Miss Fletcher
(1840-1901)
20 May 1862

Volume 6, page 335, sitting number 8209.

Given the context of the album, this is probably Miss Isabella (Isobel) Fletcher Fletcher, the daughter of the alpaca importer and county magistrate, John Charles Fletcher. Her father was born John Jack at Elgin in Morayshire and only changed his surname to Fletcher after her birth. Born on 6 August 1840, she was baptised as Isabella Fletcher Jack at St Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Liverpool on 17 September 1840

At the time of the 1861 census, she was living with her parents at Dale House, Madehurst. Although there were four other Fletcher daughters, Isabella is the only one who would have been the age of this sitter at the time that this portait was taken. Moreover, the Silvy daybooks identify her as 'Miss Fletcher,' using the nineteenth-century convention of omitting the initial from the name of the eldest daughter. 

In 1867 she married the barrister-at-law Archibald Levin Smith (later Sir Archibald Levin Smith), who was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1860. Her husband, who rowed for Cambridge three times in the boat race while at university, suffered from the pituitary disorder acromegaly, which caused him to grow to nearly 7 feet in height. The family lived at Salt Hill in Chichester, and at 40 Cadogan Place in London. Archibald Levin Smith became Judge of the High Court of Justice (Queen's Bench Division) in 1883 and was subsequently knighted. In 1900 he was appointed Master of the Rolls. 

Lady Smith drowned in the River Spey on 26 August 1901, the eve of her husband's birthday, during a visit to Wester Elschies House, the estate of their son-in-law James William Hamilton Grant at Aberlour in Morayshire. Sir Archibald died at Aberlour less than two months later, on 20 October 1901, at the age of 65. 'Sir Archibald, whose retirement from the Bench was only officially announced on Friday night, had been unwell for a considerable period, but his illness became more pronounced since the tragic death of his wife, whose body was recently found in the Spey' (The Globe, 21 October 1901). 'The terrible event had a disastrous influence on his lordship's health' (St James's Gazette, 21 October 1901).

The following year their younger son Geoffrey Smith also drowned, near Johannesburg in South Africa, aged only 29.

[From an album compiled by Rose Isabella Susan Preston (born 1842), later the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Ethelred Shuttleworth. At the time that the album was compiled, she was living at Madehurst Lodge, Madehurst, Sussex.]