Item 16 - Lord Tweedsmuir : further tributes

Violet Rosa Markham was a writer, social reformer, campaigner against women's suffrage and administrator. She grew up near Chesterfield, the daughter of Charles Markham, part owner of the profitable Markham Collieries and Markham & Co. When a friend of her late father died in 1901 Violet inherited enough money to live an independent life and devote her wealth to causes she supported, as well as to buy her own house in London. Her mother was a daughter of Sir Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal Palace, the centrepiece of the 1851 Great Exhibition.

Vere Brabazon Ponsonby, 9th Earl of Bessborough, was an Anglo-Irish businessman and politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 14th since Canadian Confederation.
Born and educated in England into 'the Ascendancy', the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, he graduated with a law degree from Cambridge University before entering politics as a member of the London County Council and then, in 1910, as a member of the British House of Commons. Upon the death of his grandfather 10 years later, Ponsonby succeeded as Earl of Bessborough and took his seat in the House of Lords. He was in 1931 appointed as Governor General by King George V, on the recommendation of British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, to replace The Earl of Willingdon as viceroy, and occupied that post until succeeded by The Lord Tweedsmuir in 1935. Lord Bessborough is remembered for promoting new communication technologies as well as giving support to the Canadian population during the Great Depression.
After the end of his viceregal tenure, he returned to London, where he continued in business and also work with the Dominions Office and the Foreign Office before his death in March 1956.
The 9th Lord Bessborough was the last Earl of Bessborough to own Bessborough House, the Ponsonby family's ancestral seat near the village of Piltown in the south of County Kilkenny in Ireland. The country house was largely built in the 1740s for the 1st Earl. It was gutted by fire during the Irish Civil War in February 1923. The 9th Lord Bessborough had the house rebuilt in the late 1920s. However, he sold the house in the late 1930s as he largely lived in Britain. The house now forms the main part of Kildalton Agricultural College.