[4] His paternal grandparents were Price Blackwood, 4th Baron Dufferin and Claneboye and Helen Blackwood, Baroness Dufferin and Claneboye (a granddaughter of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan), members of the Ascendancy, Ireland's Anglo-Irish aristocracy.

As a younger son, he was not expected to inherit the title, but on the death of his brother Archibald, Earl of Ava at the Siege of Ladysmith in the Second Boer War on 11 January 1900,[5] he became the heir and assumed the courtesy title Earl of Ava himself before succeeding his father in 1902.

[6] From 1891 to 1918, he worked as a clerk at the Foreign Office, Second Secretary of the Diplomatic Service and a Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant for County Down.

[16] Two years after his death his widow married again, to Richard George Penn Curzon, 4th Earl Howe, and died on 14 April 1925.

1923), who married Lt. Col. Sir Walter Luttrell MC, and Sonia Helen Gunston JP (b.