Content Warning: This article includes detailed discussion of suicide.
This started with my usual cruising for historical cat photos and turned into a research hole.
“Miss Stanhope makes a hobby of cats.”
What hobby? Holding cats while in pretty dresses? Is that a hobby? Does she train the cats? Breed the cats? I wanted to know more about Miss Stanhope.
The only resource I could find for this issue of The Bystander was in a paywalled archive with thumbnails so tiny you can’t see anything but the cover clear enough to know what it is.
Paywalled archives are evil.
So I took to the search engines looking for info on this cat hobby. I found one more photo from this cat hobby photoshoot, but nothing more about anything relating to Miss Ghita Stanhope and cats.
Instead, I found other bits and pieces of a tragically short life.
One large bit is that she was a historian and author who wrote (but didn’t finish, we’ll get to that) a book about her ancestor, Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope. The book, The Life of Charles, Third Earl Stanhope, is not referenced on the Third Earl’s Wikipedia page, but the first page of her book seems to be the unknown source of this depiction of Lord Stanhope.
The book was completed by G. P. Gooch (though not referenced on his Wikipedia page, either, it is listed in this archive) at the request of Miss Stanhope’s parents, because Miss Stanhope committed suicide before she finished writing it.
Miss Stanhope had been nursing her sick mother for years and according to friends and family was suffering from a “nervous breakdown”. In response, her friend Claire Sheradin‘s parents, Morton Frewen (aka “Mortal Ruin”, named so for being shit with money) and his American heiress wife, Clara (Winston Churchill’s aunt), invited her for an extended stay at Brede Place, a house she visited often.
While her hosts were out at their daugther’s home, Ghita (named Gertrude in first NYT article, also another evil paywall, thank you to the friend who bypassed it for me) killed herself inside a locked bedroom with a shotgun and a bootlace.
New York Times, September 11, 1912 (1/2) 
New York Times, September 11, 1912 (2/2) 
New York Times, September 12, 1912 
Wellsville Daily Reporter, September 11, 1912
There are extra details and photos included in this blog that I cannot find sources for, such as a mention of sleeping drugs, but the rest of the story matches similar sources. Included is a newspaper transcript of a note claimed to have been found in her room after she died. Seems an odd thing to fake as this isn’t exactly a famous person and that whole blog is based on newspaper archives.
Brede Place is said to be haunted by The Brede Giant (the stories likely invented by smugglers using the house to keep people away from said smuggling), a monk, a hanged maid named Martha, or maybe a headless man. No stories of Miss Stanhope’s ghost, though.
“Little Ghita Stanhope, a friend of Clare Sheridan’s, “blew her brains out, in the most gruesome way” some six weeks ago. She was frankly demented. She struck me as the most charming young thing conceivable.”
Henry James‘s private papers
But after all that, no answer as to what her cat hobby was. It wasn’t enough for it to be mentioned at the time of her suicide, so she wasn’t exactly famous for cats or anything. I will keep Miss Stanhope and her cats in my thoughts, and perhaps one of us will come across the rest of her story.
