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Credit: National Portrait Gallery.

Augusta Legge nee Finch. Countess, Philanthropist and Chicken Breeder.

Augusta Finch was born on 18 February 1822 in Great Packington, the daughter of Heneage Finch, 5th Earl of Aylesford, and his wife Lady Augusta Sophia Greville. She was primarily raised at Packington Hall and received an education befitting her rank from a Governess. 

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Baptism register. Credit: Ancestry.

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1841 Census. Credit: Ancestry.

Augusta married William Walter Legge, Viscount Lewisham and later 5th Earl of Dartmouth. He was a childhood friend and they married on 9 June 1846 in London. It was the third intermarriage between the Earls of Dartmouth and Aylesford.

 

The couple initially lived in Sandwell, near Birmingham and reportedly had a happy marriage. After her husband succeeded as Earl, she was styled Countess of Dartmouth.

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Marriage Register. Credit: Ancestry.

In 1848 the couple purchased Patshull Hall, near Pattingham, Staffordshire, from the Pigot family and took up residence there. The Hall had been built around 1730 in a park of 340 acres and was landscaped by Capability Brown. The American flag could often be seen flying over the Hall when the Legge family were in residence, as, due to a familial relationship with the American Founding Father George Washington, they had been granted the right to fly the flag! 

 

After it's use as an aristocratic residence, Patshull Hall served as a WW2 rehabilitation centre in the 1940s and then as an orthopaedic hospital until the 1980s. By 1996 the house had suffered extensive decay and had deteriorated so badly that it appeared on the English Heritage list of buildings at risk, but was renovated in 1997. It then operated as a wedding venue until 2015. Today, the Georgian Manor house is a grade II listed building and has been renovated as a private home.

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Credit: Patshull Hall.

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Augusta's husband William Walter Legge. Credit: National Portrait Gallery.

Augusta was a devoted Christian, a dedicated philanthropist and had strong religious principles. 

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In 1853, she founded a school for girls to train as domestic servants at the former family residence in Sandwell, near Birmingham, as she wanted to use the house for a charitable purpose of benefit to the people of the Black Country rather than it be let to tenants. It was an Anglican educational institution, which was let rent free by the Earl and Countess. The school was run firstly by Laetitia Frances Selwyn, the sister of George Augustus Selwyn who was the first (and only) Anglican Bishop of New Zealand and who was later the Bishop of Lichfield. Laetitia's successors expanded the institution to also become a ladies' home and school for middle-class girls, 'who, more or less gently born, were in needy circumstances'. Many of these young ladies were trained as governesses.

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She was involved in local branches of the Girls' Friendly Society, the Ladies' Home Mission Association, the Mothers' Union, and the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society. She paid for a nurse to attend to the poor parishioners of villages near to the family home.

 

Augusta retired to Woodsome Hall, another of the family properties, near Huddersfield, after the death of her husband in 1891. She was now styled the Dowager Countess of Dartmouth. Whilst living at Woodsome Hall she founded a local Mother's Union branch for the diocese of Wakefield and served as the branches diocesan president. In 1892, she established the All Saints' Home for orphaned boys, through the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society, in the neighbouring parish of Almondbury, West Yorkshire. It was maintained as a Cottage Home and could accommodate 6 boys between the ages of 3 and 7. Augusta supervised this home personally and had a motherly relationship with the boys.

As well as her charitable works, during the 1880s Augusta crossbred chickens and developed the Andalusian Bantam from the standard-sized Andalusian breed. They are exact miniatures of the larger birds. 

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When her son William Heneage Legge turned 21, she was proud to have provided all of the birds for the celebration. 

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Credit: ChickenLaws.com

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Credit: The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography.

She died on 1 December 1900, after a fall at her home in Woodsome Hall and was buried 3 days later alongside her husband at Patshull Hall. 

Sources:

  • Ancestry: Census Returns of England and Wales, 1841; Warwickshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1910 and Westminster, London, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1935.

  • ChickenLaws.com.

  • English Heritage.

  • FindaGrave.

  • Geni.com.

  • Hidden Lives Revealed: a virtual archive of children in care 1881-1981.

  • Historic England Archive.

  • How, Frederick Douglas. (1901) Noble Women of Our Time. London: Isbister.

  • The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography.

  • National Library of Australia: Goulburn Evening Penny Post (NSW: 1881-1940)

  • National Portrait Gallery (Great Britain).

  • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  • ThePeerage.

  • Patshull Hall.

  • Roberts, Victoria. (2008) British poultry standards: complete specifications and judging points of all standardized breeds and varieties of poultry as compiled by the specialist breed clubs and recognised by the Poultry Club of Great Britain. Oxford: Blackwell. 

  • Ruvigny, Melville Henry de. (1911) The Blood Royal of Britain: Being a Roll of the Living Descendants of Edward IV and Henry VII, Kings of England, and James III, King of Scotland. London: Melville.

  • Staffordshire Records Office.

  • University of Virginia: Collective Biographies of Women. 

  • Victoria County History. (1976) A History of the County of Stafford, Volume 17, Offlow Hundred . London: Victoria County History.

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