In 1921, the long-serving Liberal MP, Matthew Vaughan-Davies, was raised to the peerage as Baron Ystwyth, of Tan-y-Bwlch in the County of Cardigan. His elevation was a cynical move by the ‘Welsh Wizard’ David Lloyd George to bolster his support in Westminster when his leadership of the coalition government was reliant on the support of the Conservatives in the House of Commons. As a Welsh seat, Cardiganshire was widely seen as Lloyd George’s backyard and guaranteed to return an MP supportive of the Coalition. That calculation, however, failed to take account of the split in the Liberal Party since Lloyd George’s coup against former prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith in 1916. As part of the ongoing rivalry with his successor, Asquith, at the head of the Liberals on the opposition benches, decided to contest the seat.
In the resultant by-election, the Coalition Liberals put up barrister and Lloyd George’s former private secretary, Ernest Evans. After service in the Great War, in which he had been a captain in the Royal Army Service Corps (1915-18), he returned to his native Aberystwyth to fight a bitter election battle. The Tories agreed to support him and there did not seem to be any other potential competition. That was, until the Asquithian Liberals, which included the Cardiganshire Liberal Association, selected William Llewelyn Williams, another barrister who had made a name for himself as a journalist, a former MP for Carmarthen Boroughs, and, more importantly, a bitter enemy of Lloyd George. Kenneth Morgan described it as ‘a bitter civil war’, with ‘violent conflict over the personality and reputation of Lloyd George himself.’* It tore through the county with Methodists and coastal communities (including Aberystwyth) generally favouring Evans and Baptists, Unitarians, farmers, and inland towns tending to back Williams. In the end, Evans was elected with a majority of 3,000 votes but the scars ran deep and, with rival Liberal clubs being founded in Aberystwyth, they fought it out in the ensuing general elections in 1922 and 1923. This internecine electoral warfare did for the Liberal Party in many of its Welsh strongholds and, by the time they decided to settle their differences in 1923, found that they had lost South Wales to the Labour Party.
Evans lost the seat in the 1923 General Election to the Independent Liberal, and former Asquithian, Rhys Hopkin Morris. Another barrister, Morris had benefitted from the Tories deciding to contest the seat and so deprive Evans of many of his previous voters. With the Liberal leaders recognising that their infighting had left them increasingly less likely to form a government again, Morris took the Liberal whip and was one of their few success, admittedly unopposed, in the 1924 General Election. At the same time, Evans won the University of Wales constituency, one of the non-territorial constituencies elected by graduates, which led to his deep involvement with both the University in Aberystwyth and the National Library of Wales. Consistently electing Liberals, the University proved a safe seat for Evans until he stepped down to become a county court judge in 1942.
In 1931, when the second Labour government broke apart over cuts to unemployment benefits, the Liberals agreed to join the ‘Government of National Unity’ with the Tories under Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald. This ostensibly temporary alliance was to see through the immediate crisis of the Great Depression. Lloyd George, who was still Liberal leader, did not agree but he was ill and so was not consulted. Sir Herbert Samuel, then deputy leader, and Lord Reading, their leader in the House of Lords, took up positions in this new ‘National Government’ with the support of all but four Liberal MPs. These four, all related to Lloyd George and representing north Wales constituencies, remained in opposition to be joined by the old man when he returned from illness. Their opposition was, officially, because the new government, dominated by Tories, would end Britain’s free trading policy and adopt tariffs on imports. In truth, it had more than a little to do with Lloyd George not being offered a place in the Cabinet. Morris, who disliked Lloyd George, followed Samuel tentatively and, for the first time, faced a Labour candidate at the 1931 General Election.
The Liberals had agreed with the Cabinet to stand on a separate manifesto to the Tories and National Labour, which enabled them to still campaign for free trade, but the election proved a disaster. The party had been splintering since 1929 into the official party and the right-leaning ‘National Liberals’, led by Sir John Simon. With the official party reduced to a rump, Simon led his followers into joining the coalition, which left Samuel and his allies heavily outnumbered. Morris, increasingly uncomfortable at the ideological sacrifices they were making to remain in government, stood down in 1932 to become a Metropolitan Police magistrate. In 1945, he managed to buck the trend by beating Labour to win Carmarthen at that year’s general election.
Meanwhile, in the Cardiganshire by-election, the local Liberal association selected yet another local barrister, David Owen Evans, the son of a tenant farmer. Evans did not support the National Government, so the Tories asked for a free run at the seat. Fearful of a bruising contest, the Liberal leaders had Evans publicly commit to supporting the government but to no avail and he had to face both Conservative and Labour candidates. Predictably though, Evans was elected with relative ease. His reservations about supporting the National Government gave him little cause for anxiety in the end when the Liberals in Cabinet resigned. Already marginalised, the death of Sir Donald Maclean and the failure of MacDonald to appoint another Liberal had led to an ongoing argument. Then, when the Government convened the British Empire Economic Conference in Ottawa to agree on an imperial response to the Great Depression, their patience snapped. When the Government agreed to implement ‘imperial preference’, whereby tariffs would be imposed on goods from outside the Empire, Samuel led the few Liberals left in government to cross the floor.
Following his leaders, Owen Evans dutifully, and more comfortably, adjusted to opposition. It was here that the Liberals would reunite with Lloyd George and be mauled at the 1935 General Election. When Samuel lost his seat as a result, they selected the Lloyd George-backed Sir Archibald Sinclair as his replacement. Evans was not a particularly distinguished parliamentarian, but he was well respected in the Commons. His interventions included topics such as unemployment, agriculture, and army morale. In the debates around the Munich Agreement of 1938, which seemed initially to be wildly popular with the public, he supported Sinclair in voting against it and in other moves that saw the Liberal Party become one of the most consistent opponents of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler’s Germany. In the 1945 Dissolution Honours List, he had been awarded a knighthood but, before he could receive it, he died suddenly whilst going to see a doctor in London about heart trouble.
As the honour had been awarded to mark the dissolution of Parliament before the 1945 General Election, the Cardiganshire Liberal Association, as had become a bit of a tradition, selected another local barrister. Evan Roderic Bowen, a local grammar schoolboy, Aberystwyth graduate, and an army captain in the Second World War, swept to victory over his Labour opponent. In 1950, he was returned with the largest Liberal majority in the country, and, when Montgomeryshire MP Clement Davies stepped down as Liberal leader due to alcoholism-related health problems, Bowen was seen as a potential successor. In the event, Jo Grimond beat him, and he went on to eventually lose the seat to Labour in the 1966 General Election.
K.O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980, Oxford, 1981, p.190
Blog by Ewan Lawry
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