Mrs Thomas Broadwood

Identified as 'Mrs Thomas Broadwood,' this is probably the wife of one of the two Thomas Broadwoods, father and son, of the firm John Broadwood & Sons. The family had been manufacturers of fine pianos since the mid-eighteenth century.

Thomas Broadwood père was born in 1786. When this photograph was taken in 1861, he was married to his second, and much younger, wife, Mary Alethea née Matthews, born in London in late 1829 or early 1830. She was baptised at St Andrew's Enfield on 17 February 1830. Broadwood père died on 6 November 1861 at Holmbush, his residence near Crawley in Sussex, leaving an estate valued at £350,000. His widow remarried in 1863 and died in 1908.

Alternatively, this could be Eliza, the wife of Thomas Broadwood fils, who only appears on the 1861 census. On the night the census was taken, she was sailing with her husband off the coast of Cape St Vincent in their 143-ton schooner called the Galatea. She was 27 years old, so was born in or about 1834. She gave her place of birth as Lerwick in the Shetland Isles. I can find no trace of her death or divorce. Perhaps Eliza wasn't really his wife, for in 1866, when Thomas Broadwood married Florence Johnson at St Leonard's in Shoreditch, he described himself as a 'Bachelor.' When he died in 1881 he left personal property valued at £423,924.

Photographed by Camille Silvy of London on 22 July 1861.

[From an album compiled by Mrs Marianne Charlotte Isabelle Gilbert, wife of Colonel Walter Raleigh Gilbert of Priory House, Bodmin, Cornwall.]