He held a commission in the Royal Army Medical Corps (Territorials) from 1900 and served at home and in Egypt in World War I.

He was the Unionist Member of Parliament for Gainsborough, Lincolnshire from 1918 to 1923, having unsuccessfully contested Bethnal Green North East in the two 1910 general elections.

On 22 November 1920 Irish Nationalist MP Joseph Devlin raised the Croke Park deaths the previous day, causing uproar.

She had been born in Argentina, the daughter of Dr Arthur Edmund Leeson, and christened at St John's Cathedral in Buenos Aires on 16 June 1863.

His three other sons died in military service: Harold Elsdale Molson died on 5 February 1946 as a major in Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, Eric Elsdale Molson was killed in action on Good Friday, 1 April 1915 as a lieutenant in the Royal Scots (Lothian Regiment), and Gerald Hildred Elsdale Molson was killed serving as second in command of HMS Rawalpindi when she was sunk by the German warships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on 23 November 1939.