John Lucie-Smith

Sir John Lucie-Smith III, was a British Guyanese lawyer who served as Chief Justice of Jamaica.

Early life

He was born in 1825 in Demerara, British Guiana. He was the son of lawyer John Lucie-Smith Jr., and Martha Bean. Among his siblings were sister, Martha Agnes Jean Lucie-Smith, and brother, Sir William Frederick Haynes-Smith, who variously served as Attorney General of British Guiana, Governor of Antigua and Barbuda and the Bahamas, and High Commissioner of Cyprus. His father lived in Georgetown and had a plantation in Vreed en Hoop.
His paternal grandparents were John Lucie-Smith Sr. and Anna Agnes Lucie-Smith. His maternal grandparents were Charles Bean of Richmond, Surrey, and Magdalena Susanna van der Linde.

Career

Lucie-Smith trained for the law at the Middle Temple in London, where he was called to the bar in 1849. He returned to practise as a lawyer in British Guiana and was appointed Solicitor-General of the country in 1852. In 1855, he was appointed Attorney-General of British Guiana, serving until 1859.
Appointed Chief Justice of Jamaica in 1869 he was awarded CMG in the 1869 Birthday Honours and knighted in 1870.

Personal life

On 1 March 1851 he married Marie van Waterschoodt, the eldest daughter of Jean B. van Waterschoodt. Together, they were the parents of:

John Barkley Lucie-Smith, the Postmaster General of Jamaica from 1905 to 1915; he married Catherine Peynado Burke, the granddaughter of Samuel Constantine Burke, in 1884.
Sir Alfred Van Waterschoodt Lucie-Smith, also a colonial judge; he married Rose Alice Aves, seventh daughter of Edward Leopold Aves in 1885. After her death, he married Mary Meta Ruth Palmer Ross, a daughter of Sir David Palmer Ross, in 1901.

He died at Chipton, in West Worthing, Sussex on 9 July 1883.

Descendants

Through his son Alfred, he was a grandfather of John Lucie-Smith, who also served as a judge and was Chief Justice of Sierra Leone.
Through his son John, he was a grandfather of Euan Lucie-Smith, who was one of the first mixed-heritage infantry officers in a regular British Army regiment, and the first killed in World War I.