Henry Montgomery (bishop)

The Right Reverend Henry Hutchinson Montgomery, KCMG (3 October 1847 – 25 November 1932) was an Anglican bishop and author.

Rt Rev Henry Montgomery, Bishop of Tasmania

He was born in 1847 at Cawnpore, India, the second son of the colonial administrator Robert Montgomery, Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab. The Montgomerys were an Anglo-Irish gentry family from Inishowen in the north of County Donegal in Ulster. Henry was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge.[1] Writing on 16 March 1944, G. M. Trevelyan observed that Montgomery was one of the few people ever to have jumped up the college steps in one bound.[2]

Ordained a deacon in 1871 and made a priest in 1872, Montgomery took curacies at Hurstpierpoint and St. Margaret's, Westminster. The Archdeacon at Westminster was Frederic William Farrar. Montgomery became engaged to Farrar's daughter Maud when she was 14 and they married two years later:[3] one of their five sons was Field Marshal The 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.[4]

In 1879 he was appointed Vicar of St Mark's Kennington.[5] From here he was appointed to be Lord Bishop of Tasmania in 1889,[6] where he nearly doubled the number of churches in the diocese.[7]

In 1901 he was recalled to Britain to be secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). The Bishop of London appointed him to the prebendal stall of Wenlocksbarn in St Paul's Cathedral in October 1902. Appointments to the prebendal stalls of St Paul's gave voting rights in the ″Great Chapter″ of the church and carried an income, but was otherwise an honorary position.[8] In 1905 he was appointed Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George;[9] and was raised to the rank of Knight Commander in the 1928 King's Birthday Honours.[10]

In 1887 he inherited New Park, his father's country house and estate, at Moville in Inishowen, County Donegal.[11] Described in his Times obituary as a man "always young in enthusiasm and open vision",[12] he died on 25 November 1932[13] and was buried in Moville churchyard.

As mentioned above, he was father of the World War II hero "Monty". Other descendants include Canadian author Charles Montgomery, who wrote a 2004 travel memoir in the steps of his great-grandfather, The Last Heathen: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia.