The Interviewees
Interview with Ann Hudson, September 2026
1- In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography the entry for Samuel Crawley, which you penned, reads: son of Richard Crawley, deputy registrar of the high court of the Admiralty and MP for Wendover in 1701-5 and his wife Sarah née Dashwood who was the daughter of a prosperous London silk merchant who sat as MP for the city of London and later as Lord Mayor of London. So clearly he came from influential families, yet unlike his elder brother, John (1703–1767), Samuel Crawley does not appear to have attended Eton College or Oxford University; details of his education are unknown. Do you think he was trained ‘on the job’ in Messina in Sicily as a junior partner in the merchant firm of William Allen, and eventually ‘head hunted’ to be the Consul of Smyrna?
Yes, I think so. As a younger son Samuel Crawley was expected to make his own way. His father Richard Crawley aspired to be a country gentleman and bought the Stockwood estate near Luton, where his family had originated, in 1708; his elder son John was brought up to be a country gentleman and later built himself a mansion there. There is more about the family background in my biography of Samuel Crawley here:
Samuel would have received a more practical education to equip him for the merchant trade and was then set up in a partnership in Messina to learn on the job. I’m not sure, though, that ‘head hunted’ is quite the right term for his appointment as Consul in Smyrna; there must have been a lot of string-pulling by family and friends, but clearly the Levant Company felt he would be suitable for the post.
2- How accessible and detailed are the Levant Company records for this period and did they help you in reconstructing the professional life of Samuel Crawley?
The extensive records of the Levant Company are easily accessible in the National Archives at Kew and have been the main source for reconstructing Samuel’s career as Consul in Smyrna. The Levant Company records are in the State Papers class and include voluminous correspondence between the Levant Company in London and the various consuls in the Levant. For example, SP 105/117–19 are letter books containing copies of letters sent from the Company in London to Samuel Crawley as Consul in Smyrna during the whole of his time there. There are also records originating from Smyrna, such as SP 105/337, which includes copies of letters from Samuel Crawley to the Company in London and one announcing his death in 1762.
Many other sources have also helped to fill out the story. For example, a copy of the Book of Common Prayer from the Smyrna Consulate was brought back to England by the last British Vice-Consul in Izmir, George Galdies. In it Samuel Crawley wrote down details of his marriage and children, listing their godparents and their childhood illnesses – an invaluable source. It is now in Lambeth Palace Library, but there is a full facsimile on the Levantine Heritage Foundation website.
Samuel Crawley’s record of his marriage and his first child: Book of Common Prayer from British Consulate at Smyrna.
3- You are a professional indexer of books and journals. Do you think your skills in this domain were put to good use as records for this period are fragmentary? How much help did you get from other descendants and during that investigation did you get to know some descendant branches you were not even aware of?
Indexers need to be meticulous and disciplined and those skills are also useful for research, where it’s essential to make accurate notes and keep them well organised. But there’s a lot of detective work involved too, as one is piecing together a story from random bits of information, and that’s what makes this sort of research so satisfying.
Samuel Crawley had many descendants and the family tree had already been well researched by others, including one of my cousins. But through this research I have got to know several quite distant cousins, who have shared their family archives with me and taken great interest in the results.
4- Samuel Crawley is notable for his interest in the ancient world. This began when he was in Sicily with a trading company, then just starting to be a popular destination for antiquarian travellers. It developed further in Smyrna, where he entertained visitors such as the Homeric scholar Robert Wood, and James ‘Athenian’ Stuart and Nicholas Revett, authors of The Antiquities of Athens. Do you think he became an intellectual through that posting / travel and ability to meet up with antiquarians and can you imagine he relished being in that position of information access? Do you think this was one of the factors in him being selected as the role of Consul of Smyrna and staying in that position for 20 years, that required these ‘dealing with people’ skills?
I wish I knew more about Samuel Crawley’s early life. The first real evidence of what sort of person he was dates from his time at Messina, where the warm friendship he struck up with the Dutch classical scholar Jacques Philippe d’Orville suggests shared intellectual interests as well as mutual enjoyment of Messina social life, hobnobbing with the local garrison and the visiting the young nuns at a local convent. I doubt if the Levant Company would have been that interested in Samuel’s antiquarian credentials, but as you say they would have wanted someone with good ‘people skills’ to manage the English merchant community, keep on good terms with the Ottoman officials, and welcome important travellers.
5- Do we have a good handle on the official duties of a Levant Company Consul at the time, such as his duties and responsibilities concerning the British community, dealings with Ottoman officials (do we have any hints of gifts required) and providing reports and intelligence regarding trading rivals etc.? He had a stipend paid by the Company but was he also allowed to do conduct personal trade? He had some minor quarrels over expenses with the Company as Consuls were expected to lodge and feed ‘gentleman travellers’. Do you think the prestige of the job meant he had to reluctantly accept a degree of ‘out-of-pocket expenses’?
