Amelius Mark Richard, 1st Baron Lambourne (1847-1928)

Born in London on the 17th August 1847, he was the eldest son of Lieutenant-General William Mark Wood (b. 1817) and Amelia Jane, daughter of Sir Robert Williams, ninth baronet, of Penrhyn, Caernarfon. General Wood, who served in the Crimean War, had changed his name from Lockwood in 1838 on inheriting the property of his maternal uncle, Sir Mark Wood, of Gatton, Surrey. His son reverted to the original name of Lockwood in 1876.

Lockwood was educated at Eton College. He entered the Coldstream Guards in 1866 and served as adjutant and aide-de-camp to Earl Spencer, lord lieutenant of Ireland; he retired in 1883 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. In 1876 he married Isabella (d. 1923), daughter of Sir John Ralph Milbanke-Huskisson, eighth baronet; they had no children. Lockwood inherited his father's estates, which consisted in 1876 of 2300 acres in Essex, as well as 1226 acres in Glamorgan and 1440 acres in Monmouthshire. In 1892, at the age of forty-five, he entered parliament as Conservative MP for the Epping division of Essex.

Known as ‘Uncle Mark’, Lockwood was popular with all parties. Henry Lucy described him in 1902,
‘with hands in his trousers pockets, his hat pitched back on his head at an angle more miraculous than ever, the light of hospitality literally blazing on his war-bronzed face and his home-grown carnation’.
He never held office, and, as Lord Onslow recalled,
‘he came to be regarded as the typical country squire member of parliament, and exercised a considerable independent influence in the House of Commons’.
He became a Privy Councillor in 1905, and he sat on the Unionist front bench. Not that Lockwood was an entirely serious figure; at the height of the crisis over the 1909 Finance Bill he endeavoured to subvert the chancellor, Lloyd George, by taking him on a spree to the Gaiety Theatre and then to supper with what he called ‘bits of muslin’ at the Savoy Hotel, returning Lloyd George to Downing Street at 2.30 a.m. Next day the chancellor's temper was execrable. Lockwood retired from the House of Commons in 1917, when he was created Baron Lambourne.

Lockwood took an active interest in animal welfare. He was a member of the royal commission on vivisection (1906–12): he signed the minority report urging tighter controls on vivisection, and he twice attempted unsuccessfully to carry the commission's recommendations into law. Like many country gentlemen he saw no conflict between his dislike of vivisection and his support for country sports. As Lord Lambourne he served as chairman of the RSPCA from 1919 to 1924; he endeavoured to end the export of live worn-out horses for butchery on the continent; and in 1921 he piloted through the House of Lords the bill banning the shooting of live pigeons in traps.

At Bishops's Hall, his Essex home, Lockwood grew famous carnations for his buttonholes and made a collection of flowering shrubs. He was president of the Royal Horticultural Society. He collected china and books of county history. He was a generous host, and he played a prominent part in county affairs, becoming lord lieutenant of Essex in 1919. He raised money for the Essex county cricket team; he was president of the Territorial Association, honorary colonel of the 4th Essex regiment, president of the Essex Hunt Club, president of the Essex Automobile Club, provincial grand master of the Essex freemasons, and a JP. In 1928, recalled Lord Onslow, ‘Lord Lambourne refused to support the appeal for King George's Hospital at Becontree on the ground that this was a new town created by the London County Council without consulting Essex, but he withdrew his opposition immediately at the wish of the King’.

Lockwood did many things, but all of them as an amateur and a country gentleman. He was a ‘character’, an unpaid and jovial pillar of society in Essex and at Westminster; to his contemporaries he stood for more than the bare record of his achievements.

He died at Bishop's Hall, Romford, Essex, on 26 December 1928.