Henry Parnell, 5th Baron Congleton

Henry Bligh Fortescue Parnell, 5th Baron Congleton, known as Harry Parnell, (6 September 1890 – 10 November 1914) was an Anglo-Irish soldier and aristocrat of the British peerage. At the age of 24, he was killed in action in Ypres Salient becoming one of the first British parliamentarians to die on the frontline during the First World War.

The Right Honourable Henry Parnell Baron Congleton
Grave of the 5th Baron Congleton
Member of the House of Lords Hereditary Peer
In office 6 September 1911 – 10 November 1914
Preceded by	Henry Parnell, 4th Baron Congleton
Succeeded by	John Parnell, 6th Baron Congleton
Personal details
Born	(1890-09-06)6 September 1890 Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland
Died	November 10, 1914(1914-11-10) (aged 24) Zillebeke, West Flanders, Belgium
Resting place	Zillebeke Churchyard Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery
Education	Eton College
Alma mater	New College, Oxford

Biography

Parnell was born to Clonmel, County Tipperary. He was the second born child to Henry Parnell, 4th Baron Congleton (1839–1906) and his wife Elizabeth Peter Dove (1853–1931). Parnell was the great-grandson of the Irish Whig politician Henry Parnell, who was a government minister in the Whig administrations lead by Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne in the 1830s. He was knighted and made 1st Baron Congleton in 1841. Harry Parnell was thus also related to the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, of whom the 1st Baron Congleton was a great-uncle.

Parnell also came from a family with a military tradition. His grandfather Henry William Parnell, 3rd Baron Congleton, was an officer in the Royal Navy who took part in the Battle of Navarino against the Ottomans in 1827. Parnell's father, also named Henry the 4th Baron, was a major general in the British Army and took part in the Crimean War and the Battle of Inyezane during the Anglo-Zulu War. Parnell was educated at Eton College, and was still a pupil there when his father died on 12 November 1906. The 16-year-old Henry thus became the 5th Baron Congleton, although he was able to sit in the House of Lords until he came of age in 1911. There are no records of him ever speaking.

He studied Modern History at New College, Oxford from 1909. In his first year at the university, he was reprimanded for starting a bonfire in the campus quadrangle; some of his fellow students were even expelled from New College for setting fire to a teacher's furniture. He later settled down and successfully completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1912.

Grave of the 5th Baron Congleton in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission military cemetery at Zillebeke.

During these same three years he trained at the Officers' Training Corps at Oxford, and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards in 1912. In 1913 he met the explorer Joseph Foster Stackhouse, and planned to accompany him on a mission to explore King Edward VII Land in the Antarctic. The project struggled to find funding, and when Joseph Stackhouse left for the South Seas in August 1914, the First World War broke out and Parnell was mobilised. A lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards, he was killed in action at Zillebeke during the First Battle of Ypres on 10 November 1914. With Arthur O'Neill MP having been killed at Zillebeke four days earlier, Harry Parnell was the second of forty-three British parliamentarians to die in the war and commemorated by a memorial in Westminster Hall, within the grounds of the Palace of Westminster where Parliament sat. Also, dying at the age of 24 years and two months, he was the youngest of them.

External links

• Henry Parnell at Hansard (1803–2005)

See also

• List of British parliamentarians who died in the First World War