John
Selwyn Brooke Lloyd, Baron
Selwyn-Lloyd, CH, CBE, TD, PC, QC, DL (28 July 1904 – 18 May 1978), known for most of his
career as Selwyn Lloyd, was a British politician. Lloyd grew up near Liverpool. After being an
active Liberal as a young
man in the 1920s, the following decade he practised as a barrister and served on Hoylake Urban District Council,
by which time he had become a Conservative Party sympathiser.
During the Second World War he rose to be Deputy Chief of Staff of Second Army,
playing an important role in planning sea transport to the Normandy beachhead and reaching the acting rank of brigadier. Elected
to Parliament in 1945,
he held ministerial office from 1951,
eventually rising to be Foreign Secretary under
Prime Minister Anthony Eden from
April 1955. His tenure coincided with the Suez Crisis, for which he at first attempted to negotiate a
peaceful settlement, before reluctantly assisting with Eden's wish to negotiate
collusion with France and Israel as a prelude to military action. He continued
as Foreign Secretary under the premiership of Harold Macmillan until July 1960, when he was moved to
the job of Chancellor of the
Exchequer. In this job he set up the NEDC,
but became an increasingly unpopular figure because of the contractionary
measures which he felt compelled to take, including the "Pay Pause"
of July 1961, culminating in the sensational Liberal victory at the Orpington by-election in March 1962. In July 1962
Macmillan sacked him from the Cabinet, making him the highest-profile casualty
in the reshuffle known as the "Night of the Long Knives". He returned to office under
Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home as Leader of the House of
Commons (1963–64), and was elected Speaker of the House of Commons from 1971 until his
retirement in 1976. Lloyd was born on 28 July 1904 at Red Bank in West Kirby, Cheshire. His father, John Wesley Lloyd (1865–1954), was
a dental surgeon of Welsh descent and a Methodist lay preacher; his mother,
Mary Rachel Warhurst (1872–1959), was distantly related to Field Marshal Sir John
French. He had three sisters.
He was educated at the Leas School. He was particularly interested in
military history as a boy, a fact to which he later attributed his
successful military career. He won a scholarship to Fettes College in 1918. At Fettes, he became embroiled in a homosexual
scandal as a junior boy. He was nicknamed "Jezebel" after his initials (JSBL), but was deemed to be
the innocent party, and escaped punishment whilst three older boys were
expelled. In October 1923 he went up, as a scholar, to Magdalene College, Cambridge,
where A. C. Benson was Master.
There he was a friend of the future Archbishop Michael Ramsey. Lloyd acquired the nickname "Peter"
at this time. Lloyd played rugby and was disappointed not to
get a Blue. In October 1924 his
sister Eileen sailed to India to marry and work as a doctor. She died there the
following January, aged 25. Lloyd was an active Liberal as a young man, and in
March 1925 he entertained H. H. Asquith at Magdalene after a Liberal Party meeting
at the Cambridge Guildhall. He
became President of the Cambridge University
Liberal Club. Lloyd was also an active debater in the Cambridge Union Society,
where his sparring-partners included Rab Butler, Patrick Devlin, Hugh Foot, Alan King-Hamilton and Geoffrey
Lloyd. Lloyd lost his scholarship in June 1925, after obtaining
a Second in
Classics. He then switched to study History, in which he also obtained a
Second. During the General Strike of
May 1926 Lloyd, who earlier that year had begun eating dinners at Gray's Inn with a view to qualifying as a barrister, volunteered as a Special Constable. He later became
critical of the Conservative Government's clampdown on trade unions, e.g.
the Trades
Disputes Act of 1927. The university authorities encouraged students
who had worked for the government so close to their exams to extend their
studies for an extra year, which meant that Lloyd was able to spend a very rare
fifth year as an undergraduate Lloyd George had
become Liberal leader and was injecting money and ideas into the Liberal Party,
and was keen to attract promising young candidates. Selwyn Lloyd was a frequent
speaker for the Liberal Party from 1926 onwards. In 1926 he toyed, not
entirely seriously, with the idea of joining the Labour Party. In Michaelmas
Term 1926 Lloyd and Devlin (then President of the Cambridge Union)
persuaded Walter Citrine to
join Lloyd in opposing the motion that "The power of trade unions has
increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished" (an echo of Dunning's
famous motion on the power of the Crown in 1780). They had invited the miners'
leader A. J. Cook, to
the consternation of the town authorities, but in the event he was unable to
attend. Lloyd won the debate by 378 votes to 237 and was elected Secretary for
Lent Term 1927, putting him on track to be Vice-President for Easter (summer)
Term 1927, then President in Michaelmas 1927. He took office as President
in June 1927. At his retiring debate in November 1927 Samuel Hoare and
Rab Butler (then being selected as Tory candidate for Saffron
Walden) spoke. Lloyd finally graduated with a third-class in Part II
of the Law Tripos in June 1928.