Gavin Lloyd
Profile
Despite his Welsh surname, Gavin Lloyd is of Anglo-Irish stock on his father’s side (with an ancestry that can be traced back to the Jacobean plantation of County Roscommon in the 1620s) and of Cornish–Australian mining stock on his mother’s. Gavin was born in 1942 at East Horsley, Surrey. He claims to be ‘a creature of outer suburbia’; but that phrase does not convey the breadth of his sympathies or the unexpectedness of his opinions.
Gavin’s route to Unitarianism was very circuitous. He describes his father as ‘a saintly man of great integrity, a true Christian who rarely attended church’. As a child, Gavin accompanied his mother (who had a mixed Anglican and Methodist background) on her intermittent forays to church. From an eccentric and conservative Anglo-Catholic prep school in Surrey, Gavin was educated next in Edinburgh, where he came into contact with the democratic traditions of the Church of Scotland; although the chronically diffident boy found his secondary school inhibiting and oppressive, the ecumenical worship of the school chapel was an inspiration to him.
At the age of 18, with idealistic notions of justice and fair play, which seemed so absent from the institution in which he had been incarcerated, he went up to read Law at Trinity College, Dublin, where he spent four very happy years. Trinity was then a small university, with a wide variety of students of different nationalities and ages, and here he made lasting friendships. He did the rounds of several places of worship in Dublin (although he never attended the Unitarian church in Stephens Green), but was happy enough with the Church of Ireland services in the College Chapel. It was a great wrench to leave Dublin and move to London to be articled to a solicitor.
Qualifying in 1965, Gavin spent three years commuting to work in a city firm, while serving as a church-warden of a small parish church; but as a ‘liberal and low’ Christian, he never felt entirely comfortable with traditional Anglicanism, with its formal liturgy and discreet censoring of dissent. When visiting his mother in Guildford, he used to attend a flourishing United Reformed Church, and says that he might easily have gone off in that direction. In 1968, however, after moving to work in a solicitors’ office in Bicester, he happened to take piano lessons with David Butler, whose brother Graham had seen a small advertisement in a newspaper about worship at Manchester College (as it then was). Graham took Gavin to one of the services in 1972. It was in the days of Dr Harry Short and the Revd. Dudley Richards, and Gavin was immediately impressed. From about 1976, MCO Chapel became his principal place of worship.
Since then, he has rejoiced in his membership of a church which does not claim a monopoly on truth, nor impose conformity, but does aspire to follow the essential teaching of Jesus. His one great regret about Unitarianism is its general lack of interest in ecumenism. He believes that we have made ourselves unnecessarily isolated and invisible by our reluctance to engage in dialogue with other churches (although he would probably concede that the reluctance is mutual). Gavin has retained his links with local Bicester churches by his membership of the Shellswell Choir, which sings at Evensong in nine village churches in rotation. His fine bass voice is a great asset to our own congregation: the hymns are always sung more lustily when Gavin is present.
Now semi-retired from the legal profession, Gavin finds time to play squash and cricket; he is a paid-up member of the Labour Party, which he joined in 1970, but is less active in politics than formerly: he now devotes more time to Unitarian affairs. After eight years of service on the MCO Chapel Society Committee, three of them in the office of Treasurer, he has recently been elected to the position of Vice-President of the Midland Union of the Unitarian General Assembly; he represents Oxford on the MU executive committee, and represents the MU on the GA Council; and he is part of the way through a correspondence course in lay preaching. He is already conducting occasional services in Coventry, Cheltenham, and Evesham, where the chapels have no minister of their own. Although still rather nervous (‘I am not a natural speaker’), Gavin derives great pleasure from leading worship and preaching sermons (‘but 12 minutes is my limit’). He would modestly demur from the statement (but it is nevertheless true) that he has become indispensable to the religious community that he found by accident 30 years ago. Catherine Robinson July 2003