David Lloyd (riflemaker and sportsman)

David Llewellyn Lloyd (1910-1996) was an English deer-stalker, metallurgist, ballistician and sporting rifle maker, of Northamptonshire, England and Glencassley in Sutherland, Scotland. After service in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, extensive deer stalking, and frequent rifle shooting visits to Bisley ranges, Lloyd established the David Lloyd & Co. riflemakers company (registered company 05202134) at Pipewell Hall in 1936, and in the early 1950s developed the .244 H&H Magnum rifle cartridge, later adopted by Holland and Holland of London.

Lloyd developed the distinctive Lloyd rifle concept, and from the 1960s to the mid-1990s he built high-quality, magazine-fed sporting rifles with distinctively integral scope sights, capable of dependably high accuracy at long ranges, and of handling modern high-intensity, flat shooting cartridges such as the .244 H&H, the .264 Winchester Magnum and the .25-06 Remington.

The UK shooting sports weekly Shooting Times voted the Lloyd rifle number 8 in its list of the top 12 Rifles of All Time (the Kalashnikov AK-47 was number 7), and Country Life magazine described Lloyd himself as “a National Living Treasure”. Lloyd rifles are admired, owned and used by eminent international small-arms experts, including riflemakers Bill Ruger and Roy Weatherby, and by several owners of Scottish deer forests. In an active deer-stalking career extending to well over 60 years, David Lloyd accounted for more than 5,000 Scottish highland red deer stags, the vast majority of them with rifles he had built himself.

Lloyd's wife Evadne (“Bobby” - the longest-serving governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company in its history) keenly supported him in his business, and helped him to source fine walnut blanks for his rifle stocks from various European sources. On Lloyd's death in 1996 she took on the business, which by then was doing little trading, and ran it until her own death in 2003, when the company was sold to John Shirley, formerly Technical Manager with James Purdey and Sons of London. He subsequently offered the business name, goodwill and records of the David Lloyd company for sale at auction in London in December, 2006.