Isabella Elizabeth Elliot (née Gore)

1 portrait of Isabella Elizabeth Elliot (née Gore)

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Isabella Elizabeth Elliot (née Gore)

by Unknown photographer
albumen print, 1860s
3 1/8 in. x 2 1/4 in. (80 mm x 57 mm) image size
Bequeathed by Francis Needham, 1971
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax128966

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Events of 1860back to top

Current affairs

An early feminist movement, The Society for Promoting the Employment of Women is founded by Adelaide Anne Proctor, Emily Faithfull, Helen Blackburn, Bessie Parks, Emily Davies, Barbara Bodichon, and Jessie Boucherett.
The Florence Nightingale Training School for Nurses opens at St Thomas's Hospital, in London, funded from the testimonial fund collected for Nightingale following her war services, and helping to establish nursing as a profession.

Art and science

William Morris and new wife Jane Burden move into the Red House, near Bexleyheath, Kent. The house, designed by Philip Webb, represents Morris's principle in interior design, that no object should be in a house that is not beautiful.
Ford Madox Brown paints The Last of England, showing a boat of emigrants leaving England under desperate circumstances, inspired by the emigration of the Pre-Raphaelite Thomas Woolner to Australia in 1852.

International

Italian unification continues as the Treaty of Turin brings much of Northern Italy under nationalist leader Cavour's control, who cedes Savoy and Nice to France. Garibaldi siezes the opportunity to invade Marsala in Sicily with his army of 1,000 redshirts, proclaiming himself dictator in the name of Victor Emmanuel II.
Republican Abraham Lincoln becomes President of the US, with only 39% of the popular vote.

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nigel sadler

18 August 2020, 19:27

I am the curator at Ottery st Mary Museum, in Devon. I believe the picture shows Isabella Elizabeth Elliot (1823?-1902). Unfortunately there are questions about the year of birth and I have found 1822 (in a panel in the present hospital), 1823 if you use the age of 58 in the 1881 census and one reference to 1825 in a persons family history tree which I cant verify.

Isabella Elizabeth Gore was born in Tipperary, Ireland. She married Gilbert John Elliot (1818-1860) and they had one child, Mary, but there is no further information on this girl so one must assume she died. It appears They married in 1849 in New South Wales but it is unclear how, or why, she made initially made her way to Australia, or her way to England and to Ottery St Mary, which happened after the death of Gilbert in New South Wales. The photograph appears to show her in mourning so must be post 1860

It is fortunate though that she did end up in our town. In 1871 she founded Ottery’s first Cottage Hospital in Lambs Court and personally funded it until 1893 when she gifted it to the town. It must have been soon after that date she left Ottery and died in 1902 in Winchester, seemingly a pauper after using up her funds on the hospital.

In the 1881 census she lived in Paxford House, along with the nurses and other staff of the hospital. Oddly I can not find her in the 1871 or 1891 census but if the other facts are right then she should have been in the town. We are unsure how she had the funds to pay for the hospital but as a widow it suggests her husband had left her well off.