Mrs.
STEWART SOUTHAM MASON (LESLIE HAWTHORNE LINDSEY), Saloon Class Passenger
image:
The
Illustrated London News,
29 May 1915. Courtesy Mike Poirier.
image:
The Boston Globe,
Globe Pequot Press. Guilford, CT. Courtesy Carole Lindsay.
Leslie Mason, born Leslie Lindsey, 28, was born on 11 June 1886.
She was the eldest of three children born to William Lindsey and Anne
Hawthorne of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Her
siblings were Kenneth and Dorothy.
William
Lindsey invented the ammunition belt and his business in arms
manufacturing earned his family a fortune. William did not have
an easy start. As the United States Armed Forces wouldn't accept
his idea, he set out for England in 1889 and found her Ministry of
War "as easy to storm as the kingdom of Heaven." He slinked
around the building finding the only approachable person the janitor, a
one-legged veteran of the Crimean War. One day when the guard was
not there, William stormed the war lord's office. As William was
about to be thrown out, he declared that he could help the British win
the Boer War. Interested, Lindsey was given one month to fulfill
the given quota of 40 000 belts. With a job, he sent for his
family to come over (he married Anne Hawthorne on 16 December 1884),
and that Christmas he pinned a check from the British Government for
650 000 on the family Christmas tree.
The Boer War had made so much money for the Lindseys that William could
retire in 1904 at age 42. The Lindseys moved back to Boston and
William commissioned a Tudor-revival mansion on 225
Bay State Road in
1904. Construction began the following year and it was completed
in 1914. Before the mansion was completed, the Lindseys lived at
the residence of Mr. James Means' house at 191 Bay State. The
mansion was modeled after Athelhampton Hall in Dorchester,
England.
225 Bay
State Road today. Web editor's collection.
In the meantime, William dedicated his life to the arts. He was
an officer of the Boston Authors' Club, and a member of the Authors'
League of New York. His works include the novels Severed Mantle (1909) and Backsliders (1922), the
plays Red Wine of Roussellon
(1915), Seremonda
(1917, an adaptation of Severed
Mantle), and a posthumous collection of sonnets, The Curtain of Forgetfulness
(1923).
Like her father, Leslie had an interest in the theater. She was a
member of the Vincent Club and had participated in several amateur
dramatic productions. Described as "dark and lithe like her
father" and a "beautiful dancer," Leslie
was known for performing for charitable entertainments.
image:
The Boston Globe,
Globe Pequot Press. Guilford, CT.
Courtesy Carole Lindsay.
Around this time of leisure the Lindsey family traveled. Family
friend Jeanne Robert Foster noted a picture in the Lindsey family
collection of Leslie in Jerusalem, dressed in Arab garb. Jeanne
mused that tourists in those days probably found it fashionable to
dress like the locals. Unfortunately, in the years since Jeanne's
correspondence with Boston University, much of the Lindsey family
memorabilia has been lost.
Leslie's brother,
Kenneth Lovell Lindsey, Harvard's class of 1910, was in charge of his
father's London office. During one winter of his college years,
he rescued two women who had fallen through the ice while trying to
cross the Charles River. In 1915, Kenneth would escort Stewart
Mason of Ispwich, England, on the St.
Louis to America were Stewart would marry Leslie.
On Wednesday, 21 April 1915, Leslie and Stewart were married in
Boston's Emmanuel Church. They
were to sail on the Lusitania for their honeymoon and then make
their home in Riverdale, Woodbridge, Suffolk, England.
Accompanying the newlyweds was Oliver
Bernard, an artist from Convent Garden, London, England, who was
working in Boston for William Lindsey for the latter's production of
Red Wine of Roussellon,
which Oliver called "a deplorable play set round medieval
Picardy[.]"
Onboard the Lusitania, Leslie and Stewart often kept to
themselves and did not bother Oliver much. As Oliver was also not
too fond of romantic love, he was quite relieved. Leslie and
Stewart were present at the ship's concert on Thursday night.
After the torpedo struck on Friday afternoon, Leslie met up with Oliver
on the port side of Promenade Deck "A" by the verandah café
She was hysterical, shouting, "Where is my husband?"
"Your husband will soon be here." Oliver answered reassuringly.
"We shall be going ashore directly."
Leslie was still hysterical and Oliver grabbed her by the shoulders and
shook her violently, shouting, "Listen to me! If you stay
right here your husband will find you . . .. If you go running
around this town of a ship, you'll never meet up with him.
Understand?"
He then told Leslie to wait for him in the verandah café while
he went to go look for Stewart and lifebelts. When Oliver came
back, however, Leslie was gone. If Leslie and Stewart ever found
each other before the ship sank one can only guess. Neither
Leslie nor Stewart survived; a tragic irony that William Lindsey who
made his millions in arms manufacturing should lose his daughter in
an act of war.
Leslie's body was recovered by a tug on the night of Monday, 10 May,
twenty miles from where the ship sank. American consul Wesley
Frost
found her lying at the back of the Cunard office "like a statue
typifying
assasinated innocence."
Her body was #152, shipped back to her father in Boston, arriving in
New
York on the Lapland on 31 May 1915. She was wearing
rubies
and diamonds that her father had given her as a wedding gift. The
jewels Leslie was wearing were sold to fund construction of the Leslie
Lindsey Chapel of the Emmanuel Church, consecrated in 1924.
Leslie
Lindsey Memorial Chapel, under renovation as of 25 October 2003.
On Leslie's grave is the hymn title, "The King of Love my Shepherd Is".
Oddly, Stewart Mason's body was not buried with Leslie, but in Common
Grave B of the Queenstown churchyard.
Also in 1915, Leslie's sister Dorothy married hastily at the age
17. She regretted marrying her husband before the honeymoon was
over. To obtain a French divorce, Dorothy and a family friend
Jeanne Robert Foster, moved to France and lived there for 9 months to
establish residency. During this time Dorothy's husband, whose
name Jeanne does not mention in her correspondence, became increasingly
irate and sent a private dectective after them. Four French and
one American lawyers later, the divorce was finalized.
In 1917, William Lindsey donated 560 musical intruments to the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, of which he was a trustee, creating the Leslie
Lindsey Mason Collection.
Interestingly, a 1921 passenger list from the Caronia lists an
infant "Leslie Lindsey" of Boston as one of the passengers. This
was
Kenneth's daughter, named after his sister. Another daughter,
Maria, would die not long after her second birthday.
William Lindsey died suddenly on 25 November 1922 and the Lindseys
moved out of 225 Bay State and sold his library to the Emmanuel
Church. Anne and Kenneth went to live in London, England at 84
Brook Street, Mayfair, sometimes touring the European Continent.
Anne sold 225 Bay State in 1927 to Oakes Ames who them with Dr. and
Mrs. William E, Chenery sold the mansion to Boston University in 1939.
"The Castle," as the Lindsey mansion
is called today, is operated by Boston University's Office of
Conference Services and used primarily for functions, receptions, and
conferences.
Dorothy, a few years after her divorce, would marry Count Bruno Leydet
and settle in Dordogne where the couple had three children.
Jeanne Foster mused in her correspondence how William would have liked
Bruno if they had met. Bruno knew much of Provence, where William
liked to set his plays and novels, and was also the French minister
Plenipotentiary to Austria.
Leslie's name is sometimes incorrectly spelled "Leslie Lindsay,"
"Lesley Lindsey," and a number of other variations.
