Mrs S. D. Derbishire
(1804-1880)
9 May 1862

Volume 6, page 288, sitting number 8024.   

[Identified as ‘Mrs S.D. Darbishire’ [sic] in the Silvy daybooks, this is probably the wife of Samuel Dunkinfield Derbishire of Manchester and Pendyffryn, Carnarvon.]

Born Mary Blackmore in Manchester on 19 October 1804, her parents were merchant Robert Blackmore of Mount Pleasant and his wife Ann née Hinde. Mary was baptised at Cross Street Presbyterian Church in Manchester on 19 December 1804.

On 10 October 1825 she married attorney-at-law Samuel Dukinfield Derbishire, whose family owned slate mines in Wales. He was later a friend of William Gladstone, who visited the Derbishires at Pendyffryn Hall in Wales during the 1850s. As a Unitarian and as trustee of Cross Street Chapel Samuel also became good friends with William Gaskell, husband of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. 

Samuel Dukinfield Derbishire was a founder of Manchester Athenaeum, now part of Manchester City Art Gallery, and of Manchester New College.

He died at Pendyffryn on 5 August 1870, leaving an estate valued at £80,000. ‘Mr S.D. Derbishire, a highly respectable Manchester solicitor, who has been out of practice for some years, died at Pendyffryn, Carnarvonshire, on Friday’ (Manchester Evening News, 8 August 1870).

His widow Mary Derbishire appears on the 1871 census, now the head of the household at Pendyffryn. She gave as her profession ‘Annuitant [and] Farmer of 75 acres.’

Mrs Mary Derbishire died, aged 75, at Pendyffryn on 13 May 1880.