She was born Mabel Boisragon Winter in Loughton, Essex, England on 18 January 1867, the daughter of William Henry O’Brien Winter and his wife Fanny Cheney Winter (née Hart.) The name Boisragon appears to have come from the surname of one of the witnesses at her parents' wedding in 1861.
The 1871 census return gives us a good snapshot of the family into which she was born. The occupation of her father, then aged 39, was listed as “Civil Service”, and her mother was aged 32. She herself was now aged 4. She had a younger brother, Clifford Boardman Winter aged 2; an older sister, Ethel Winslow Winter, aged 5; and an older brother, Edgar Francis Latimer Winter, aged 8. They lived at 157 White Hall Lane, Woodford, Essex, and were prosperous enough to employ a governess, a housemaid and a cook.
By the time of the 1881 census the family had shrunk to father (now working for the G.P.O.), mother, and sister Ethel (1), who were living at 12 Royal Crescent, Melcombe Regis, Weymouth, Dorset. No servants are listed. Brother Clifford (now aged 12) was at Eton, boarding with an uncle, and brother Edgar (now aged 18) was at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. The education of their sons may well explain the lack of servants at this time. But where was the now 14 years old Mabel ? She seems to feature nowhere in the 1881 census, and why was she not at home with her parents and older sister ? After the census of 1871, Mabel seems to disappear from the online records until her marriage to Sainthill Eardley–Wilmot in India in 1891, of which more later. Meanwhile, the careers of her brothers may well explain her appearance in India and, perhaps, some of the photographs used in her Rubaiyat of 1912.
Edgar was appointed to the Indian Civil Service in 1881, serving in the North–Western Provinces (as they were then known), Punjab and Oudh, as Magistrate and Collector. In 1890, at Naini Tal, a hill station and administrative centre in northern India, he married Rose Mary Noon Partridge. (Naini Tal features quite prominently in what follows.) He was Secretary to the Government in 1898–9, a member of the Legislative Council in 1905 and held the post of Officiating Commissioner in 1907. He retired in 1909 and returned, with his wife, to live in England. He died in Bude, Cornwall, in 1948.
Clifford enlisted in the army in 1890, and was seconded as a Lieutenant in the Lincolnshire Regiment to the Indian Staff Corps in 1892. By 1901 he had been promoted to Captain. In 1903 he became a Freemason of the Quetta Lodge (then in India, now in Pakistan), and in the same year he was appointed to the post of Consul at Turbat–i–Haidari in the Razavi Khorasan province north–eastern Iran – Omar country, of course. He seems to have held this post until about 1908. In 1907, in Karachi, he married May Cooper. He achieved the rank of Lieutenant Colonel by 1916, and in that same year was awarded the D.S.O. (Distinguished Service Order.) In 1917 he was awarded the C.M.G. (the Order of St. Michael and St. George – C.M.G. being the initials of “Companion of Michael and George.”) He died back in England, at Ascot, Berkshire, in 1930.
To return to Mabel’s marriage, now, as indicated above she married Sainthill Eardley–Wilmot in India, in 1891. He had joined the Indian Forest Service at Lucknow in Northern India in 1873, serving in the North–Western Provinces and Oudh, but was to work extensively throughout India during his career, with a spell in Burma. In this field he achieved such a level of success in prudent management and conservation work that he was promoted to the post of Inspector General of Forests in India in 1903. He was knighted for his services in 1911, his wife then becoming Lady Eardley–Wilmot.
How the two met is not clear. In 1884 Sainthill had married Emma Elizabeth Casey at the above–mentioned Naini Tal, one of the many bases from which he worked, some 200 miles north–west of Lucknow, and the place in which Mabel’s brother Edgar was to marry in 1890, as noted above. In 1886 they had a daughter, Helen Jessie Eardley–Wilmot, who was baptised (and born ?) in Bareilly, some 90 miles south of Naini Tal and 155 miles north–west of Lucknow (see Map.) Emma seems to have returned to England, possibly for reasons of health, for she died in Bournemouth in 1890, aged only 46 (2). One assumes that his relationship with Mabel blossomed after that. Given the Naini Tal connection, it is tempting to assume that Mabel travelled out to India to visit her brother Edgar, possibly even to attend his wedding, and that she met Sainthill around then. But of course that is pure speculation at this stage – after all, they may have first met in England when he was on furlough there. What is a fact is that they married in Lucknow (where Sainthill had begun his career) on 12 December 1891 and two years later they had a daughter, Mabel Iris Eardley–Wilmot, born – here it is again – in Naini Tal, and who seems to have been sent back to England to live with her aunt Ethel (1). Some of her youthful line drawings were used in two of her father’s books, The Life of a Tiger (1911) and The Life of an Elephant (1912).
