Lemma Holmes-Smith (b.c.1900)
Emina "Lemma" (Izzet el-Abed), Dass, Smith, Holmes
She was born in Constantinople (Istanbul), one of the daughters of Ahmed Izzet Pacha el-Abed and the sister of Muhammad Ali Bay al-Abid, Ottoman Ambassador to the United States and afterwards the first President of the Syrian Republic. Following the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, the family lived in London for some time before living in France and Switzerland and then finally settling in Cairo, Egypt.
She was first married as a child bride into the Harem of a Turkish prince. Her alleged second husband was a Hindu, Diwan Jarmani Dass, author and Minister of Kapurthala and Patiala, to whom she was married in the Punjab in 1926, but she later claimed her participation in the ceremony was, “mere social pleasantry”. Her third husband to whom she was married in Cairo was an English tobacco executive, Kenelm Stanley Smith. She divorced him in 1933 and in the same year married Carl Fleischmann Holmes, of New York, heir to a fortune as the grandson of the founder of the Fleischmann Yeast Company. She divorced him just two years later (1935) on the grounds of “extreme cruelty” and reverted to being styled as “Mrs Lemma Smith”– Smith having died in 1934. In 1938, she returned to New York (styled in the press as the “Turkish Princess, Mrs Lemma Holmes-Smith”) to sue Holmes for control of a $300,000 trust fund that he claimed she was not entitled to on account of evidence he had that her Indian marriage was never dissolved.
She was first married as a child bride into the Harem of a Turkish prince. Her alleged second husband was a Hindu, Diwan Jarmani Dass, author and Minister of Kapurthala and Patiala, to whom she was married in the Punjab in 1926, but she later claimed her participation in the ceremony was, “mere social pleasantry”. Her third husband to whom she was married in Cairo was an English tobacco executive, Kenelm Stanley Smith. She divorced him in 1933 and in the same year married Carl Fleischmann Holmes, of New York, heir to a fortune as the grandson of the founder of the Fleischmann Yeast Company. She divorced him just two years later (1935) on the grounds of “extreme cruelty” and reverted to being styled as “Mrs Lemma Smith”– Smith having died in 1934. In 1938, she returned to New York (styled in the press as the “Turkish Princess, Mrs Lemma Holmes-Smith”) to sue Holmes for control of a $300,000 trust fund that he claimed she was not entitled to on account of evidence he had that her Indian marriage was never dissolved.
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Contributed by Mark Meredith on 03/11/2022 and last updated on 05/11/2022.