Richard Smith (merchant)


Richard Smith was an English merchant in the West Indies trade, and a director of the East India Company.

Life

Smith was born in Whitehaven, then in Cumberland, or Appleby, Westmorland. He was a merchant and slave owner in the West Indies. When he moved back to England from Barbados, where he was a plantation owner, he brought five enslaved people with him.
Smith's business assets included a warehouse in Cheapside, and Lys Farm near Bramdean in Hampshire, once used for cattle-breeding. Having bought the farm in 1769, he began to transform it into a gentlemanly estate, Brockwood Park, building a country house; a wing was added to the house in 1774, and at the end of his life it was a family home. Since the 1960s Brockwood Park has been the site of the Krishnamurti Centre.
Smith died on 13 October 1776.

Legacy

Smith's will left a number of enslaved persons, by name, to his grandchildren. The drafting of the will was intended to keep a substantial estate in trust for these grandchildren; but the effect was otherwise. It was the subject of Chancery proceedings until 1813, when the estate was much diminished. This case has been suggested as one of the inspirations for Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Charles Dickens's Bleak House.
Benjamin Smith, the younger son, bought sugar plantations in 1781, to provide income from the trust arising from the will. Covered by the will was the advowson for St Mary's Church, Islington, which Richard Smith had purchased in 1771.

Family

With his first wife Elizabeth Crow, widow of Nathaniel Crow or Crowe of Barbados, Smith had three children:
  • Richard II, who was Rector of Islington, and married Elizabeth Mary Mapp of Barbados — they had two children;
  • Benjamin, who married Charlotte Turner in 1765 — they had 12 children;
  • Mary who married twice, having three children with her first husband William Berney of Barbados, and five with her second, Thomas Dyer.
Smith had a step-daughter Mary, from Elizabeth Crow's first marriage: she married John Robinson. After Elizabeth's death Smith married again in 1767, his wife being Lucy Towers, sister of Charlotte Turner's mother Anna.

Slave Compensation Act 1837

The descendants of Richard II Smith, and the Berney branch of the family, retained connections with slave plantations in the West Indies, and feature in the compensation records made as a consequence of the Slave Compensation Act 1837. The following grandchildren are documented in this way:
  • Mary Gibbes Allen, married to Captain Robert Allen;
  • Richard III Smith, married to Mary Evatt Acklom;
  • Dorothy Elizabeth Boehm, married to Edmund Boehm in 1781.