Alan Lloyd: The Lost Generation

The Great War: The People's Story

Alan Lloyd

THE LOST GENERATION

Isobel Charman

First published by ITV Ventures as an eBook edition in 2014.

This book is published to accompany the television series entitled The Great War: The People’s Story, produced by Shiver for ITV Studios and first broadcast on ITV in 2014.

Director of Shiver: Alexander Gardiner

Executive Producer: Ollie Tait

Producer: Isobel Charman

Director: Paul Copeland

Publication © ITV Ventures 2014

Text © ITV Ventures

Images © Lady Vivien Cockcroft

Isobel Charman has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means with prior written permission from the publishers.

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Head of Publishing for ITV Studios Global Entertainment: Shirley Patton

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ISBN 978-1-910332-04-7

The other books in the series are:

Reg Evans DCM – A Hero’s War in His Own Words by Pamela Armitage Campbell

Kate Parry Frye – The Long Life of an Edwardian Actress and Suffragette by Elizabeth Crawford

The Great War – The People’s Story by Isobel Charman

For Alan and Dorothy

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: A Victorian Childhood

Chapter Two: Trinity College, Cambridge

Chapter Three: Dreaming of the Future

Chapter Four: Adventures in the Empire

Chapter Five: The Course of True Love

Chapter Six: A Soldier and his Wife

Chapter Seven: Who Dies if England Live?

Chapter Eight: ‘It’s not easy in this war’

Chapter Nine: The Somme

Chapter Ten: Facing the Future

Afterword

About the Author

Introduction

Icould not, and would not, have written this book without the support of the Lloyd family. Alan’s granddaughter, Vivien Cockcroft, has offered me endless encouragement and her enthusiasm has made the whole process a pleasure as well as a privilege. I would also like to thank Gerald’s grandson Alan Lloyd and his wife Judy Lloyd for their help, and for allowing me to draw on the extensive, excellent research done by Judy for her PhD thesis. It is an enormous honour to be allowed to tell their family’s story and I hope I have not let them down.

The Lloyd family were meticulous record keepers, which has allowed me - over a century later - to construct the story of Alan’s life in great detail. The main sources I have drawn on are: Gertrude Lloyd’s and Dorothy Lloyd’s diaries, now in the possession of Vivien Cockcroft; the Lloyd family’s correspondence, held in the archives at Birmingham Central Library; and the wartime letters (primarily) between Alan and Dorothy, which are held in the Imperial War Museum. It was the historians of the Imperial War Museum who first introduced me to Alan during the research for the ITV Series, The Great War: The People’s Story, and for that I must thank them.

Used in conjunction with the official records documenting the movements of Alan’s regiment during the war, these personal sources give an extremely full picture of what Alan was doing over the 27 years of his life. Where necessary, I have filled in the blanks with a little bit of imagination, and a determination to be true to the spirits of these remarkable people and these extraordinary times.

A Victorian Childhood

The 14 October 1888. It is late on a Sunday afternoon and the streets of Edgbaston, a middle-class suburb of Birmingham, are appropriately quiet. In the sky above the neat roads of large houses the last light of an autumn day is draining into sunset. Though only a couple of miles from the centre of Birmingham, Edgbaston feels a world away from the sprawling metropolis, which is just how the residents – industrialists and businessmen whose money is made in the factories and offices clogging up the streets and lungs of England’s second-largest city – like it.

As the sun falls from the sky and the cold cloak of dusk spreads out in its place, a carriage makes its way up Carpenter Road. The sound of hooves clattering up the drive of number fifty announces the return of John Henry Lloyd. The housemaid, in her starched white apron and cap, rushes to open the heavy wooden front door; stepping back out of sight to clear the way for the master of the house. A tall, slim man, in his mid-30s, wearing the simple, dark clothing favoured by those of the Quaker religion, jumps from the carriage. He strides towards the imposing brick house with its pillared portico, towards the light of the hallway lamps just lit for the evening, which spills out to greet him. Then he disappears behind the closed door, leaving the sound of the horses scratching at the dirt of the driveway outside.

John Henry, like many of his neighbours in Edgbaston, is a Quaker and a businessman. Descended from the Lloyds banking family – his uncle Sampson Lloyd is the current chairman of the bank – his own working week is taken up in the factories of Lloyd & Lloyd, the largest manufacturer of steel and iron tubes in England. Today, however, he has been fulfilling the civic role his religion demanded of him. Like most Sundays, he has been teaching at the adult school on Severn Street in the city centre, where the scripture is used as a means of teaching basic literacy to the working masses.

But today is not an ordinary Sunday. The housemaid, head bowed, speaks to John Henry in a hushed voice. Upstairs his wife Gertrude is in labour for the second time. Her nurse is at her bedside; John Henry can do little more than wait. He had married Gertrude, now 31, four years ago; she has already borne him one son. Childbirth is a highly dangerous affair – still the single biggest killer of women. John Henry waits; the doctor, he has been told, is on his way.

