Annabel Smyth's Home Page

Hello, and welcome to my home page. This just gives a little background to me and my family, for those of you who only know me through my sermons, recipes or travel blog.

I was born, rather longer ago than I care to remember, in Abingdon, in what is now Oxfordshire. My father, FitzRoy Somerset (1923-2019), was working for what was then the Ministry of War as a chartered surveyor, and my mother, a trained architect, stayed at home to look after me, as was the norm back then. In 1957, my grandfather died, and my father inherited an estate in West Sussex, so we moved there, and in September 1958 we moved to the house that was to be home for the next 57 years.

My father took over the running of the estate.  Sadly, my parents had to downsize in 2015 and moved into a smaller house in the village; my mother and sister still live there, next door to my brother.

I was educated at St Swithun's School, Winchester, and then did a trilingual secretarial course at Worthing College of Further Education. I then went to live and work in Paris – heavily influenced, I now realised, by Nancy Mitford's “The Pursuit of Love”– where I worked for four years. During that time, I attended St Michael's Church, and “became a Christian” (although I had certainly had faith before that time).

I returned to England in 1975, and in 1979 Robert (The Swan Whisperer) and I were married.

Our daughter, Emily, was born in 1980.

She was educated at what is now Streatham and Clapham High School, a GDST school, and then at York University, from which she graduated in 2002 with a 2.1 degree in History and Archaeology. She married Andrew Morrell, now a lawyer, in 2007

, and they have two sons, James, born in 2010 and Nicholas, born in 2013.

 Emily works for Methodist Publishing and Andrew is a barrister. 

Robert and I are both now retired and enjoy travelling around Europe in our motor home, as you will doubtless have read on my travel blog.