DAVID LLOYD GEORGE EXHIBITION 1863-1945 March 1995

Department of Pictures and Maps

Exhibition

WARS IN SOUTH AFRICA

These pictures of the war were taken by the Welsh who went to South Africa to fight or to work in military hospitals. David Lloyd George saw the war as one that was forced on the Boers by the British Government at the behest of the Rand gold mining syndicates unhappy with the "restrictive" laws and high taxes of the Boer administration. Once he declared his views publicly, most famously in a speech to the House of Commons on 6 February 1900, he threw himself tirelessly into opposing the war. The subject split the Liberal party and brought Lloyd George into contact with "British" radicals outside the Welsh circles where he had been very much at home. By the end of hostilities in May 1902 Lloyd George had become estranged from his party, but had become a "national" figure.

© National Library of Wales
J L Thomas, Welsh soldiers on a train at Springfontein on their way to Pretoria.
(PZ4209 Llyfr Ffoto LLGC : NLW Photograph Album 107, p.29)

© National Library of Wales
J L Thomas, "Annexation of Orange River Colony, 28 May 1900."
(PZ4209 Llyfr Ffoto LLGC : NLW Photograph Album 107, p.38)

© National Library of Wales
Capt Davies-Evans (Highmead), "One of my guns on Morphy's Hill at Thobanchu 1901."
(PZ4179 Llyfr Ffoto LLGC : NLW Photograph Album 36, Picture 192)

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