The name Wyndham is Anglo-Saxon, and derives from Benjamin’s great-great grandfather Wyndham Kent Wise, a businessman, contractor and world traveler born in the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s Wyndham was in Shanghai as a contractor, working on the building of the Bank of England, locally famous for its unique gold foil roof. His son, Wyndham Townend Wise, and Wyndham Townend’s mother, Louisa Townend, visited great-great grandfather Wyndham in Shanghai before returning to England with his mother on the newly completed Trans-Siberian railroad from Vladivostok to Moscow.

Wyndham Townend Wise, Benjamin Wyndham’s great-grandfather, was a mechanic on the ERA racing team of the then famous Raymond Mays, who domninated the Voiturette Circuit (Equivalent to today’s Formula 2 racing) in Europ before the Second World War, a fact that has undoubtedly contributed to his family’s weakness for speed, and the resulting high insurance costs of keeping the family on the road. Wyndham Townend signed on for WW2, and served in Kenya for two and a half years until the Italian and German campaigns there were completed, and later in what is now Bangladesh, stationed at Cheriga, just south of Chittagong, in a forward base that supplied munitions and logistical support to the campaign against the Japanese in Burma. Following the war he settled in Colchester, just outside London, England, and had two sons, Wyndham and Stephen, and a daughter, Rosemary.