Lieutenant–Colonel Charles Octavius Head, DSO (30 May 1869 – 16 October 1952) was an Irish colonel in the British Army, and author of four books including his autobiography, No Great Shakes.

His home near Pontesbury was also destroyed by fire, this time accidentally, when much of his library was incinerated, making his written works rare.

He had three brothers, William Edward, John Henry, and Michael Ravenscroft, and four surviving sisters, Elizabeth, Georgiana, Isabella, and Anna.

[4] He attended boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow before enrolling in the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, London in 1885.

[5] Head married Alice Margaret Threlfall of Tilstone Lodge, Tarporley, in Cheshire in 1908, they had three children, Elizabeth, Isabel Grace, and Michael.

Michael's daughter, Sara Day, is an author whose nonfiction works include Coded Letters, Concealed Love: The Larger Lives of Harriet Freeman and Edward Everett Hale[19] and a history of the Head family in Ireland, Not Irish Enough: An Anglo-Irish Family's Three Centuries in Ireland.

[2][20] This book expands on her grandfather's autobiography by tracing the Heads from their arrival in Ireland until the atrocity that caused the departure of the last landowning branch of the once numerous family in N. Tipperary.