Second wife of Calvert Toulmin Jnr.,
My paternal grandmother was a colourful character. Born in the 1840's, she was more than thirty years younger than her husband. He was fifty seven when he married her, she was twenty-one, and they had nine children in fairly rapid succession. The family home was named Althorp, in the Bury Road, Newmarket, and the total household between 1905 and 1910 was reputed to number twenty-five, including a governess, grooms, stable boys and house staff.
When Calvert died in 1910 she moved to Buckingham Palace Gardens in London, with the children, and after two years of high living was declared bankrupt on Friday 10th January, 1913, thus ending the four or five generations of considerable affluence the family had known. The youngest four children were taken from their mother at this time, and all made wards of court, to be placed in various residential schools until maturity. The reason for this action by the courts is not known.
Taken soon after her marriage |
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At the height of her elegance |
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In her later years, as Mrs. Warwick married to an ex-soldier and living on a smallholding in Devon. |
The above picture, taken in the drive of the house then called Althorp, Newmarket around 1905, shows Marie with two of the children, all three fashionably dressed in the mode of the time. |