Anthony Loyd
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Anthony William Vivian Loyd was born on 12 September 1966 and is a noted British war correspondent.
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[edit] Early life
Loyd grew up in Churt on the Hampshire/Surrey border and attended Eton College. He later served with the British Army in Northern Ireland and the first Persian Gulf war.
[edit] War correspondent
On leaving the army he became a war photographer and relief correspondent for The Daily Telegraph in Bosnia. Afterwards he was put on retainer by The Times of London and regularly sent to war zones around the world.
Among the wars he reported were the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Iraq. Loyd was noted for the risks he took in pursuing his stories. He was alleged to have taken heroin while in Bosnia.
His most recent bylines (as of 15 September 2005) have been from Baghdad, where he has been out on patrol with both the American and Iraqi forces.
[edit] Author
My War Gone By, I Miss It So , is a noted book based on his experiences in Bosnia and Chechnya. The memoir is a chilling depiction of the depravity of war and adrenalin addiction Loyd experienced covering the violent dissolution of Yugloslavia in the mid-1990s. Kirkus Reviewers described My War Gone By as "a breathtaking, soul shattering book".
Loyd staggers chapters about war in Bosnia (and Chechnya), and boredom tinged with heroin addiction in London.
[edit] Like his famous great-grandfather
Loyd's risk-taking shows similarity to his maternal great-grandfather, Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton De Wiart VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (1880-1963). Unlike Loyd, the great-grandfather was able to keep excitement in his life while not in battle (Second Boer War, World War I, Polish-Soviet War, Polish-Ukrainian War, World War II) with a strenuous life of hunting, fishing, polo, fox hunting and pig sticking.
Though Loyd was born three years after his great-grandfather's death in 1963, the fact that he had a poor relationship with his father may well have made him model his life after De Wiart. This would account for the extreme risks Loyd takes. His great-grandfather was not only a highly decorated British soldier, he was also one of the most wounded (eleven times, which included the loss of an eye and a hand). He was admired by figures as diverse as Winston Churchill, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Marshall Józef Piłsudski. He was also the reputed model for Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour Trilogy.
Both his great-grandfather and great-grandson served in the British Army, but had little patience for peacetime routines, and both married into the landed aristocracy. Loyd refers to Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart as his grandfather in several articles, whereas Carton de Wiart is actually his maternal great-grandfather.
Loyd was born too late to recreate the life of his great-grandfather.
[edit] Marriage and connections
Anthony Loyd married Lady Sophia Hamilton, daughter of the 5th Duke of Abercorn in 2002 at Baronscourt, the Duke's 5,500 acre (22 km²) ancestral estate, near Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.
They were divorced in 2005.
Reports indicate that the divorce was amicable, occasioned by Loyd's frequent absences reporting on wars. There were no children.
[edit] Sources
The marriage and divorce of Anthony Loyd were reported on the Usenet group alt.talk.royalty from British newspaper accounts. The ancestry of Anthony Loyd vis-a-vis Adrian Carton de Wiart was also discussed on that group.
