A Gathering of Broughams, the Brougham family history compiled by Peter Brougham Wylie in 1998 also includes our closest Brougham relatives, Edith’s three brothers and two sisters. A little digging on ancestry.com turns up additional descendants not accounted for on the 1998 chart. We have cousins living in England today, descendants of John R. Brougham and Henry W Brougham, Edith’s brothers.
I know the phrase “cousins across the pond” from books and movies and it always seemed merely quaint. Nothing personal. Now, as it turns out we seem to have actual living cousins over there, and despite the fact of genetic distance (we are 3rd or 4th cousins), and the ocean (not a pond) and the long ago severed social connection, it feels weirdly personal.
Hello cousins, descendants of Rev. Henry W. Brougham Dean of Lismore, especially Karen Bruce-Lockhart who I only know through her ancestry.com posts. She is the source of many facts outlined below.
Edith Alice’s brothers Henry W. Brougham (1853-1908) and John R. Brougham (1857-1923) both attended Oxford. Queens College for John, Keble College for Henry.
Henry W. Brougham (1853-1908), Edith Alice’s oldest brother seems to have been quite the sportsman. When Edith Alice was 12 and still living at home in Lismore, Henry and the Gentlemen of Ireland cricket team played in New York.
Henry Brougham of “Dooks” and Wellington College. He was more interested in games, horses & singing than in work. In 1879 he organised a Cricket Team of “the Gentlemen of Ireland” to play three or four matches in the United States.
Notes by JMcGBL. Source: ancestry.com member KarenBruceLockhart originally shared this on 27 May 2014.
He and his team sailed to New York on the Cunard Line, stayed at the Brevoort House Hotel at on 5th Avenue, won two games, lost one game and celebrated afterward
The enormous feast after the match set the standard for the whole tour. There were seven courses including ice cream in glasses made of ice, ecrevisses, salmon, lamb and grouse. ‘The waiters were all niggers black as coal, fine looking men and excellent servants, once we found that the black of their hands did not come off on the plates.’ Then to Manhattan beach and the Hudson ‘which nothing can excel for loveliness in the Fall.’
Article written by Logie BL in The Cricketer based on the book a copy (one of only two believed to be in existence) of which is in the hands of Mark BL in 2014. Karen BL has one of the gold cricket ball pendants commemorating the tour. Source: ancestry.com member KarenBruceLockhart originally shared this on 25 May 2014.
The games (and presumably the off hand racism too) continued and concluded, Henry returned to England and after short stints at other schools, settled in as housemaster at Wellington College, Sandhurst, just southwest of London, famous for another school, the Royal Military college. Wellington College was originally dedicated to educating the sons of deceased officers who had held commissions in the Army.
He built a house by the little Golf course at Dooks near Glenbaigh in Kerry, and a large house in the grounds of Wellington College. This became the first Boarding House at Wellington College – “Brougham House”. He was by all account a charmer. He was known affectionately as “Idle Paddy”, largely because he hunted two mornings a week with eh Garth in term time!
Notes by JMcGBL. Source: ancestry.com member KarenBruceLockhart originally shared this on 27 May 2014.
Edith’s middle brother John Richard Brougham (1857-1923) went into industry. He was managing director of the British Bolt and Screw company in Yorkshire.
Brougham John Richard of Buckland House Lymington Hampshire died 31 July 1923 Probate London 4 October to Isabel Margaret Brougham widow Frances Edmind Vincet Currey gentleman and Hugh Barham Carlake solicitor. Effects £15,065 3s. 2d.
England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1995
John’s effects alone are today worth about $855k. It seems like he made a financial success. Today, his house and gardens at Buckland Manor Farmhouse is a Grade II listed building, available for hire as a location for magazine & advertising shoots.
Edith Alice’s third brother Roland Vaux Brougham (1860-1895) married Anna Wall (1863-1922) in 1891 in Ireland. They sailed to Australia, settled in Queensland started grazing sheep and less than 5 years later Roland Vaux died in a riding accident. Anna was left with two year old daughter Lucy Eileen (1893-1984) and infant son Roland Vaux Jr. (1895-1906). Then another tragedy: Roland Vaux Jr. died when he was 11 years old. Daughter Lucy Eileen married and had one child who died in World War II. He was buried at sea somewhere during the North Africa campaign.
Edith’s oldest sister Katherine Anna Mona Brougham (1852-1924) married William Whitelock Lloyd (1856-1897), an artist. Their niece Mona (the person who seems to have approved of Edith’s marriage) recalled the couple.
[Katherine] Married Willie Whitelock Lloyd an artist only son of George Whitelock Lloyd owner of Strancally Castle on the Blackwater. The old man was mad at his only son marrying a parson’s daughter & “cut him off with 1/-” but the castle was entailed & had to go to Kate’s son Percy
———
My Aunt Kate married Whitelock Lloyd an artist, was the eldest. She was left a widow early & lived near & later with Grandpapa & Grannie [Re, Henry Brougham and Lucy A Becher]. She was kind & charming & humourous & my father’s [Henry the sportsman] favourite sister. He called her Snee. She had two children Winifred & Percy. The latter was a wild fellow & caused her much anxiety & grief, as a child I liked him very much.
