Lewis William Lloyd, LL.M., Ph.D., F.R.Hist.S.

Lewis Lloyd was born in London on 13 June 1939. After early schooling at Willesden County Grammar School the family returned to their father's birthplace, Llanfair, near Harlech, and Lewis continued his education at Barmouth County School, Ysgol Ardudwy, Harlech, and the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he graduated with a first in law in 1960. Two years later he took the LL.B. postgraduate degree at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, and went on to the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University at Canberra which awarded him a doctorate in 1966 for his thesis on `The Sources and Development of Australian Mining Law'. Returning to England in the same year, Lloyd was appointed lecturer in the department of law at Leeds University and in 1968 tutor in political theory and institutions at Coleg Harlech. A popular lecturer, he was subsequently promoted to senior tutor and took early retirement in 1992 to pursue his own researches into the maritime communities of Merioneth and Caernarvonshire, although he continued to lecture throughout Wales and made a major contribution to continuing education in the principality. The fruits of Lloyd's retirement studies were: The Maritime Community of Abermaw/Barmouth, 1565-1920, (1993); De Wintons of Caernarfon, (1994) and the two-volume, A Real Little Seaport: the Port of Aberdyfi and its People, 1565-1920, (1996). Some of Lloyd's many articles and books were published by the Gwynedd Archives Service but the major volumes were privately printed at considerable personal expense. In Lloyd's own words `the sea provided a highway to the world' and he viewed Welsh emigration as an important aspect of the country's maritime tradition, his publications on the Welsh seaports being as much studies in social as in maritime history. Letters from America, co-authored with Aled Eames and Bryn Parry, was published in 1975 and Australians from Wales in 1988. Towards the end of his life he was researching Welsh emigration to America and died only a few weeks after returning from Washington where he had been studying historical data. Lloyd was a founder-editor of Maritime Wales/Cymru a'r Môr and a senior member of the Merioneth Historical Society, having served on its council since 1977 and been elected vice-president in 1989. He died suddenly in Llanfair, aged 57, on 11 April 1997.