A student of Julian Ashton's, Lloyd migrated to London in 1930 where he became a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the London Sketch Club. For a time Lloyd was also the proprietor of an upmarket boarding house whose guests and associates included fellow Australian artists Will Ashton, Alison Rehfisch and George Duncan, pianist Nancy Weir and war correspondent Harold Fyffe, who introduced Lloyd to H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.