In 1908 Sainthill retired and they returned to England. From at least 1920 they lived in Tollgate Cottage, Remenham, Berkshire, where Sainthill died on 13 November 1929, aged 77. A lengthy obituary of him appeared in The Times on 14 November 1929 (p.19, col.2.) Mabel lived on in the same address until 18 August 1958, when she died in a nursing home in Maidenhead, aged 91. Her death was reported in the deaths column on the front page of The Times on 20 August 1958.
Mabel’s claim to fame, of course, is as an early woman photographer, her photographs being used in her husband’s book Forest Life and Sport in India, published by Edward Arnold, London in 1910, shortly after their return from India. Figs.1a & 1b are two examples. Of more interest to us here though is the use of 32 of her photographs in Sir Edwin Arnold’s book The Light of Asia, published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., London, in 1908 – Figs.2a & 2b are two examples; 40 of her photographs in Laurence Hope’s book Songs from the Garden of Kama, published by William Heinemann, London, in 1909 – Figs.3a & 3b are two examples; and, of course, 38 of her photographs in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., London, in 1912, which used FitzGerald’s first version – Fig.4a (illustrating quatrain 1), Fig.4b (illustrating quatrain 16), Fig.4c (illustrating quatrain 21), Fig. 4d (illustrating quatrain 24) & Fig.4e (illustrating quatrain 59) are five examples.
[The images can be browsed here.]
I have to confess that I am not much enthralled by most of her photographs, which, in The Light of Asia and Songs from the Garden of Kama, are mainly landscapes that relate to various phrases used in the text, without any attempt to elucidate their particular context, and with little or no symbolic message, though they do make clever use of things like sunlight streaming through trees, or reflections in water. Even in The Rubaiyat most of her illustrations relate to phrases in their respective quatrains but show little imaginative or symbolic content. She does, however, feature some adventurous symbolic content in a few – but only a few – of her photographs in The Rubaiyat – the ghost images associated with quatrains 42 (Fig.4f) & 49 (Fig.4g), for example, the shadows associated, somewhat clumsily, with the Magic Shadow–show of quatrain 46 (Fig.4h) and the moving finger image with quatrain 51 (Fig.4i.) In this last the shadowy finger has traced out the word “qesmat”, the Persian form of the English “kismet” meaning fate or destiny (3).
A review in The London Evening Standard on 28 May 1912 (p.5) is of interest here:
The Persian poet was not thinking of Kodaks when he wrote about a magic shadow show, played in a box whose candle is the sun. Nor could he have had the faintest premonition of the English rendering of his Rubaiyat adorned with photographs. This is what Lady Eardley–Wilmot gives us. The text is that of FitzGerald’s first edition, and the illustrations are reproduced from plates which could only have been exposed under an Eastern sky. It would be more satisfactory, perhaps, had Lady Eardley–Wilmot stated exactly where each photograph was taken. In more than one the landscape, the architecture, or other details might be Persian or Indian; while others will suggest a doubt whether the scene should be laid in Nishapur or Babylon. But the general effect is distinctly pleasing. Such views as that of the snow upon desert’s dusty face – a glimpse, it may be, of the lower slopes of the Elburs range, of the Sultan’s turret caught in a noose of light [Fig.4a], of the battered caravanserai [Fig.4b], of the courts where Jamshed gloried and drank deep, of the potter thumping his wet clay [Fig.4e], tell the reader more about Omar Khayyam’s environment than whole chapters of commentary.
