Mrs Thomas Heywood and Mabel Heywood

A carte-de-visite portrait of Mrs Thomas Heywood and her daughter Mabel.

Born Sophie Grace St George in or about 1840 in County Sligo in Ireland, in 1862 at Newton Abbott in Devon she became the second wife of Colonel Thomas Heywood, grandson of the founder of Heywood’s Bank in Manchester and son of a noted antiquary. Thomas’s first wife Mary Emily (née Beresford) had died in 1858, a year after the birth of her third child.

The 1871 census shows Thomas and Sophie living at Ocle Court in Ocle Pychard, Herefordshire, with their seven-year-old daughter Ellen Mabel and Thomas’s three children by his first marriage. Also present on the night of the census were a governess and six servants, including a coachman and a footman. In 1911 the couple were living with an adult granddaughter and six servants at Hatley St George (formerly Oak Hall), a large house at Great Malvern in Worcestershire.

Sophie Grace Heywood died on 18 January 1918, aged 78, at Walmer Lodge in Great Malvern, Worcestershire. She left an estate valued at £6335.

The child in this portrait is Thomas and Sophie’s daughter Ellen Mabel, born in 1864. She appears on the 1881 census living with her family at Ocle Court in Ocle Pychard, Herefordshire. She married Arthur Cartwright in 1884. The couple appear on the 1891 census living at ‘The Paddock’ on the High Street in Market Harborough, Leicestershire. Her husband gave ‘HM Inspector of Schools’ as his profession. In 1911 he described his profession as ‘Civil Service – Board of Education / HM Inspector of Schools.’ The couple had at least one daughter and two sons.

Ellen Mabel Cartwright died, aged 77, on 26 January 1942 at The Old Vicarage in Towersey, a village near Thame in Oxfordshire. She left effects valued at £1075. Probate was granted to her son Kenneth Thomas St George Cartwright, a mycologist.

Photographed by Samuel Oglesby of Llandudno in North Wales.