James Creed Meredith - Mrs Lorraine Creed Meredith

Mrs Lorraine Creed Meredith

In 1908, at St. George's Church, Montreal, Meredith married Lorraine Seymour Percy, the daughter of Charles Percy (1852–1918) of Weredale Park, Montreal, 'one of the great railway geniuses of his era', and a niece of Arthur Trefusis Heneage Williams. Mr Percy was "a great family man, devoted to cultivated society and an admirier of fine arts, particularly music, and a lover of nature and his family fireside." Percy had come from England to Canada in 1876 at the bequest of the Chicago and Grand Trunk Railway Company to be their treasurer, later becoming a director of the Central Vermont Railway.

Lorraine's mother, Annie Redmond Meredith (1849–1930), was a daughter of Henry Howard Meredith (1815–1892) of Rosebank House, Port Hope, Ontario. She was a first cousin of James Creed Meredith's mother, and a niece of the already mentioned Edmund Allen Meredith and William Collis Meredith. Mrs Annie (Meredith) Percy was a talented artist and "a woman of rare culture and charm, artistic in taste, and noted for her charitable works and activities associated with the Church of England, of which she was a communicant since childhood".

Lorraine Meredith was herself a great patron of various Irish artists and poets. She was particularly close to the painter Grace Henry, the wife of the better known Paul Henry. Grace Henry's biographer described the two women as "slightly silly and full of fun". The two often travelled and painted together, and when Mrs Henry died in 1953, it was Mrs Meredith - then living in Cyprus - who paid for her funeral. Mrs Meredith kept close ties with her Canadian relations and frequently took her two daughters (Moira and Brenda) to stay with them, particularly at the country home in Livingston County, Michigan of her uncle, Howard Graves Meredith (1856–1934), described by Lord Birkenhead as "a great character, and one of the most attractive and warm-hearted men I have ever met".

Their daughter Moira's son is Rowan Gillespie, the Irish bronze casting sculptor, whose latest work Proclamation is a memorial to the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and, according to his biographer Roger Kohn, to his grandfather's dream of a Utopian society.