Lieutenant General Samuel Holt Lomax, CB (2 August 1855 – 10 April 1915) was a British Army officer who commanded the 1st Division during the early battles of the First World War. He was fatally wounded in action in October 1914 at the First Battle of Ypres, being one of the most senior British officers to die on active service during the war.

Born 2 August 1855 to Thomas and Mary Helen Lomax of Grove Park in Yoxford, Suffolk, Lomax joined the Scottish 90th Regiment of Foot as a junior officer aged eighteen in June 1874. In 1877 he went with the regiment to South Africa and participated in the Ninth Cape Frontier War, and the latter phase of the Zulu War in 1878, seeing action at Kambula and Ulundi, which secured British victory in the campaign.^[1] Returning to Britain with his regiment, Lomax was promoted to captain following the Cardwell Reforms which amalgamated his regiment into the Scottish Rifles in 1881. His unit was not called on for service in India or the Second Boer War and he did not see further action for 36 years.^[1]

Lomax was promoted to major in 1886, lieutenant colonel in 1897, and colonel in 1901. In early 1902, he was transferred to a temporary staff posting as Assistant Adjutant General of the 2nd Army Corps from 26 February 1902,^[2][3] an appointment which was made permanent later the same year.^[4] In 1904 he was given an operational command, 10th Brigade. He was promoted to major general in 1908, and in 1910 given command of the 1st Division.^[5] This was normally a four-year posting, and in late July 1914 he received notice that he would not be further employed due to his advanced age and lack of operational experience.^[1]

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 put all plans of retirement on hold and Lomax was given command of the British Army's 1st Division as part of the British Expeditionary Force being dispatched to France under the leadership of Field Marshal Sir John French. After taking part in the Battle of Mons in August 1914, Lomax commanded the division through the First Battle of the Marne, and in the counter-attack on the German invasion of the West at the First Battle of the Aisne. His direction of operations was so accomplished that it has been said that he was "the best Divisional General in the early days of the war".^[1] On the 19 October 1914 he received notice that he was to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant general, and was marked to be given the command of a corps when one next became available.^[1]

On arrival back in England, Lomax was treated in a nursing home in London, where he received palliative care for the next five months before dying of his wounds in his 60th year on 10 April 1915. His body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, and his ashes were buried at Aldershot Military Cemetery, later to be joined by his wife's under a private headstone.^[10]

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later wrote that Lomax's early death in the war had deprived the British high command of a talented general, which "was a brain injury to the Army and a desperately serious one."^[9]