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Lionel Courtenay

Australian politician

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 20, 2026
Entity authorityQ6555587 ↗
Source-derived summary

Lionel Thomas Courtenay (1 December 1879 – 11 July 1935) was an Australian businessman and politician. Born in Sydney, he left school at a young age but became general manager of an engineering company. He was involved in local politics, sitting on Mascot Council, Mosman Council and Sydney City Council. In 1932, he was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Council as a member of the United Australia Party. He left the Council in 1934 to contest the Australian Senate as a UAP candidate for New South Wales, in which he was successful. However, he died on 11 July 1935, 11 days after he formally became a Senator, necessitating the appointment of Guy Arkins to replace him.

Early life

Courtenay was born on 1 December 1879 in Balmain, New South Wales, the son of Catherine (née Gleeson) and Lionel Lewis Courtenay. His mother was born in Ireland, while his father, an engineer, was born in England. He attended Gardeners Road Public School in Rosebery.

Business career

Courtenay left school at the age of fourteen and began working as a messenger boy for J Tylor & Sons, a sanitary and hydraulic engineering firm.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Lionel Courtenay” as australian politician. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1879, 1935, 1932, 1934—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Lionel, Courtenay and Australian can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as australian politician. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6555587. The first chronological checks are 1879, 1935, 1932 and 1934.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Lionel Courtenay”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Lionel Courtenay primary sources, Lionel Courtenay archive and Lionel research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Lionel Courtenay”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Lionel Courtenay” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.