The banker’s heiress
Harriet Sarah Jones-Loyd was born on 30 June 1837, the only child of Samuel Jones-Loyd, the banker who became Lord Overstone and one of the richest men in Victorian Britain. In 1853 Overstone bought East Lockinge, south-east of Wantage, and when Harriet married the Crimean War hero Robert Lindsay in 1858 he gave the couple the Lockinge estate as a wedding present. Her husband took the name Loyd-Lindsay, and in 1885 they became Lord and Lady Wantage.
Building the Lockinge estate
Over the next thirty years the couple enlarged the estate by buying the manors and farmland of Ardington, Lockinge and neighbouring parishes until it covered some 20,000 acres. From 1860 part of the old village clustered around Lockinge church was cleared to give Lockinge House more privacy, and a new estate village was built at East Lockinge in a distinctive Victorian style, with schools for the villages from 1861. The Loyd-Lindsays saw themselves as improving landlords and later introduced profit-sharing for estate workers. Whether the villagers who were moved felt the same is not recorded.
Red Cross, art and giving
Lady Wantage supported her husband’s work for the National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War, the forerunner of the British Red Cross, and Queen Victoria awarded her the Royal Red Cross in 1883. She was also a serious collector: the pictures at Lockinge House and the couple’s London home included works by Turner, Claude, Rembrandt and Cranach.
After Lord Wantage died in 1901 she devoted much of her energy to memorials. She wrote a memoir of him, published in 1907. She paid for the building of Wantage Hall at Reading (1906–1908), the first hall of residence of the University College, of which her husband had been the first president; it is still in use by the University of Reading and is a listed building. And in 1903 she raised the tall marble Lord Wantage Monument on the Ridgeway above Lockinge.
She died on 9 August 1920. The estate passed to her Loyd relatives, who still own it. Lockinge House itself was demolished in 1947.
What to see locally
- East Lockinge and Ardington: the estate cottages, schools and buildings of the Loyd-Lindsay era.
- Lord Wantage Monument, on the Ridgeway off Bitham Road (Grade II), erected by her in 1903.
- Holy Trinity, Ardington, the family church.