Place Name
Frances Elizabeth Jocelyn (née Cowper; 1820 – March 26, 1880), Viscountess Jocelyn, was sister – or possibly half-sister – to Emily, wife of Anthony Ashley-Cooper the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, whose family owned Shaftesbury House, previously Rosedale Cottage, between 1805 and 1866. It was the 7th Earl who sold the land for development and named the subsequent roads after members of the family. Lady Frances married Robert Jocelyn, Viscount Jocelyn, the son and heir of the 3rd Earl of Roden, in 1841, and became a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria later that year. The couple went on to have five children. Frances herself was born as the youngest daughter of Peter Cowper, 5th Earl Cowper and his wife Emily Lamb. (However, it has long been rumoured that both she and her brother William were fathered by Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, whom Lady Cowper married in 1839, after her first husband’s death.) Lady Frances’s husband Lord Jocelyn, who was an army captain was staying in the Tower of London in preparation for departure to the Crimea when he contracted cholera and later died. The tragic turn of events devastated his young widow who returned from Northern Ireland where she had been staying. As a widow she turned to photography, focusing on domesticity, a subject that was common for women photographers in the Victorian era. Lord Jocelyn had a home in Kew. This road was featured on the estate plan of 1869.
