W. Lloyd Phillips

Lloyd Phillips took up gymnastics in South-east Wales but, by 1900, was training at the German Gymnasium in London. He was included in the British delegation to the Paris Olympics, where he finished fourth of the five British competitors and seventy third overall. He became club champion of the German Gymnasium and was acknowledged as one of the “best bar workers in Britain” when he was chosen for the English team for the four team competition in 1903 between England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. However he refused selection and opted instead to compete for his birth country of Wales.

Phillips married and settled down in the town of Bournemouth where he became a part proprietor of a school teaching physical culture, fencing, gymnastics, and skating. In 1911 the marriage seems to have failed spectacularly and Lloyd eloped with his American mistress, Clara Hyams, to New South Wales. Hyams had lived in England since her father had been cleared of the brutal murder of an employee in Toronto some years earlier.

He found success in Australia as the Physical Education director of the Brisbane YMCA before being lured to New Zealand where he performed various roles for Otago’s YMCA system. Phillips was called up to the New Zealand Army in 1918 but the war ended whilst he was still in training and he returned to his old job having negotiated a pay rise. In 1920 Phillips made another change in location as he and Clara moved to work for the YMCA near her birthplace of Rutherford, New Jersey. He later worked for many years as a physical instructor for the Bedford branch of the YMCA in Brooklyn.