It is certainly true that it would be interesting to know where exactly some of these photographs were taken, for it would tell us much about Mabel’s travels – in India with her husband or brother Edgar; or in Persia, perhaps when visiting her brother Clifford during his consulship at Turbat–i–Haidari. But alas, we have no details, though the text of Forest Life and Sport in India shows that she must have travelled extensively within that country, as is evident even in the captions of the illustrations. If there is a Mabel Eardley–Wilmot Archive somewhere, I do not know where it is, but it is to be hoped that her original photographs, along with notes on them, and perhaps diaries, have survived somewhere.
No books using her photographs seem to have been published after The Rubaiyat of 1912, except for those used in her husband’s posthumously published book, Leaves from Indian Forests, a collection of his articles previously published in the likes of The Field. It was published by Edward Arnold & Co., in 1930. So what was she doing after that ? The following clip from The Aberdeen Press and Journal for 14 November 1929 (p.7) gives us an unexpected lead:
Sir Sainthill Eardley Wilmot K.C.L.E. died suddenly yesterday after returning to his home, Tolegate (sic) Cottage, Henley–on–Thames, after a drive. Lady Eardley–Wilmot, who is a well–known breeder of cats, was in London at the Cats’ Show when her husband died.
Now, one has to be careful in tracing the activities of “Lady Eardley–Wilmot” without the Mabel, as there were at least three of them in circulation at that time. But her long residence at Tollgate Cottage, Remenham (Henley–on–Thames), Berkshire, serves as a useful guide. Thus we learn that “Lady Eardley–Wilmot, of Henley” was a successful exhibitor in a Championship Cat Show in Reading in October 1924 (Reading Standard, 25 October 1924, p.6) and that her cat “Champion Gentleman of Henley” was pictured (without his owner) in The Daily Mirror on 28 January 1927 (p.17.) The Daily Mirror, on 7 October 1933 (p.14) also furnishes us with one of the few known photographs of Lady Eardley–Wilmot (Fig.5), shown with her cat, Ebbisham Blessing, looking disdainfully away from the camera.
It is curious, given her love of cats, that one of her husband’s ‘notable’ achievements in India, recorded in the obituary of him in The Times, mentioned above, was that “he was a great sportsman, and during his service in the United Provinces and Burma, no fewer than 130 tigers fell to his gun.” Not the sort of thing would advertise today, and rightly so, but then times do change.
Again in The Daily Mirror, on 27 September 1938 (p.11), a reporter recorded his visit to see her at her home:
Since I wanted a peaceful afternoon I drove down to Henley and there in an old cottage right on the bank of the river by the bridge, I saw Lady Eardley–Wilmot, who lives there with her large family of thirty or forty, I am not sure which.
Sixteen of them, at any rate, are champion Persian cats, and the rest are Lovebirds – Budgerigars – of all colours, from white to the brightest yellow. If ever there was a cat–and–bird life going on, surely it is here.
The exhibiting of her cats continued after the Second World War, for in the Notts and Derby Cat Club Show on 28 November 1945, out of nearly 200 cats on show, hailing from all parts of the country:
Lady M. Eardley–Wilmot, of Henley–on–Thames, who was present, won the “Victory Cup” for the best exhibit in the show, with her male cat, Southway Nicholas. (Nottingham Journal, 29 November 1945, p.3.)
It was all a long way from India, Persia and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, though perhaps one can argue that her beloved Persian cats do form a link of sorts.
Note 1: In 1891 Ethel married a tea merchant called Frank Watson Robinson. In the 1901 census they were living at 24 Parchmore Road, Croydon, with their three children, a cousin, their niece, Iris. E. Wilmot (then aged 7, and born in Nainatal (sic), India), plus two servants. Iris E. Wilmot is clearly Mabel Iris Eardley–Wilmot. Ethel died in Broadstairs, Kent in 1908. Iris married George H. Dummett in London in1922, and died in Newbury, Berkshire in 1980.
Note 2: I suspect that Helen Jessie, returned to England with her mother, though I have found no proof of this. Certainly she died, unmarried, in Uckfield, Sussex, in 1963.
Note 3: My thanks to Barney Rickenbacker for translating this.
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