Design and Art Australia Online

cartoonist, watercolourist and photographer, was born in Edinburgh on 31 March 1867, third daughter of the nine children of Dayrolles Blakeney Eveleigh-De Moleyns, the 4th Baron Ventry, and Harriet, née Wauchope of Niddrie Marischal, near Edinburgh. The De Moleyns had lived in County Kerry since the 17th century and Hersey grew up at Burnham House (now an Irish-speaking girls’ secondary school known as Coláiste Ide) as well as Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge, London, where the Hopetouns were neighbours. On 18 October 1886, aged 19 Hersey married John Adrian Louis Hope, the 7th Earl of Hopetoun, at All Saints’ Ennismore Gardens. Their son (Queen Victoria’s godson) Victor Alexander John, Lord Hope (“Hopie”), was born a year later. Lord Hopetoun, a Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria, had been born in the family seat, Hopetoun House, outside Edinburgh, and before being appointed Governor of Victoria the family spent three months every year there.

Lord and Lady Hopetoun entered Melbourne with great ceremony on 28 November 1889 – declared a public holiday (as usual) – and were sworn in on the steps of Parliament House. Cheering crowds lined the streets and the governor and his family were attended by a fantastic retinue of footmen, postilions and outriders wearing magnificent livery and white powdered hair. Lord Hopetoun proved popular with Victorians, but Lady Hopetoun, aged 22, painfully shy and with no experience of public life, was thought reserved and haughty, especially in comparison with her popular predecessor Elizabeth, Lady Loch. She had been ill since the birth of Hopie and at the end of 1890 returned to England for medical advice. Her brother Frederick resigned as ADC and went with her while Hopie stayed in Melbourne with his father. Hersey’s comic ink sketch, 'Plan of Modern Bottle Feeding – Scale 1/8 of an inch to 1 foot’ (ill. Hancock p.209), shows Lord Hopetoun feeding the baby – Hopie, according to Hancock – from a bottle of 'Pomery 1874’. After seven months Hersey returned cured, in May 1891. Back in Victoria she soon became pregnant again. Their second son, Charles Melbourne Hope, was born on 20 February 1892. Two daughters were born after the family returned to Britain.

Hersey’s private character was less formal than her public one. She had little taste for public life but was a keen angler, an expert horsewoman and an enthusiastic hunter. A rather crude cartoon, 'Sport with the Melbourne Hunt’, shows a man jumping a fence advertising 'Wolffs Schapps cures the stomach ache’, 'Use Bathes Powders’ and 'Ones Sor(?) Cures Worms’ and lots of foxes, some emerging from a van in the background (ill. p.213). She was also a crack shot, even though shooting was still considered an unusual activity for a woman, thought rather 'fast’ and disapproved of by Queen Victoria (according to an equally disapproving Hancock, p.211). She also took photographs; 'the Australasian reported that she had brought home “a series of beautiful views” from the North Island’ after a NZ holiday at the beginning of three months leave in 1893 (quoted Hancock, 212: none illustrated).

Her sense of humour is evident in the cartoons and caricatures she sketched in Victoria (all held by the Hopetoun Papers Trust). Most illustrated in Hancock are of the family, e.g. Hopie and his steward on the voyage to Australia in 1889 and 'The Hoods’ (her sister, brother-in-law and niece who accompanied them to Australia). 'The Hopetoun Family’, an unflattering self-portrait showing her towering over her husband with a smug Hopie behind, is paralleled with an even crueller caricature of the vulgar 'Mayor, Mayoress & Master Mayor of Geelong’ (ink, ill. p.202). She also did straight watercolours, e.g. 'the governor sitting in the sun/ thermometer at 100 in the shade’ and 'Mount Macedon [the gubnatorial mountain residence]. A hot day’ (ill. colour Hancock).

The Hopetouns left Australia in March 1895 after five and a half years in Victoria. They returned in 1901-2 when Lord Hopetoun served as the first Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, for which he was made Marquess of Linlithgow.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007