Background
John Selwyn Brooke Lloyd was born on 28 July 1904, at West Kirby, Wirral, the son of Sir John Wesley Lloyd, a dentist, and his wife, Mary Rachel Warhurst.
John Selwyn Brooke Lloyd was born on 28 July 1904, at West Kirby, Wirral, the son of Sir John Wesley Lloyd, a dentist, and his wife, Mary Rachel Warhurst.
He was raised as a Methodist and was educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh, and at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was president of the Cambridge Students’ Union in 1927, became a barrister in 1930, and built up a general common law practice on the northern circuit. He was a member of the Hoylake Urban District Council, in Cheshire, for ten years. He enlisted in the Royal Horse Artillery at the beginning of World War II and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1941 and brigadier in 1944.
He was appointed as one of the three parliamentary members on the Beveridge Committee, which inquired into the organization of the BBC in 1949.
He was appointed a minister of state at the Foreign Office in 1951, where he worked closely with Sir Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary. In 1954, when Eden was ill, he took on responsibility for the day-to-day activities of the Foreign Office. As a result he became closely involved with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who in 1954 promoted him to minister of supply.
Six months later, when Eden became prime minister, Selwyn Lloyd was made foreign secretary.
In July 1960 Selwyn Lloyd became chancellor of the exchequer. Faced with inflationary pressures, rising wage demands, and increasing government expenditure, he introduced the “pay pause,” a period when no pay increases were allowed. He followed up with a more flexible wage policy that allowed wage increases of up to 2.5 percent. He also set up the National Economic Development Council, dubbed “Neddy,” as a discussion forum for trade union representatives, employers, and government. However, his strict financial controls on the economy began to dampen political support for the Conservative Party, as a result of which Macmillan organized a ministerial reshuffle (“the night of the long knives” 13 July 1962). Selwyn Lloyd was one of those who lost their posts.
Aggrieved by these developments, he nevertheless remained an active member of the Conservative Party. He conducted an assessment of the national organization in 1963, after which he recommended changes in the party’s selection of candidates, its subscriptions for party membership, and the role of its agents. He also influenced the selection of Lord Home as Conservative leader, and thus prime minister, on the resignation of Harold Macmillan in 1963. As a reward, he was given the posts of Lord Privy Seal and leader of the House of Commons, which he enjoyed for ten months, until Harold Wilson’s Labour government came to power. From then until 1966, he was a member of the Conservative shadow cabinet. After the Conservatives returned to government under Edward Heath in 1970, Selwyn Lloyd was made speaker of the House of Commons in 1971. He resigned in 1976 and was given a life peerage.
Selwyn Lloyd produced his own report in 1951 that suggested that the BBC should not have a monopoly in broadcasting and should raise revenue from advertising.
He was involved in securing independence for Sudan.
His main responsibility as a foreign secretary was to mobilize an international response to the actions of Colonel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, who had nationalized the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956. To this end Selwyn Lloyd organized an international conference in London in August 1956, at which 18 of the 22 participating countries supported the resolution for an international solution to the Suez Canal crisis that would guarantee Egyptian sovereign rights while establishing the rights of users of the canal. The conference sent Sir Robert Menzies to negotiate with Nasser; but the negotiations proved unsuccessful, perhaps in part because U.S. President Eisenhower had declared that he would only support a peaceful resolution to the issue. The Americans also prevented the British from bringing the matter before the United Nations Security Council, advocating that John Foster Dulles’s plan for a Suez Canal users’ association should be discussed first.
At this point Selwyn Lloyd tendered his resignation, but he was asked to continue as foreign secretary. On 22 October 1956 he became aware of a French-Israeli plan for military action in the canal zone, and on 26 October Israel attacked. By then, Selwyn Lloyd had begun to prepare for the parachuting of British troops into Suez, an event that occurred on 5 November 1956 and that led to the securing of 23 miles of the canal in one day. Selwyn Lloyd wanted to continue until the whole of the canal was secured; but British action ceased on 6 November, after the British cabinet buckled under pressure from the United States, which was threatening to provoke a sterling crisis. Shortly afterward, Eden resigned and was replaced by Harold Macmillan, who kept Selwyn Lloyd on as foreign secretary. From that point on, their main purpose became to improve Anglo-American relations, through the Bermuda Conference of 1957, and to improve Anglo-Soviet relations, through their visit to the Soviet Union in 1959.
Politically, Selwyn Lloyd had been drawn to the Liberal Party in his early years, due to family connections, but was adopted as a Conservative candidate for Wirral in 1939 and was easily elected for that seat in the 1945 general election. He remained Wirral’s M.P. until 1976. Although in his early years his attention was concentrated primarily on building up his legal practice, his political career began to thrive.
Selwyn Lloyd married his secretary, Elizabeth Marshall, the daughter of a solicitor.
