Gerald Ponsonby Lenox-Conyngham, 1866-1956

Gerald Ponsonby Lenox-Conyngham was born on 21 August 1866 at Springhill, Moneymore in County Londonderry, Ireland. He was the seventh of the ten children of Sir William Fitzwilliam Lenox-Conyngham, K.C.B., D.L., J.P. His father’s family, the Conyngham’s, had come to Ireland, probably from Ayrshire, early in the seventeenth century. His great- great-grandmother inherited the family house and married Clotworthy Lenox who added his wife’s family name to his own. His mother, Laura Calvert Arbuthnot, was the daughter of George Arbuthnot of Ockley in Surrey who spent many years in India and founded the once flourishing firm of Arbuthnot & Co. of Madras. An account of this family has been given by Mrs P. S.-M. Arbuthnot in a book entitledMemoirs of the Arbuthnots of Kincardinshire and Aberdeenshire . When the children reached school age the family moved to Edinburgh in order that the boys might attend the excellent schools available there. Lenox-Conyngham was educated at the Edinburgh Academy from the age of nine till he was sixteen. While there he decided to try to join the Royal Engineers and, after a year of private coaching, took the Woolwich entrance examination soon after his seventeenth birthday. He passed first and in later life ascribed this success to the care with which his aunt, Miss Eleanor Arbuthnot had selected his teachers.