Lucy Catherine Lloyd was born in Norbury in Staffordshire on 7 November 1834. Her father, William Henry Cynric Lloyd, was the rector of Norbury and vicar of Ronton, two villages in the west of England. He was also chaplain to the Earl of Lichfield, to whom he was related through his mother. Lucy Lloyd’s mother was Lucy Anne Jeffreys, also a minister’s daughter, who died in 1842 when Lucy was only eight. Lucy Lloyd was the second of four daughters, Julia, Jemima and Fanny being the others. Her father married Ellen Norman in 1844 and had 13 additional children with his new wife. After her mother’s death, Lucy and her sisters lived with their maternal uncle and his wife, Sir John and Lady Caroline Dundas, from whom they received a private and apparently liberal education. In 1847 Robert Gray was consecrated bishop of Cape Town and he established a diocese that included Natal, where clergymen were needed. William Lloyd was sent to Durban along with his family in April 1849, when Lucy was 14, as colonial and military chaplain to the colony’s British forces. He later became archdeacon of Durban. A separate Anglican diocese was established in 1853, with the consecration of John William Colenso as bishop. Colenso set up residence in Pietermaritzburg and a party of 45 accompanied him, including the young Wilhelm Bleek, who was to assist Colenso as anthropologist and philologist.
The Lloyd family had limited financial means in Durban. Jemima recalled endless cleaning and mending and household chores – not surprising given the size of the family and the fact that her stepmother’s sanity appeared strained to the limit. The four older girls each had a small inheritance from their mother, but the capital was only made available to them at maturity. Lucy and Jemima (who was to marry Wilhelm Bleek) were very close and despised their father, whom they saw as a hypocrite, distancing themselves from what they thought of as his unreasonable and unethical behaviour. When Lucy resisted his attempts to gain control over her inheritance, he threw her out of the house. LLOYDS BIO OF HER DAD. Jemima eventually suffered the same fate.
At first Lucy went to stay on a farm owned by Mr and Mrs Middleton. She had become engaged to the sweet and widely travelled George Woolley, the son of a clergyman, in 1858. According to Jemima, the Middletons were meanspirited people who, reluctant to see her move on, sowed distrust and pain between her and George, telling the one one thing and the other another. Lucy, her confidence undermined, broke off the engagement but over time began to re-establish her relationship with George. She left the Middletons and set up home on her own. Jemima eventually joined her, the two women valuing their independence despite the unfriendly comments of many who disapproved of two women living alone. She saw less of George during this period, partly because she thought it inappropriate to entertain him in the absence of parental supervision. This was something he found difficult to bear.
George lived on a little farm called Matlock some way out of town. When he became ill he had no one to care for him, nor did he send word that he needed assistance. He died intestate on the 17th October 1860, all alone and feeling, Jemima imagined, abandoned by all but God. Lucy was devastated. She blamed herself for not being with him, and since he seemed to have died from suffocation, thought that with a little careful nursing she might have saved his life. ’My poor Loui,’ Jemima wrote, ’cannot you just feebly imagine how dreadful … [this] knowledge must have been to [her] and how [it] must have taken all gladness out of life for a time leaving it scarcely endurable indeed.’ Jemima married Wilhelm Bleek on 22 November 1862 and Lucy helped them prepare for the wedding. She almost did not reach Cape Town since the Natal mail steamer, the SS Waldensian, was wrecked near Cape Agulhas. Although the passengers and crew were rescued, Lucy lost most of her possessions and wedding gifts, managing to retrieve only a pair of vases for her sister (which she carried on her lap in the lifeboat) and a set of Sir Walter Scott’s novels that had washed ashore in good condition as they were wrapped in waterproof packaging (see The Wreck of the Waldensian )
Sometime before 1870 Lucy came to live with her sister and Wilhelm at The Hill in Mowbray. Lucy started her work with oral histories on the arrival of the first |xam speaker at their home in 1870, after which she was responsible for two-thirds of the texts recorded until Bleek’s death and the publication of their second report to the Cape parliament in 1875. After Bleek’s death, and true to his desire expressed in a codicil to his will written in 1871, Lucy continued working on their joint ’Bushman studies’ with the support of Jemima, (see Jemima’s bio) While Lucy would undoubtedly have done this anyway, Bleek’s request must surely have bestowed on her work a little of the credibility that, in those days, was usually reserved for male scholars and researchers.
