Early Life
Coningham was born in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia on 19 January 1895. His early life was one that made him learn to be adaptable. His father, also Arthur Coningham, who had played Test cricket for Australia, was a con man who was exposed in court for fabricating legal evidence in a trial designed to shake down a Catholic priest, Denis Francis O'Haran, secretary to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. The resulting scandal drove the older Arthur Coningham to remove the Coningham family to New Zealand while Coningham was still young. The change of scene to New Zealand did not change the father's modus operandi; he spent six months imprisoned there for fraud.
Coningham was resilient enough and sufficiently motivated to win a scholarship to Wellington College. Although Coningham had won a scholarship, he was not an academic star. However, he was athletic and an outdoorsman, with expertise in horsemanship and with firearms.
His parents divorced when he was seventeen; grounds were his father's infidelity. Arthur Coningham was maturely assured enough to remark, "Look here, Coningham, you may be my father, but I am ashamed of you." The comment reflects Coningham's persona; he was abstemious by nature, being a non-smoker, near teetotaler, and impatient with obscene language.
Read more about this topic: Arthur Coningham (RAF Officer)
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