Richard Charles Lowndes

Major Richard Charles Lowndes MC (1888 – 1960) was a British Royal Artillery officer and influential British freemason.

Richard Charles Lowndes (1888–1960)^[1] 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,^[2] and Margaret Moody JP (1863–1943),^[3] a Pershore District Councillor,^[2] 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.^[2]

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.^[2] His father had been Rector for 43 years,^[2] and his paternal grandfather The Rev. Edward Spencer Lowndes also had been Rector.^[2] His paternal grandmother was the daughter of The Rev. William Parker, of Trinity College, Oxford, who also had been Rector.^[2]

Richard Charles Lowndes had one brother who was The Rev. William Parker Lowndes, of St. Pancras Church, Ipswich, also of the Royal Artillery,^[2] who died during 1929 after a fall from his horse exacerbated wounds that he had received in World War I.^[4] He had two sisters: Mary de Clervaux, who married Alan Edgar Lester, of Birmingham and Harborne, and who drowned in 1950;^[5] and Margaret Alice, who was a missionary at Zanzibar with the Universities' Mission to South Africa.^[2]

He was educated at Malvern College,^[6] and lived at Boar's Hill, Oxford.^[7]

He married Phyllis Daphne Vernon Cooke (1897–1995) in 1920.^[8]

Richard Charles Lowndes served in the Royal Artillery,^[9] into which he was commissioned in 1909,^[10] including in India,^[10] and was captured and imprisoned by the Turkish after the Siege of Kut in World War I.^[2]

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.^[2]

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.^[10] He was initiated into Mount Everest Lodge No. 2439 in Darjeeling, India, which is now known as Mount Everest Lebong Lodge No. 52.^[10] He was also a member of Felix Lodge No. 355 of the Scottish Constitution,^[10] and a member of the Correspondence Circle of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076,^[11] and a Celebrant of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia.^[12]