Eric Lloyd Williams

He and his wife, Peggy, who died in 2001, were married for 46 years. They had three sons.

In his obituary in 1988, the Herald newspaper in Port Elizabeth described him as "South Africa's most distinguished war correspondent of the Second World War".

In 1957, Lloyd Williams joined the Anglo American Corporation as public relations consultant, working initially in Johannesburg. The corporation posted him to Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia in 1961, Lusaka, Zambia in 1964 and finally London in 1966. He retired in 1975 and settled in Romsey, Hampshire, where he died in February 1988 after a long illness.

In the 1950s, he and fellow journalist John Sutherland produced Africa X-Ray Report, a monthly newsletter that reported on political and other trends in Africa, including the growing tide of African nationalism. The newsletter was described as being "decades ahead of its time".

After the war, Lloyd Williams opened a North American bureau for Sapa in Washington DC, where he worked from 1946 to 1949. In 1949 he became a public relations officer for the South African Chamber of Mines.

In 1944 the Argus newspaper in Cape Town called Lloyd Williams "the outstanding South African war correspondent of this war".

In a national broadcast on South African radio in February 1944, Lloyd Williams described some of the war correspondents he worked alongside in North Africa and Italy.

In 1943, Lloyd Williams entered the Libyan capital, Tripoli, a key Axis base, on 23 January, the day the Eighth Army captured it from the Germans. In May 1943, he entered Tunis six hours after it fell to the Allies, with the surrender of all German and Italian forces in North Africa. Four months later he was with the Eighth Army when it invaded the South of Italy from Sicily.

Lloyd Williams won the South African Society of Journalists trophy for the best news story of 1943 for a report on a dash through no man's land that he and two other correspondents made in Italy in September that year. In his war journal he identifies one of the other correspondents as Daniel De Luce of Associated Press but does not name the third.

Lloyd Williams reported on the North African campaign of the British Eighth Army, which included troops from India, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, among others. He covered El Alamein, the pivotal battle in 1942 that turned the tide in favour of the Allies in North Africa.

He earned the nickname Benghazi while reporting from North Africa. The Libyan port of Benghazi, a vital supply town, changed hands several times during the course of the fighting in 1941–42.

Eric Lloyd Williams (1915–1988) was a South African-born journalist and war correspondent who covered World War II for the South African Press Association and Reuters.

Of Welsh descent, Lloyd Williams was born in Cape Town on 30 August 1915. He was educated at South African College Schools (SACS) in Cape Town, Grey High School in Port Elizabeth and the University of Cape Town. He began his career in journalism in 1938 when he joined the Argus in Cape Town. A year later he joined the Western Mail in Cardiff, Wales. He also had a stint on the Rhodesia Herald in Salisbury before joining the South African Press Association (Sapa) as a parliamentary reporter.