Baroness recalls ‘goat’ David Lloyd George’s appetite for ‘measuring’
DAVID Lloyd George was already notorious for his womanising, but now a 95-year-old peer has revealed how he enjoyed “measuring” her when she was a land girl at his farm.
The former Liberal Prime Minister was known as “the goat” and Baroness Trumpington described her memories of being posted to his farm at the age of 17.
When asked by the BBC’s John Humphrys how Lloyd George behaved towards her, she said: “Well, he liked measuring me... In other words, he’d say go and stand over there.
“He had a tape measure and he would measure me.”
When Mr Humphrys suggested this was an “intimate” thing to do, she said: “It was, but I thought, well, that’s what people do.”
She commented that a Prime Minister who attempted this today who be “booted” out of office.
Her response to Lloyd George was “thank you very much”.
Describing Lloyd George’s relations with his mistress and secretary, Frances Stevenson, she said: “He built her a most charming cottage, really, and when the family came down she went there and when the family left she went up to the big house.”
Baroness Trumpington retired from the Lords in October and was a guest editor yesterday on Radio 4’s Today programme.
She worked as a cypher clerk at the Bletchley Park codebreak- ing centre and later became Mayor of Cambridge and a Conservative minister.
In her 2014 memoir, Coming Up Trumps, she recounted her time at Lloyd George’s Surrey farm, saying: “There was absolutely nowhere to go and nothing to do.
“Occasionally, Lloyd George would ask me up to the house – where the old goat would stand me up against a wall, take out a tape measure and try to take all my measurements; it was never explained why and because he was my boss and the grandfather of my buddies I didn’t dare ask – or he would go up to London and I would get a lift in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce.
“But these were rare outings.”