Miss A.A. Gawthrop
(1841-1930)
13 July 1864

Volume 12, page 128, sitting number 15,662.

Born on 9 December 1841 at Birkenhead in Cheshire, Alice Anne Gawthrop was the eldest daughter of Hugh Gawthrop and his wife Alice née Rothwell.

On 29 May 1866 at the British Legation in Brussels she married John Joseph Hanley Wheelwright, son of John Hawden Wheelwright (London Evening Standard, 1 June 1866).

Their first child was born the following year at Ipswich in Queensland, Australia. An announcement of the birth in a British newspaper describes Wheelwright as ‘of Burncluith, Dalby,’ which is also in Queensland but one hundred miles nearer to Brisbane.

Their marriage eventually produced a total of ten children.

By 1881, the family had returned to England on account of the Australian drought. The couple’s eighth child was born in Queensland in 1877, their ninth at Leamington in 1881. According to the 1888 census, John Wheelwright was a ‘Colonial Sheep Farmer.’

He died at Greenford in Middlesex on 17 March 1888.

In 1891 Alice was living with six of her children (the youngest was 5 years old) at 36 Windsor Road in Ealing. The household included no servants.

When the 1901 census was taken, Alice was living at Watford in Hertfordshire with four of her children and one servant. The oldest child, aged 33, was the artist Rowland Wheelwright.

In 1911 she was at Aldenham in Hertfordshire with one unmarried daughter, a son — John Sylvester Wheelwright, a textile designer – and John’s wife, Beatrice.

Alice Anne Wheelwright died, aged 88, at 68 Langley Road, Watford. She was buried at Greenford in Middlesex on 4 December 1930.

[See page 55 of this section for a portrait of her aunt, educator Ann Elizabeth Gawthrop.]