sketcher and amateur photographer, was born in Hanover Square, London on 3 August 1842, eldest son of Anne Amelia née Colville and Francis Jack Needham, Viscount Newry and Morne. On his father’s death in 1851 young Francis succeeded to the viscountcy, becoming heir to his grandfather, the Earl of Kilmorey. He was educated at Eton (1855-60) and Christ Church, Oxford (BA 1864, MA 1867). In 1867 Newry and the Hon. Eliot Yorke were chosen as companions to Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh (Queen Victoria’s second son) for a round-the-world voyage in the Galatea . The three young men were soon bored by the endless speech-making and hand-shaking of the Australian leg of the tour and made amends with their after-hours activities: gambling, sexual dalliance, amateur theatricals and schoolboy pranks. The press, though unwilling to criticise Alfred himself, suggested that Newry and Yorke could well have given lessons in 'fast’ behaviour to the most dissolute colonial youth.
Although Prince Alfred is known to have been both a painter and photographer there is no record of any colonial artwork. Newry, however, is known to have sketched and taken photographs while in Australia. When the royal party was in Melbourne in December 1867 he showed Curtis Candler, the city coroner, his sketchbook and photograph album. Candler noted that 'he [Newry] himself took most of the photographs in the book – all those in fact in which he did not appear’, including 'a very good one taken at the Cape’ of the Prince on an elephant hunt. There were also photographs and sketches of 'some pretty girls – a few colonial’, including one whom 'he had photographed and drawn several times – this was his “Muffin” he told me’. Candler was also shown Newry’s 'drawings of women in Naval uniform’ intended as illustrations for 'The Fairy Toothpick’, a story set on board 'a fairy vessel of war in which all the officers and sailors are women’.
Newry was also something of a caricaturist. Candler recorded seeing Newry’s caricature portraits of members of the royal party, including Yorke, Lieutenant Haig and Oswald Brierly , as well as a humorous sketch of an Aboriginal corroboree witnessed in South Australia. When the Galatea was at Hobart Town in January 1868 Newry offended Chief Justice Sir Valentine Fleming by drawing an unflattering caricature of him during a Government House function. (Fleming, a short man, wore spectacles and had only one eye.) Stanley Leighton noted that Fleming was 'much hurt … [and] complained vehemently to the Governor saying that he had not come there to be quizzed. Colonel Gore Browne hardly appeased him by saying, “He did the same of me”’.
The colonial press increasingly commented on Newry’s supercilious manner. Perhaps significantly, Newry labelled some of his Tasmanian sketches sent to Candler Souvenirs d’un Flâneur . At the fancy dress ball held at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Sydney on 10 March 1868, Newry and the Prince disguised themselves as monks and mingled undetected with guests after the royal party had ostensibly left the ball early. Afterwards Newry celebrated this escapade by being photographed in his monk’s costume with three female members of the Deas Thomson family. The photograph (National Library of Australia), attributed to Helen Lambert or to Lady Jocelyn – who was never in Australia – shows the monk’s robe and cowl to have been the perfect disguise; Newry can be identified only from the handwritten caption.
Newry seems not to have accompanied Alfred on the Galatea 's return visit to the Australian colonies in 1869. He was appointed High Sheriff for County Down in 1871 and served as the Tory member for Newry in 1871-74. He succeeded his grandfather as third Earl of Kilmorey in 1880 and married Ellen Constance Baldock the following year. He died in London of pleurisy and pneumonia on 18 July 1915.
- Writers:
- Callaway, Anita
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
