drama, playing characters onstage and at the piano, this was the first time I felt an authenticity about myself and my performance, an awareness of unavoidable feelings that could be embarrassing but that I’d just unwittingly shared with 2000 strangers. It would take another twenty years or more of mistakes, cockups, counselling and rueful self-examination to become somebody I actually liked, but Sydney Film Festival was, unexpectedly, the first step towards channelling my inner emotional life; allowing myself, all the nasty, messy, scary stuff, into my music and my writing and, later, into my everyday life as well.

I guess it’s called growing up.

I still had a way to go, mind…