Venetia Stanley Errington
(1846-1900)
[1860]

[The portrait does not appear in Silvy daybooks. Stylistically, it ought to be in Volume 1. It is possibly one of the sittings that occurred between sitting numbers 100 and 300. About 120 of these were the theatrical series produced by Silvy and his assistant Adolphe Beau to launch the studio in the spring of 1860. These were subsequently removed from the daybook and floated off their original mount, ending up in the Guy Little Collection, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The portraits that weren’t of theatrical luminaries were all discarded.]

Born in London on 6 March 1846, Venetia Stanley Errington was the daughter of Sir Rowland Stanley Errington, 11th Bt. 

She appears on the 1861 census living at Sandoe Hall in Northumberland with her father, who was by then a widower, and her sisters Claudine and Ethel. The household also included a governess and fifteen servants. 

On 24 April 1867 she married John Horace Savile, elder son of Irish peer John Charles George Savile, 4th Earl of Mexborough, of Lifford in County Donegal. 

On the death of his father on 17 August 1899, John Horace Savile became the 5th Earl of Mexborough and Venetia became the Countess of Mexborough.

Lady Mexborough died on 13 November 1900 at 16 Park Lane, London. A funeral Mass was held at the Church of the Assumption in Warwick Street on 16 November, after which her body was conveyed by train from Waterloo to Bournemouth and buried in Bournemouth Cemetery in the same grave as her sister, Lady Cromer, who had died in 1898.

‘She was only surviving daughter of the late Sir E. Stanley Errington, and married in 1867 the present Earl of Mexborough, who succeeded last year to the title. In common with her much-lamented only sister, Lady Cromer, Lady Mexborough possessed in no ordinary degree those qualities which ensure affection. She was a perfect woman of the world without being worldly, possessed very solid accomplishments, was a popular member of society, and the truest of friends. The serious nature of her illness only became apparent a few weeks ago. By her death the senior line of the historic family of Stanley becomes extinct’ (Leeds Mercury, 15 November 1900).  

[From an album compiled by Bertha Amelia Yorke, daughter of the Very Rev. and Hon. Grantham Munton Yorke.]