Major Richard Charles Lowndes (1888 – 1960) was a British Royal Artillery officer and influential British freemason.
Family Richard Charles Lowndes (11 July 1888 – 1960)The Daily Telegraph, 18 July 1960, 'Deaths' was the elder son of The Rev. William Dobson Lowndes, of Christ's College, Cambridge, of Little Comberton Rectory, Pershore, Worcestershire,The Worcester News, 21 March 1941, p.5 and Pershore District Councillor Margaret Moody JP (1863–1943),Berrow's Worcester Journal, 18 December 1943, p.4 who was a daughter of Major-General Richard Clement Moody (who was the founder of British Columbia) and of Mary Susannah Hawks of the Hawks industrialist dynasty.
His maternal uncles included Colonel Richard Stanley Hawks Moody CB (b. 1854); Captain Henry de Clervaux Moody (b. 1864); and Major George Robert Boyd Moody (b. 1868). His maternal great-grandparents were Colonel Thomas Moody, CRE WI, ADC, Kt. and Martha Clement (1784 – 1868).
The Rectorship of Little Comberton, Pershore, Worcestershire, had been held by his paternal line continuously for 113 years. His father had been Rector for 43 years, and his paternal grandfather The Rev. Edward Spencer Lowndes also had been Rector. His paternal grandmother was the daughter of The Rev. William Parker, of Trinity College, Oxford, who also had been Rector. He was related to the judge Sir George Rivers Lowndes.
Siblings Richard Charles Lowndes had one brother who was The Rev. William Parker Lowndes, of St. Pancras Church, Ipswich, also of the Royal Artillery, who died during 1929 after a fall from his horse exacerbated wounds that he had received in World War I. He had two sisters: Mary de Clervaux, who married Alan Edgar Lester, of Birmingham and Harborne, and who drowned in 1950;The Tewkesbury Register and Agricultural Gazette, 16 September 1950, p.3, 'Bathing Tragedy' and Margaret Alice, who was a missionary at Zanzibar with the Universities' Mission to South Africa.
Marriage and issue He married Phyllis Daphne Vernon Cooke (1897 – 1995) in 1920.The Ealing Gazette and West Middlesex Observer, 26 June 1920, p.5 They had at least one son, Andrew Lowndes (1921 - 2003).
He is buried, with his mother and wife and son, at St. Peter's, Little Comberton, Worcestershire.
Vocation He was educated at Malvern College.The Malvern Register, 1865 - 1904, Second Edition, by R. T. C. Cookson, Malvern Advertiser, 1905, p.515
He served in the Royal Artillery,The London Gazette, 12 July 1938 into which he was commissioned in 1909, including in India, and was captured and imprisoned by the Turkish after the Siege of Kut in World War I.
After he had retired from the British Army, he worked as a shipping merchant at Killick Nixon, Bombay, India, before he returned to live at Wardens Close, Boar's Hill, Oxford.
Freemasonry Lowndes was a member of at least six freemasonic lodges. He was a Royal Arch freemason of Ubique Chapter No. 1789, of which he served as First Principal, and a founder of Old Malvernian Lodge No. 4363. He was initiated into Mount Everest Lodge No. 2439 in Darjeeling, India, which is now known as Mount Everest Lebong Lodge No. 52. He was also a member of Felix Lodge No. 355 of the Scottish Constitution, and a member of the Correspondence Circle of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076,Ars Quatuor Coronatorum Vol. 49, Volume XLIX Part I, 1939, p.191 and a Celebrant of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia.
Ancestry
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