Lord Ronald Gower

A carte-de-visite portrait of Lord Ronald Gower, dressed as he appeared in some amateur theatricals while he was a student at Cambridge. I am told that he is probably seen here as Mrs Rabbits in a production of Tom Taylor’s The Overland Route in 1866.

Born on 2 August 1845, Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson-Gower was the youngest of the eleven children of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland. His childhood was spent at the family homes of Cliveden, Dunrobin and Stafford House. He was educated at Eton, which he disliked, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, which he adored but left without a degree.

Although he was the Liberal MP for Sutherland between 1867 and 1874, he had no heart for the work and spoke in Parliament only once. His interests lay in the world of art and letters. He trained as a sculptor and published several monographs of British artists as well as histories of the Tower of London, Joan of Arc and the last days of Marie Antoinette. He was also a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. In 1883 he published a volume of reminiscences and in 1902 his Old Diaries.

One of the least discreet homosexuals of his age, he sued the journal Man of the World when in 1879 it published hints of his same-sex liaisons. Later that same year the Prince of Wales sent him a letter accusing him of being ‘a member of an association for unnatural practices,’ to which Gower wrote an angry reply. John Addington Symonds, who stayed with him once, later remarked that Gower ‘saturates one's spirit in Urningthum of the rankest most diabolical kind.’ He is generally identified as the model for Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and he was implicated in the notorious Cleveland Street male brothel scandal (also 1890).

His longest, most significant relationship was with the journalist Frank Hird, who was nearly 30 years his junior. They lived together and, in an attempt to disguise the nature of their relationship, Gower adopted Hird as his son. Oscar Wilde famously once quipped ‘Frank may be seen but not Hird.’

The couple appear on the 1911 census living at Lested Lodge, Well Walk, Hampstead. Also present on the night of the census were five servants, including a butler and an eighteen-year-old ‘Odd Man.’

Lord Ronald Gower died, aged 70, on 9 March 1916 at his home in Tunbridge Wells. Frank Hird died in 1937. They are buried together at St Paul’s in Rusthall, Kent.

Photographed by the Farren Brothers of Cambridge.