The collection included rare footage of Lloyd George's career, including Topical Budget cinema magazine items from the early 1920's and three reels of Hepworth political interviews. The 16mm material included footage shot by the former Premier's private secretary A.J. Sylvester.

One film was more tantalising than the rest - 37 rolls in a nitrate box, sealed in 1920 and marked Ideal Film Co. of London's Wardour Street. Glimpses of inter-titles on the negative stock confirmed the most exciting find in the archive's short history for this was the long lost silent feature The Life Story of David Lloyd George, "suppressed" by the British government in bizarre circumstances seventy-six years ago, never shown, and thought to have been destroyed. It was the most significant discovery of "vanished" film in Wales since The Maid of Cefn Ydfa, made in 1913-14 by William Haggar Jnr (son of the renowned Welsh-based travelling cinema pioneer), which was retrieved form a Swansea house in 1984, almost 40 years after its last public screening. The latest find made one more keenly aware of that priceless lost legacy of silent Welsh films which includes nearly 30 fiction movies (most of them features) set and often shot in Wales between 1912 and 1928. British film historians had been baffled for years by the non-release of the Lloyd George biopic after its completion in 1918 by Maurice Elvey, the most prolific of all UK directors, then working for Ideal. Shot partly in Wales, with some filming at the 1918 National Eisteddfod in Caernarfon, the movie dealt in detail with Lloyd George's early life and political career. Did war censorship seal its fate?

The mystery was partially solved in an article by writer/researcher Sarah Street in 1987 after she examined in the British Film Institute library the unpublished memoirs of Harry Rowson, Ideal's co-founder. She uncovered a remarkable story.

The Life Story of David Lloyd George starred Norman Page as the politician, Alma Reville (later Hitchcock's wife) as Lloyd George's daughter Megan and Ernest Thesiger (soon to become a cadaverous Hollywood villain) as Joseph Chamberlain. It had been scripted by Sir Sidney Low, a celebrated British historian, after extensive research in North Wales. Permission had been given and the film unit had access to Lloyd George's Cricieth home. Then the blow fell.

The infamous Horatio Bottomley, sometime Liberal MP and later indicted and goaled for fraud, attacked the credibility of Ideal company executives. As editor of the jingoistic but popular Odham's Press periodical John Bull Bottomley, a noted bigot and xenophobe, took advantage of prevailing wartime paranoia with an article alleging that certain people behind the film had "hun" (sic) sympathies, pointing out that they changed their names during the war and hinting that they were unsuitable people to be handling the movie. John Bull was Odham's biggest asset with the profits of £113,000 in 1918 and a circulation of 1,700,000 by 1920, and it is clear that Lloyd George or his ministerial advisers developed cold feet. The Rowsons - Harry and his brother Simon (producer of the film) were English born of Russian-Jewish descent and had changed their names, along with many others sensitive to wartime by Government ministers and friends in industry that release of the film would create a "major scandal" - though ministers denied any change of heart was due to the John Bull piece.

The Rowsons feared the repercussion on their small company if they released the movie and then Lloyd George disowned it. They agreed to withhold the film in return for reimbursement of production costs. Finally, in the story's most astonishing twist, a representative of Government solicitors turned up one day at the Ideal Film Co. offices, peeled off twenty £1,000 notes, and took away the positive print and the negative in a taxi. Rowson never saw them again. In court, John Bull and Odham's withdrew all imputations and they paid all costs, but for years Harry Rowson was haunted by the loss of income - an estimated £100,000 in Britain alone - and potential kudos. He claimed that Carl Laemmle of Universal headed a queue of American distributors anxious to snap up the film - even after Bottomley's malevolent outburst. To add to the mystery, years later director Elvey still insisted in an unpublished interview, that the film was suppressed merely because of fears of accusations of bias and criticism of a pro-Lloyd George film in the Commons. It was the North Wales première of the Lumière restored amateur film of Lloyd George's 1936 visit to Hitler which led the statesman's grandson to deposit his family collection (kept for years in a barn) with the Archive. He had no idea that the contents included both the long-lost feature and the original camera reversal of the 1936 visit of Lloyd George to Germany.

Preservation and Restoration

The preservation of The Life Story of David Lloyd George, which arrived in 137 negative rolls, is being undertaken in collaboration with NFTVA, London. The duplication work currently underway at the John Paul Getty Conservation Centre will be followed by restoration at WFTVA. This will present a few challenges - e.g. matching shots to inter-titles (currently all on 3 reels), and deciding how best (or whether) to represent the tinting and toning which was clearly intended by the producers. We will be well supported in our efforts by a team of film and political historians, and of course by the staff at Berkhamsted. We are particularly grateful to Kodak Ltd. for sponsoring the preservation work by undertaking to supply the film stock.

Plans for screenings

1995 is the 50th anniversary of the death of Lloyd George, and it is hoped that a new restored print will be ready for a première screening in late 1995 as part of the series of events planned to mark the occasion. There will be other opportunities for screenings as part of Wales's contribution to the celebration of the Centenary of Cinema.

Adapted from the original article written by Dave Berry for Planet - The Welsh Internationalist, Issue N° 108, December/January 1994-95.

by Dave Berry and Iola Baines, Wales Film and TV Archive, Aberystwyth

David Berry is the author of Wales and the Cinema: The First 100 Years (University of Wales Press/ British Film Institute) published in November 1994.