James Rutherford Lumley Explained

Major-general Sir James Rutherford Lumley KCB (1773–1846) was an English soldier of the Bengal Army in British India.

A son of the Reverend James Lumley and his wife Alice Rutherford, he was baptised on 22 December 1773 at Longford, Shropshire.^[1]

Lumley was commissioned into the Honourable East India Company’s Bengal Infantry and by 1824 was a lieutenant-colonel.^[2] In January 1837 he was promoted to Major-General.^[3] He was adjutant general of the Bengal army which defeated the Mahrattas in 1844 and soon after that was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath for his services.^[4] He died in 1846.^[5]

On 21 November 1809, at Calcutta, Lumley married Caroline Wilkinson.^[1] Their children included Anne Lumley (died 1859), James Rutherford Lumley (1810–1885), William Brownrigg Lumley (born 1812), Caroline Lumley (born 1816), Arabella Lumley (born 1817) and Robert Wilkinson Lumley (born 1819). In 1873, William Brownrigg Lumley was a retired Captain of the Indian Army.^[6]

The actress Joanna Lumley is his direct descendant.

Notes and References

1. https://www.ancestry.co.uk/discoveryui-content/view/98030446:9841 "James Rutherford Lumley"
2. James Silk Buckingham, Oriental Herald and Colonial Review, Vol. 3 (1824), p. 599
3. The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register (1837), p. 139
4. "LUMLEY K.C.B. Creat. 1844 – Sir James Rutherford Lumley" in Robert Phipps Dod, The Peerage, Baronetage, and Knightage of Great Britain and Ireland (1846), p. 253
5. "Sir James R Lumley" in C. E. Buckland, ed., Dictionary of Indian Biography (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1906)
6. "William Brownrigg Lumley, son of James Rutherford Lumley K.B. Major General" in Marriages Solemnized at the Parish Church in the Parish of Kentish Town in the County of Middlesex, No. 178, June 10, 1873, accessed 25 November 2022