The Honourable Kenneth Howard

A carte-de-visite portrait of the Honourable Kenneth Howard (1845-1903).

Born in London on 14 June 1845, he was the third son of Henry Howard, 2nd Earl of Effingham, and his wife Eliza née Drummond, only daughter of General Sir Gordon Drummond.

From 1865 he was a clerk in the Foreign Office but retired in 1882 ‘owing to delicate health’ (London Evening Standard, 23 January 1903). At the time of the 1881 census he was living at 57 Eaton Place, the home of his parents the Earl and Countess of Effingham. The household included ten servants, with several more, including a groom and a coachman, lodged in the mews behind the house.

The Honourable Kenneth Howard never married. He died, aged 57, of pneumonia following a bout of influenza on 21 January 1903 at 18 Sackville Street in Westminster. Several obituaries referred to him as ‘one of the most familiar figures in London Society for the last forty years,’ commenting that ‘[h]e had resided in London practically all his life, and preferred it to any other place in England.’

His funeral took place on Saturday 24 January at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge and was followed by an interment at Kensal Green Cemetery, where his handsome stone cross still stands. He left an estate valued at £40,759 to his nephew, the 4th Earl of Effingham.

Photographed by Camille Silvy of London on 3 May 1862, a month or so before the sitter's seventeenth birthday.

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