Lloyd George’s love nest Eluned Price
Elegant barn where Lothario Prime Minister enjoyed trysts with mistress
OVERLOOKING the Wey valley south of Farnham in Surrey sits a beautiful converted barn. The drawing room alone has leaded windows, a minstrels’ gallery, vaulted oak beams and a stone-framed fireplace almost 11ft wide.
Whoever converted this barn certainly knew what they were doing.
That person was Frances Stevenson, long-term mistress of Britain’s First World War Prime Minister, David Lloyd George – and The Old Barn, near the village of Churt, was the home she created to be near him.
He had built his own family home a few miles away.
Ll o yd George is often quoted as saying: ‘ Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.’ The barn was only one of the many big steps Frances took in her life – the first of which was becoming the mistress of a man whose daughter she had been a schoolfriend of.
Born in 1888, Frances went to school with Mair, Lloyd George’s eldest daughter, who died in 1907 aged 17 during an appendectomy. In 1911, Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, offered her the post of governess to his youngest daughter, Megan.
Two year later, Frances, at 24, took the biggest step of her life. Lloyd George proposed that she become his secretary – on condition that she also became his mistress. He was 25 years her senior.
AJ Sylvester, Lloyd George’s parliamentary private secretary, wrote in his diary: ‘He is mental on matters of sex. In his view, a man and a woman could not possibly be friends without sexual intercourse.’
And Lloyd George charmed many women. When he spoke in the Commons the public gallery was crowded with female admirers. Frances her- self wrote: ‘I fell under the sway of his silver voice and his electric personality. I felt myself drawn in some mysterious way into his orbit.’
And his own son, Dick, said that, in the company of an attractive woman, Lloyd George was ‘like a Bengal tiger with a gazelle’.
In 1921, Lloyd George sent Frances to view a 60-acre parcel of land in Surrey. Here, he could have a house built for himself and his family – and a few miles away was a barn that could be converted so Frances could stay there.
The main entrance to the five-bedroom Old Barn – which is now for sale for £2.695 million – is through old, arched double doors into a courtyard and thence to a slate-flagged hall divided from the dini ng end of t he vaulted d drawing room by folding o oak doors. Evidence of Frances and L Lloyd George pops up in various places: the carvedstone faux well in the centre o of the courtyard reportedly ca came from the House of C Commons; the coat cupboard in the hall was, it is said, Ll Lloyd George’s telephone cu cubicle; and the carved oak lin lintels above the garden doors to the kitchen read ‘ FS’ on on one, and ‘1928’ on the other. In 1929 Frances gave birth to a daughter, Jennifer, brought up to believe she was the daughter of Col. Thomas Tweed, with whom Frances had been having an affair – her only other serious relationship – although many believe Lloyd George was actually her father.
IN 1943, two years after the death of Lloyd George’s wife Margaret, he married Frances, dying himself just two years later. ‘Old Barn has a lovely, peaceful atmosphere,’ says Annabel Bishop, who currently owns the property with her husband Neil.
They have lived in it for seven years, respecting all aspects of Frances’s design while bringing it up to contemporary standards of comfort and economy.
The Bishops have rewired the house, put in underfloor heating downstairs, and added new bathrooms and a new kitchen.
There is an acre of garden and two big paddocks, totalling six acres in all. There is also a swimming pool and pool house, tennis court, garden stores and garaging.
‘Had we been staying we would have made a wild flower meadow,’ says Annabel.
‘We are off to live in California, both for Neil’s business and our son, who is at university there. We would never have wanted to move otherwise. It’s a magical place.’