Frances Claudia Wright
| Frances Claudia Wright | |
|---|---|
Frances Claudia Wright
|
|
| Born | Frances Claudia Wright 5 March 1919 Freetown, Sierra Leone |
| Died | April 2, 2010 South Kensington |
| Nickname | West Africa's Portia |
| Occupation | Barrister |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | British Subject, Sierra Leonean |
| Ethnicity | Creole |
| Education | Dame Alice Harpur School, Gray's Inn |
Frances Claudia Wright, OBE (5 March 1919 – 2 April 2010) was a prominent Sierra Leonean lawyer during the 20th century. Known as "West Africa's Portia", in 1943 Wright was the first Sierra Leonean woman to pass the bar in Great Britain and to practice law in Sierra Leone.
Frances Claudia Wright was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Claude and Eva Wright. Her father Claude and his brother Ernest Jenner were born in England to Sophie Slocombe, an English woman, and the Sierra Leonean man Claudius Ernest Wright, then a student. He later became a lawyer who served on the Legislative Council of Sierra Leone and as mayor of Freetown. Like his father, Claude studied law. He passed the bar at age 21, at the top of his class. He went to Sierra Leone from England in search of his father, finding that he had died and left Claude's half siblings in debt. Deciding to settle in the Creole society of Freetown, Wright set up a practice and revived his father's Gloucester Street premises.
Frances's mother was Eva Smith, who was the outside daughter of Francis Smith, the second Sierra Leonean to qualify as a lawyer. Francis Smith was the brother of Claudius Wright's mother-in-law and was the half-brother of Adelaide Casely-Hayford. Smith had served as puisine judge on the Gold Coast after attending QEGS in Wakefield, England.
To satisfy her father's aspirations for a child to succeed him as lawyer, Frances Wright studied at Bedford Girls' Modern School in England and was called to the bar from Gray's Inn in 1943, during the Second World war. She sailed for Sierra Leone on the ship SS California, but when this was sunk off North Africa she lost all of her possessions and had to be rescued by HMCS Iroquois.
...
Wikipedia