Mrs Rousby

Mrs Rousby was one of the most successful and beautiful actresses of the 1870s. She was born Clara Marion Jesse Dowse on 13 October 1848 at Parkhurst barracks on the Isle of Wight, the fourth daughter of Richard Dowse, an Army hospital Inspector General.

On 19 January 1867 she married the actor-manager William Wybert Rousby of Jersey at the Roman Catholic cathedral, Plymouth. Their marriage was not a happy one and they couple eventually separated, though they were never divorced. They had two children together, although one did not survive childhood. Their first child Mary Gwendaline Wybert Rousby was born in the first quarter of 1868; her birth was registered at Newport on the Isle of Wight. She died, aged 3, in the first quarter of 1871; her death was registered at East Stonehouse in Devon.

Mrs Rousby's second child, a daughter named Ursula, appears on the 1871 census living with her maternal grandparents at Stonehouse in Devonport. She never married. In 1901 and 1911 she was going by the name of 'Daisy' and living in Hampstead with her uncle, Otto Freiderici, a Naturalised British Subject from Hanover in Germany who in 1879 had married Eva Henrietta Dowse, one of Clara's older sisters. Ursula Margaret Mary Nellie Wybert Rousby ‘of 95 Alexandra-road, St Johns Wood, Middlesex, spinster' died 18 October 1954 at the age of 85 at St Marychurch, Torquay. She left an estate valued at £1224.

Photographed by William and Daniel Downey of London and Newcastle.