Matthew Ponsonby, 2nd Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede

Matthew Henry Herbert Ponsonby, 2nd Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede (26 July 190429 April 1976) was a British peer.

Life Ponsonby was the son of Arthur Ponsonby, by his marriage to Dorothea Parry. He was educated at Leighton Park School and Balliol College, Oxford.

Ponsonby had some difficulty with the Responsions to get into Oxford and had to be tutored for them, not arriving at Balliol until 1923, when he was nineteen. At the University, he became a friend of Evelyn Waugh, with whom in 1925 he was arrested by the police, while the two of them were on a pub crawl and Ponsonby was driving the wrong way along Oxford Street while drunk. Ponsonby later lost his driving licence and was fined £23 9s, then a large sum. Another university friend, Anthony Powell, recalled of Ponsonby's sister Elizabeth that she was "something of a gossip-column heroine of what came later to be looked on as the Vile Bodies world." Unlike his sister, he remained fond of their parents' country house, Shulbrede Priory, and enthusiastically took part in the archaeological digs there conducted by his father and Charles Strachey.

Ponsonby married Elizabeth Mary Bigham (1905-1985), a daughter of Clive Bigham, 2nd Viscount Mersey, and they had five children: Thomas Arthur Ponsonby, later 3rd Baron (1930–1990); William Nicholas Ponsonby (1933–1942); Laura Mary Ponsonby (1935–2016); Rose Magdalen Ponsonby (born 1940) and Catherine Virginia Ponsonby (born 1944).