By the age of fifteen his mother had died and his father, an ex-soldier, was a semi-invalid, and Lloyd was sent as an assisted migrant to Australia in a scheme organised by the Royal British Legion.

When Lloyd returned to the UK in 1935, during the Great Depression,[1] in the absence of a permanent job he pursued his interests in studying folk music and social and economic history, doing much of his research at the British Museum; he is quoted as saying that there is "nothing like unemployment for educating oneself".

[5] During this decade, Lloyd joined the Communist Party of Great Britain[6] and was strongly influenced by the writings of the Marxist historian, A. L. Morton, particularly his 1938 book A People's History of England.

[1] As a proponent of communism, he was staunchly opposed to Adolf Hitler, and, in 1939, was commissioned by the BBC to produce a series of programmes on the rise of Nazism.

[8] Harper went to note that, at a time when the English folk revival was dominated by young people who wore jeans and pullovers, Lloyd was rarely seen in anything other than a suit (and a wide grin).

The 1956 film Moby Dick, directed by John Huston, featured Lloyd singing a sea shanty as the Pequod first sets sail.

Mark Gregory interviewed him in 1970 for the National Library of Australia,[12] and Michael Grosvenor Myer for Folk Review magazine in September 1974.