The Welsh detective and the Liverpool mystery

What was Mr Lloyd's real role in the mystery he was so proud of solving?

Richard Lloyd’s entry in the 1881 census for 19 Old Quebec Street, Marylebone. This was given as his office address, but was clearly also his home. (TNA/Ancestry)

As I've mentioned before, one of the key skills a private detective had to have in the late 19th century was that of self-publicity. He or she should never be modest about his/her achievements; a lost dog becoming a found dog might be worthy of a small newspaper item, but every private detective worth their salt wanted the found dog to be the recipient of headlines that referred to the amazing, unique skills that a private detective had had to utilise in order to find that dog. Any good headlines could be reused almost endlessly in a detective's own subsequent press adverts - but unfortunately, due to the cost of these ads, some prior successes, boiled down to just a line or a few words, could become somewhat meaningless to the average reader.

Richard Alfred Lloyd, a Welsh-born detective with an office at Marble Arch in the 1880s, believed himself to be well-known and successful enough that his ads could refer to intriguing-sounding former cases without him having to explain himself too much. Lloyd had, like many Victorian and Edwardian private detectives, had a varied career before finding himself in the inquiry trade.

Born in 1850 probably in Llannor, Caernarfonshire,* he claimed to be a vicar's son, but at the age of 21, rather than following his father's career, he had become a militiaman. In 1881, he was living in London and working as a private detective, giving this as his profession both in the census and on his marriage later that year.

However, ten years later, he was a managing director for trade products, and when his son Richard Elyn and daughter Blodwen were baptised in the 1890s, he gave his job as accountant. This may, however, have been a respectable 'front' he gave to others, now he was a respectable father in his 30s, for in 1901, he was saying he was a secret service agent (probably still a private detective, but bigging up his career for the census enumerator) and in 1911, he was a retired accountant.

How long he was actually working as a private detective for is, then, slightly up in the air: he may have been an accountant alongside his detective work, for there was often a crossover between the roles, with many jobs involving tracking down missing money, or investigating fraud. He was certainly operating by 1879, when he would have been a bachelor in his 20s, newly established in London, and there are press adverts for Lloyd's Private Detective Office throughout the early 1880s.

One boast in 1883 that he had established his agency in 1870 - around the time that he was a militiaman, still living in Wales - seems unlikely. Although his office location changed over time, from 19 Old Quebec Street in Marble Arch (also his home in the 1881 census, suggesting a smaller-scale business than he preferred to boast about) to 16 South Molton Street, his boasts remained similar. His was a 'much-favoured' agency; it was the 'most successful agency in Europe' (debatable). But Richard's favourite boast was that he was the detective who 'solved the Liverpool mystery'. Elsewhere, in 1883, he gave the patina of age by stating that Lloyd's Detective Office was 'still conducted by Mr Lloyd, who cleared up the Liverpool Mystery'.

This repeated boast suggests that readers of the Daily Telegraph (his favoured newspaper to advertise in) would remember the Liverpool Mystery, and associated Richard Lloyd with it. It must either be a huge case from years ago, hence wondering whether Lloyd was still working, or a case recent enough for it to have lodged in readers' minds. But tracking down  the Liverpool Mystery made me wonder whether it was really.... all THAT. It seemed more of a common or garden detective case.

The mystery had started some four years earlier, in the autumn of 1879. A Miss Edwards had run away from her home in Liverpool on 13 September, saying she was going to do some shopping. Instead, for the next seven weeks, there was no sign of her, until she eventually emerged in London.

There were all sorts of rumours about what had happened to her in that time, the most common one being that she had fainted in the streets, been drugged before being 'confined and outraged in a disreputable house in Liverpool'.

The truth was, as is normally the case, far more prosaic. On the day she was supposed to be shopping, Miss Edwards had taken the train to Shrewsbury, and then another one to London. A man there, who had previously been a constable in her hometown, recognised her as wandering in the area around Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus on several evenings, and found that she had been staying in an apartment with another young woman.

Richard Lloyd was employed to accost Miss Edwards and confirm her name; he then told her that 'further concealment was out of the question, and] an adjournment to the residence of her London-based uncle was advisable'. Miss Edwards' family was duly able to get her back to the north.

In short, Lloyd did not track down the missing woman, nor did he do much beyond asking her to confirm that she was who others had told him she was. She was simply a young woman with a very narrow life who had wanted to experience a bit of excitement in London, and it was another man who had spotted her doing so in the first place, not the Welsh PI. But Lloyd knew it was a case he could boast about, maximising his involvement in it, and continued to boast about it for at least the next four years.

Richard Alfred Lloyd lived in Sussex and Kent for the last few decades of his life, and died in the latter county in 1932, aged 82. Two different birthplaces are given for him in the censuses: the village of Llannor, but also nearby Abererch.