William Henry Smyth - Biography

Biography

William Smyth was born at 42 Great Peter Street, Westminster, London. He was the only son of Joseph Brewer Palmer Smyth and Georgina Caroline Pitt Pilkington, granddaughter of the Irish writer Laetitia Pilkington and husband Matthew Pilkington, both protégées of Jonathan Swift. His father was a colonial American who lived in East Jersey. He was an English loyalist, however, and after the American Revolution emigrated to England where his son was born shortly before Joseph died. His half brother was the famous painter & traveller Augustus Earle.

He married Eliza Anne "Annarella" Warington in Messina on 7 October 1815, when they were 27. Smyth and Annarella had eleven children between 1816 and 1835. Their three sons were Charles Piazzi Smyth, Sir Warington Wilkinson Smyth and General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth. Of their eight daughters, two died young, a third "married and died" aged 20, another also died at 20, unmarried, and another unmarried at 25, of diphtheria. Their other three daughters were Henrietta Grace, who married Rev. Professor Baden Powell and was mother of nine, including Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell; while Georgiana Rosetta married Sir William Henry Flower and had seven children; and Ellen Philedelphia, who married Capt. Henry Toynbee and sailed out to Australia as a young bride in 1855. She died childless in 1881 aged 52 after a long illness.

Smyth suffered a heart attack at his home near Aylesbury in early September, 1865, and at first seemed to recover. On 8 September he showed the planet Jupiter to his young grandson, Arthur Smyth Flower, through a telescope. A few hours later in the early morning of 9 September, at age 78, he died. He was buried in the churchyard at Stone near Aylesbury.