Mary Ethel Harcourt, Viscountess HarcourtGBE
(néeBurns; 26 August 1874 – 7 January 1961) was an American-born British aristocrat and philanthropist.
Early life
Mary Ethel was born on 26 August 1874 in Paris, France. She was a daughter of American banker Walter Hayes Burns (1838–1897) and his wife, Mary Lyman (née Morgan) Burns (1844–1919), who lived at 69 Brook Street in Grosvenor Square, London and North Mymms Park in the English county of Hertfordshire.[1] She had two older siblings, William Burns, who died young, and American-born British art collector Walter Spencer Morgan Burns (lord of the Manor of North Mymms, who in 1907 married Ruth Evelyn Cavendish-Bentinck,[2] a daughter of William and Elizabeth (née Livingston) Cavendish-Bentinck).[3][4]
Through her, the Harcourt family acquired the famous "Harcourt emeralds".[6] According to her husband's obituary in The New York Times, she was "very popular, and more than doubled her husband's social successes, which were an asset to past Liberal Cabinets."[7]
Hon. Barbara Vernon Harcourt (1905–1961), who married Robert Jenkinson in 1927. They divorced she remarried William James Baird in 1937. She died in 1961, by self-inflicted gunshot wound, a few months after her husband's death.[13]
Lord Harcourt died in his sleep at his London town house at 69, Brook Street (now the Savile Club) in the early hours of 24 February 1922, aged 59.[14] He had taken an overdose of a sleeping draught, and there were rumours of suicide following accusations of sexual impropriety by Edward James, a young Etonian who later became an important collector of surrealist and other contemporary art. James's mother spread the story in society although the accusations remained unknown by the wider public for fifty years.[15]
