Lieutenant-Colonel R.M. Raynsford
1st Bn., Leinster Regiment (Royal Canadians)

As you are no doubt aware we, the “Royal Canadians” together with other Irish regiments are being disbanded. I am hoping you may see your way to use your powerful influence to assist us in our efforts to be retained in the British army as the Prince of Wales’s Royal Canadian Regiment, our original title.

While all ranks desire the honor of still representing Canada, I have a personal interest as my wife is the grand daughter of Sandfield Macdonald, the first Prime Minister of Ontario.

(R. M. Raynsford to the prime minister, Ottawa Journal, 14 Mar 1922, 6)

Born in London on 19 May 1877, Richard Montague Raynsford married twenty-three-year-old Daphne Mildred Pemberton in England in April 1911. The daughter of an Indian Army colonel, she was the granddaughter of John Sandfield Macdonald (1812–1872), Ontario’s first premier after Canadian Confederation in 1867. The son of a Madras Army colonel, Raynsford was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Leinster Regiment in 1897, served in the Boer War and was adjutant in the 4th Battalion until 1908.

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