Selwyn-Lloyd, John Selwyn Brooke, Baron, CBE, CH
1904-1978

Speaker of the House of Commons, born on 28 July 1904 of Welsh stock at West Kirby, Wirral. (His great-grandfather, a Welsh-speaking WM minister, had spent forty years in Welsh circuits.) He was the first to be baptized at Westbourne Road WM church, where his father, a doctor and dentist, was a prominent member. Selwyn himself was later to be a trustee of the church for almost fifty years. In 1918 he won a scholarship to Fettes College, Edinburgh and went from there to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read classics, history and law and became President of the Union in 1927. He was called to the bar in 1930. His war service included landing in Normandy on D-Day and being among the first to enter Belsen. He received an OBE in 1943 and a CBE in 1945.

Elected as Consrvative MP for the Wirral in 1945, he represented the constituency until entering the House of Lords in 1976. His cabinet posts included that of Foreign Sercretary 1955-1960 (which included the Suez crisis) and Chancellor of the Exchequer 1960-1962 and he was Speaker of the House from 1971 to 1976. He was made Companion of Honour in 1962, received honorary degrees from Cambridge, Liverpool, Oxford and Sheffield, and became deputy high steward of Cambridge University in 1971. He was elevated to the House of Lords in 1976 as Baron Selwyn-Lloyd of the Wirral. He gave much support to the work of the MMS and the Ministerial Training Fund, and as a Vice-President of the Friends of Wesley' Chapel played a leading role in the campaign to restore the Chapel in the 1970s. He died at Preston Crowmarsh, Oxon, on 17 May 1978.

Sources
  • Selwyn Lloyd, Mr. Speaker, Sir (1976)
  • Times, 18 May 1978
  • Methodist Recorder, 25 May 1978
  • D.R. Thorpe, Selwyn-Lloyd (1989)
  • Oxford DNB