[4] Lord Aberdare, who would rise to the substantive rank of captain (and would become an honorary colonel) in World War I, served variously in the Glamorgan Yeomanry, the 2nd Life Guards, the headquarters of the 61st (2nd South Midland) Division and in the Guards Machine Gun Regiment; in 1919, immediately after the armistice, he was promoted to captain.

In addition there was much support for compulsory physical training as opposed to the council's approach of a voluntary ethos.

[7] He was a key player in the decision to send British athletes to Hitler's 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, asserting that "neither nor his colleagues 'had yet heard of a genuine case of an Olympic athlete being boycotted or impeded because of his non-Aryan origin'", this despite Nazi Germany's overtly stated anti-semitism.

[2] In 1912, he married Margaret Bethune Black, with whom he had two sons and two daughters:[4] Lady Aberdare died on 8 February 1950.

[4] Shortly after his second marriage, Lord Aberdare and his new wife drove to attend the 53rd Session of the IOC in Sofia, Bulgaria, held from 23 to 28 September.

[2] The repatriation of Lord Aberdare's body was arranged by Sir John Lambert at the UK embassy in Belgrade: as coffins were not permitted on passenger flights, Lambert concealed Aberdare's body among the cellos of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra.