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= Anna Geddes (music teacher) =

Anna Geddes (née Morton; 19th November 1857 – 9th June 1917) was a music teacher and partner in the work of Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes. Anna Geddes was an English social environmental activist, and the wife of the Patrick Geddes. She was born in Liverpool, the daughter of Frazer Morton, an Ulster-Scot who had been successful in the linen business. Whilst married to Patrick Geddes, she played an instrumental role in implementing his social projects, from both an organisational and an intellectual standpoint. Anna had personal connections with both Octavia Hill, the housing reformer, and Josephine Butler, who campaigned for women’s suffrage and education.

Early life
Anna Geddes was born Anna Morton to an Ulster Scot merchant Frazer Morton and his wife in Liverpool on 19th November 1857, and was the fourth of six children. She was born into a strict Presbyterian household, but was encouraged to pursue music and after finishing boarding school she was sent to Dresden to study singing and piano, later becoming a music teacher.

She formed a social enterprise for girls in Liverpool, and in 1884 she helped to found the Environmental Society (which later evolved into the better known Social Union) along with her sister Edith and her husband James Oliphant (headmaster of a private school for young ladies in Charlotte Square), which is where she met Patrick Geddes.

Life and work with Patrick Geddes
Whilst visiting her younger sister Edith and her husband James Oliphant in 1883, she met Oliphant's colleague Patrick Geddes, and discovered that they shared an interest in social reform. Over the following three years, they developed a close friendship and married in April 1886; after which she was very involved in all of Patrick's projects "as an independent-minded, ‘heroic’, selfless and ‘cheerful’ partner" (J. Arthur Thomson, quoted Mairet 1957, p. 80). She often oversaw finance and administration aspects of Patrick's work. She gave birth to their first child, Norah, followed by Alasdair and Arthur, in a rundown tenement, James Court, in the Lawnmarket; where the couple moved to during Patrick's work on the Edinburgh Old Town rehabilitation schemes. They moved into another building project, Ramsay Garden, after Anna received her inheritance in 1891. All three of their children were educated at home.

Anna oversaw many practical details during the Summer Meetings organised by Patrick Geddes in the 1890s, especially the music - calling upon performers such as Marjory Kennedy Fraser. She travelled often with Patrick, including journeying to Cyprus to care for Armenian refugees (1896–7), visiting settlements in the USA, and spending most of 1900 in Paris, where Patrick ran a summer school during the World’s Fair.

Their daughter, Norah Geddes m. Mears (1897–1967), became a garden designer or ‘landscape architect’. She planned and created gardens and playgrounds in slum areas of Dublin (1911–13) and in Edinburgh’s Old Town, as a member of Geddes’s Open Spaces committee. She also worked with her father and her future husband, Frank Mears, on designing Edinburgh Zoo (1913).

Death
Over the years Anna Geddes travelled with her husband extensively on his various projects and it was during a second visit to India in 1917 where her husband was advising and lecturing that Anna fell ill with typhoid fever and died in Lucknow. She was cremated in India.