Earlier this year BACSA Chairman Paul Dean and his wife Moira visited several historical sites in India, as part of a long-awaited extended trip to mark their retirement. Mention of a Viceroy’s visit, and a photo of a youthful aviator, in their hotel room in Darjeeling led to a post-holiday research trip to Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, unravelling the Lytton (and Lutyens) family trees, and their connections with India…

(Photo: P Dean, 2024)
‘On our recent trip to India, my wife, Moira, and I ended our tour in Darjeeling, where we stayed at the Windamere Hotel – the name chosen, apparently, in 1939 as a deliberate misspelling of the English lake, so as to avoid any possible confusion with the Windermere Hotel there.
We were booked into the Knebworth Suite, which was the quintessential British in India experience and had on its walls a couple of photographs of ‘Viscount Knebworth, 1903 – 1933’, a rather dashing young man of the interwar generation who, according to the caption, had died young in an air crash. This went some way to explain the name of our accommodation, but not very far.

(Photo: P Dean, 2024)
We live reasonably close to Knebworth in Hertfordshire, which I knew to be the site of the Lytton family’s stately home. I had in the past visited the house, played cricket in its grounds, and noticed an interesting exhibition of Indian paraphernalia housed in a disused squash court. The Lyttons, I recalled, had produced a famous writer, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, probably best-known for his 1834 work ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’, and his son Robert Bulwer-Lytton, who became Viceroy of India from 1876-1880.
Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Viceroy of India (1876-1880)

‘Though Afghanistan received the most attention during Lytton’s viceroyalty, he also did much for Indian administration. He supervised effective measures for famine relief, abolished internal customs barriers, decentralised the financial system, proclaimed Queen Victoria Empress of India (presiding at the ‘Proclamation Durbar’, held in Delhi on 1 Jan 1877), and reserved one-sixth of the civil service posts for Indians’ (Wikipedia / Britannica.com)
Research on the internet (the Windamere’s wifi was unexpectedly reliable) told me that the latter had been appointed by Disraeli, had been a member of the ‘forward’ school in Indian foreign policy and, as a result, had declared war on Afghanistan (the Second Afghan War 1878-80).
This in turn led to the assassination of the British envoy in Kabul, Sir Louis Cavagnari, and a general election in which Disraeli was replaced by Gladstone, causing the Viceroy also to be replaced; he was created Earl of Lytton and Viscount Knebworth instead. In ‘The Viceroys of India’, which I looked at on my return home, Mark Bence-Jones writes: ‘If Lytton was a bad Viceroy, at least he was not a colourless one’.
I also discovered from its website that, before being renamed in 1939, the Windamere had, since 1841, been known as the ‘Ada Villa’ which ‘looked after all the needs of Raj types coming up from what was called Calcutta in those days’. In describing its rooms, there was this: ‘Knebworth: This room was named after Lord Cobbold’s stately home in England. His father, the Earl of Lytton, was a former Viceroy of India, during the Raj period and was also known as Viscount Knebworth. They all stayed with us.’
Victor Lytton, Governor of Bengal (1922-1927)
The ‘Viscount Knebworth’ on the walls of the suite, however, was not the former Viceroy. The website also had a section on ‘Memories of the British Raj’ which included a note from David Lytton Cobbold: ‘The reason for our first visit to Darjeeling is to follow in the footsteps of our forbears. I am travelling with [four family members]. Three of us are grandchildren of Victor, 2nd Earl of Lytton. In 1922 Victor, with his family, returned to India as Governor of Bengal. During his 5 years of service, Darjeeling was his home for 5 months of the year’.

Setting off on a hike in Sikkim, with members of his family, some staff, and two dogs.
In 1925 Victor’s son Antony, aged 22, wrote:
‘I’ve been having the most marvellous time in the mountains – and have crossed right through the Himalayas into Tibet and back over a pass 18,000’ high, feeling dead ill, eating Bovril, sleeping in a tent in 14 sweaters and riding a yak in the daytime’ (Knebworth House Archives)
Victor himself described that trek, during which he suffered seriously from altitude sickness, in his 1942 book ‘Pundits and Elephants’.
There the matter rested until we got back to England. We then paid Knebworth a visit and were reminded that Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), the architect of New Delhi, had married a daughter of the house (the Viceroy’s third, Lady Emily) and had designed buildings around the house, as well as in the village.
We also learnt that the Viceroy’s oldest surviving son, Victor, who had been born in Simla, the hill station used by the Viceroys, had inherited the title, becoming the 2nd Earl, and had been Governor of Bengal from 1922 to 1927 during which time he had been briefly the acting Viceroy (in 1926, between Lords Reading and Irwin; I will refer to him from now on as ‘the Governor’). Most of the contents of the exhibition in the squash court dated from his term in office, rather than his father’s.
I knew that Darjeeling was the hill station to which the government of Calcutta retired during the summer. This was obviously the time when the Knebworth connection with the Windamere began. The Windamere’s website was, however, confusing in suggesting that it was the Viceroy who came regularly to Darjeeling. He would have gone to Simla, where the Governor was born, whereas the Governor himself obviously went regularly to Darjeeling for nearly half of every year.
On leaving Knebworth House we saw in the grounds the church of St Mary and St Thomas of Canterbury to which is attached the Lytton Chapel, according to Pevsner, ‘the most remarkable display of family pride in the county’.

(An ‘early member of 601 Squadron’,
he wrote to his mother ‘You really
mustn’t mind my doing this… It isn’t
any more dangerous than boxing, and
is good fun and excellent training’)
(Knebworth House Archives)

Lutyens
(Photo: P Dean, 2024)
The tombs within the chapel itself are mainly 18th century. It is entered through an iron screen, designed by Lutyens, in which is a panel, also by Lutyens, in gold or brass, surmounted by a cross superimposed on a sun. The panel is inscribed: ‘In memory of Edward Antony James Viscount Knebworth MP, Pilot Officer AAF, May 13, 1903 – May 1, 1933.’
This was the subject of the photographs in the Windamere’s Knebworth Suite. An information panel said he had died in a crash at Hendon while taking part in a practice flight for an annual air pageant.
There were two other memorials of interest to us on the walls of the chancel and the chancel arch itself.

(Photo: P Dean, 2024)

(Photo: P Dean, 2024)
The first was to the Governor, which read: ‘Victor Alexander George Robert, Earl of Lytton, Baron Lytton, Viscount Knebworth KG PC GCSI GCIE, Born 9 Aug 1876 Died 25 Oct 1947. The son of Robert First Earl … He was Civil Lord of the Admiralty, Under Secretary of State for India, Governor of Bengal and Viceroy and acting Governor General of India …’
The second was to the Governor’s younger son, Alexander Edward John, who succeeded to the title of Viscount Knebworth on his elder brother’s premature death, but was killed in action at El Alamein in 1942. His death meant that the Governor had no surviving male heirs. The Lytton titles passed to the Governor’s younger brother, while the estate passed to his older daughter, who had married into the Cobbold brewing family (and whose husband was subsequently made Lord Cobbold). The Lord Cobbold referred to on the Windamere’s website and the David Lytton Cobbold, quoted there, was the same person and their son and heir.
Edwin Lutyens, architect, 1869-1944
In the churchyard we found a number of headstones designed by Lutyens, including one with a sycamore beginning to grow out of it, a problem BACSA is only too familiar with! In the village the Lutyens footprint is even more marked. He built a handsome house, Homewood, for his mother-in-law, the Dowager Countess, as well as the parish church of St Martin (finished by someone else in the 1960s) and the Golf Clubhouse.’

(Photo: P Dean, 2024)

Paul Dean
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