• The Lusitania sank in 18 minutes by a U-boat 11 miles off Ireland.
• Of 1962 passengers and crew, 761 survived and 1201 were lost.
• An Irish fishing tug recovered her body 20 miles from the site.

• The bridal ushers served as pallbearers at Emmanuel Church.
• Her tombstone at Mt. Auburn Cemetery bears as epitaph the hymn title “The King of Love my Shepherd Is”.

Building the Memorial Chapel

• December 8, 1919: Vestry accepted gift of proposed chapel
• 1920: Cornerstone laid
• 1922: William Lindsey died
• October 1, 1924: Chapel consecrated

Leslie’s grieving parents, William and Anne Lindsey, decided to build a Lady chapel at Emmanuel Church as a memorial to their daughter and her husband. In 1919 the Lindseys purchased 27 Newbury Street, a brownstone adjoining Emmanuel Church, and offered Emmanuel a memorial chapel to be built on the site, using the finest materials and workmanship that America and Europe could provide. Its construction at a cost of $500,000 was overseen by a three-person committee consisting of Mr. Lindsey, Emmanuel’s rector Elwood Worcester, and Emmanuel’s architect Francis R. Allen. The cornerstone was laid in the spring of 1920. Leslie Lindsey Memorial Chapel was consecrated by William Lawrence, Bishop of Massachusetts, on October 1, 1924, the twentieth anniversary of Dr. Worcester’s rectorship. The communion hymn at the dedication service was “The King of Love My Shepherd Is.”

The Boston Athenaeum has a print of the chapel’s facade by Sears Gallagher.

William Lindsey (1858-1922) was a cotton-yarn salesman from Fall River, who moved to Boston as a young man and married Anne Hawthorne Sheen (1863-1943) of Dorchester. His affairs prospered after he acquired the patent on a jute-webbing ammunition belt, which was widely adopted in America and Europe after the Boer War. In 1904, at the age of 46, the prosperous industrialist was able to retire from business. He lacked a college education because his father had put him to work very young. Nonetheless he had a deep interest in literature, to which he was able to  devote himself in retirement.

In 1905 he built for his wife and three children a richly decorated Tudor manor at 225 Bay State Road in the Back Bay, which displayed many of the ornamental and architectural elements he had admired or acquired during his travels in  England. With a touch of the gothic, he installed a secret door in his bedroom, which lead to a third-floor study, where he wrote poetry, plays, and historical romances. His play “Seremonda” was produced in 1917 in New York. A theatrical designer who staged one of his plays described him as “by occupation a millionaire, by inclination a successor of minstrels in Provence.” He also generously supported young artists, actors, and musicians. As war approached in 1915, he sponsored for a three-month period Harvard University’s volunteer ambulance unit in France. For more biographical detail about the Lindseys, see Boston University’s centennial celebration of the Castle. [1]

As an initial memorial to their musical daughter Leslie, in 1916 the Lindseys bought a famous English collection of 560 musical instruments dating from 1460 to about 1850. William Lindsey bequeathed it, along with an endowment for its care, to the Museum of Fine Arts, where it remains the core of the musical instrument collection.

As the construction of Lindsey Chapel progressed, William Lindsey became seriously ill. Fifty years later, his younger daughter Dorothy remembered him sitting on the sidewalk outside, watching its construction and grieving that he would not see his daughter’s memorial finished. He died in 1922, two years before the chapel’s completion in 1924. Three years later his widow Anne sold the Tudor manor to Boston University, where it became known as “The Castle” and for many years housed the university president’s office. It has recently been renovated and renamed the Dahod Family Alumni Center.

Subsequent History

On a Sunday afternoon forty years later, November 22, 1964, the chapel’s chancel was damaged by a set fire. The probable arsonist later admitted to setting fires in eleven cities, and said he “didn’t know” why he set the fires. After extensive repairs to the organ, the pulpit and choir stalls, and the columns on either side of the chancel arch, the chapel was reopened on September 25, 1966. More recently, extensive repairs to the chapel roof, copper flashing and downspouts were made in 1999.