Fitzgerald Wintour

Major-General Fitzgerald Wintour (30 December 1860 – 18 June 1949) was a British Army officer who served in the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment and the Royal Norfolk Regiment. Wintour was commissioned in the British Army in 1880 and fought in the Anglo-Egyptian War, the Mahdist War, the Tochi Expedition, the Second Boer War, and in World War I. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his military service. Wintour was the father of newspaper editor Charles Wintour and of Cordelia James, Baroness James of Rusholme and the grandfather of Dame Anna Wintour and Patrick Wintour.

Early life and family Fitzgerald Wintour was born in 1860 to Rev. Fitzgerald Wintour and Isabel Milnes Gaskell. He was the grandson of Mary Wynn Williams-Wynn, the daughter of Charles Williams-Wynn, and Conservative politician James Milnes Gaskell of Thornes House, Wakefield, Yorkshire, and of Wenlock Abbey, Much Wenlock, Shropshire. His maternal great-grandfather was Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 4th Baronet and his great-great grandfather was British prime minister George Grenville. Wintour was the nephew of Liberal politician Charles Milnes Gaskell.

Military career The Staff College, Camberley, class in 1890. Sat in the front row, third from the left, is Fitzgerald Wintour.

After passing out from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, Wintour was commissioned in the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment on 11 August 1880. He was adjutant of the 1st Battalion of the Royal West Kents from 1884 to 1889. In 1890, he entered the British Army Staff College. In 1897, Wintour was sent to the North Western Frontier Province as part of the Tochi Expedition. and a brevet colonel in October 1905. He was made a colonel in 1908.

In October 1912 he succeeded Major General John Hanbury-Williams as brigadier general in charge of administration and was promoted to the temporary rank of brigadier general while employed in this role.

During World War I, Wintour commanded a brigade, the Administration Scottish Command, in France from 1914 to 1915. He was relieved of his command on 23 February 1915 after the brigade lost a hundred yards of trench during a raid by the Imperial German Army. and returned to the Western Front on 30 June 1915, serving as deputy assistant and quartermaster general of the Second Army, holding this post until 9 November. but in January 1917 he received a temporary appointment as an assistant quartermaster general.

He was placed on retired pay and retired from the army in March 1918 with the honorary rank of major general.

Photocopies of memoirs from Wintour's time in service, including an account of the Tochi Valley expedition in 1897 and a complaint relating to conditions in the trenches on the Western Front of World War I from 1915, are housed in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London. The documents were donated by his family in 1990.

Wintour and Foster had two children, Cordelia Mary Wintour (later Baroness James of Rusholme) and Charles Vere Wintour CBE. He is the grandfather of Dame Anna Wintour and Patrick Wintour.