Australian Dictionary of Biography

Patrick David Lloyd (1926-1988), crime reporter, was born on 16 August 1926 at Maryborough, Queensland, son of Thomas Joseph Lloyd, police constable, and his wife Rhoda May, née Carroll, both Queensland born.  Completing the Junior public examination at Marist Brothers’ College, Tambourine (Eagle Heights) in 1942, on 15 February 1943 Pat followed his father into the Queensland Department of Police.  In May he joined the traffic branch.  At Roma Street Cadet School, Brisbane, he studied shorthand and typing, skills that would later serve him well in his journalistic career.  Sworn in as a constable in September 1945, he was assigned to Roma Street police station.  In August 1949 he and another officer received a favourable record for outstanding work in arresting a man for several breaking and entering offences.  He resigned in April 1950, when he was informed that he was to transfer to Thursday Island.

Embarking on a career in journalism, Lloyd worked on Brisbane’s Courier-Mail for five years.  On 2 April 1951 at St Stephen’s Cathedral he married with Catholic rites Joan Marjory Francis, a bank clerk-typist.  In 1955 he and other Brisbane journalists formed the Downs Star, an afternoon newspaper published in Toowoomba.  When the Star was taken over in 1959, he returned to Brisbane and joined the Telegraph, quickly becoming the paper’s chief crime reporter.  Holding the post for twenty years, he covered the State’s most notorious crimes and worst natural disasters.

With his extensive police contacts, Lloyd was able to ferret out information denied to other reporters.  One colleague remembered him as the quintessential newspaperman, a larger than life figure who smoked a pipe constantly while pounding away at his typewriter.  Possessing a fine sense of the dramatic, he liked to string the editors along, waiting until the last second to finish the story by deadline and then calling loudly for the copy boy to collect his story.  He could also 'pull a story out of a hat' when the editors were desperate for fresh items in a paper that published several editions a day.  In 1969 he received a Walkley award honourable mention for a story about an individual who was 'catapulted into life by pure accident, through the toilet pedestal of a speeding train on the Gayndah line in 1940'.

From 1980 Lloyd was the Telegraph’s film critic and golf writer.  A passionate golfer, he was a long-time member of the Nudgee Golf Club and a regular sight on its greens.  When the Telegraph closed down in February 1988 he took early retirement, but the following August decided to work part time with the Sunday Mail.  He was on a special assignment for the paper when he suffered a heart attack in his Clayfield home.  Survived by his wife and their daughter, he died on 12 September 1988 in Royal Brisbane Hospital and was buried in Nudgee cemetery.