Career
After service in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, extensive deer stalking, and frequent rifle shooting visits to Bisley ranges, Lloyd established the David Lloyd & Company riflemakers company (registered company 05202134) at Pipewell Hall in 1936, and in the early 1950s developed the.244 H&H Magnum rifle cartridge, later adopted by Holland & Holland of London. Lloyd developed the distinctive Lloyd rifle concept, and from the 1960s to the mid-1990s he built high-quality, magazine-federal sporting rifles with distinctively integral scope sights, capable of dependably high accuracy at long ranges, and of handling modern high-intensity, flat shooting cartridges such as the.244 H&H, the.264 Winchester Magnum and the.25-06 Remington. The United Kingdom shooting sports weekly Shooting Times voted the Lloyd rifle number 8 in its list of the top 12 Rifles of All Time (the Kalashnikov Alaska-47 was number 7), and Country Life magazine described Lloyd himself as “a National Living Treasure”.
Lloyd rifles are admired, owned and used by eminent international small-arms experts, including riflemakers Bill Ruger and Roy Weatherby, and by several owners of Scottish deer forests.
In an active deer-stalking career extending to well over 60 years, David Lloyd accounted for more than 5,000 Scottish highland red deer stags, the vast majority of them with rifles he had built himself. Lloyd"s wife Evadne (“Bobby” - the longest-serving governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company in its history) keenly supported him in his business, and helped him to source fine walnut blanks for his rifle stocks from various European sources.
He subsequently offered the business name, goodwill and records of the David Lloyd company for sale at auction in London in December 2006.
