Lieut. Stewart of the Royal Artillery
(1839-1905)
April 1863

Volume 10, page 172, sitting number 13057. 

[Identified as 'Lt. Stewart, R.A.' in the Silvy daybooks, this is possibly Algernon Augustus Stewart of the Royal Artillery. Hart's Army List (1861) records 56 officers with the surname Stewart, but only one of them is a Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery.]

Born at Colombo in Ceylon [now Sri Lanka] on 31 January 1839, Algernon Augustus Stewart was the son of Algernon Stewart of the Ceylon Civil Service and his wife Charlotte née Clement.

He appears on the 1861 census, a twenty-two-year old Lieutenant stationed at the Royal Artillery barracks in Woolwich.

On 25 October 1864 at Christ Church in Paddington he married Sophia Anne Eleanor Hobart, daughter of the late Honourable and Very Reverend Henry Lewis Hobart, who among several other livings was the Dean of Windsor from his appointment in 1816 until his death in 1846. At the time of his marriage, Algernon was living at Inverness Terrace, Bayswater, which is two streets away from Silvy’s studio.

The couple appear on the 1871 census living at 1 Woolwich Common. Algernon was now a Captain in the Royal Artillery. The household also included a son and a daughter. Three more children followed later.

In 1901 Algernon was a ‘Retired Major-Gen'l in the Army’ living with his wife and three unmarried daughters at 36 Roland Gardens in Fulham.

Major-General Algernon Augustus Stewart died, aged 66, on 23 July 1905 at Lea Farm, Bramley, Surrey. He left an estate valued at £19,932.

According to his obituary in the Army and Navy Gazette (29 July 1905), he was educated at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich and he obtained his commission in the Royal Artillery on 1 August 1855 when he was sixteen years old. ‘He was in India during the Mutiny, and bore his burden of work in that trying period, but he had not the good fortune to see service in a general engagement, and so did not get the war medal.’ He ‘retired with the honorary rank of Major-General’ on 24 June 1887.