George Lindsay (British Army officer)

Lindsay was born in 1880, the sixth son of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Gore Lindsay, the Chief Constable of Glamorganshire, and Ellen Sarah Lindsay. His paternal grandmother was the sister of the Earl of Arran, and his maternal grandfather was Charles Morgan, 1st Baron Tredegar.^[1] His siblings included Henry (known as "Morgan") (b. 1857), later Colonel of the Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers;^[2] Lionel (b. 1861), who later succeeded his father as Chief Constable;^[3] and Walter (b. 1866), who became the High Sheriff of County Kilkenny.^[4]

Lindsay was educated at

In 1916, Lindsay was given a front-line posting, as the brigade major of the 99th Brigade (United Kingdom), a New Army formation primarily composed of London volunteers from the Royal Fusiliers. He served with the 99th through the Battle of the Somme and Battle of Arras, receiving the Distinguished Service Order. In March 1918 he was promoted to colonel and made a staff officer at the First Army headquarters, responsible for the Army's machine-gun units.^[1] Following the Armistice, he commanded the 41st Battalion, Machine Gun Corps, in the Army of Occupation in Germany.^[10]

Following the reduction in forces after the end of the war, the Machine Gun Corps units were disbanded and Lindsay attended the

Returning from Egypt in 1932, Lindsay was given command of the 7th Infantry Brigade at Tidworth Camp, a motorised unit which had previously been the core of the Experimental Force. The culmination of his work with combined-arms forces was the end of the 1934 Army exercises, in which the 7th was used as part of an improvised armoured division led by Lindsay. However, the results were of limited success, partly due to personal disputes with Percy Hobart, who commanded the tank brigade and with whom Lindsay had had an acrimonious dispute. The immediate result of the failed experiment was to cut Lindsay off from the debate around the future of armoured warfare; he had recently been promoted to Major-General, and he would continue to rise in the Army, but he would no longer be involved with developing modern fighting doctrine.^[1]

In 1935, Lindsay was posted to Calcutta to command the Presidency and Assam District in eastern India; he held the post until 1939, when he retired from the Army. In retirement, he worked as Director of the

Lindsay stepped down as Commissioner in 1946, and relinquished his ceremonial colonelcy of the Royal Tank Regiment in 1947. Finally retired, he served on a number of committees and councils, as diverse as the Army Boxing Association, the Anglo-Danish Society and the Educational Interchange Council, and in 1952 published a short pamphlet on "The Soviet-Communist Menace".[10] He died in Epsom in 1956, survived by his wife and his surviving daughter, and leaving an estate of thirteen thousand pounds.^[1] His papers are held by the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives,^[11] and by the Tank Museum at Bovington.^[1]