Charles Henry Tempest

Born on 5 January 1834, he was the son of Henry Tempest of Heaton and his wife Jemima, second daughter of Sir Thomas Joseph Trafford, 1st Baronet of Trafford Park, Manchester. He married, firstly, on 21 May 1862 Cecilia Elizabeth Tichborne, daughter of John H. Washington Hibbert of Bilton Grange. In 1866 he was created 1st Baronet Tempest of Heaton. His first wife met her end by a terrible accident when her dress caught fire and she burnt to death. ‘Sir Charles, who was severely injured in endeavouring to extinguish the flames, experienced a great shock by his wife’s lamentable death, and from that period until his second marriage he lived the life of a recluse’ (The Times, 11 February 1878).

In March 1874 he met and fell in love with Harriet Manson Gordon, a seventeen-year-old girl of good family, and the two were married on 1 June 1874 at the Bavarian Chapel on Warwick Street. In 1877, however, his young wife eloped to Paris with an acquaintance of her husband’s, Henry Vane Forester Holdich Hungerford. For three weeks the two lovers lived together under the name Hungerford at the Hotel Wagram in Paris, before embarking from Le Havre for the United States; however, Lady Tempest soon returned alone. Sir Charles Henry Tempest divorced her in 1878. He died on 1 August 1894, aged 60.

Photographed by the Mayer Brothers of London.

[From an album compiled by Anna Maria Louisa Barnewall, daughter of Lord Trimleston.]