Lieutenant John Lyttleton POWYS (1870–1897)
John Littleton Powys (whose middle name is sometimes spelt Lyttleton) was born in Malta on 17 June 1870. He was the only son of Colonel Henry Littleton Powys of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry and Helena Cecilia Graves, who were married in Kenmare, Kerry, Ireland on 7 August 1869. He had one sister, Norah Powys, born in 1872.
At the time of the 1881 census John (10) was staying at Bewsey House, Holdenhurst, Hampshire with his 75-year-old paternal grandmother Percy Gore Powys (widow of Horace Powys) and his unmarried aunts Percy Maria Powys (35) and Laura Harriet Powys (31).
John went to school at Marlborough College, and in September 1888 he entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst as a Gentleman Cadet, passing out third on the list in July 1889.
On 21 September 1889 Powys was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Oxfordshire Light Infantry, and joined the 2nd Battalion in Burma in December 1889. He served there with the Wuntho Field Force from 23 February to 9 April 1891, winning medal and clasp, and arrived back in London from Calcutta in August 1891.
in 1897/8 he served as a Lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry both in the Mohmand Expedition and with the Peshawar Column, where he was put in charge of a Maxim gun.
He contracted meningitis while on active service in the Bara Valley and was sent back from Ilum Gadr to Nowshera in Bengal where he died in hospital on 11 December 1897 at the age of 27 and was buried the following day. The following report on his death appeared in The Times on 15 December 1897:
The death is announced at Swarkot, on the Indian frontier, of LIEUTENANT JOHN LYTTLETON POWYS, 2nd Oxfordshire Light Infantry, aged 27. He was the only son of Colonel H. L. Powys, entered the army in 1889, and received his lieutenant's commission in 1892. He served in the Wuntho expedition [of 1891] with a detachment of the 2nd Oxfordshire Light Infantry, and received the medal with clasp.
Powys was posthumously also awarded the India Medal with two clasps.
Lieutenant Powys's obituary was published in the Oxfordshire Light Infantry Chronicle for 1897, pp. 249–250 (with the above portrait photograph opposite page 249).
