George Ambrose Lloyd, 1st Baron LloydJames Lees-Milne, Ancestral Voices, London:Chatto & Windus, 1975, p. 6, n. 1. (19 September 1879 – 4 February 1941), was a British Conservative politician and colonial administrator who was strongly associated with the "Diehard" wing of the party. From 1937 to 1941, he was chairman of the British Council in which capacity he sought to ensure support for Britain's position during the Second World War.
Early life Lloyd was born at Olton Hall, Warwickshire, the son of Sampson Samuel Lloyd (whose namesake father was also a Member of Parliament) and Jane Emilia, daughter of Thomas Lloyd. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He coxed the Cambridge crew in the 1899 and 1900 Boat Races. He left without taking a degree, was unsettled by the deaths of both his parents in 1899 and made a tour of India.Article by Jason Tombs.
In 1901, Lloyd joined the family firm Stewarts & Lloyds as its youngest director. In 1903, he first became involved with the tariff reform movement of Joseph Chamberlain. In 1904, he fell in love with Lady Constance Knox, daughter of the 5th Earl of Ranfurly, who forbade the match with his daughter considering him unsuitable (she then married Evelyn Milnes Gaskell, son of the Right Honourable Charles Gaskell, in November 1905).Gamble, Cynthia, (2015) Wenlock Abbey 1857–1919: A Shropshire Country House and the Milnes Gaskell Family, Ellingham Press. In 1905, he turned down an offer by Stewarts & Lloyds of a steady position in London and chose to embark on a study of the East in the British Empire.
Foreign Office Through the efforts of his friends Samuel Pepys Cockerell, working in the commercial department of the Foreign Office, and Gertrude Bell, whom he had come to know, he started work as an unpaid honorary attaché in Constantinople. At "Old Stamboul",John Charmley: Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire St Martin's Press, New York 1987 as he came to remember the Embassy of Sir Nicholas O'Conor, he worked together with Lancelot Oliphant, Percy Loraine and Alexander Cadogan. There also, he first met Mark Sykes and Aubrey Herbert. In April 1906, Herbert joined him on an exploration of the state of the Baghdad Railway.John Charmley Lord Lloyd New York 1987 Chapter 2 The Lure of the East. His confidential memorandum of November 1906 on the Hejaz Railway gave a detailed account of many economic problems. That and other papers on Ottoman finance, for example, led to his appointment in January 1907 as a special commissioner to investigate trading prospects around the Persian Gulf.
Parliamentary candidate Lloyd had been strongly influenced by Joseph Chamberlain's call for tariff reform to link Britain and the dominions closer together, and the tariff issue now inspired Lloyd to enter politics.Atherton, p. 26. At the January 1910 general election, Lloyd was elected as a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) for West Staffordshire. He married Blanche Lascelles the following year. In February 1914, Lloyd was adopted as Unionist parliamentary candidate for Shrewsbury ahead of the next general election (expected no later than the end of 1915Based on the five-year term laid down by Parliament Act 1911, calculated from the previous general election in December 1910.) when the sitting MP, the unrelated namesake George Butler Lloyd, intended to retire. Lloyd was completely opposed to women's suffrage and wrote that to give women the right to vote would ensure that they would vote "for the beaux yeux of the candidates".Charmley, John Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire St Martin's Press, New York p. 68.
The general election and his candidacy were both forestalled by the outbreak of the First World War, and the sitting member continued to hold his seat until 1922. He and another backbench colleague in Parliament, Leopold Amery, lobbied the Conservative leadership to press for an immediate declaration of war against Germany on 1 August 1914.
In conjunction with Edward Wood (later Earl of Halifax), Lloyd wrote The Great Opportunity in 1918. The book was meant to be a Conservative challenge to the Lloyd George coalition and stressed for devolution of power from Westminster and the importance of reviving English industry and agriculture.
First World War As a lieutenant in the Warwickshire Yeomanry, Lloyd was called up three days after Britain had entered the war.
During the war, he served on the staff of Sir Ian Hamilton at Gallipoli and landed with the ANZACs on the first day of that campaign; took part in a special British mission to Petrograd to improve Anglo-Russian liaison; visited Basra to update his study of commerce in the Persian Gulf; and, after a time in Cairo, with T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Bureau in Hejaz, the Negev and the Sinai Desert. He reached the rank of captain in the Warwickshire Yeomanry in which regiment he continued to hold rank until 1925, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and made Companion of the Indian Empire in 1917. For services in the war, he also received the Russian Empire's Order of St Anne, 3rd Class, and the Order of Al Nahda (2nd class) of the Kingdom of Hejaz.
Colonial posts Bombay In December 1918 he was appointed Governor of Bombay and made Knight Commander in the Order of the Indian Empire. His principal activities as governor were reclaiming land for housing in the Back Bay area of the city of Bombay and building the Lloyd Barrage (now Sukkur Barrage) an irrigation scheme, both of which were funded by loans raised in India, instead of in England. Lloyd's administration was the first to raise such funds locally. His province was one of the centres of Indian nationalist unrest to deal with which he insisted in 1921 on the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi, who was subsequently imprisoned for six years for sedition.
