Eleanor E. Smith

Miss Eleanor E. Smith
File:Smith, Eleanor E..jpg
Born	1822
Died	1896
Residence	museum, Oxford 13 Banbury Road, Oxford [1885]
Occupation	museum work
Society Membership membership ordinary fellow - life compounder left 1896 deceased elected_AI 1881.11.08

Notes

House Notes

1881.10.25 proposed
1896.12.08 death announced
death noted in report of the council for 1896

Notes From Elsewhere

Miss ELEANOR E. SMITH, sister of the late distinguished Professor Henry Smith, died at her residence in Oxford on Tuesday afternoon. For some time past Miss Smith had been failing in health, but her indomitable energy enabled her to maintain to the last her active interest in all the many objects, philanthropic and educational, to which she had devoted herself for so long. Miss Smith was born in Dublin on September 30, 1822. In 1849 she settled in Oxford, and on her mother’s death took charge of the house of her brother. She was a good linguist. By her eighth birthday she had taught herself and her sister Hebrew with the help of a grammar and dictionary given to them to play with. In her old age she resumed the study of Greek, and she was a diligent reader of Dante. Miss Smith was for many year a hardworking member of the council of Bedford College, London, a manager of the great girls’ school in Bedford, and an original member of the council of Somerville College. Her active participation in these works was continued to within a few months of the end of her life. She became a valued member of the committee of management of the Radcliffe Infirmary, at a time when the co-operation of women in such works was discouraged and rare. She was an active member of the committee of the Sarah Acland Home for Nurses, a promoter and director of the Provident Dispensary, for many years a district visitor and a member of the Oxford School Board. Though by no means rich, she started and for seven years entirely maintained a district nurse to work gratuitously amongst the poor, a provision then hardly existing elsewhere in England. It was on this beginning that the Sarah Acland Home was founded in 1878. On the very day of her death she expressed the keenest interest in the memorial buildings of this institution now in process of erection.