Notes by Mona BL. Source: ancestry.com member KarenBruceLockhart originally shared this on 19 Feb 2010
Katherine (Edith Alice’s sister) and William lived in Strancally Castle, a 19th c. gothic country house and 5000 acre estate a few miles downstream from Lismore. William’s father, George Whitelocke Lloyd, High Sheriff of Waterford, son of a wealthy Anglo-Irish manufacturing family bought the place in 1856, the year William was born. William went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1874 (along with Oscar Wilde), but failed his preliminary examinations and joined the services instead: in 1878 he received a commission as Second Lieutenant in the 1st Battalion, 24th Regiment of Foot, then serving in Cape Colony [South Africa].
Lloyd left the army in 1882 and married Katherine Brougham (Edith Alice’s sister) in 1885. Lloyd became official artist for the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co., sketching and painting scenes on board steamers and ashore. Their daughter Winnifred (1887-1976) was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1887 and their son Percy in 1890, the year Lloyd published Sketches of Indian Life. Two other publications followed.
Lloyd’s early death in 1897 meant that he never became more fully established as an illustrator. He left effects worth £639 3s. 1d.
Edith’s second sister Lucy Ellen Brougham (1863-1942) married Chetwoad Hamilton Curry (1847-1883) in Lismore in 1880. Three years later Chetwoad died leaving Lucy a young widow with two infant children, Francis Edmund Vincent Curry and Winnifred Mabel Vaux Curry. In 1891 Lucy, was living on her own means with her two children in England about 10 miles away from her brother Henry, housemaster at Wellington College. In 1901 Lucy and daughter Winifred were boarding in West Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London. In 1910 Lucy married Edward Hobson in London. Mr. Hobson gave “Esquire” as his profession on the marriage certificate and their residence on Ebury Street Belgravia, a fashionable address in central London.
Lucy died in 1942 in Lismore. A bronze plaque on the wall of Lismore Cathedral reads:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
LUCY ELLEN HOBSON
BORN 24TH APRIL, 1863. DIED 13TH SEPT., 1942
YOUNGER DAUGHTER OF
THE VERY REV. HENRY W. BROUGHAM, DD.,
DEAN OF LISMORE
“In Thy presence is the fullness of Joy”
ALSO OF
FRANCIS EDMUND VINCENT CURREY
BORN 13th FEB., 1881 DIED 15TH JAN., 1953
SON OF CHETWOADE HAMILTON CURREY
“I will cast mine eyes up the the hills.”
To summarize, Edith Alice and Roland Vaux went off to America and Australia, Henry and John went off to England, Katherine lived in a castle just up the river from Lismore when she wasn’t off traveling with her artist husband, Lucy suffered the early death of her husband made her way to England, another marriage and life in London. In other words, the family broke up and the children went their separate ways. They weren’t alone.
There was no family estate or title to inherit. The Irish Church Act of 1869 and other legal reforms saw to it that the Irish Broughams and other Anglo-Irish children of the Ascendancy lost their political, economic, and social privilege, and whatever credibility remained after members of their set, absentee landlords, were caught shipping locally produced food overseas, while much of the population starved in the Great Famine.
Edith’s generation of landowners, clergy, and members of the professions, all members of the Church of Ireland, saw their world crumble, then burn. Between 1919 and 1923 during the Irish War of Independence Protestant landlords were assassinated and nearly 300 stately homes of the old landed class burned down.
It was this branch of the Brougham family, the Irish one that hired John Francis Prendergast to handle their horses and according to Mona, to give Edith Alice riding lessons. (Mona, really? Riding lessons?)
Whatever the Dean and his wife discovered about the affair it was likely not a premarital pregnancy. A US birth record shows that John R. Prendergast, Edith and John’s son, was born on St. Valentine’s Day 1895, so he would have been conceived in June 1894 shortly after John and Edith settled in Gardiner, Maine.
I can see why Edith Alice might look for a fresh start in America. Her social prospects in Ireland, a life of dim decadence tied to another member of her small disinherited and dwindling class, seems grim in hindsight. In any event, she went another way entirely, married a “native” Irish guy and got out with him before the whole rotten system crashed. Good for you Edith Alice.
Ignoring the fact that the Broughams can’t seem to locate poor Edith correctly (Kentucky, Australia, whatever) I appreciate that some remembered her. I like Mona’s account best. My great grandparents were basically banished to America and landed up the Kennebec River in Maine. They reconciled religious and class differences, started a family, got a living, and here I am generations later writing about them.
Love conquers all it would seem.
EditH Alice Brougham & John Prendergast 