Mr and Mrs Charles Freville Surtees
(1823-1906 and 1833-1882)
10 October and 20 November 1862

Volume 9, page 251, sitting number 12,003 (him) and Volume 9, page 314, sitting number 12,251 (her).

Born Bertha Chauncy, the daughter of Nathaniel Snell Chauncy Esq., she was christened at Little Munden, Hertfordshire on 23 August 1833. She appears on the 1851 census, living with her parents and three sisters at 59 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington. Her father gave 'West India merchant' as his profession. On 25 August 1855 she married Charles Freville Surtees, a Captain in the Light Dragoons.

Charles Freville Surtees was born in 1823 at Heighington in Durham, the son of Robert Surtees of Redwood Hall. He was educated at Harrow and entered the Army in 1842, reaching the rank of Captain in the 10th Hussars in 1847. From 1865 to 1868 he was the Member of Parliament for South Durham, and in 1873 he was High Sheriff of County Durham. From 1873 he was Colonel of the 3rd Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry. According to Who Was Who (1897), his recreation was ‘travelling’ and his clubs were the Army and Navy, the Carlton, the United Services Club, the Cavalry and the Ranelagh.

He appears on the 1861 census, age 37, living at Chobham House in Surrey, at which time he gave his profession as 'Army Captain, Retired.' Twenty years later, on the 1881 census, he described himself as a 'Colonel in Militia' and had moved to Little Ditton in Surrey.

Mrs Bertha Surtees died, aged 49, at Chalcott House in Long Ditton on 5 November 1882.

Charles Freville Surtees died on 22 December 1906. A short obituary appeared in The Times on 24 December 1906: 'The death is announced of Colonel Charles Freville Surtees at the Charing-cross Hotel on Saturday. Born in 1823, he was the youngest son of the late Mr R. Surtees, of Redworth-hall, county Durham. He was hon. colonel of the 3rd Battalion Durham Light Infantry, and was formerly captain in the 10th Royal Hussars. Colonel Surtees sat in the House of Commons from 1865 to 1868 as the Conservative member for South Durham. He was lord of the manor of Mansford, county Durham, and deputy-lieutenant and justice of the peace for county Durham, and he served as Sheriff in 1873. Colonel Surtees, who was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, married, in 1855, Bertha, daughter of Mr N. S. Chauncy, late of Green Ends, Herts.'

[From an album compiled by Gertrude Frances Vesey of Long Ditton in Surrey. Born the daughter of George and Harriet Vesey in 1842, she was 18 years old when she began to compile the album. She lived at home with her parents for many years, until on 23 November 1876, at the age of 34, she became the second wife of the 58-year-old Reverend John William Hawtrey. She appears on the 1881 census living at St Michael’s School, Langley Marish in Buckinghamshire, where her husband was the headmaster 'without the cure of soul.’ The couple had a three-year-old daughter called Gabrielle and a nine-month-old son called Guy.]