Dates

• Existence: 1854 - 1946

Biography

Lady Emma Cecilia 'Ida' Darwin (1854-1946) was the daughter of the civil servant Thomas Henry Farrer (1819-1899), 1st Baron Farrer and his first wife, Frances Erskine (1825–1870), whose father was the historian and orientalist William Erskine (1773–1852). The Farrer family lived at Bryanston Square in London and Abinger Hall in Surrey, where Ida and her father shared a love of botany. Thomas Farrer, the Board of Trade's first Permanent Secretary, was a keen amateur orchid breeder and in the early 1860s he corresponded with Charles Darwin and the two men became friends. In 1880 Ida married Sir Horace Darwin (1851-1928), civil engineer, fifth son of Charles Darwin. They had three children: Erasmus (1881-1915) who died at Ypres during the First World War, Ruth Frances [Rees-Thomas] (1883-1973), and Emma Nora [Barlow] (1885-1989).
Ida and Horace Darwin lived at ‘The Orchard’, a large house on Huntingdon Road in Cambridge. Ida joined the Ladies Dining Society, a private women’s discussion club, which championed women’s education and had a life-long association with the provision of mental health services and social work in Cambridgeshire.
Ida died on 5 July 1946. In 1962 her daughters Ruth Rees-Thomas and Nora Barlow donated their family home 'The Orchard' along with Ida’s celebrated garden, to help found Cambridge’s third women’s college, now known as Murray Edwards College.

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