Benjamin Leigh Smith
Benjamin (Ben) Leigh Smith (12 March 1828 – 4 January 1913) was an English yachtsman and explorer.
He was born in Sussex, the extramarital child of Anne Longden, a milliner from Alfreton, and the Whig politician Benjamin (Ben) Leigh Smith (1783–1860), the only son of the Radical abolitionist William Smith. Benjamin senior had four sisters. One, Frances (Fanny) Smith, married into the Nightingale family and produced a daughter, Florence Nightingale, the nurse and statistician; another married into the Bonham Carter family. William Smith wanted his son to marry Mary Shore, the sister of William Nightingale, now a relative by marriage.
Benjamin Senior's home was in Marylebone, London, but in 1816, he inherited and purchased property near Hastings: Brown's Farm near Robertsbridge, with a house built around 1700 (extant), and Crowham Manor, Westfield, which included 200 acres (0.81 km2). Although a member of the landed gentry, Smith held radical views. He was a Dissenter, a Unitarian, a supporter of free trade, and a benefactor to the poor. In 1826, he bore the cost of building a school for the inner-city poor at Vincent Square, Westminster, and paid a penny a week towards the fees for each child, the same amount as paid by their parents.
On a visit to his sister in Derbyshire in 1826, Benjamin Senior met Anne Longden. She became pregnant by him and he took her to a rented lodge at Whatlington, a small village near Battle, East Sussex. There she lived as "Mrs Leigh", the surname of his relations on the nearby Isle of Wight. The birth of their first child, Barbara, created a scandal because the couple did not marry; illegitimacy carried a heavy social stigma at the time. He rode from Brown's Farm to visit them daily, and within eight weeks Anne was pregnant again. When their son Ben was born, the four of them went to America for two years, during which time another child was conceived.
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