"It not only includes eye-witness accounts, but is also a record of gossip and rumours circulating in the British Army.Born Frances Isabella Locke in Devizes in Wiltshire in 1829, the daughter of Anna Maria Selina "née" Powell (1783–1838) and Wadham Locke (1779–1835), a Wiltshire banker, after the death of her mother in 1838 she moved to live with her eldest brother (also Wadham Locke) at Ashton Gifford House in Wiltshire.