Margaretta Louisa Lemon

Margaretta Louisa Smith was born on 22 November 1860 in Hythe, Kent, to William Elisha Smith and Louisa Smith (née Barclay). William Smith was a captain of musketry in the Royal Sherwood Fusiliers, later to become the Sherwood Foresters, and was adjutant at the musketry training school in Hythe. Etta was the oldest of three children, followed by her brother Edward and sister Woltera Mercy. Etta's mother had a stillborn baby in 1866 and died giving birth in 1867, along with the newborn child. Her father married 26-year-old Mary Anne Wollaston later in the same year. Etta and Mercy (the names that the sisters preferred to be called) initially lived with their father and stepmother at their new home in Blackheath, then a Kenitsh village ten km to the south-east of London. At about this time, Captain Smith left the army. From 1868 until his death in 1899, he served as honorary secretary of the Evangelisation Society, which aimed to promote the gospel in hard-to-reach situations.

Etta was soon sent to Hill House boarding school in Belstead, Suffolk, run by Maria Umphelby—another evangelical Christian—and remained there until she was 16. She returned briefly to Blackheath before being sent to a finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she became fluent in French. Her brother Edward went to study medicine at Cambridge. He later took on the name Barclay-Smith and served as a professor of anatomy.

After returning to Blackheath aged 18, Etta joined her father in his evangelical work, writing pamphlets and accompanying him on daily train journeys to London, where she learned to speak in public at evangelical meetings. On these journeys, they often met William Lemon and his son, both lawyers. The younger Lemon shared Etta's views on cruelty to animals and the practice of using birds in hat-making (then called millinery).