Mrs John Forbes
(1834-1910)
2 July 1861

Volume 4, page 159, sitting number 4705.

[Identified as 'Mrs General Forbes' in the Silvy daybooks, the same sitter later visited the studio a second time, this time with her husband, on which occasion she was more fully identified.]

Born in Bombay on 26 December 1834, Emily Sandelia Gidley Drummond was the third daughter of Captain (later Colonel) Adam Augustus Drummond of the Honourable East India Company. Her grandfather was the Scottish merchant, banker and politician Admiral Sir Adam Drummond of Megginich in Perthshire.

On 15 January 1848 she married Captain John Forbes. The bride was three weeks past her thirteenth birthday. The groom was thirty years old. According to one source, the marriage took place at Sukkur in India [now in Pakistan]; according to another source the couple were married at Strathdon in Aberdeenshire. Their first child Mary was born in Scotland in 1851; there was then a six-year gap until the next child and then eight more followed in swift succession.

Emily and her ten children appear on the 1871 census living at 1 Royal Park, Clifton, Bristol. Also present on the night of the census were eight servants, including a butler and a footman. General Forbes was elsewhere on the night of the census.

Ten years later the family were living at 50 Queen’s Gate Terrace in South Kensington, near the Albert Hall. 

General Sir John Forbes died in London on 6 July 1906.

Lady Emily Sandelia Gidley Forbes ‘of Inverernan, Parish of Strathdon, sometime temporarily residing at Ardanair, Pitlochry, Perthshire, widow of General Sir John Forbes, GCB, of Inverernan,’ died, aged 75, in London on 19 June 1910. She left an estate valued at £1961.

[For another Silvy portrait of the same sitter see page 97 of this section.]