REGINALD WYNDHAM :1876-1914 : THE POBBLE

REMEMBERING DEAR REGY

LIEUTENANT THE HON. WILLIAM REGINALD WYNDHAM

Regiment: 1st Life Guards

Service No: Officer

Date & place of birth: 16 March 1876, Petworth, Sussex

Date & place of death: 6 November 1914, Belgium

With much thanks to June Clark ( of Swansea) for taking a photograph of Regy's grave, a few years ago, at Zillebeke Cemetery.

 

Always Known as ‘Regy’ or ‘ Reggie’ he fought in the Boer War as well as the First World War.

 

He was born in Petworth House the son of the 2nd Lord and Lady Leconfield. He was the third youngest of seven children. He was in the 17th Lancers and in the Boer War from 1899 to 1902 he was given the Queen’s Medal with three clasps.

 

He left the army after a riding accident in 1903. He farmed in East Africa, then moved to the Rockies, USA where he went hunting and suffered severe frostbite, requiring the amputation of several toes and gaining the nickname of “Pobble”.

 

He eventually returning to England, spending his winters in Grantham where he still hunted with the Belvoir hounds. When war broke out he was gazetted as a Captain in the Lincolnshire Yeomanry and later attached to the Household Cavalry First Life Guards. He was sent to France on 8 October 1914.

 

Regy never married, although he was deemed a possible husband for the Honourable Gwyneth Ericka Morgan, ( 1895-1924),  Lord Tredegar's wayward daughter, they were linked not so much in romance but a family arrangement that would have given Gwyneth a life of dignified obscurity.

 

In his Will Regy left £3000 to the officers of the 17th Lancers for the promotion of sport in the regiment, and his collection of stuffed hunting trophies to the Borough of Grantham. There was a rumoured romantic link between Regy and an American woman Phyllis Langhorne, one of the five daughters of C D Langhorne of Greenwoods, VA. She had married a New York millionaire Reginald Brooke, but also “captured the heart” of Regy Wyndham and also Captain the Hon. George Douglas Pennant. It was claimed that both these men, killed in action left a fortune in their Wills to Phyllis, who later remarried a Captain Robert Brand.  There is a Wyndham Memorial Park in Grantham which was opened in 1924, after Lady Leconfield donated £1000 towards it as a memorial to her son.

“The war is sad….So many nice men gone! “

Letter of Charles Whibley, Scholar and Critic referring to Regy Wyndham.(2018)

“Poor Reggie Wyndham fell by my side shot through the heart.“

George Fisher Baker, a biography. ( 1938)

Bless him.

 

GRAVE OF REGY WYNDHAM IN BELGIUM

AT ZILLEBEKE CEMETERY

 

DEAR  REGY

FOR MORE INFORMATION EMAIL WILL CROSS

williecross@aol.com

BECAUSE OF THE LINK WITH GWYNETH MORGAN REGY FEATURES IN WILL'S BOOK OF THE TREDEGAR WAR DEAD OF THE GREAT WAR