Miss M. Harrison
(died 1863)
29 April 1861

Volume 3, page 161, sitting number 3334.

Born Mary Harriet Harrison, her father was Robert Harrison of Plâs Clough, Henllan, Denbighshire, Wales.

Her father appears on the 1861 census living at Henllan in Denbighshire. He described himself as ‘Gentleman.’ At the time of the 1851 census, he and his wife were living at Sculcoates in Yorkshire. He gave ‘JP, East Riding Yorks., Banker’ as his profession. On both nights his daughter Mary was elsewhere.

On 16 July 1861 at Trefnant in Denbighshire she married Lieutenant-Colonel Wilbraham Oates Lennox V.C. (1830-1897), later General Sir Wilbraham Oates Lennox-Sinclair. 

On 19 July 1863 Mrs Lennox gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Lilian Emily, at South Camp in Aldershot. Mrs Lennox died soon after on 22 July 1863 (of 'puerperal metritis [and] peritonitis') and the child died a few days later on 3 August 1863 at West Cliff House, Brighton. According to a brief announcement in the Brighton Gazette (20 August 1863): 'The Lennox and other families have been placed in mourning owing to the death of Mrs Wilbraham Lennox and her baby. The bereaved husband, Colonel Lennox, V.C., is staying with his mother, Lady George Lennox, at Lady Abinger's, at Brighton.' The same journal later announced (1 October 1863) that Colonel Lennox 'has left England for the East, trusting that time and change of scene in the Holy Land may in some degree restore his peace of mind, which has been much destroyed of late by the early demise of his wife and child.'

[See page 13 of this section for a portrait of the sitter's husband and a portrait of Mrs Lennox with her first child.]