My paternal grandfather’s mother died in childbirth in 1893 leaving my great-grandfather with four young children to bring up. He married again in 1895 and had three more children.
His second wife is Gwendoline Marie Josephine Fitzherbert Herbert-Huddleston, quite a mouthful, whose family are from Clytha in Monmouthshire. He died in Kensington in 1933 and she survived him dying in 1940, presumably in London. I wish I had asked my grandparents about this generation. My strong feeling is that my grandfather had little affection for his step-mother and that probably soured his relationship with his father but this is just supposition based really on their absence from his many anecdotes.
Gwendoline, however, took a keen interest in the family she married into. You have already read the correspondence she published about my French aunt being guillotined and now something else has turned up; Leaves from a Grandmother’s Album.
We all know the Album of the young lady of the present day that she carries with her wherever she goes, from country-house to country-house, to the sea-side, anywhere and everywhere on her travels, and which gradually gets filled with a variety of indifferent sketches, fading photographs and untidy signatures inscribed by more or less unwilling acquaintances. Our great-grandmothers did things differently; they, too, had their scrap-books in which their friends left souvenirs in drawing and in verse; but oh! the immaculate neatness of that slanting handwriting, supposed in those days to indicate gentility, sensibility, and other old-fashioned famine virtues – and the charm of their sketches! often, it is true, a little too finished and betraying too intimately the inspiration of the drawing master, but delicate in colour and accurate in drawing. If not so true to life as photographs, they are probably more lasting, and certainly far more interesting as the actual handiwork of their contributors.
Such a dear old boook of this sort lies before me, gilt-edged with leaves of many colours, and a binding of white vellum stamped in gold designs round the initials of its proud possessor, Margaret Bryan. This was a young woman known in the foreign circles in which she moved as ‘the Irish Diamond’, whether for her wit or for her beauty who can tell? Beautiful she was, as her portraits show us, and brilliant in a way, and much inclined to be a Mrs Leo Hunter. She not only extracted poems from her distinguished friends, but souvenirs of all sorts, including large portraits.
A girl from the wilds of County Wexford, in 1820 she became the wife of Mr George Bryan, and for over twenty years led a life of never-ending travel, backwards and forwards between Rome and Brussels and Paris, with only occasional visits to her native land.
Rome appears to have been her favourite resort. Here she and her sister, Lady Shrewsbury, spent much of their time, and being Catholics and Irish, they seem to have been always well received in that inner circle of the Roman world, that in those days looked on the Pope as a King in fact, and welcomed his Cardinals in society as Ministers of State.
Margaret Bryan was always referred to by my grandfather as ‘Naughty Margaret’ and when I dip into her album there may be some evidence to support this.
(to be continued.)