Lloyd was very strongly opposed to Indian independence or even bringing a measure of democracy to the Raj and wrote of what he called "the fundamental unsuitability of modern western democratic methods of government to any Oriental people".Charmley, John Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire St Martin's Press, New York, p. 170. A strong believer in what he regarded as the greatness of the British Empire, Lloyd wrote from Bombay to a friend on 25 August 1920: "The real truth is that we can't withdraw the legions: every schoolboy knows what happened to Rome as the legions began to do so".Charmley, John Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire St Martin's Press, New York, p. 95. The British historian Louise Atherton described Lloyd: "Idealistically, almost mystically, devoted to the British Empire, he advocated the use of force, if necessary, to maintain British control". He completed his term as governor in 1923 and was made a Privy Counsellor and Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India.
He was instrumental in selecting and sending the first truly-Indian team of athletes to Olympics in 1920 to the 7th Olympic Games, held at Antwerp, Belgium. He helped form the ad hoc Indian Olympic Association under the chairmanship of the industrialist and philanthropist Sir Dorabji Tata. Lloyd made special arrangements for the preparations and training of the six-member team in England, arranged for their travel and stayed in military facilities both in London and then Antwerp. He negotiated the arrangements with Sir Winston Churchill and got the required permissions even when the Britain was broke from the First World War and struggling even to send its own teams to the Games. A patron of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, he also established an annual grant dedicated to its efforts in producing a critical edition of the Hindu epic Mahabharata.
Egypt He returned to Parliament again for Eastbourne in 1924 and served until 1925, when he was made Baron Lloyd, of Dolobran in the County of Montgomery, named after his Welsh ancestral home. After his ennoblement, he was appointed High Commissioner to Egypt and served until his resignation was forced upon him by the Labour Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson in 1929. Lloyd's views and experience formed the background of a self-justifying two-volume book, Egypt Since Cromer (published 1933–1934).
Lobbying In 1930, Lloyd became president of the Navy League, which lobbied the government for to spend more money on the Royal Navy, and he was a member of the India Defence League, which lobbied the government not to grant home rule to India. During the 1930s, he was one of the most prominent opponents of proposals to grant Indian Home Rule, working alongside Winston Churchill against the National Government. From 1931 to 1935, Lloyd employed James Lees-Milne as one of his male secretaries.
Lloyd was suspicious of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, which he saw as a threat to Britain.Michael Bloch, biography of James Lees-Milne, page 57, 2009. He agitated for rearmament against Germany as early as 1930, before Churchill did so.Lord Lloyd and the decline of the British Empire J Charmley, pp. 1, 2, 213ff.
British Council From July 1937 onward, he was chairman of the British Council in which he oversaw an increase in lectureships and made cultural tours of neutral capitals to maintain sympathy for Britain's cause during the early months of the Second World War.
The council was a purportedly-independent group meant to engage in cultural propaganda promoting the British way of life to the rest of the world that was in fact under the control of the Foreign Office.Atherton, pp. 26–27. As head of the British Council, Lloyd ran his own private intelligence network that employed as one his spies the journalist Ian Colvin, who served as the Berlin correspondent of The News Chronicle.Watt, D. C. How War Came, New York: Pantheon, 1989 p. 182. Unusually, Lloyd enjoyed a privileged access to the secret reports of MI6, the British intelligence service. The British historian D. C. Watt called Lloyd "one of those uncontrollable lusi naturae the British elite throws up from time to time".Watt, D. C. How War Came, New York: Pantheon, 1989 p. 90.
In November 1937, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden instructed Lloyd that the British Council was to concentrate especially on improving Britain's image in Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland.Atherton, p. 27. Regarding the Middle East, especially Egypt, as a crucial area of control for Britain, Lloyd regarded the approaches to the Near East as equally crucial, which led him to become obsessed with the Balkans, which called the "eastern approaches", independently of Eden's instructions.Atherton, p. 28. In April 1938, he suggested in a memo sent to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax that Britain needed to become more economically involved in the Balkans, which were rapidly falling into the German economic sphere of influence. After discussing the issue with King George II of Greece during a visit to Athens in May 1938, Lloyd submitted another memo calling for Britain to increase the import of staple goods from Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece and Romania.Atherton, pp. 28–29. In response, Britain granted Turkey a credit of £16 million that month, but Lloyd's idea of an "economic offensive" in the Balkans was not taken up at the time.Atherton, p. 29.
Czechoslovakia Lloyd was not in sympathy with the Chamberlain government's policies towards Czechoslovakia in August–September 1938, and his advice that he gave to his old friend, Lord Halifax, who served as Foreign Secretary after Eden had resigned in February 1938 in protest against the Chamberlain's government's policies towards Fascist Italy, was not followed.