As the local representative of the Levant Company, who paid his salary, the Consul was responsible for ensuring that trade with England ran smoothly and for making sure the concessions granted by the Ottomans were upheld. He therefore needed to be a skilled diplomat to ensure smooth relations with the local Ottoman officials, and the mutual exchange of gifts was an important part of this; clocks and watches were popular gifts for the Ottomans.
The Consul was also responsible for the good behaviour of the English merchants, not always easy when most of them were young men far from home, and to settle any legal disputes among the English community. And as the man on the spot, he was expected to report to the British government about the local situation, especially in times of war.
The Levant Company seems to have allowed all reasonable expenses, though as you say there were some wrangles about such things as the cost of entertaining travellers. Consuls were not allowed to trade on their own behalf, but they collected consulage, a duty on all English merchants’ goods arriving at or leaving Smyrna. Samuel Crawley seems to have done quite well for himself; his will shows that he had accumulated considerable cash and property, with specific bequests totalling 22,100 dollars, a tidy sum considering that his annual salary was apparently 2,000 dollars. Maybe he was happy to meet some of the costs of entertaining the antiquarian travellers whose visits he enjoyed.
6- Do you think it is strange that during 20 years residence in Smyrna till he died Samuel Crawley never visited England? Could we speculate that though he kept up with surviving family members, as recorded in the family bible and his notes of God-parents to his children, the pressure of work and the difficulties of taking extended time off work would mean this was not possible?
It does seem strange, and rather sad, that Samuel Crawley never managed a trip to England once he had arrived at Smyrna. It would have been possible, I imagine, to leave matters in the hands of the other consular officials and senior merchants, as happened between the death of Samuel’s predecessor as Consul and his arrival in Smyrna late in 1743, about 18 months after he was appointed. But the journey from the Levant to England was long and arduous and not to be undertaken lightly. Samuel probably planned eventually to resign his post and return to England to live off the capital he had accumulated. However, the involvement of family members as godparents to his children does show that he kept up with them all by letter. If only some of those letters survived!
7- Did Samuel correspond with the Society of Dilettanti (founded in 1737 so during his time in Sicily and by Sir Francis Dashwood, presumably related to his mother’s family), was he a member and do we know if they had any lectures or organised tours in the Smyrna region?
There’s some uncertainty about the date of foundation of the Society of Dilettanti, but it was in the 1730s and Sir Francis Dashwood, Samuel Crawley’s first cousin once removed, was one of the founder members. Samuel was not a member but clearly took a great interest. Robert Wood, welcomed to Smyrna by Samuel in 1750, was a leading member of the Dilettanti, who sponsored Stuart and Revett’s trip to the Levant in the 1750s. Samuel entertained Stuart and Revett in Smyrna and subscribed to the first volume of their Antiquities of Athens (1762).
8- Samuel married in 1749 the Protestant Marie Dunant, from a family of watchmakers or merchants in watches and fine jewellery in Constantinople. Does history record if Marie took an interest in the affairs of her husband and may have advised him?
Sadly, I have no firm information. The Smyrna merchant set-up was very male-dominated, but Marie seems to have been a strong character and I can imagine her taking an interest in Consular affairs, when she had time to spare from her large family.
Portrait of Marie Dunant, wife of Samuel Crawley, by Jean-Etienne Liotard. Private collection.
9- Is your research on the life and times of Samuel Crawley over, or is there more to uncover, if you have the time? Anything our readership could possibly help with?
I have done as much as I can from the sources which are available to me at the moment but I am always on the lookout for more. There are many gaps which I would love to fill. The internet is an increasingly useful resource – in particular, of course, the LHF’s own website and newsletters with links to new research. Travel books from the early 18th century are increasingly freely available in facsimile online, including several which I looked at in the British Library twenty years ago. And more and more catalogues of manuscript collections are being posted online. I am sure there must be other letters from Samuel Crawley in archive collections which might help to fill out the story, and maybe there is a portrait lurking somewhere – I have no idea what he looked like.
If anyone in the LHF network can point me to any new information I would be very grateful. An important potential source are the official Ottoman archives of the period; I know there are people currently working on these, and I would be delighted to hear of any references there to Samuel Crawley.
10- What are you working on now?
Having immersed myself in 18th-century Levant Company history for so long, I am tempted to start some new research in this area. A possible subject is the career of Colville Bridger (1729–97), a merchant in Aleppo in the 1750s and 60s, whose business letter book and invoice book are in my local County Record Office.
Interview conducted by Craig Encer
