The Times/1940/Obituary/Frederic Sawrey Archibald Lowndes

MR. F. S. A. LOWNDES

VALUABLE SERVICE ON "THE TIMES"

Mr. F. S. A. Lowndes, who retired from the editorial staff of The Times on March 1, 1938, after long and valuable service died yesterday in the house of his youngest daughter, Senhora Susan Lowndes Marques, at Wimbledon. He had had a short illness, and was believed to be on the way to recover.

Frederic Sawrey Archibald Lowndes was born in January, 1868, his father being the Rev. Charles Clayton Lowndes, vicar of St. Mary's, Windermere. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he was a Ford student, and took honours in Classical Moderations and in Literae Humaniores. At Trinity he made good friends, and he always kept up his connexion with the college.

Lowndes entered the service of The Times in 1893, filling a vacancy on the sub-editorial staff which had been caused by the premature death of an elder brother, Charles Arthur Lowndes. He had had a good experience al-round journalism with the Manchester Evening Times, the Worcester Echo, and the Sheffield Independent, and he brought to his work great powers of application and an instinct, which never failed him, for sifting rapidly and decisively the good from the bad in the multifarious matter which came before him. He had already developed a taste for biography, and he published a work of reference, now necessarily forgotten and out of date, on the holders of episcopal office at home and abroad. As time went on his solid services to the paper became more and more indispensable: he was, in fact, for many years a steady, permanent, though invisible pillar in the daily structure of The Times.

During the War of 1914-18 Lowndes was seconded for a period for special work under the Government; but he returned to Printing House Square in March, 1918, and soon afterwards until his retirement it was his special function to supervise the obituary notices in The Times. For this duty he had, as has already been indicated, a natural inclination; but by now it was greatly strengthened by his own wide social knowledge, his extraordinary memory for genealogy and family history, and the shrewdness which enabled him to form his accurate personal estimate of many of the subjects of the biographies henceforward to be published. This function of his brought him into pleasant relations with the editors of recent Supplements to the Dictionary of National Biography, who would often consult him on points of detail.

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Outside The Times Lowndes, who had a sound masculine style, wrote little; but he produced at different times two short plays which acted in London, though with less success than his friends had hoped and he could have wished. One of his hobbies was Victorian fiction, for which he had a special liking, Trollope being perhaps his favourite author. When he left The Times after some 45 years of continuous service, his powers showed no signs of weakening, except for is increasing deafness; he was still keen on his occasional game of gulf; and his cheerful, sociable nature remained unchilled.

He married on January 9, 1986, who, with three children—a son and two daughters—survives him. Of his happy family life that is not place to speak except to say that in Mrs. Belloc Lowndes's career as a novelist and writer he took much pride and interest. The elder of their two daughters became the wife of Lord Iddesleigh in 1930 and has four children.

Our photograph reproduces Sir William Rothenstein's portrait made in 1934.