Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who had been suffering from bronchitis for several days died on 30th ult. at her house in Strattan-street, London, at the age of 92.
Angela Burdett was a daughter of Sir Francis Burdett, and grand-daughter of Mr. Thomas Coutts, the richest private banker in England. In 1837 she inherited from her step-grandmother, the Duchess of St. Albans, a huge fortune amounting to nearly two millions in cash, and half the profits of the famous bank in the Strand, and her life has been an unexampled exhibition of princely but unostentatious charity in the widest sense of that sometimes abused term. Beyond all the examples of her munificence at home, such as the buildings of Columbia market, the foundation of vaious model town schools for girls, and dozens of other benefactions, there were enterprises which she directed or aided in the Imperial sphere. Her connection with Borneo may be recalled.
When Sir James Brooke returned to this Country, depressed with his failure to obtain Government recognition for his project at Sarawak and smarting under a sense of the injustice done to him by public opinion, he had the good fortune to meet Miss Burdett-Coutts at Torquay.
She soon grasped the probabilities of the situation at Labuan, and provided the eager "Raja" with the one thing, as he conceived it, necessary to make his authority effective. She presented him with a steamer, fully found, and allowed him in a addition a subsidy towards the expense of administration. How succesful from the patriotic standpoint the investment has proved our protectorate and the operations of the company declare.
When the famous Raja Brooke died he made provision by will whereby, in default of any successor to his immediate heir, Baroness Burdett-Coutts was to take means for retaining Sarawak as a British possession, and she duly executed a trust for this purpose.
A model farm, designed to train the Dyaks in the art as well as the habit of agriculture, was for many years a specific indication of her interest in the people.
The late Baroness is to be buried tomorrow in Westminster Abbey, close to the statue of Lord Shaftesbury, after lying in state at her residence in Stratton-street.
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