He was born in Croydon on 14 March 1875 to Dr Henry Thomas Lanchester MD and his wife Catherine Forster.
His proposers were John Graham Kerr, Edward J. Bles, Malcolm Laurie and Ramsay Heatley Traquair.
[2] In 1910 he was living at 19 Fernshaw Road in Chelsea, London, a fashionable three storey Victorian mid-terraced villa.
However, he moved to the Royal Army Medical Corps and rose to the rank of captain.
In 1899 he and his friend from King's College, Francis Perch Bedford, had collected some crustaceans in Singapore and Malacca.