Lloyd George Knew My Father (song)

"Lloyd George Knew My Father" is a 20th-century English schoolboy folk song. The simple lyrics consist of the phrase "Lloyd George knew my father/Father knew Lloyd George" sung to the tune "Onward, Christian Soldiers". In the schoolboy song, the two lines referring to Lloyd George are repeated incessantly, typically by groups of schoolboys on a bus or similar setting, until boredom sets in. There are no lyrics other than those two lines. The song gains much of its notoriety from the irony inevitable in the clash between the song's flippant lyrics and Sabine Baring-Gould's classic hymn from which Arthur Sullivan's tune is inextricable. It is also commonly sung to the tune of "Land of Hope and Glory".

The origin of the song is not known but there are several theories, one that it began as a music hall song making an oblique reference to David Lloyd George's supposed womanizing proclivities (with the right timing and intonation and a well-placed wink, "father" could be taken to mean that the singer was the product of a liaison between his mother and Lloyd George). The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations attributes the song to Tommy Rhys Roberts QC, the son of a former law partner of Lloyd George. According to David Owen, it was a World War I marching song.

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