Jenico Preston, 14th Viscount Gormanston

Jenico William Joseph Preston, 14th Viscount Gormanston, (1 June 1837 – 29 October 1907), was an aristocratic Anglo-Irish colonial administrator.

Biography Born at Gormanston Castle, County Meath, he was the elder son and heir of Edward Preston, 13th Viscount Gormanston, by his wife Lucretia, daughter of William Charles Jerningham, brother of the 8th Baron Stafford.

He was commissioned into the 60th King's Royal Rifle Corps in 1855, and served as a Lieutenant during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, before retiring from the British Army in 1860.

As the Hon. Jenico Preston he served as High Sheriff of County Dublin (1865), County Meath (1871) before being appointed Chamberlain to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Marquess of Abercorn KG, between 1866 and 1868. He succeeded his father in the viscountcy in 1876, having entered the House of Lords under the subsidiary title of Baron Gormanston, created for his father in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in 1868.

In 1885 Gormanston was appointed Governor of the Leeward Islands, a post he held until 1887, and then served as Governor of British Guiana from 1887 to 1893 and as Governor of Tasmania from 1893 to 1900.

Appointed KCMG in 1887, he was promoted GCMG in 1897.

Lord Gormanston married firstly the Hon. Ismay Louisa Ursula Bellew, daughter of Patrick, 1st Baron Bellew, in 1861; they had no children. After his first wife's death in 1875, he married secondly Georgina Jane Connellan, daughter of Major Peter Connellan, in 1878; they had three sons and one daughter.

Georgina, Lady Gormanston suggested that a maternity hospital would be a fitting way of marking Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. At the time the only assistance to pregnant women came from untrained and unregulated midwives. It was agreed and a committee of women manage the Queen Victoria Maternity Hospital which opened in September 1897.

Lord Gormanston died at Dublin in October 1907, aged 70, and was succeeded in his titles by his eldest son Jenico Edward Joseph Preston, 15th Viscount Gormanston.