Draft:Lorna Beatrice Lloyd

• Comment: Large portions are unsourced, especially relating to the subject herself, rather than her work.
  Please also merge duplicate sources. Greenman (talk) 09:58, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

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Lorna Beatrice Lloyd
Born	7 January 1914 Filton, Bristol
Died	2 February 1942 Malvern Link, Worcestershire, UK
Cause of death	Heart failure and cancer
Burial place	Malvern Wells Cemetery, Worcestershire, UK
Citizenship	British
Education	Sheffield High School for Girls, Girton College, University of Cambridge
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Known for	Diary of the war
Parents	Albert Edward Lloyd (father) Alice Ethel Lloyd (née Featherstone Witty) (mother)

Lorna Beatrice Lloyd (1914–1942) was a British Second World War diarist, school mistress, amateur artist and writer. She is best known for her posthumous Diary of the war. This was first published in a Blipfoto journal in 2019, and then in a nationally-acclaimed eight episode podcast series in 2022. Her life and work is commemorated in a display at Malvern Museum of Local History.

Early life and family

Lorna Beatrice Lloyd was born in Filton, Bristol on 7th January 1914, the only daughter of Albert (Bertie) and Alice (Topsie) Lloyd (née Featherstone Witty). Over the course of her childhood, Lloyd lived with her parents and elder brother Theodore (born 1912) in Bristol, Stirling, Ilford, and Sheffield. 

Lloyd's parents were from families that benefited socially and economically in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Her maternal grandfather Peter Featherstone Witty began his career as a railway clerk in Yorkshire; he ended it as a banker and stockbroker in Bristol, and a friend of King Peter I of Serbia. Lloyd's paternal grandfather's first job was as an errand boy for his journeyman fishmonger father; by the time of Lloyd's birth, Gabriel Lloyd ran a chain of fishmongers across five locations in Bristol. The Lloyd and Featherstone Witty families of this generation had large families, lived in big houses with servants, had enough leisure time to take holidays, and - at least outwardly - lived as committed Christians. In the 1911 census, Lloyd's father was described as a man of 'private means' and, like married women of her class at the time, Lloyd's mother did not undertake paid work. Lloyd was fortunate to have been born into a family that was relatively wealthy at the start of the twentieth century, and continued to be so throughout her short life.

Lloyd's privileged middle class childhood afforded leisure time and resources to develop various talents. She played the piano; she wrote short stories, plays and poetry; she drew and painted; and she designed costumes for theatrical performances. Lloyd's childhood passions were books, dogs and boats, all of which she enjoyed on family holidays in Looe, Cornwall with her parents and brother, and the Lloyd grandparents, uncles and cousins.

Education and career

Lloyd undertook her secondary schooling first at Ilford Hall High School, then at Sheffield High School in the city where her father was an iron and steel merchant between 1925 and 1935. Academically-gifted, Lloyd left home in 1933 to study at Girton College, Cambridge supported by a prestigious UK. She read for a BA in English in 1936. However, since the University of Cambridge did not award degrees to women in the 1930s, she did not graduate. When at Girton, Lloyd was an active member of the college Dramatic Society as a producer, designer and actor, and a member of the Debating Society. 

Lloyd's first job was part-time English mistress at the County High School, Stourbridge (1936-37), and her second assistant English mistress at the Royal School, Bath (c1937-39). She gave up teaching in 1939 due to ill health.

The writing of the Diary of the war

From the start of the Second World War in September 1939, 25 year old Lloyd was living with her parents who had moved to Malvern, Worcestershire in the English Midlands following the sale of her father's Sheffield business in 1935. Between 1st September 1939 and 4th January 1941 Lloyd composed 106 diary entries offering commentary on the progress of the war. The activities reported in the diary include Lloyd's direct experience of the reception of child, the issue of ration books, and the billeting of armed personnel in civilians' houses. Lloyd also reflects on war time incidents and events reported in the print and broadcast news such as the evacuation of Dunkirk (26th May to 4th June 1940), the Battle of Britain (July to October 1940), the sinking of the City of Benares (17th September 1940) and the bombing of Coventry (14th November 1940).

Illness and death

From her base in Malvern Lloyd was able to attend Gloucester Infirmary for medical treatment from 1939 to 1942. Ultimately this was unsuccessful. Lloyd's condition worsened from mid-1940 onwards and she died at her parents' house in Malvern on 2nd February 1942 a month after her 28th birthday. The cause of death was certified as 'acute cardiac dilatation, paroxysmal tachycardia and intrathoracic neoplasm' i.e. heart failure and cancer.

Diary of the war and its online publication in two formats

In 2019 the Lloyd family donated the Diary of the war to the Malvern Museum of Local History. Immediately prior to this, each page was photographed for posting to a Blipfoto journal where the date of each diary entry would correspond with the same date 80 years earlier. The Blipfoto journal was active between 31st August 1939 and 11th January 2021.

In 2022 a team of staff and students from Edinburgh Napier University's School of Computing produced an eight episode podcast series based on the Diary of the war supplemented by contemporaneous news reports, including original BBC broadcasts. At the same time, bonus episodes of some of Lloyd's poems were made, and a volume of her poetry published. This work was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and supported by the BBC, the British Library, and Malvern Museum of Local History. The podcast series achieved national recognition as a runner-up for the British Records Association's Janette Harley Award in 2022.

Academic research related to the Diary of the war

Following the release of the podcast series of the Diary of the war, Edinburgh Napier University staff conducted research into audience engagement with the two digitised versions of Lloyd's work. Their findings were published in an article volume 58, issue 2 of the British Records Association's Archives journal.

The podcast series was considered by listeners as a flexible form of entertainment that prompts learning and generates emotional responses to the diary content. Online text and images of the same content were found to offer greater affordances for access to contextual information to 'explain' the archive. These also prompt a stronger sense of authenticity because the audience has sight of source material in the images on the Blipfoto platform.

Key to these findings is the additional content used to 'frame' the archive. In the case of the podcast series, this is (mainly) print and broadcast news stories that tie to the diary entries (including BBC sound files); with the text and images are ephemera related to the diarist (e.g. family photos, art work), an emerging storyline of family history, a narrative on the construction of the history, footnotes on the diarist's commentary (e.g. explanations to references, links to further information), and audience comments.

The authors conclude that these findings draw attention to the role of editorial and curatorial effort in promoting audience engagement with digitised archive collections. In particular they raise questions over the extent to which an archive should be augmented with additional content or left to 'speak for itself' - without diminishing the authenticity of the source material nor the entertainment value offered by digitised formats.