Marianne Smith
New Zealand businesswoman, community worker, philanthropist (1851-1938)

Marianne Smith (born Mary Anne Caughey; 10 March 1851 – 1 September 1938), and known as Marianne Caughey Preston since 1932, was a notable New Zealand businesswoman, community worker and philanthropist.
Mary Anne Caughey was born in Portaferry, County Down, Ireland, in 1851.
Marianne Smith established Smith & Caughey's in 1880. Her husband joined her when there was sufficient business to support the two of them. In the 1935 King's Birthday Honours, she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire, for philanthropic services.
She died at her home in Auckland on 1 September 1938, and was buried at Purewa Cemetery in the Auckland suburb of Meadowbank.
In 2009, Smith was posthumously inducted into the New Zealand Business Hall of Fame.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marianne Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.