Annie Brassey

Anna Brassey, Baroness Brassey (née Allnutt; 7 October 1839 – 14 September 1887) was an English traveller and writer. Her bestselling book A Voyage in the Sunbeam, our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months (1878) describes a voyage around the world.

Life

Annie Brassey was born Anna Allnutt in London in 1839 to John Allnutt. As a child, she faced serious health problems. In The Last Voyage, her husband recalled that Allnutt suffered from an inherited "weakness of the chest", apparently a form of chronic bronchitis. As a young woman, she also suffered severe burns when she stood too close to a fireplace and her skirt caught fire. It took six months for her to recover from them.

In 1860, she married the English Member of Parliament Thomas Brassey (knighted in 1881 and became Earl Brassey in 1886), with whom she lived near his Hastings constituency. The couple had five children together before they travelled aboard their luxury yacht Sunbeam. The yacht was said to have been named after their daughter – Constance Alberta – who was nicknamed Sunbeam; she died of scarlet fever, aged four, on 24 January 1873. The golden figurehead of the yacht depicting her is at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

A Voyage in the Sunbeam, describing their journey round the world in 1876–1877 with a complement of 43, including family, friends and crew, ran through many English editions and was translated into at least five languages. Her accounts of later voyages include Sunshine and Storm in the East (1880); In the Trades, the Tropics, and the Roaring Forties (1885); and The Last Voyage (1889, published posthumously). She had published privately earlier works including A Flight of the Meteor, detailing two cruises in the Mediterranean on their earlier yacht Meteor and A Voyage in the Eothen a description of their travels to Canada and the United States in 1872. She was also involved with the publication of Colonel Henry Stuart-Wortley's 1882 Tahiti, a Series of Photographs.