Fanny and Julia Lloyd joined the Bleek and Lloyd household, which in 1875 moved to Charlton House, also in Mowbray. Lucy was appointed curator of the Grey Collection as successor to Bleek after his death in 1875, at half his salary, a position she accepted reluctantly. During this time she worked with the Grey Collection and at editing various manuscripts collected by Bleek, as well as continuing with her |xam research in her own time. She began corresponding with George W Stow in 1875 about his copies of rock paintings, and in 1876 he proposed a book that would eventually be published (with Lucy’s support) as “The native races of southern Africa”. Lucy also played an important role in the founding of the South African Folklore Society, for which she acted as secretary for a while, and in helping found the Folklore Journal in 1879.
Lucy’s services at the South African Library were terminated in 1880 when Dr Theophilus Hahn was appointed, after a long and painful saga, in her place. Her relationship with the library had been fraught, and particularly so was her relationship with the Cape colony’s superintendent general for education, Langham Dale, who had made the new appointment. She had little respect for Hahn and thought his appointment a disaster. Lloyd and the trustees of the Grey Collection, who supported her, took the case to the Supreme Court for judgment. The appointment, however, went ahead. Hahn resigned two years later, after which no custodian was appointed for the collection.
After Stow’s death in 1882, Lloyd purchased his tracings and copies of Bushman paintings as well as the manuscript of ’Native races’ from his wife, Fanny Stow (see fragment). Lucy then engaged the services of the historian George M Theal to work with her on the manuscript and edit it. It was published in London in 1905 along with some photographic images taken from Lucy’s own collection. Lucy and her sister Fanny went to England in 1883, for financial and health reasons. Lucy’s letters show her to have been ill at the time. Indeed, she described herself as having endured ’years of overwork and many of ill-health’. After the loss of her position at the South African Library, the family had found themselves in a precarious financial position with too many mouths to feed – at times, whole families, numbers of adults as well as children, often in poor health, lived in their home – and Lucy’s last recorded work with language instructors appears to have been in 1884. All in all, at least 17 people besides the family had lived in the Mowbray household between 1870 and 1884, some for extended periods. Expenses included food, clothing and tobacco, and according to Bleek’s list of expenses for 1871 he had also budgeted for the arrival of the informants’ wives. After Wilhelm’s death in 1875, followed by the loss of Lucy’s job, the financial as well as emotional strain of providing for their guests and their families, as well as their own sisters and young children, took its toll on both Lucy and Jemima.
In 1884 Jemima Bleek moved her family to Germany to stay with relatives and receive schooling there, and it appears that the other Lloyd sisters joined them. Lucy Lloyd is believed to have gone to Europe in 1887 – around this time she trained her niece Dorothea in research methods – and she moved between Germany, Switzerland, England and Wales, with occasional trips to the Cape around 1905 and 1907. She returned to South Africa in 1912. The Bleek family remained in Germany for the following 21 years.
Lucy Lloyd submitted a third report to the Cape government concerning ’Bushman Researches’, dated 8 May 1889, in which she added 4534 half-pages or columns to the collection. In 1911 a selection of texts from Bleek and Lloyd’s extraordinary project – and a considerable achievement given Lloyd’s personal circumstances at the time – was edited by her and published as Specimens of Bushman folklore.
In 1913 Lloyd received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Cape of Good Hope in recognition of her contribution to research. In the words of the time, the citation read: ’an original production worthy of the highest praise. It is not only a masterly exposition of the folklore of a vanishing race that has remained primitive, but the philological value of the work is greater still, and the work will remain an authority on the language of the “Bushmen and kindred races”.’ She was the first woman to receive this degree in South Africa.
Lloyd was deeply committed to the project of collecting the ‘national literature’ of those she termed the ‘aboriginal people’ of South Africa, in their own languages. It was a project of the 19th century on a scale unique in the world. While !kun is still spoken |xam is now a dead (or dormant) language, which survives only in the notebooks and the 40000+ slip dictionary she and Bleek assembled (all copied on this site).
Lucy Lloyd died at Charlton House on 31 August 1914 at the age of 79 having endured six painful days of peritonitis, and is buried in the Wynberg cemetery in Cape Town near her nieces and nephew and Wilhelm Bleek whose gravestone faces hers.