Here is the obituary for Garry: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/garry-lloyd-obituary-6960c68gr

Garry Lloyd obituary

Investigative journalist for The Times who broke an award-winning story of widespread corruption at the Metropolitan Police

Friday April 07 2023, The Times

The front page of The Times on Saturday, November 29, 1969 not only featured a photograph of Apollo astronauts walking on the moon. Alongside it was an exclusive report on Scotland Yard detectives who were blackmailing criminals. It claimed that corruption was widespread. One of the two reporters who exposed this scandal was Garry Lloyd.

Lord Justice Edmund Davies spoke of the “great public service rendered by these two reporters” which laid bare a hideous cancer that, if unchecked, could have done even greater damage to law enforcement. The story earned the then editor, William Rees-Mogg, a press award for backing Lloyd and his colleague in a decision to use hidden tape recorders — a first for a newspaper hitherto not known for investigative reporting.

A minor criminal claimed he had not only been blackmailed to pay detectives, one had promised to clear police from the street and suggested a supermarket that could be robbed when they were clear. The tapes proved everything that was alleged. Three detectives were jailed and, as the result of the subsequent investigation by HM Inspector of Constabulary, by 1975 nearly 300 police detectives had been removed.

After the investigation The Times set up a six-strong team of investigatory reporters of which Lloyd was a founder member. His attention to forensic detail was admired by all his colleagues.

He recalled the time he spent covering the Nigerian civil war as the saddest of his career. The Igbo people of Biafra, a secessionist state, fought for three years from 1967 against Nigeria’s powerful federal army. Having seen the extent of the starvation suffered, particularly by children in the besieged “state”, on a second assignment he took with him a shoulder bag crammed with barley sugar because it was sweet and allegedly sustaining. Mindful of the Igbo people’s extraordinary dignity, he obtained their permission to take photographs of the starving children. Charities used the pictures to raise substantial funds for the victims of the war and famines.

Garry Lloyd was born in 1937 and both his parents, Cecil Lloyd, a baritone and Hilda Hanson, a soprano, were opera singers initially with the Royal Carl Rosa Opera and then with the Sadler’s Well company in London. As his parents toured with the opera companies, Garry and his younger brother recalled spending school holidays having to watch the other boys head off, while they remained at school.

As a teenager, Garry saw a film called Front Page Story, which provoked his interest in journalism and led him to become the youngest student on Pitman’s Central London journalism course. Here he became expert at Pitman shorthand, a phonetic system of fast handwriting that uses symbols instead of letters to write words.

He joined the The West Essex Gazette, where his biggest scoop came while taking down verbatim Sir Winston Churchill’s farewell speech to his Woodford parliamentary constituents. In the middle of it, Winston’s son Randolph walked out of the room. From his position at the side of the stage, Lloyd witnessed Sir Winston give his son an angry dressing down and his report of the incident was published the next day.

In 1956 Lloyd was called up for National Service and posted to the First British Corps at Bielefeld in Germany, where he discovered the Corps polo ponies were quartered and delighted in learning to ride.

He later worked as a reporter for the Bournemouth Echo and then the Western Morning News. In 1960 he moved to the Press Association. During his time there he covered the trial of the Great Train Robbers. This required him to take down every word said in shorthand, with he and a colleague alternating with 20-minute stints before filing “live” back to the Press Association.

In 1966, when for the first time The Times put news stories on its front page instead of small advertisements, Lloyd joined the paper as a reporter. While covering a riot in Londonderry he nearly lost an eye after venturing into a Protestant enclave, where a group dragged him over to a parked car and banged his head against the car’s metal rain guttering. He spent a night in hospital having his wound stitched by surgeons who personally apologised to him for what he had suffered.

He was married three times. First to Ann Nottle in 1957, then to Sally Robertson in June 1974. They were divorced after four years. In 1985 he married Sherrie Street, who survives him. He had no children. He left The Times in 1972 to work on BBC local radio and TV until retirement, after which he sang in a barber shop choir.

Gareth Lloyd, journalist, was born on June 27, 1937. He died on March 13, 2023, aged 85