Lady Mary Kirkham Yarde-Buller (1849-1904): Beauty, Royal Titles, and Scandal end in a Sanitarium

Plot 6, Lot 172, Grave 3

Once the toast of San Francisco drawing rooms, Lady Mary Kirkham Yarde-Buller burned brightly, extravagantly—and at last, alone.

She arrived in this world wrapped in privilege and promise, born in 1849 to one of California’s most powerful pioneer families. Lady Mary Kirkham Yarde-Buller—known in her youth simply as Leilah Kirkham—was raised amid wealth, diplomacy, and social ambition, the daughter of General Ralph Kirkham, a man whose name still clings to streets and institutions like a civic watermark. From the beginning, hers was a life meant to be admired, envied, and watched.

And watched she was.

In the 1870s and ’80s, Leilah Kirkham reigned as one of San Francisco’s celebrated belles, a striking young woman whose beauty and bearing drew suitors like moths to gaslight. Marriage carried her across the Atlantic and into the English aristocracy, where she acquired the title Lady Yarde-Buller and a husband whose name promised stability, respectability, and restraint. None of it lasted.

The union collapsed amid whispers of incompatibility, financial recklessness, and emotional instability. Divorce followed—still a scandal in both England and America—and Lady Yarde-Buller returned to public view not as a contrite exile, but as a woman determined to live loudly, lavishly, and on her own terms. Newspapers tracked her movements with thinly veiled fascination, chronicling her travels, her feuds, and her increasingly erratic behavior. 

Money flowed through her hands as if it were water. She spent freely, generously, and often inexplicably—at one point accused of flinging coins into public streets, an act that delighted onlookers and horrified relatives in equal measure. Lawsuits followed. Guardianship petitions were filed. Sisters, in-laws, and attorneys squared off in courtrooms over allowances, arrears, and the uncomfortable question of Lady Yarde-Buller’s mental competence.

There was a second marriage—brief, troubled, and ill-fated—adding another chapter to her reputation as a woman forever at odds with convention and consequence. Each legal skirmish seemed to tighten the net around her independence, as relatives and judges alike tried to rein in a life they no longer understood, and perhaps never had.

By the turn of the century, the glitter had faded. Lady Yarde-Buller drifted between Europe and California, her once-famous beauty dulled by illness and exhaustion. In November 1904, the story ended quietly and grimly: death in a sanitarium in Livermore, far from the salons and ballrooms where she had once commanded every eye.

The newspapers were merciless and fascinated to the last, recounting her “strange and dramatic career” with the same appetite that had followed her triumphs decades earlier. The belle of San Francisco society had become a cautionary tale—of privilege without peace, freedom without anchor, and a woman whose refusal to live small made her impossible to contain.

Lady Mary Kirkham Yarde-Buller left no quiet legacy. She left headlines, court records, and a life that flickered brilliantly before collapsing into shadow. In death, as in life, she remained impossible to ignore.

Sources: San Francisco Call Bulletin (Nov. 16, 1904, pp. 1–2); San Francisco Examiner (Apr. 14, 1898); Oakland Enquirer (Apr. 16, 1896); San Francisco Call Bulletin (Aug. 27, 1899).