Lloyd

Lloyd is the Welsh adjective llwyd, usually translated grey, and it describes a man rather than recording his father. It covered more ground than English grey does: T. J. Morgan and Prys Morgan set it across a range of browns as well, and ordinary Welsh keeps that sense, where dŵr llwyd is the brown water of a river in flood. Of a young man it most likely meant mouse-coloured hair, of an old one the grey of age.

By the time llwyd hardened into a family name it had largely stopped meaning grey at all, and the Morgans dismissed the antiquarian who explained a David Llwyd in one pedigree by supposing he had gone grey early. The word carried a second sense in the medieval period, holy, and it behaves oddly in the grammar because of it: Welsh adjectives normally soften after a personal name, and llwyd is the exception that keeps its hard consonant. It may also have marked a man as owed respect.

Welsh naming ran on ap. A man was his father's son and nothing more, Evan ap Thomas, then John ab Evan, then Rees ap John, the name rebuilt every generation, and strings running back to a seventh ancestor were unremarkable. The Encyclopaedia of Wales suggests the habit rested on Welsh law, where descent from an ancestor decided what a man was entitled to. In 1292 some 48 per cent of recorded Welsh names were patronymics, and in certain parishes over 70 per cent.

Lloyd did not come through that machinery, and that one fact separates it from the rest of the Welsh surname stock. Powell is ap Hywel with the ap worn down to a P, Pryce is ap Rhys, Bowen is ab Owen. Nothing of the kind happened to Lloyd, because llwyd was never anybody's baptismal name: it was an epithet, and an epithet attaches to the man, not to the line.

What makes Lloyd unusual is that it stuck anyway. Hereditary Welsh surnames were exceptional well into the early modern period, and llwyd is named as one of the exceptions, with goch, red, which became Gough: fixed epithets already passing down the generations as early as the 14th century, while most of Wales was still rebuilding its names each generation.

The Tudor century settled the rest of Wales. Surnames became hereditary among the gentry in Henry VIII's reign and spread slowly downward, the districts nearest English influence abandoning ap first, while some rural areas kept patronymics into the early 19th century. Wales came under a single administration with England in 1536, and administration means paper: rolls, rentals and wills, all written down by clerks.

Those clerks then met the Welsh ll, a voiceless hiss made at the side of the tongue with no English equivalent whatever. Often they gave up and wrote a single l; sometimes they reached for thl or ffl to show that this l had something extra in it. The diphthong wy, roughly the vowel of gooey said as one syllable, came out as oy.

The result is a whole family of spellings that are one Welsh word: Floyd, Flood, Fludd, Flude, Flewitt, Lhuyd, Loud, Thloyd. Most date from the Tudor period, and they are not separate names belonging to separate families. The same man could be entered as Lloyd on one page and Floyd on the next by a clerk doing his honest best with a sound his own language had never needed.

Wales carries a remarkably small stock of surnames for the number of people using them, partly because the Reformation cut down the range of baptismal names the patronymics were built from. Two people named Jones, even in the same village, cannot be assumed to share an ancestor.

For a descriptive byname the point is sharper. A patronymic at least requires a father with the right first name; grey hair required nothing but a neighbour with eyes. There is no founder, no chief and no seat that owns this name, and a pedigree that joins one Lloyd family to another because the spelling matches has invented the join.

One Lloyd family can be pointed at on a map. Whittington, on the Welsh Marches close to the old fort at Old Oswestry, was a motte and bailey rebuilt in stone in the 13th century and, after the defeat of Llewelyn in 1282, a lordly residence for the FitzWarins, a line of lords all named Fulk. In 1545 John Bourchier, 2nd Earl of Bath, traded the lordship to Henry VIII for former monastic estates nearer his Devon home, and it passed through various hands to William Albany, a London merchant taylor.

From 1750 Albany's descendants are the Lloyd family of Aston, near Oswestry, who own Whittington still, although they lived at Great Fernhill rather than in the castle. No descent from the Fulks is claimed for them. What survives is the stone gatehouse flanked by two round towers, conserved and restored and open to visitors under a preservation trust: a named address kept in one family's hands since 1750.

A second Lloyd house stands in Ireland. Strancally, near Youghal in County Waterford, was built about 1830 by the architects James and George Richard Pain for John Keily, above the River Blackwater and in front of the ruin of an old Desmond castle raised by Raymond le Gros. In 1856 the castle and an estate of 5,000 acres were bought by George Whitelocke Lloyd, then twenty-four years old and of a wealthy Anglo-Irish manufacturing family. Nothing connects him to the Lloyds of Aston or to any particular Welsh line, and nothing needs to.

David Lloyd George was born in Manchester on 17 January 1863 and raised from infancy at Llanystumdwy in Caernarfonshire, in a Welsh-speaking, chapel-going household kept by his widowed mother and his shoemaker uncle. He qualified as a solicitor, and in 1890 was elected member of parliament for the Caernarvon Boroughs, a seat he would hold for fifty-five years. As Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908 he carried the People's Budget of 1909 and the National Insurance Act of 1911, which established the first national systems of health and unemployment insurance in Britain and are reckoned among the founding stones of the modern welfare state.

He became Prime Minister in December 1916, at the darkest point of the First World War, reorganised the direction of the war through a small War Cabinet and a unified Allied command, and under his leadership Britain and the Allies carried the war to victory in November 1918. The following year he led the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. He was the first Welsh speaker and the first man of genuinely modest origins to reach the premiership, he governed in his second language, and he remains the only Welshman to have led a British government. Near the end of his life he was created Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor.

Lloyds Bank is no part of this history: it was founded in Birmingham in 1765 by an English Quaker family and has nothing to do with the Welsh llwyd. The traffic has lately reversed on the Tudor clerks: Llwyd, the spelling closest to the Welsh word, had long fallen out of use, and in recent years it has been deliberately put back.

Selwyn Lloyd (1904–1978) carried the name to the Foreign Office and afterwards to the Speaker's chair in the Commons. Lloyd began as one man's hair, noticed by his neighbours and never meant to outlive him. It is now the great descriptive surname of Wales, densest in Powys and Ceredigion, and carried by people whose one certain kinship is the word itself.