Harry Grey, 8th Earl of Stamford

Who was Harry Grey, 8th Earl of Stamford?

Harry Grey, 8th Earl of Stamford was an English peer.

Harry Grey was born in England, the son of Revd. Harry Grey and Frances Elizabeth Ellis. In 1836 he took Holy Orders in the Church of England.

An Oxford educated man, well-schooled in the Classics, including Latin, Greek, Theology and Philosophy, he was married in Devon in 1844 to the "lower class" Susan Gaydon, but later developed a serious drink and gambling problem, and was sent to the Cape Colony as a remittance man, leaving his wife behind, and receiving a monthly stipend.

Once in the Cape Colony he stayed in the historical Cape Town suburb of Wynberg, and then worked as a miner in Namaqualand. Later he was, by all accounts,a farm labourer just outside the hamlet of Wellington. His first wife died in Devon in 1869. After siring a child, Emma, with Caroline Collins, he remarried in 1872 in Cape Colony. Ann McNamara, his second wife, was suffering from tuberculosis and he engaged his future third wife, Martha Solomon, as a nursemaid. Martha was the daughter of a black Cape slave whom he had met a decade before in the village of Wellington. When his second wife died in 1874 Harry Grey entered into a relationship with Martha which led to the birth of a son, John, in 1879, and a daughter, Frances. He married Martha in 1880 to legitimise the existing two children, and then in 1882 had a further daughter, who would become Lady Mary Grey. The middle daughter of Harry Grey and Martha Solomons died of smallpox at an early age, which coincided with Harry Grey becoming Earl.²