Lady Mary Fraser

Mary Fraser was the only daughter of Alasdair Fraser, Lord Saltoun. The family lived in Philorth House, Fraserburgh, and this sketch of the house and policies may be by her.

She was very fond of her four brothers, and they revelled in their remote connection with Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat (1668-1747), the last nobleman to be beheaded on Tower Hill in London in 1747 for his role in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion.

Thousands of these prints were made from Hogarth’s sketch; this one is a family treasure!

Mary was the toast of London: she married Lieutenant-Commander John Codrington during the First World War, only to be widowed in 1918, just as the war was ending. This velvet covered folder records their brief union. Their letters have been presented to the Codrington family.

After the war, she married Arthur Wardlaw Ramsay and they lived at Tillicoultry as Whitehill was due to be sold.

They then moved to Devon to live in Awliscombe House, near Honiton, which had been made available to them by the Codringtons. During the war, British troops and soldiers from the nearby US base were quartered on them intermittently. A brief spell in London followed, so their daughters could do ‘the season’. Mary took on a flat in South Kensington after Arthur’s death. This photo shows her with her granddaughter Celia Heneage. She kept in touch with her Scottish relatives; happily, her brother Alasdair and wife Dodo lived nearby, in Cross Deep, Twickenham. He was a member of the House of Lords. It was on one of her journeys North to visit Scottish relatives that she died on 11 August 1969, in a motorway accident. She was buried in the family plot at Whitehill Mains.