| Notes |
- From Wikipedia (accessed 2 Sep 2020):
Richard Smith was an English merchant in the West Indies trade, and director of the East India Company.
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 from Barbados, where he was a plantation owner, to London, 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. It is now the site of the Krishnamurti Centre, as Brockwood Park.
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 Smith's 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.
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Nielsen Hayden genealogy
1707 - 1776 (69 years)
[3, 4]