Author: Holderness, Mary
Biography:
HOLDERNESS, Mary formerly HARDWICK (1782-1866: ancestry.co.uk)
Her former surname is sometimes spelled Hardwicke. She was baptised on 11 Oct.1782 at Market Deeping, Lincolnshire, the daughter of William Hardwick, a miller, and his wife, Mary Thorp. She married William Holderness, a farmer, on 3 Mar. 1806. They went on to have at least six children who were variously baptised in Lincolnshire and London. Her husband went bankrupt in early 1815 and began to dispose of his holdings. In the same year they responded to an advert by Arthur Young, the agriculturist, to go to the Crimea and farm his estate. They arrived in Riga on 6 Nov. 1815 and travelled to the Crimea; at the time, their youngest child, Robert Fitzroy Holderness, was just two months old. On return to England in 1820, she published her Notes Relating to ... the Crim Tartars (1821) This was later reprinted with her fuller account in New Russia (1823 and a second edition in 1827). By age and place, her husband seems likely to be the William Holderness who died in London in 1824. Previously, details about her early life were unknown but A Manual of Devotion (1825) provides the key to her identity. The subscribers list includes four Hardwickes, two Thorps, and nine Andrews, and it establishes her connection to Blackheath and South London where she would later live. (The two-month old boy who went out to the Crimea grew up to be a stockbroker and married Ellen Louisa Andrews, the daughter of Joseph Andrews who had married Mary Holderness's cousin, Elizabeth Hardwicke in 1805 at Market Deeping. All were subscribers.) In 1828, she was living at 19 Golden Terrace, Pentonville, and applied to the RLF for assistance; the application was supported by William Jerdan and William Upcott and she was awarded £20. By 1851, she was living in Woolwich, with her son Robert Fitzroy and his family. Mary’s unmarried daughters, Mary Elizabeth and Emma, and her cousin also lived there. In 1861 she is recorded as living in Peckham with her eldest son, John, also a stockbroker, and his family. He died in early 1866 and she then seems to have moved back to her other son who lived at Western Villas, Back Lane, Brentwood. She died there on 28 Nov. 1866. (ancestry.co.uk 3 Nov. 2020; findmypast.co.uk 3 Nov. 2020; Stamford Mercury 17 Feb. 1815, 5 May 1815, 26 Mar. 1824; Suffolk Chronicle 6 May 1815, 2 Sept. 1815; RLF file 1/627; William Upcott, BL, Add. Ms. 78687, ff. 61-65 [Letters of Distinguished Women, II]; Essex Standard 30 Nov. 1866; John G. Gazley, “The Reverend Arthur Young (1769-1827)”, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 37 (1955), 360-405; NCCO; British Women’s Travel Writing www4.wlv.ac.uk/btw/authors/1075 accessed 26 Feb. 2019) AA with contributions from SR