Before Winston Churchill, there was David Lloyd George, Britain's prime minister during World War I.

Lloyd George is a hero to many in the U.K. for his wartime leadership and for reforming the nation's economic and social fabric.

Born in 1863, he grew up in the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy. Self-taught, he became a solicitor, a type of British lawyer, by age 17.

Young David's hero was another self-taught lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, says great-grandson Robert Lloyd George, chief executive of the U.K. investment firm Lloyd George Management.

"He had a portrait of Lincoln on his wall," said Robert, who wrote the book "David and Winston: How a Friendship Changed History."

"To my great-grandfather, Lincoln was a model — a man who had made it from farmhouse to White House by being a lawyer."

Starting a law firm with his brother, Lloyd George earned a reputation as a defender of common folk against entrenched, aristocratic power. He would become the only Welshman to hold the post of British prime minister.

And he would hold his seat in Parliament for 55 years. That was second only to his friend Churchill, with 61 years.

Lloyd George's life was based on hard work and purpose. His father, a teacher, died shortly after David's birth. David and his brother, William, were inspired by their uncle, Richard Lloyd George, a cobbler.

The position had status in a Welsh village, says Chris Wrigley, a professor of modern British history at Nottingham University.

On The Rise

Also important was Richard's role as head of the Baptist congregation to which the family belonged. In British parlance, Baptists were nonconformists because they did not belong to the Church of England, also called the Anglican Church.

And nonconformity in its broader sense defined young Lloyd George.

He was determined to rise above the station in life British society would have prescribed for him, says Margaret MacMillan, his great-granddaughter and warden of St. Antony's College, Oxford.

"Politics was his great dream, to play a part on a bigger stage," said MacMillan, author of "Paris 1919," a book examining how Allied leaders forged the postwar peace treaty.

Why politics? He detested the unearned power and privileges of the land-owning nobility. Those noblemen made it impossible for farmers to get ahead, says Wrigley, who wrote "David Lloyd George and the British Labour Movement."

Lloyd George found his ideological home in the Liberal Party. The U.K. Liberal tradition calls for minimal government interference in individual lives and opposition to what Brits call the "nanny state."

British Liberals of Lloyd George's era favored entrepreneurship over privilege. They advocated low government spending. They wanted a free-trade economy unconstrained by aristocracy and unions. "He was always in favor of business," said Robert Lloyd George.

"British Liberalism spoke to the lower middle class about equality of opportunity," Wrigley said. When Lloyd George spoke, his oratory "could bring an audience to its feet."

"Who ordained that the few should have the land of Britain as a prerequisite?" Lloyd George said. "Who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?"

His speaking skill helped him hurdle the class system. "He came from a modest background, at best lower middle class, with no money and no connections," MacMillan said.

The future prime minister found himself up against graduates of posh boarding schools and Oxford and Cambridge.

In 1890 he won election as a member of Parliament by 18 votes. At 27, he was Britain's youngest MP.

MPs got no pay. Tradition held that only the rich gentry should hold public office.

William financed David's political career for 21 years, Wrigley says.

In 1908, Lloyd George became chancellor of the exchequer, or the finance minister. In 1911, he pushed through legislation to give MPs salaries so ordinary people could run for office. With Churchill's help, he brought in a range of social reforms. Among them were old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.

Churchill called it "a safety net for the unemployed, sick and the old."

A change of values? Not at all, says Robert Lloyd George.

"The Liberal Party had a pro-business attitude," he said. "But as the voting population expanded, Liberals knew they had to create that safety net for society."

Lloyd George's policies were "compassionate conservatism," MacMillan said. The chancellor's budget of 1909 promised to pay for the safety net with new taxes. Taxes on what? High incomes and land owned by titled aristocrats.

The House of Lords, Britain's upper chamber, vetoed it. Lloyd George fought back.

"Unemployment, with its injustice for the man who seeks and thirsts for employment, who begs for labor and cannot get it and who is punished for failure he is not responsible for by the starvation of his children — that torture is something that private enterprise ought to remedy for its own sake," he said.

His campaign worked. King Edward VII became an ally. The budget passed. And Parliament cut the veto power of the House of Lords.

With the start of World War I in 1914, Lloyd George got a new job. He became minister of munitions in a coalition government of Liberals and Conservatives.

If anyone could get arms to the military, Lloyd George could. He was a dynamo. He settled labor disputes and built war plants.

"Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated," he said. "You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."

"He gave new impetus and energy and direction to the British war effort," said Robert Lloyd George. Shortages turned to surpluses.

In December 1916, with armies bogged down in the trenches, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith resigned after bungling the war effort. The wartime coalition chose Lloyd George to replace him.

Then the Russian army collapsed after the Bolshevik revolution. "We nearly lost the war — 1917 was dire," said Robert Lloyd George.

German submarines tried to starve Britain, picking off supply ships from North America. Countermanding his admirals, Lloyd George ordered the royal navy to adopt the convoy system to defend large groups of cargo ships with small numbers of anti-sub vessels.

It worked. He rallied the country until U.S. troops flooded the front in 1918.

Hailed in Britain as the man who won the war, Lloyd George went on to win the 1918 election. He told voters that Great Britain should be a land "fit for heroes to live in."

In 1919, he brokered the Treaty of Versailles. "He had a tremendous capacity to bring differing sides together to find common ground," Macmillan said.

He pushed President Wilson and French President Georges Clemenceau to agreement.

He led a coalition government of Liberals and Conservatives until 1922, but resigned when the coalition broke up. Out of power, he stuck to his principles of free trade, equal opportunity and economic fair play. "Ideas came back to the (Liberal) Party," a political foe said.

Shaky Call

He blundered in 1936. He said a meeting with Adolf Hitler left him impressed. "It was not his finest hour," said Robert Lloyd George.

He did redeem himself. In 1940, Lloyd George engineered the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, who had appeased Hitler. Churchill came to power.

The new PM asked him to take on a wartime post — ambassador to America. Lloyd George declined. Fighting cancer, he did accept an earldom in 1945 — in spite of his hostility to nobility. The way he saw it, an award was an honor and different from an unearned title.

Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor died two months later, in March 1945.

He was buried in Llanystumdwy. His grave is under a boulder on which he'd sit and think.

Lloyd George's statue will be unveiled outside the British Parliament in October.

BY PETER BENESH.