Granby Calcraft

Granby Hales Calcraft (18 January 180216 January 1855) was a Whig member of parliament for the constituency of Wareham (1831-1832) and a captain in the army (1824-1833). Biography Calcraft was born in St George Hanover Square, London, the son of John Calcraft of Rempstone, Dorset, and Elizabeth Hales, daughter of Sir Thomas Pym Hales. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford University. While at Oxford, it was reported of him by John Stuart Wortley that, ‘little Calcraft has been great fun lately'. Like his father and grandfather before him, Calcraft seemed to have had a passion for the theatre. He purchased a commission to the army in 1824 and was made an unattached captain in 1826. Having been elected to Brooks’s on the 21st of February 1825, it may have been he and not his brother, John, who carried to Lord Lansdowne a message from the Whig meeting at the club in April 1827 urging him not to break off negotiations for joining the Canning administration. However, it is possible he was out of the country at that time, as he certainly served abroad for a while with his regiment. On his return in 1828, Calcraft became enamoured of Sarah Emma Love (1798-1881), a contralto opera singer and actress who had joined the company at Drury Lane theatre from Covent Garden and was known for her role in Cobb’s comic opera, The Siege of Belgrade. On 10th November 1828, they married at St. Pancras church. The marriage was kept secret from his father, who he thought would disapprove, and also from her mother for a brief period of time. Calcraft's father had provided him with an allowance of £1,000 on the condition not to marry beneath his station. Emma, of low birth, learned of this imminent poverty from Stephen Price, manager at Drury Lane, after the marriage and urged Calcraft to keep their situation a secret. Emma refused to cohabit for fear of losing her theatre contract and sending both Calcraft and herself into the "horrors of poverty" as "neither of them [was] so constituted as to be able to endure" such a turn of events. Within months of the marriage Robert Sherard, 6th Earl of Harborough, had renewed a former interest in her, they had been romantically involved since 1824, even as Calcraft sought her assurance that she would join him.