Anna, Lady Geddes was an English social environmental activist, musician and partner in the work of Sir Patrick Geddes.
10 Facts About Anna Geddes
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Anna Geddes was born Anna Morton to an Ulster Scot merchant Frazer Morton and his wife in Liverpool on 19 November 1857, and was the fourth of six children.
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Anna Geddes was born into a strict Presbyterian household, but was encouraged to pursue music and after finishing boarding school she was sent to Dresden to study singing and piano, later becoming a music teacher.
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In London, Geddes began to focus on social work, during an era that included a movement for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, as well as the work of Octavia Hill and Josephine Butler.
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Anna Geddes formed a social enterprise for girls in Liverpool, and in 1884 she helped to found the Environmental Society along with her sister Edith and her husband James Oliphant, which is where she met Patrick Geddes.
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Anna Geddes often oversaw finance and administration aspects of Patrick's work and often traveled with him, including to Cyprus, the United States, Paris, and India.
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Anna Geddes gave birth to their first child, Norah in 1887, followed by Alasdair and Arthur, in a rundown tenement, James Court, in the Lawnmarket, where the couple had moved to work on the Edinburgh Old Town rehabilitation schemes.
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Anna Geddes planned and created gardens and playgrounds in slum areas of Dublin and in Edinburgh's Old Town, as a member of Geddes's Open Spaces committee.
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Anna Geddes worked with her father and his assistant, her future husband, Frank Mears, on designing Edinburgh Zoo in 1913.
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In 1917, during a second visit to India, while she was the primary organizer of a version of the Edinburgh Summer meetings that was planned to feature Rabindranath Tagore, Anna Geddes died from typhoid fever in Lucknow.