Richard Smith (merchant) facts for kids
Richard Smith (1707–1776) was an English businessman who traded with the West Indies, a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea. He was also a director of the East India Company, a very powerful trading company in his time.
Contents
Richard Smith's Life Story
Richard Smith was born in either Whitehaven or Appleby, England. He became a merchant and owned plantations in the West Indies, especially in Barbados. Plantations were large farms where crops like sugar were grown, often using the forced labor of enslaved people. When Smith moved back to London from Barbados, he brought five enslaved people with him.
Smith owned a warehouse in Cheapside, a busy area in London. He also bought a farm called Lys Farm in Hampshire in 1769. He began to change this farm into a grand estate, which he named Brockwood Park. He built a large country house there, adding a new part in 1774. By the end of his life, Brockwood Park was a family home. Today, it is known as the Krishnamurti Centre.
Richard Smith passed away on October 13, 1776.
What Richard Smith Left Behind
In his will, Richard Smith named several enslaved people and left them to his grandchildren. His will was meant to keep his large fortune safe for his grandchildren. However, it led to long legal battles in a court called Chancery, which lasted until 1813. By then, much of his wealth was gone. This case is thought to have inspired a famous legal case in Charles Dickens's book Bleak House, called Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
Richard's younger son, Benjamin Smith, bought sugar plantations in 1781. He did this to create income from the money left in his father's will. The will also covered the right to choose the priest for St Mary's Church, Islington, which Richard Smith had bought in 1771.
Richard Smith's Family
Richard Smith had three children with his first wife, Elizabeth Crow. Elizabeth was a widow from Barbados.
- Richard II (1739–1772) became a priest in Islington. He married Elizabeth Mary Mapp from Barbados, and they had two children.
- Benjamin (1742–1806) married Charlotte Turner in 1765. They had 12 children.
- Mary (1740–1775) married twice. She had three children with her first husband, William Berney from Barbados. She then had five more children with her second husband, Thomas Dyer.
Richard Smith also had a step-daughter named Mary from Elizabeth Crow's first marriage. Mary married John Robinson (1727–1802). After Elizabeth died, Richard Smith married again in 1767 to Lucy Towers. Lucy was the sister of Charlotte Turner's mother, Anna.
The Slave Compensation Act of 1837
Some of Richard Smith's grandchildren and their families kept their connections to slave plantations in the West Indies. After the Slave Compensation Act 1837 was passed, they received money as compensation. This act provided payments to former slave owners when slavery was abolished in the British Empire. The following grandchildren are recorded as receiving such payments:
- Mary Gibbes Allen (born Smith, 1764–1787), who married Captain Robert Allen.
- Richard III Smith (Rev. Richard Smith, 1766–1848), who married Mary Evatt Acklom.
- Dorothy Elizabeth Boehm (born Berney, 1766–1842), who married Edmund Boehm in 1781.
