Soldier and VC
Robert James Lindsay was born on 17 April 1832, the second son of Lieutenant General Sir James Lindsay. He joined the Scots Fusilier Guards and served as a captain in the Crimean War. At the battle of the Alma on 20 September 1854 he steadied the line and held the regiment’s colours under heavy fire, and at Inkerman on 5 November 1854 he led a charge against Russian troops. He was among the first recipients of the new Victoria Cross, which Queen Victoria presented to him in Hyde Park on 26 June 1857.
Lockinge and the Vale
In 1858 he married Harriet Jones-Loyd, only child of the banker Lord Overstone, and took the name Loyd-Lindsay. Overstone had bought East Lockinge in 1853 and gave it to the couple as a wedding present. Over the following decades they built up the Lockinge estate, eventually more than 20,000 acres around Ardington and the Lockinges. They rebuilt East Lockinge as an estate village from the 1860s, built schools for the villages, and later introduced a profit-sharing scheme for farm workers.
He was Conservative MP for Berkshire from 1865 to 1885 and Financial Secretary to the War Office from 1877 to 1880, and commanded volunteer forces in the Home Counties. He was created Baron Wantage in 1885.
The Red Cross
When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Loyd-Lindsay wrote to The Times urging a British society to help the wounded of both sides. The National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War was formed that summer, with him as chairman; it became the British Red Cross Society in 1905. He chaired it until his death.
Gifts to Wantage
He gave the town the marble statue of King Alfred, unveiled in the Market Place in 1877. Around 1900 he gave the town 46 paintings by Louis Desanges showing Victoria Cross actions, hung in the former Corn Exchange, which was renamed the Victoria Cross Gallery. After the Second World War the paintings were dispersed to regimental and national museums; the building, described in 1924 as a public hall belonging to the council, still stands on the Market Place. He was also the first president of the University College at Reading.
Lord Wantage died on 10 June 1901 and was buried at Holy Trinity, Ardington. He had no children and the title died with him.
What to see locally
- King Alfred’s statue, Market Place, Wantage.
- Victoria Cross Gallery, south side of the Market Place.
- Lord Wantage Monument, a tall marble cross on the Ridgeway above Lockinge, off Bitham Road, erected by Lady Wantage in 1903 and listed Grade II.
- Memorial seat, Church Street, Ardington, beside the war memorial: a long stone seat ‘erected by the parish of Ardington’ in 1902, with ‘Alma’ and ‘Inkerman’ on its sides.
- Holy Trinity, Ardington, where he is buried, and the estate villages of Ardington and East Lockinge.