Constance and Emily Heywood

A carte-de-visite portrait of Constance Mary Heywood and Emily Frances Heywood, daughters of Colonel Thomas Heywood by his first wife, Mary Emily, daughter of Reverend Marcus Gervais Beresford, who, from 1862 until his death, was the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.

Colonel Thomas Heywood (1826-1915) was the grandson of the founder of Heywood’s Bank in Manchester and the son of a noted antiquary. On 16 August 1853 he married Mary Emily Beresford. Their first child, Henry De La Poer Beresford Heywood, was born on 23 January 1855.

The two girls seen in this portrait are their daughters Constance Mary Heywood (born 1856 at Colwall in Herefordshire) and Emily Frances Heywood (born 1857 in Kensington). Their mother died on 12 August 1858.

In 1882 Constance Mary married Alfred Joshua Butler (1850-1936), a Fellow of Eton College and a Fellow and Bursar of Brasenose College, Oxford. He was the author of Sport in Ancient Times and of The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt. He also wrote articles for the for the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica on the Abyssinian Church and on the Coptic Church. Their marriage produced at least two sons and two daughters. Mrs Constance Mary Butler died on 31 December 1940, aged 84. She left effects valued at £3563.

Her sister Emily Frances never married. She died, aged 62, on 12 September 1919 at St John’s Home in St Mary’s Road in Oxford. She left effects valued at £1171. The abstract of her will gives her address as the Mission House in Newport, which was a children’s home run by an Anglican order of Augustinian nuns, the Clewer Sisters of St John the Baptist. It is possible that Emily Frances devoted her life to charity, perhaps even took the veil herself, though at the time of the 1911 census she appears to have been living with her sister Constance in Minehead, Somerset.

Photographed by Samuel Oglesby of Llandudno in North Wales.