Miss Harriet Turner and Miss Helen Turner
(1852-1919 and 1855-1917)
29 August 1864
Volume 12, page 172, sitting number 15,836.]
[The sitters are identified as ‘Miss Harriet Turner & Miss Helen Turner’ in the Silvy daybooks.]
Born in or about 1852 Harriet Maria Turner was the eldest child of the Reverend Edward Blomfield Turner and his wife Maria Venour, youngest daughter the Reverend John Venour, Rector of Bourton-upon-Dunsmore, Warwickshire.
Born in 1855 Helen Rosina Turner was the couple’s third child and third daughter.
The first Mrs Turner died in 1855, possibly as a result of bringing Helen into the world. (Her death was registered in the same quarter as Helen’s birth).
On 6 August 1857 the Reverend Turner married secondly Amelia Margaretta née Skipworth (the eldest daughter of George Skipworth of Morton House, Lincolnshire). This marriage produced one more child, also a daughter.
The family appear on the 1861 census living at Rectory House in the village of Offord Cluny in Huntingdonshire [today in Cambridgeshire], where Edward Blomfield Turner was the Rector. The household included his four daughters, and four servants, specifically a cook, a housemaid, a nurse and an under nurse.
When the 1871 census was taken, Harriet and Helen were the only children in the household. Their sister Emily Francis Turner, Reverend Turner’s second daughter, had died at the end of 1863 and Amelia Isabel Turner, his fourth daughter and only child of his second marriage, had died in the third quarter of 1864.
On 28 June 1888 at St John’s, Paddington, Helen married William Henry Gibbons, like her father a ‘Clerk in Holy Orders.’
Helen Rosina Gibbons appears on the 1911 census, a widow living with her daughter (and only child) Helen Gladys Dorothy Gibbons and four servants at Cowley Villa, Upton Pyne near Exeter.
She died there on 9 October 1917 leaving an estate valued at £18,307.
Harriet Maria Turner also got married in 1888, on 1 February, and also at St John’s in Paddington. Her husband was Lindsay Horrocks, son of the late John Horrocks of the 58th Regiment. Their two daughters Gwendoline and Muriel were both born in Weimar, Germany.
Harriet Maria Horrocks died on 18 September 1919 at Southbourne near Bournemouth leaving an estate valued at £16,417.