Just before dawn the next morning, the household is woken with the good news: Gertrude has had a baby boy and is doing well. The sun rises on the house as its newest resident is being swaddled in blankets and handed to his mother. The early morning sunlight falls on leafy, pleasant Edgbaston outside the curtained windows, and illuminates the already teeming streets of Birmingham beyond. Horse-drawn trams carry workers to the factories where pens, guns, bicycles, engines, industrial parts and goods of almost infinite variety will be churned out all day. Beyond the city limits trains steam through the countryside; flying past country estates where servants are preparing breakfasts and fires and horses, and arrive with steam and screeches in the giant rail terminuses of the capital city. The electric lights lining the streets – a fairly recent addition – have gone dark; London is wide awake now. Newspaper boys shout the latest about the brutal Whitechapel Murders and the mysterious perpetrator, Jack the Ripper. Businessmen and bakers’ boys, and butchers and bankers hurry to work. Victoria, Queen of Britain and Empress of India, now in the fifty-first year of her reign, watches over them all. This is Britain in 1888: industrial, imperial, divided. This is the nation into which the latest member of the famous Lloyd family has been born.

A week later, on another quiet Sunday afternoon, Gertrude and John Henry sit together in Gertrude’s bedroom. Their newborn babe lies in his cradle, placed carefully atop the bed. The nurse and maid have left the three of them alone. Mother and father sit quietly and look at their son with his scrunched-up fists and face. They name him Alan Scrivener: Alan, a Celtic name meaning harmony; Scrivener, a family name. Once named, his parents, both devout believers, gaze down on him and they pray.

John Henry Lloyd and Gertrude Keep on their engagement, 1884.

This baby’s life had begun well: Alan Scrivener Lloyd had been born on the right side of the line separating the privileged and the poor. The house he shared with his three-year-old brother Gerald and their parents had nine bedrooms, and servants to take care of their every need: nurses for the children, a kitchen maid, parlourmaid and housemaid. Alan’s grandfather, who lived just a short walk away, was George Braithwaite Lloyd II; a retired chairman of Lloyds bank and former mayor of Birmingham, he was now devoted to public life in the city. The children were frequent visitors to Edgbaston Grove, a grand house set in large grounds, and the country estate they owned at Bordesley, known simply as ‘the Farm’. Alan did not go without in his childhood.

Nor did he want for love or companionship. His upbringing was in keeping with that of the age and most of the time he and his brother were cared for by the servants. But their mother Gertrude was devoted to them, and agonised over the minutiae of their health and development. She noted the details of Alan’s infancy in a diary she kept about him from his birth, writing of him at six months, ‘This baby is a great joy and delight to me… such a healthy, rosy, happy, frolicking boy never was.’ His mother couldn’t keep him quiet, or still – first he was shuffling around on his bottom, then pulling himself up to walk by his first birthday. Baby Alan wanted to be heard, and he wanted to go places.

Alan’s family grew as he did; two more brothers, Eric and Ronald, followed and then a sister, Joan. Christmases were spent singing carols at their grandparents’ house, snow covering the extensive grounds outside; summers were spent running free on the Farm. Alan and his older brother Gerald, ‘Ger’, would spend entire days climbing trees or Alan would tear around on his bicycle, or in quieter moments push his younger siblings around the garden in a cart. There were many visitors, especially as the family grew in stature as well as size: John Henry became a councillor when Alan was three years old, following in his father’s footsteps into public life.

Alan and his siblings: From R-L: Alan, Joan, Gerald, Eric and Ronald.

50 Carpenter Road was a bustling household, but it was also a deeply pious one. The Lloyd family were leading figures in the Quaker community. John Henry and Gertrude were elders in the Edgbaston Meeting House, and both were involved in local philanthropic ventures. Gertrude was an ardent believer in teetotalism and purity, and worried ceaselessly for her own children’s souls – especially Alan’s. As the seasons passed, Alan grew into a handsome, tall boy, and an increasingly wilful one. Gertrude wrote anxiously in her diary of him aged just three-and-a-half: ‘Much exercised by Alan’s wilfulness and contradicting, says now so often I shan’t and I won’t and I can’t cure him of it. I find him a great handful, so wilful and obstinate and yet very loving.’

By the age of eight Alan had read the entire New Testament. But he was constantly questioning the religion he was being brought up in and argued fiercely with his mother over things he was forbidden to do – like going to the pantomime, impermissible because of the alcohol at the theatre. Gertrude worried desperately, writing of her headstrong boy, ‘Dear Lord, thou hast given me this child to train, do give me wisdom.’ She also looked elsewhere for help with him. In February 1897, Gertrude visited West House School for boys, which had opened the previous year and was just down the road in Edgbaston. She decided Alan would start at the end of the summer term.

Alan was nine years