Lord Radstock

A carte-de-visite portrait of Lord Radstock, Lieutenant-Colonel of the West Middlesex Rifles from 1860 to 1866, a volunteer regiment raised by him in 1860.

Born in London on 10 April 1833, Granville Augustus William Waldegrave was the only son of the Irish peer Granville George Waldegrave, 2nd Baron Radstock. He was educated at Harrow and at Balliol College, Oxford. He became the 3rd Baron Radstock on the death of his father in 1857.

On 16 July 1858 he married Susan Calcraft (1833–1892) in Trinity Church, Marylebone. She was the youngest daughter of John Hales Calcraft, MP for Wareham, and Lady Caroline Montagu, daughter of William Montagu, 5th Duke of Manchester. The couple had nine children. In 1889, they acquired the Mayfield estate in Weston, Southampton.

Lord Radstock is perhaps best known for his work, beginning in 1874, as an Evangelical missionary among the aristocracy and upper-class of St Petersburg. He preached in French at evening parties and at 5 o’clock teas and, according to the historian Leroy-Beaulieu, ‘This high-class missionary quickly became fashionable.' Although sceptics mocked the ‘apostle-lord’, as he was soon known, 'the evangelic seed sprang up none the less from falling on drawing-room carpets.’ He returned to Russia in 1875–6 and again in 1878. He also extended his mission all over Europe and visited India a total of seven times. In London he was responsible for many social and philanthropic works.

Lord Radstock died, aged 80, in Paris on 8 December 1913. A lengthy obituary appeared in The Times the following day.

Photographed by the Southwell Brothers of London.