Hoylake

Peter Clarke

• Selwyn Lloyd by D.K. Thorpe
  Cape, 516 pp, £18.00, February 1989, ISBN 0 224 02828 6

Grandfather was John Wesley Lloyd, son of the Rev. John Lloyd from Llanidloes; after an education at Kingswood School, entry to which was restricted to the sons of Methodist ministers, he became a dentist and moved to Liverpool. His own son, also John Wesley Lloyd, was ineligible for Kingswood and sent therefore to the Methodist-inspired Leys School in Cambridge as the next best thing; he qualified in medicine but, like his eponymous father, became a Liverpool dentist – chapel-going, teetotal, Liberal. This textbook story of steady, unspectacular upward social mobility and incremental secularisation was illustrated by the family’s suburbanisation, with the transfer of the dental practice from the city to the Wirral, first as a summer adjunct, but latterly as the main family home. It was here that Dr Lloyd’s third child and only son was born in 1904. Naturally he wished the boy to be christened John Wesley: but his Anglican wife had other ideas, and they settled on an appropriately Low Church compromise – Selwyn.