Annie Lorrain Smith

Who was Annie Lorrain Smith?

Annie Lorrain Smith was a British lichenologist whose Lichens was an essential textbook for several decades. She was also a mycologist and founder member of the British Mycological Society, where she served as president for two terms.

Though born in Liverpool, her family lived in rural Dumfriessshire where her father Walter was Free Church of Scotland minister in Half Morton parish, a few miles north of Gretna Green. She had several talented siblings, including the pathologist, Professor James Lorrain Smith.

After school in Edinburgh she went abroad to study French and German, and then worked as a governess. She moved to London, started studying botany in about 1888 and went to classes at the Royal College of Science taught by D. H. Scott. He found work for her at the British Museum, but she had to be paid from a special fund because women could not be employed there officially. She identified and reported on newly collected fungi, arriving from abroad as well as from the UK, and worked in the museum's cryptogamic herbarium.

In 1904 she was one of the first women admitted to be Fellows of the Linnaean Society after a change in the society's bye-laws.