Welsh Journals

OBITUARY JOHN DAVIES KNATCHBULL LLOYD 1900-1978 Few members have served the Powysland Club with such devotion and distinction as Dr. J. D. K. Lloyd, who died suddenly at his home, Bron Hafren, Garthmyl, on December 13th 1978. As a regular contributor to the pages of "Mont. Coll. as a tactful and efficient chairman of council, and as a speaker on the Club's excursions to historical sites, he will be most grievously missed. Educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford, he joined the Club in 1923, soon after coming down from Oxford, and was a member for fifty-five years, up to the time of his death. In 1935 he was elected to the council, and in the following year he became Joint Hon. Sec. with T. Simpson Jones. This was a link with the very earliest days of the Club, for Simpson Jones, who was Hon. Sec. for 45 years (1891 to 1936), was a son of Morris Charles Jones one of the founders of the Club. Almost at once, on the death of Simpson Jones, he became the sole Hon. Sec., a post he held for the next thirty years, assisted for a time by D. H. Hoggins. For much of this time the chairman of council was J. B. Willans of Dolforgan, Kerry, but when he died in 1957 no-one was appointed as chairman in his place. The obvious candidate was J. D. K. Lloyd but the Club did not wish to lose his service as Hon. Sec. In 1967 Lloyd resigned the secretaryship and was at once made a Vice-President and chairman of council. His first contribution to "Mont. Coll." was a paper on "The Bailiffs of Montgomery", published in 1936 (Vol. XLIV), and for the next forty years there was rarely an issue without an article from his pen. In all he contributed some fifty papers to our journal, all of them works of authority, meticulously researched and eminently readable; to list them all would be an index in itself. He made no claim to be a pre- historian; he was happiest when writing of the 18th and 19th centuries, and especially when his subject was some aspect of the history of the borough of Montgomery. He was a member of the Borough Council for many years and served as mayor from 1932 to 1938; he sat on the bench as a magistrate, and was a warden of the parish church, and a lay-reader. He was the unquestioned authority on the history of the church and on the castle, and wrote guide books to them both, and to the town itself. He was