Miss Alicia Duff-Gordon
(1822-1901)
10 June 1862

Volume 7, page 99, sitting number 8642.

Born at Brook Street in London, Alicia Frances Duff-Gordon was baptised at St George’s Hanover Square on 17 June 1822. Her father was Sir William Duff-Gordon, 2nd Baronet, who died on 8 March 1823 when Alicia was less than a year old.

She appears on the 1841 census, living with with her widowed mother, her older sister Georgina and six servants at a house in Hertford Street, Mayfair.  

She appears on the 1891 census living with her sister Georgiana, also unmarried, at 34 Hertford Street, Mayfair, London. The two women had six servants to keep house for them, including two footmen and a lady’s maid.

G.F. Watts used a drawing he had previously done of her for the head of one of the figures on the far left of his Alfred Inciting the Saxons to Prevent the Landing of the Danes, painted for, and still hanging in, the Palace of Westminster. 

Miss Alicia (otherwise Alice) Duff-Gordon died, aged 79, on 13 June 1901 at 34 Hertford Street, Mayfair. She left an estate valued at £17,408.

‘The death […] of Miss Alice Duff-Gordon, one of the two sisters who have lived for so many years in Hertford Street, and have always hospitably entertained, removes a very well-known lady from the ranks of London society. Miss Duff-Gordon was taken ill on Sunday night, and died on Thursday from pneumonia. Much sympathy is felt for her sister, who has been her inseparable companion for so many years’ (Aberdeen Press and Journal, 15 June 1901).

[From an album assembled by Edmund Baskerville-Mynors, Rector of Ashley in Wiltshire.]