Ralph Lumley nació en 1864 en Manchester, Inglaterra. Fue un escritor, conocido por In the Soup (1936). Estuvo casado con Florence Wood. Murió el 27 de mayo de 1900 en Londres, Inglaterra.
Ralph Robert Lumley was the father of Henry Ralph Lumley, who was an airman in WW1 whose plane tragically crashed on graduation day. The failure of Henry Ralph Lumley's surgery was a milestone in revolutionizing how surgeons grafted skin, especially for serious burns. Rather than attempting to graft large swaths of skin at a time, from then on, surgeons (including Harold Gillies) did grafts in stages instead.