Richard Pope-Hennessy

Major-General Ladislaus Herbert Richard Pope-Hennessy (18 August 1875 – 1 March 1942) was a British Army officer of Irish Catholic descent who served in both the Second Boer War and First World War. In 1905, he led a punitive expedition which resulted in the killings of 1,850 men, women and children of the Kipsigis tribe.

Background

Pope-Hennessy was the eldest son of Sir John Pope-Hennessy MP, of Rostellan Castle, County Cork and Catherine Elizabeth Low. He was educated at Beaumont College.

Military career Pope-Hennessy was commissioned into the Oxfordshire Light Infantry in 1895.

Following the success of the expedition, Pope-Hennessy, promoted to major in March 1906, was made commandant of the 4th Battalion, King's African Rifles in 1906 for which service was appointed a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order in 1908.

After the war he was promoted to brevet colonel in January 1919 and, promoted again, now to colonel (with seniority backdated to January 1919 ), he served as a staff officer at the War Office and then was Military Inter-Allied Commissioner of Control in Berlin. Subsequently, he spent three years as military attaché in Washington D.C. He was promoted to substantive major general in August 1930 and became general officer commanding (GOC) of the 50th (Northumbrian) Division, a Territorial Army (TA) formation, on 20 February 1931, taking over from Major General Henry Newcome. He vacated command of the division on 20 February 1935 before retiring from the army on the same day.

Pope-Hennessy published a number of books an articles on military matters and in one of them he predicted the technique of the German Blitzkrieg. Electorate 56,106

Personal life He married, in 1910, Una Birch a writer, historian and biographer. They had two sons,