Lieutenant General Sir Henry Royds Pownall, KCB, KBE, DSO & Bar, MC (19 November 1887 – 10 June 1961) was a senior British Army officer who held several command and staff positions during the Second World War.

[10] On 10 December 1918, Pownall married Lucy Louttit, the widow of Captain John Gray, a British Indian Army officer of the 36th Sikhs who had been killed in the siege of Kut Al Amara in 1916.

[11] Pownall attended the Staff College, Camberley from 1920 to 1921, and then served as a brigade major at the School of Artillery in Larkhill from 1924 to 1925.

[14] After completing his training at Staff College he took part in operations on the north west frontier of India through 1931,[1] for which he was mentioned in despatches a third time,[15] and awarded a bar to his Distinguished Service Order.

[20] Britain entered the war on 3 September 1939, and the following day Pownall was appointed Chief of General Staff of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), with the acting rank of lieutenant-general.

[24][25][26] Pownall then assumed the position of inspector general for the recently created Home Guard and was Commander of British Troops in Northern Ireland, before being appointed the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff (VCIGS) in the War Office in 1941.

It was rumoured that he might succeed Field Marshal Sir John Dill as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), but this did not occur,[12] Winston Churchill wanted to appoint Major-General Archibald Nye, but Nye managed to persuade him to appoint General Sir Alan Brooke.

[28] For this service, he was mentioned in despatches once more,[29] and he was made a Grand Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands.

[33] After the war, Pownall was chairman of Friary Meux Limited and a member of the committee of Lloyds Bank.