George Lindsay

Major-General George Mackintosh Lindsay, (3 July 1880 – 28 November 1956) was a British Army officer who played a prominent role in the development of mechanised forces during the 1920s and 1930s. Lindsay had spent much of the First World War developing doctrine for the use of machine-guns and training specialist units to operate them. After the war, commanding an armoured-car unit in Iraq, he became intrigued by the potential of mechanised warfare techniques. He was an influential figure in the debate around armoured forces during the 1920s and 1930s, working with J.F.C. Fuller on the Experimental Mechanized Force, and commanded the first experimental armoured division in 1934. Retiring just before the Second World War, Lindsay was called out of retirement to command the 9th (Highland) Infantry Division in the first months of the war, following which he worked as a civil defence commissioner and as a representative of the Red Cross during the liberation of Europe. Early life and career 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. His siblings included Henry (known as "Morgan") (b. 1857), later Colonel of the Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers; Lionel (b. 1861), who later succeeded his father as Chief Constable; and Walter (b. 1866), who became the High Sheriff of County Kilkenny. Lindsay was educated at Sandroyd School and Radley College, and in 1898 was commissioned into the Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers, a militia unit, in which his brother Henry was already an officer. In January 1900 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Rifle Brigade, a regular infantry regiment, and two months later left Southampton on the SS Umbria to serve with them in South Africa in the Second Boer War. During the war he took part in operations in the Natal, including the action at Laing's Nek, operations in Transvaal July to November 1900, then served with the 13th Battalion Mounted Infantry in the Orange River Colony. He was promoted to lieutenant on 22 February 1901, and mentioned in despatches (including 25 April 1902 "for able and fearless leading in Ermelo district on 26th January 1902").