Folk-Lore/Volume 26/Obituary/Lucy Catherine Lloyd
OBITUARY.
In Memoriam—Lucy Catherine Lloyd.
1834-1914.
Miss L. C. Lloyd was born at Norbury, Staffordshire, of which parish her father, the Rev. W. H. Cymric Lloyd, was rector. She was barely fifteen when the family removed to the then infant colony of Natal, where Mr. Lloyd was appointed Archdeacon. When afterwards her younger sister married Dr. W. H. I. Bleek, the noted South African philologist, Miss Lloyd became a member of their household at Mowbray, Cape Colony, and assisted her brother-in-law in his researches into the Bushman language, which was till then unwritten and practically unknown. Dr. Bleek housed a number of Bushmen successively on his premises and wrote down the narratives they related. When he died in 1875 Miss Lloyd continued her studies alone, and in 1889 she published a Report or Calendar of the material collected. But it was not till 1911 that she succeeded in publishing a selection of Bushman Folklore, (cf. Folk-Lore, xxiii. 278), in which the narratives appear in Bushman and in English on opposite pages. She made a point of this, for though well-read in folklore, and fully aware of its scientific value, her own chief interest was in the language itself, which had been the original object of her fellow-worker. The University of Capetown subsequently granted her the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, a public recognition of her labours which gave her great pleasure. In 1887 she had returned to Europe, where she resided for some time in North Wales, afterwards removing to Berlin; but in 1912 she and her surviving sister undertook the journey back to Cape Colony, where her death occurred at Mowbray on the 31st August, 1914. The same mail that brought the news to England brought also a kindly-appreciative letter from herself, acknowledging the receipt of a copy of the Handbook of Folk-Lore.
To the quiet dignity of an old-fashioned English gentlewoman she added the painstaking accuracy of the truly scientific student. "To all faithful workers" she dedicated her book. Her knowledge of Bushman lore was unique. It is pleasant to know that before the end came she had been able to impart much of it to Dr. Bleek's only surviving unmarried daughter, Miss Doris Bleek, who inherits the precious manuscripts and follows up the researches of her father and aunt.