Purvis Farquhar » (1860-1929)

Personal data  

• She was born in the year 1860 in Bayswater, Middlesex, England.

  1881 British Census data.

• She died on December 10, 1929 in Epsom, Surrey, England, she was 69 years old.
• A child of Alfred George Farquhar Bernard and Elisabeth Antoinette Moore

Household of

Notes about

In 1881 Esther was staying with her brother Alfred Bernard at 75 Queens Road, West Ham, Essex, England. Status Unmarried, no occupation. [From 1881 British Census data, via LDS on web.]

After
her brother Henry took up the position of Assistant-Chaplain to St Andrew's church in Moscow in 1882, Esther went over to Moscow to act as Henry's housekeeper. She met and married Allan Hopper in Mos
cow. The Hoppers were successful industrialists, with an iron foundry in Moscow, who lost everything in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Allan's father, William Hopper, moved to Moscow from Scotland in
1842.

"The clergyman, Henry M. Bernard aslo had his sister out from England to keep house for him & there was plenty of fun & social intercourse among the British Colony." ........ "Maida Mirri
elees did not very long keep house for her brother before she became engaged to the Rev. Henry Barnard & they were married (in Vienna in November 1883). Esther Bernard naturally had to go back to her
mother but she then became engaged to Allan." From: Lucy Hopper. Memories of her youth 1870-1893. Transcribed in March 2000 by her grandson, Charles Cazalet, with photographs added from the family a
rchives. 2nd edition 2003.

'While we were in London, Mamma and Flo had gone to make personal acquaintance with Esther Bernard's mother [Elizabeth Antoinette (Moor) Bernard] who lived in London
but was more or less an invalid. Esther had spent the Winter in Germany after Harry [Henry] Bernard's wedding (to Maida Mirrielees) but she had come back to London to see to her Trousseau & she & Alla
n (Hopper) were to be married in the Autumn (1885). Her eldest brother, Frank (Francis Gumm) Bernard, had come back from Singapore on holiday & intended to give her away." From: Lucy Hopper. Memories
of her youth 1870-1893. Transcribed in March 2000 by her grandson, Charles Cazalet, with photographs added from the family archives. 2nd edition 2003.

One of the photos in the above publicat
ion shows a Hopper family group together with Frank Bernard and Esther Bernard, taken on holiday in Colwyn Bay, Wales, UK, in August 1885.

"Allan had taken a self-contained house on the Donskaya
. It was a wooden house (6rooms, kitchen & bathroom) with a nice garden in the front." ....... "Mamma and Allan were very busy getting the house ready, buying furniture & getting curtains made & Mamma
took endless trouble over it."....."Allan started for England about a fortnight before the date fixed for the wedding in London & Syd was to come down from Bolton to be best man." ....... "About 3 we
eks later Allan & Esther returned from their honeymoon & found their house clean & tidy & a cook & house parlour maid installed. On the day they arrived we had a family dinner ready for them in their
house & Grusha (Hopper family nursemaid/old retainer) had been over to teach the parlour maid to lay the table "English fashion" as she called it. Their heavy loggage did not arrive from England until
later but by Christmas (1885) they were quite comfortably settled." From: Lucy Hopper. Memories of her youth 1870-1893. Transcribed in March 2000 by her grandson, Charles Cazalet, with photographs
added from the family archives. 2nd edition 2003.

After her husband's suicide in 1810, Esther left Moscow and settled in England.

"When Granny Hopper first came over to England to oversee
the furthr schooling of her family, she lived in a large redbrick Edwardian house in Ashstead called 'The Cane', which was still there in the thirties. The girls were sent to boarding school in Eastb
ourne and the boys went to St John's School in Leatherhed." .... (Barbara Dods 'Recollections' December 2000.

Esther Hopper was living in Epsom in Gwynne House when her granddaughter Barbara (ag
ed 3) left for Kenya in 1927.

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