George Ambrose Lloyd, 1st Baron Lloyd, GCSI, GCIE, DSO, PC (19 September 1879 – 4 February 1941) was a British Conservative politician and colonial administrator who was strongly associated with the "Diehard" wing of the party. From 1937 to 1941, he was chairman of the British Council in which capacity he sought to ensure support for Britain's position during the Second World War.
Early life
Lloyd was born at Olton Hall, Warwickshire, the son of Sampson Samuel Lloyd (whose namesake father was also a Member of Parliament) and Jane Emilia, daughter of Thomas Lloyd. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He coxed the Cambridge crew in the 1899 and 1900 Boat Races. He left without taking a degree, wad unsettled by the deaths of both his parents in 1899 and made a tour of India.
In 1901, Lloyd joined the family firm Stewarts & Lloyds as its youngest director. In 1903, he first became involved with the tariff reform movement of Joseph Chamberlain. In 1904, he fell in love with Lady Constance Knox, daughter of the 5th Earl of Ranfurly, who forbade the match with his daughter considering him unsuitable (she then married Evelyn Milnes Gaskell, son of the Right Honourable Charles Gaskell, in November 1905). In 1905, he turned down an offer by Stewarts & Lloyds of a steady position in London and chose to embark on a study of the East in the British Empire.
Foreign Office
Through the efforts of his friends Samuel Pepys Cockerell, working in the commercial department of the Foreign Office, and Gertrude Bell, whom he had come to know, he started work as an unpaid honorary attaché in Constantinople. At "Old Stamboul", as he came to remember the Embassy of Sir Nicholas O'Conor, he worked together with Laurence Oliphant, Percy Loraine and Alexander Cadogan. There also, he first met Mark Sykes and Aubrey Herbert. In April 1906, Herbert joined him on an exploration of the state of the Baghdad Railway. His confidential memorandum of November 1906 on the Hejaz Railway gave a detailed account of many economic problems. That and other papers on Ottoman finance, for example, led to his appointment in January 1907 as a special commissioner to investigate trading prospects around the Persian Gulf.
Parliamentary candidate
Lloyd had been strongly influenced by Joseph Chamberlain's call for tariff reform to link Britain and the dominions closer together, and the tariff issue now inspired Lloyd to enter politics. At the January 1910 general election, Lloyd was elected as a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) for West Staffordshire. He married Blanche Lascelles the following year. In February 1914, Lloyd was adopted as Unionist Parliamentary candidate for Shrewsbury ahead of the next general election (expected no later than the end of 1915) when the sitting MP, the unrelated namesake George Butler Lloyd, intended to retire. Lloyd was completely opposed to women's suffrage and wrote that to give women the right to vote would ensure that they would vote "for the beaux yeux of the candidates".
The general election and his candidacy were both forestalled by the outbreak of the First World War, and the sitting member continued to hold his seat until 1922. He and another backbench colleague in Parliament, Leopold Amery, lobbied the Conservative leadership to press for an immediate declaration of war against Germany on 1 August 1914.
In conjunction with Edward Wood (later Earl of Halifax), Lloyd wrote The Great Opportunity in 1918. The book was meant to be a Conservative challenge to the Lloyd George coalition and stressed for devolution of power from Westminster and the importance of reviving English industry and agriculture.
First World War
As a lieutenant in the Warwickshire Yeomanry, Lloyd was called up three days after Britain had entered the war.
During the war, he served on the staff of Sir Ian Hamilton at Gallipoli and landed with the ANZACs on the first day of that campaign; took part in a special British mission to Petrograd to improve Anglo-Russian liaison; visited Basra to update his study of commerce in the Persian Gulf; and, after a time in Cairo, with T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Bureau in Hejaz, the Negev and the Sinai Desert. He reached the rank of captain in the Warwickshire Yeomanry in which regiment he continued to hold rank until 1925, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and made Companion of the Indian Empire in 1917. For services in the war, he also received the Russian Empire's Order of St Anne, 3rd Class, and the Order of Al Nahda (2nd class) of the Kingdom of Hejaz.