Lady Lucy Smith
(1794-1865)
29 April 1861
Volume 3, page 162, sitting number 3338.
Born in Edinburgh on 20 January 1794 Lady Lucy Smith was the eldest daughter of Alexander Leslie-Melville, 7th Earl of Levin, 6th Earl of Melville. Her mother was Jane née Thornton, daughter of John Thornton, a British merchant and philanthropist who became immensely wealthy through investment in the North Sea Russia trade.
On 14 July 1824 she married the banker Henry Smith, son of the Nottingham banker and Tory politician Samuel Smith.
The couple appear on the 1861 census living at Wilford House in Nottingham with seven servants.
Lady Lucy Smith died at Wilford on 23 December 1865, at the age of 71. The following obituary appeared in the Bedfordshire Mercury (6 January 1866).
‘Her Ladyship was the eldest daughter of Alexander, ninth [sic] earl of Levin and Melville. Her father, while Viscount Balgonie, lived part of the year at Balgonie Castle, Fife, and part of the year at Edinburgh. It was in the latter place that she was born, on the 26th of January, 1794. Her mother was the daughter of John Thornton, of Clapham, Esquire, a name well known known in his day in connexion with every labour of evangelic philanthropy. […] Lady Lucy’s marriage, on the 14th of July, 1824, to Henry Smith, of Wilford House, Esquire, one of the senior partners in the Nottingham bank of Samuel Smith, and Co., while it placed her under the protection and guidance of one whose heart went wholly with her in her self-dedication to her Saviour, greatly enlarged her means and opportunities of service to all, but especially to her humble friends and neighbours. […] Lady Lucy Smith was by early education and cordial attachment a Presbyterian of the Church of Scotland, and she never, even after she had taken up her permanent abode in England, gave in her adhesion to any other ecclesiastical body, though when the “Disruption” took place in 1843, her affections followed Chalmers and the many other excellent men who headed the Free Church movement. […] Amongst the numerous charities to which her time and her purse were devoted, in none was she more deeply interest than in the House of Refuge for females in Chaucer-street. On the 13th instant she attended a meeting of that institution for devotional purposes. The room was very hot, and it was in passing from it through the chill outer air to her carriage that she caught the cold which brought on congestion of the lungs.’