Northcote, Lady Rosalind

Northcote, Lady Rosalind, Pynes, Upton Pyne

 Lady Rosalind Lucy Stafford Northcote (1873 – 1950) was born in Ouseburn, North Yorkshire, in 1873, the first of four children of Walter Stafford Northcote, 2nd Earl of Iddesleigh (d. 1874) and Elizabeth Lucy Meysey-Thompson (d. 1928).[1]  She survived her siblings and died unmarried on 31 December 1950.  Lady Rosalind’s grandfather was Sir Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh (1818-1887). He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1874 and 1880 and as Foreign Secretary between 1885 and 1886 and was an early sympathiser of the cause of women’s suffrage.[2]

 

 

Lady Rosalind Northcote, by Alexander Bassano, 1895, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.[3]

 

The Northcotes had a terraced townhouse dating from c.1776-88 in Manchester Square, London, where they are recorded as living in the 1881 census. Their country house was Pynes, an early C18th house at Upton Pyne, near Exeter.[4] The four-storey Queen Anne style house has 41 rooms covering 2,000 sq m and grounds of around 40 acres. Also resident with the family at the time of the 1891 census were a governess, lady’s maid, cook, young ladies’ maid, kitchenmaid, underhousemaid, and butler. Lady Rosalind lived at Pynes for the rest of her life, choosing to be listed there on the 1911 census. During World War II, Pynes appears to have been partly in use as offices for the Ecclesiastical Commission with a number of legal assistants, typists etc living in.[5]

Lady Rosalind’s politics were conservative. She was a member of the Tiverton Division Conservative and Unionist Association and was Dame President of The Rougemont Habitation of the Primrose League.

Lady Rosalind was keenly interested in animal welfare. She was a lifelong member of the Ladies’ Devonshire Branch of the RSPCA, and a keen advocate of ‘Bands of Mercy’, local initiatives to educate children about kindness to animals and birds.  In 1896, she established the Exeter Cart Horse Parade, which became a popular annual event to promote the care of the city’s many working horses.[6]

Lady Rosalind’s key interests were health and welfare, particularly of the poor and those affected by conflict. She was President of Devon and Exeter Women’s Equitable Benefits Society[7] and President of the Devon branch of the United Associations of Great Britain and France, a charity helping injured servicemen.[8] She is also believed to have helped found a hospital in Bulgaria, although the details of this have not been established.[9]  During World War I Lady Rosalind served in the Red Cross in Turkey, Serbia and France and was awarded the British War Medal for her work with the YMCA at Dieppe between June and November 1918.[10]

Lady Rosalind supported women’s enfranchisement as a Vice-President of the Exeter Branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and, from 1913, as a Vice-President of the newly established Devon and Exeter Branch of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association (CUWFA).

Lady Rosalind had a high profile locally as a speaker, campaigner and writer.  She spoke in support of women’s suffrage at public gatherings, including at a ‘crowded’ meeting at Barnfield Hall Exeter in February 1909, alongside other prominent local suffragists Sir Robert Newman (leader of the Exeter Conservative Party), and Frances, Lady Balfour.[11]  She also understood the power of harnessing public opinion through other means, such as exhibitions. In 1914, she opened the CUWFA’s Sweated Industries Exhibition at the Barnfield Hall, and in her address, urged the public to open their eyes to the conditions under which many women were working, and in which ‘they lost all their pleasure in life.’[12]

Lady Rosalind was also an author, but wrote about nature rather than her philanthropic interests. She published two books on the landscape, folklore and flora and fauna of Devon – The Book of Herbs in 1903 and Devon: Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts in 1908.

Lady Rosalind died on 31 December 1950 and is buried in the Church of Our Lady, Upton Pynes.  Probate records show that her wealth at death was £124,5030 2s 7d.[13]  Her memorial plaque at the church records her love of Devon and her Red Cross service.

 

 

Memorial to Lady Rosalind Northcote, Church of Our Lady, Upton Pyne, Devon

 

 

Entry created by Liz Clare, October 2018


[1] Census records from www.ancestry.com. Family records from http://www.thepeerage.com/p33024.htm

[2] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Northcote, Stafford Henry, first earl of Iddesleigh’, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/20328. Accessed 07 Sep 2018.

[3] Dry-plate glass negative, 1895. National Portrait Gallery (NPG x1668)

[4] Pynes was listed at Grade II* in 1952 (https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1097597

[5] Household Register for civil defence reasons

[6] http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_events/carthorse.php

[7] The Devon and Exeter Women’s Equitable Benefit Society was formed in 1912 under the aegis of the Exeter Equitable Benefit Society, originally the Exeter Conservative Equitable Society, set up in the  early 1890s as part of the drive by the Conservative Party to attract more working class members. The Exeter Equitable Benefit Society was a ‘friendly society’, that is an organisation owned by its members designed to provide members, in return for regular payments, with sums of money to tide them over in case of illness and accident and, in addition, to secure savings

[8] Founded at the outbreak of the World War II, the UAGBF was a charitable organisation which helped care for injured servicemen.

[9] Devon and Exeter Gazette, 25 Nov 1913, p.12. At the AGM of the Exeter Conservative Equitable Society, the Chairman spoke of ‘her ladyship [Northcote] as a second Florence Nightingale. She had gone out to Bulgaria where she had founded a hospital …’

[10] www.ancestry.com

[11] Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, Friday 26 February 1909

[12] Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, Saturday 21 February 1914

[13] Probate, 17 April 1950.

 

Return to Index