Lucy Lloyd

Lucy Catherine Lloyd (7 November 1834 – 31 August 1914) was the creator, along with Wilhelm Bleek, of the 19th-century archive of ǀXam and !Kung texts.

Her father, William H.C. Lloyd, Archdeacon of Durban, was the rector of Norbury and vicar of Ranton, two villages in western England in Staffordshire.

After her mother's death, Lucy and her sisters lived with their maternal uncle and his wife, Sir John and Caroline Dundas, from whom they received a private and apparently liberal education.

Lucy 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 lost most of her possessions and wedding gifts, managing to retrieve only a pair of vases for her sister (which she carried on her lap in the lifeboat) and a set of Sir Walter Scott's novels that had washed ashore in good condition as they were wrapped in waterproof packaging.

While Lucy would undoubtedly have done this anyway, his request must surely have bestowed on her work the credibility that, in those days, was usually reserved for male scholars and researchers.

Lucy 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.

She 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 (with Lucy's support) in an incomplete form as The Native Races of Southern Africa.

Lucy's services at the South African Library were terminated in 1880 when Dr Johannes Theophilus Hahn was appointed, after a long and painful saga, in her place.

As a result of these financial constraints, Jemima Bleek moved her family to Germany in 1884 to stay with relatives and receive schooling there, and it appears that the other Lloyd sisters joined them.

Lucy Lloyd is believed to have gone to Europe in 1887 – around this time she trained her niece Dorothea in Bushman research – and she moved between Germany, Switzerland, England and Wales, with occasional trips to the Cape around 1905 and 1907.

Lucy Lloyd submitted a third report to the Cape Government concerning 'Bushman Researches', dated London 8 May 1889, in which she added 4,534 half-pages or columns to the collection.

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.

Lucy Lloyd (ca 1862)
The Hill in Mowbray in the early 1870s when the Bleeks lived there and where many of the ǀXam prisoners' interviews occurred
Lucy Lloyd notebooks: Story: Lion and giraffe; Contributors ǁKabbo (Jantje)
Lucy Lloyd's grave, Wynberg Cemetery, Cape Town