Lady Helen Filmer
(1810-1888)
10 July 1861

Volume 4, page 199, sitting number 4865.

Born in Canada on 25 June 1810, Ellen (later Helen) Munro was the second daughter of David and Catherine Munro of Quebec. She was baptised at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Quebec on 29 July 1810. 

On 1 September 1831 she married Edmund Filmer, who became the eighth Baronet on the death of his uncle, the Reverend Sir John Filmer, in 1834. 

‘MARRIED — At Weymouth on the 1st instant, by the Rev. Charles Blathwayt, Edmund, only son of the late Edmund Filmer, Esq. of Bath, Helen, second daughter of David Monro [sic], Esq. late of Quebec, Lower Canada’ (Morning Post, 3 September 1831). Their marriage produced at least two sons and three daughters.

The couple appear on the 1851 census living at 90 Eaton Square in London’s Belgravia. Sir Edmund described himself as a ‘Baronet, MP, Landed Proprietor.’ The household included the couple’s three daughters and son Arthur, aged 6, as well as a governess and nine servants. Arthur died, aged 12, in 1857. 

Sir Edmund Filmer died, aged 47, on 8 January 1857. ‘For many months past he had been in a declining state of health; and in the early part of last spring he announced his intention of retiring from public life at the close of the present Parliament’ (Morning Post, 9 January 1857). 

Lady Helen Filmer appears on the 1871 census, the ‘Widow of [a] Baronet’ living at the The Bourne in Holyport, a village near Maidenhead in Berkshire. 

Lady Helen Filmer died there, aged 78, on 17 July 1888. She left an estate valued at £8005.

‘DEATH OF THE DOWAGER LADY FILMER — We have with regret to announce the death of the Dowager Lady Filmer, at her residence, The Bourne, Maidenhead, on the 17 inst. The deceased lady was the widow of the eighth baronet, Sir Edmund Filmer, who died in 1857, and who sat as MP for West Kent, as a Conservative, from 1838 to the year of his decease. Lady Filmer was the second daughter of David Munro, Esq., of Quebec, and was married in 1831. Her eldest son became the ninth baronet, and sat for West Kent in the Conservative interest from 1859 to 1865, and for Mid Kent from 1880 to 1884, when he retired. The ninth baronet died in 1886, and was succeeded by the present baronet, Sir Robert, who is now ten years of age’ (Kent Times, 28 July 1888). 

She is buried in Bray Parish Cemetery in Berkshire.