Richard Charles Lowndes
Major Richard Charles Lowndes was a British Royal Artillery officer and influential British freemason.
Family
Richard Charles Lowndes was born into an upper middle class family. He was the elder son of The Rev. William Dobson Lowndes, of Christ's College, Cambridge, of Little Comberton Rectory, Pershore, Worcestershire, and Margaret Moody JP, a Pershore District Councillor, 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 family.His maternal uncles included Colonel Richard Stanley Hawks Moody CB ; Captain Henry de Clervaux Moody ; and Major George Robert Boyd Moody. His maternal great-grandparents were Colonel Thomas Moody, CRE WI, ADC, Kt. and Martha Clement.
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.
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; and Margaret Alice, who was a missionary at Zanzibar with the Universities' Mission to South Africa.Private life
He was educated at Malvern College, and lived at Boar's Hill, Oxford.He married Phyllis Daphne Vernon Cooke in 1920.
Military service
Richard Charles Lowndes served in the Royal Artillery, 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 retired from the British Army he worked as a shipping merchant at Killick Nixon, Bombay, India, before he returned to live at Boar's Hill, Oxford.