Arthur Lloyd (musician)

His father was Horatio Lloyd, a comic actor based at the Theatre Royal, and his mother, Eliza Horncastle, was a member of the Pyne and Harrison Opera Company.

The family lived at 7 Annandale Street, a large Georgian flat at the top of Leith Walk.

[2] From an early age, the young Arthur expressed a desire for a career on the stage, however his father was initially resistant.

[5] He had enormous popular success with Not For Joseph (1868), a tune that was inspired by a chance meeting with a London bus conductor, who spoke about himself in the third person.

This became the first comic tune to sell more than 100,000 copies[6][5] In the 1860s, Lloyd, along with contemporaries Alfred Peck Stevens and George Leybourne, were instrumental in developing a new style of music hall performer, known as the lion comique or swells.

In this style, performers relied less on copying burlesque, and instead sought inspiration in their everyday experiences and the colourful characters of daily street life.

Unlike other music hall composers, his songs were not entirely dependent on the performer's ability to mimic Cockney accents and mannerisms, but rather the lyrics used a "quaintness of fancy" and humour.

[8] A prolific composer, Lloyd wrote over one thousand songs,[9][6] most of them now forgotten, except for Married to a Mermaid (1866) which is occasionally sung in the UK.

The term most likely originated from an abbreviation of Cockney slang, where a toffee-nosed person was simplified to a toff.