Kathleen ffrench

A carte-de-visite portrait of a young girl wearing a Spanish costume. An inked inscription verso identifies her as ‘Kathleen Ffrench’ [sic] and gives the date, 1871.

Kathleen Emily Alexandra ffrench was the daughter of Robert Percy ffrench (1832-1896) and his wife Sophie ffrench née de Kindiakov. Robert was a member of the British diplomatic service and served as Secretary to the British Embassy in St Petersburg and Vienna.

Born on 20 June 1864, Kathleen would have been 6 or 7 years old when this photograph was taken. At that time, her father was the British Chargé d’Affaires in Madrid.

She never married. [But according to her Russian Wikipedia page, for a while at least she was the common-law wife of Pyotr Mikhailovich von Bradke, who had formerly managed her vast estate at Simbirsk.]

She died, aged 73, on 1 January 1938 at Harbin in northeast China, where many white Russian émigrés had settled after the Russian Revolution. Her body was brought back to Ireland and she was buried alongside her father in the mausoleum she had built for him in the woods at Monivea, the family’s estate in County Galway.

‘MISS KATHLEEN EMILY ALEXANDRA FFRENCH, the “grand dame” of Manchukuo, lived an extraordinary and complicated life. With her death at Harbin, Manchukuo, in January, the story became more complicated still.

Yesterday Dublin High Court heard a claim against her estate for 8,300,000 local dollars from Far East creditors. The Court postponed decision on this claim but ordered the sale of Miss French’s London art treasures to meet the cost of repairing her house in Lower Grosvernor-place, W.

‘Miss ffrench, who was 79 when she died, was born in Russia. She had a Mongol chieftain in her ancestry. Heir to vast estates on the Volga in Tsarist Russia, she owned also the ancient family seat of Monivea Castle, Co. Galway, besides her London home. Her estates in Russia she forfeited in the Revolution. Monivea Castle and estate she bequeathed in her will to Eire. Twenty indigent artists — ten men and ten women — she decreed should make their home there. The Eire Government has accepted her gift.

‘The Duke de Stacpoole, her cousin, holder of an old papal title, is a creditor of her estate for over £3,000 and is administering it under the direction of the Court.

‘In her last years Miss ffrench acted as League of Nations representative in Harbin, helping émigrés and travellers. When she was 64 she trekked into the wilds of Mongolia, partly in the hope of being cured at a spring of healing water, far into the hinterland. But the “cure” failed. Yet although she was forced to spend her days on a divan, she still held court .Travellers came to see her, her friends still gathered at her “salon.” In the Harbin district she was almost a legend’ (Daily Herald, 25 August 1938, paragraphing altered).

As Kathleen Percy-French, she has a Russian Wikipedia page with much more information about her life. Apparently she not only lost her Russian estate in the October Revolution, she was also imprisoned for a while.

Photographed by E. Otero of Madrid.

[From an album compiled by Lady Augusta Frances Hoare, wife of Sir Henry Ainslie Hoare, 5th Baronet.]