Place Name
Sophia Johnstone (1785 – 1841), the Duchess of Cannizzaro (note the spelling), was a tour de force of the Georgian age. She mixed beauty with wit, and as the heiress to George Johnstone (a Scot who was a governor of West Florida and a director of the East India Company), had oodles of cash to boot. She and her brother, also called George, moved to Wimbledon sometime in the early 19thCentury and when her brother died in 1813, inherited the family fortune. She wasted no time in making the most of all the freedoms his passing offered. Sophia soon married the “good-looking, intelligent, and of high birth” Francis Platamone, Count St Antoni. The marriage gave the impoverished Sicilian aristocrat an income and her a title, initially as Countess and later, when he became the Duke of Cannizzaro, Duchess. The couple had a son, also called George, but he died in childhood. In 1817, three years after marrying, the couple moved into Warren House using it as their country home. She indulged in her “all-absorbing interest” of music, becoming a great patron of musicians and building up her own music library. They entertained lavishly – attendees included the Duke of Wellington and Mrs Fitzherbert, mistress of King George IV – but they clearly looked out of place in late Georgian society circles, being described as “two most colourful characters” (code for oddballs). The diarist Charles Greville later wrote: “The other day died the Duchess of Cannizzaro, a woman of rather amusing notoriety whom the world laughed with and laughed at… She was a Miss Johnstone and got from her brother a large fortune; very short and fat, with rather a handsome face, totally uneducated, but full of humour, vivacity and natural drollery, at the same time passionate and capricious… Soon after the Brother’s death she married the count San Antonio (who was afterwards made Duke of Cannizzaro) a good-looking intelligent but penniless Sicilian of high birth, who was pretty successful in all ways in society here. He became disgusted with her however, and went off to Italy, on a separate allowance which she made him. After a few years he returned to England, and they lived together again; but he not only became more disgusted than before, but he had in the meantime formed a liaison in Milan with a very distinguished woman there, once a magnificent beauty but now as old and as large as his own wife, and to her he was very anxious to return. This was Madame Visconti… Accordingly, San Antonio took occasion to elope (by himself) from some party of pleasure at which he was present with his spouse, and when she found out that he had gone off without notice of returning, she fell into violent fits of grief… and then set off in pursuit of her faithless lord. She got to Dover, where the sight of the rolling billows terrified her so much that after three days of doubt whether she should cross the water or not, she resolved to return and weep away her vexation in London. Not long afterwards however she plucked up courage and taking advantage of a smooth sea she ventured over the Strait, and set on to Milan, if not to recover her fugitive better self, at all events to terrify her rival and disturb their joys. The advent of the Cannizzaro woman was to the Visconti like the irruption of the Huns of old. She fled to a villa near Milan, which she proceeded to garrison and fortify, but finding that the other was not provided with any implements for a siege, and did not venture to stir from Milan, she ventured to return to the city, and for some times these ancient Heroines drove about the town glaring defiance and hate at each other, which was the whole amount of the hostilities that took place between them. Finding her husband was irrecoverable, she at length got tired of the hopeless pursuit, and resolved to return home, and console herself with her music and whatever other gratifications she could command. Not long after, She took into keeping a strapping young Italian, a third-rate singer at some small theatre in Italy, who came over here on speculation and found this if not the most agreeable from the nature of the work the most profitable business he could engage in… The worst part of the story was that this profligate blackguard bullied and plundered her without mercy or shame, and She had managed very nearly to ruin herself before her death. What she had left, she bequeathed to her husband, notwithstanding his infidelities and his absence. (The Duke of Cannizzaro only enjoyed his inheritance a few months as he died at Como in October 1841). But her story did not end there. Richard Milward in Wimbledon Past takes up the story following her death: “William Mason, acting as enumerator for the census that summer, called at the house he found only servants there. So on his form, with no owner to record, he gave the place a name – Cannazerro House. The name somehow stuck in local directories, finishing in 1874 with the present spelling Cannizaro.” A major fire at the beginning of the 20thCentury destroyed much of the house but it was rebuilt and extended to its current arrangement. In the 1920s Cannizaro House was owned by Admiral Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax. He sold it to the Wilson family, its last private owner. In 1947, the house and gardens were sold to Wimbledon Borough Council. The gardens were opened to the public shortly afterwards and the house was for a time used as a nursing home. The London Borough of Merton sold the house in the 1980s and it was subsequently converted to its current use as a hotel. Cannizaro Park was the home to a bust of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, created by Hilda Seligman. Selassie stayed in Wimbledon during his exile from Ethiopia in 1936, staying at Seligman’s nearby family home. The statue was installed in Cannizaro Park after Seligman’s home, Lincoln House, was demolished in 1957. However, the bust was destroyed in June 2020 by a crowd of around 100 protestors, thought to have been linked to unrest in Ethiopia following the shooting of Hachalu Hundessa the previous day.
