Vincent Meredith - Lady Meredith

Lady Meredith

In 1888, Vincent Meredith married (Isabella) Brenda Allan (1867–1959), the youngest daughter of Andrew Allan, who had then succeeded his elder brother, Sir Hugh Allan, as President of the Allan Line and the Merchant's Bank etc. This marriage brought Meredith additional wealth and powerful connections. As a wedding gift, his father-in-law gave him and his wife a parcel of land on the corner of Pine Avenue and Peel Street in the Golden Square Mile, just across from Ravenscrag, where Lady Meredith's cousin, Sir Montagu Allan, lived. In 1894, they employed the architect Edward Maxwell to build them a house there, "Ardvarna", a turreted, red brick mansion, now known as Lady Meredith House. Maxwell had also previously designed their summer house at Mont Saint-Bruno, Quebec. Lady Meredith House was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1990. Following the First World War, when wounded Canadian soldiers started to return from the Front in 1918, Lady Meredith set up a rehabilitation centre for officers at her and Vincent's Montreal home. During their 1939 Royal Tour of Canada, Lady Meredith was the hostess to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother during their stay in Montreal. In 1942, Lady Meredith donated the house to the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal as a residence for the nurses.

Brenda Meredith donated the Lady Meredith Cup for the Quebec Ladies' Hockey Association in 1920, the first ice hockey trophy in Canada to be competed for between women in ankle-length skirts. On the 100th anniversary of the Montreal Thistle Curling Club in 1943, the Montreal Gazette of the day reported that on Christmas Eve, 1870, she was "probably the first lady in Canada to put up an iron". She served as President of the Purple Cross (a service for the care of wounded and disabled horses on the battlefield during World War I); President of the Canadian Women's Army Auxiliary Corps; Governor of the Royal Victoria's Maternity Hospital; Director of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Vice President of the Women’s National Immigration Society, and honorary patroness of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire with Lady Eugène Fiset and Lady H. Montagu Allan. She was a member and benefactor of the Presbyterian Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, Montreal, and was one of the founders of the Montreal Ladies Golf Club.

They left no children, but along with Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn and George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Vincent Meredith was the godfather to Robert Henry Arthur Rivers-Bulkeley (1914–2007), son of Colonel Charles Rivers-Bulkeley and Annie Evelyn Pelly. Lady Meredith was the godmother of Frederick Edmund Meredith's only grandson, and the only son of her first cousin, Sir Montague Allan.