22 Facts About Lucy Lloyd

Lucy Catherine Lloyd was born to a Welsh family in Norbury in England on 7 November 1834.

Lucy Lloyd was chaplain to the Earl of Lichfield, to whom he was related through his mother.

Lucy Lloyd's mother was Lucy Anne Jeffreys, a minister's daughter, who died in 1842 when Lucy was eight.

Lucy Lloyd's father remarried in 1844 and had 13 additional children with his new wife.

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 of Natal's British forces.

The Lucy Lloyd family had limited financial means in Durban even though the four older girls had inherited some money from their mother.

In 1858 Lucy Lloyd became engaged to the sweet and widely travelled man George Woolley, the son of a minister.

Lucy Lloyd broke off the engagement, but she regretted this all her life, blaming herself for George's early miserable death.

Lucy Lloyd travelled to Cape Town from Durban aboard the Natal mail steamer, the SS Waldensian, in October 1862, for the wedding of her sister.

The ship ran aground on a reef near Cape Agulhas and, although the passengers and crew were rescued, Lucy Lloyd lost most of her possessions and wedding gifts, managing to retrieve only a pair of vases for her sister and a set of Sir Walter Scott's novels that had washed ashore in good condition as they were wrapped in waterproof packaging.

Lucy Lloyd settled with her sister and Wilhelm after their marriage.

Lucy Lloyd started her work with oral histories on the arrival of the first Xam speaker at Mowbray 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.

Fanny and Julia Lucy Lloyd joined the Bleek and Lucy Lloyd household.

Lucy Lloyd 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.

Lucy Lloyd began corresponding with George W Stow in 1875 about his copies of Bushman art, and in 1876 he proposed a book that would eventually be published in an incomplete form as The Native Races of Southern Africa.

Lucy Lloyd played an important role in the founding of the SA Folklore Society, for which she acted as secretary for a while, and in the founding of the Folklore Journal in 1879.

Lucy Lloyd thought Hahn to be a fool and his appointment a disaster.

Lucy Lloyd then engaged the services of the historian George McCall Theal to work with her on the manuscript and edit it.

Lucy Lloyd's letters show her to have been ill at the time.

In 1913 Lucy Lloyd received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Cape of Good Hope in recognition of her contribution to research.

Lucy Lloyd was the first woman to receive this degree in South Africa.

Lucy Lloyd died at Charlton House on 31 August 1914 at the age of 79, and is buried in the Wynberg cemetery in Cape Town near her nieces and nephew and Wilhelm Bleek himself.