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Baroness Role Models

Angela Burdett-Coutts, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts.

King Edward VII is reported to have said "After my mother (Queen Victoria), the most remarkable woman in the kingdom."

In my search to find out what a Baroness does, I came across this article in wikipedia and would love to aspire to this and do such good one day.

Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts (24 April 1814 – 30 December 1906), born Angela Georgina Burdett, was the daughter of Sir Francis Burdett, 5th Baronet, an MP, and the former Sophia Coutts, who was the daughter of Thomas Coutts, the wealthy banker who founded Coutts & Co.

In 1837 she became the wealthiest woman in England when she inherited her grandfather's fortune of nearly three million pounds sterling via his wife Harriot Mellon, joining, by Royal Licence, the surnames of her father and grandfather to become Burdett-Coutts, and was widely known as "the richest heiress in England". She was a collector of significant paintings, and following the Westminster Hall competition of 1847, she purchased Robert Scott Lauder's Christ Walking on the Sea. The Reverend Richard Harris Barham, in a ballad he wrote under the pen name "Thomas Ingoldsby" for the Queen's coronation as part of the Ingoldsby Legends, referred to her as 'Miss Anjaley Coutts' and she became a notable subject of public curiosity, receiving numerous offers of marriage.

She also inherited the country house at The Holly Lodge in Highgate, which was then just outside London, where she was famous for throwing large parties. However, she spent the majority of her inherited wealth on scholarships, endowments, and a wide range of philanthropic causes. One of her earliest was to establish a home to help young women who had 'turned to a life of immorality' escape from prostitution.

 

Some other projects she did were:

• President, British Beekeepers Association 1878–1906
• President of the Ladies Committee of the RSPCA (England/Scotland).
• the building of Anglican churches
• church bells for St Paul's cathedral
• cotton gins for Nigeria
• drinking fountains for dogs
• help for Turkish peasants and the refugees of the 1877 Russo-Turkish War, receiving the order of the Medjidieh, the only time it was conferred on a woman
• housing schemes for the working-class
• lifeboats in Brittany, France
• The London Ragged School Union
• a sewing school for women in Spitalfields when the silk trade declined
• soup kitchens
• support organisations for the aboriginal peoples of Australia and for the Dayaks of Borneo
• The Temperance Society
• in Ireland she helped to promote the fishing industry by starting schools, and providing boats, also advancing £250,000 in 1880 for supplying seed to the impoverished tenants
• placement of hundreds of destitute boys in training-ships for the navy and merchant service
• financing the first archaeological survey of Jerusalem in 1864 to improve its sanitation
• prominent supporter of the British Horological Institute at a crucial time in its history, due to her acquaintance with John Jones, a BHI founder

 

She also established the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in 1883, the Westminster Technical Institute in 1893 and was closely involved with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). Angela also founded Columbia Road market in 1869 in Bethnal Green in the East End of London, the district where much of her work was carried out. Through her support of missionary and nursing efforts she was associated with Louisa Twining and Florence Nightingale.