John Walsingham Cooke Meredith

His mother, Magdalene (1785–1851), was the eldest daughter of John Redmond (1737–1819) J.P., of Newtown House, County Wexford & Charlemont Street, Dublin, by his wife, Anne (1743–1821), daughter and co-heiress of John Walsingham Cooke of Cookestown (otherwise Sleanagrane), County Wexford, who was the last male descendant of Sir Richard Cooke, Chancellor of the Exchequer of Ireland.

Returning to London the following year (1831), he was admitted as a barrister to Gray's Inn and became a member of the first Eccentric Club at May's Buildings on St Martin's Lane.

The accused, a young servant by the name of Ann Hyde, attempted to implicate the new lodger – Meredith – as the thief of several rubies and emeralds.

Two weeks later (July 16), one of their children recorded that 'my father and mother sailed for Liverpool' from Dublin, but this seems unlikely as they were not yet married and Sarah would only have been twelve or thirteen years old.

Liverpool then being a popular port for those choosing to emigrate to North America, it is possible that Meredith sailed to Canada from there, but his biographers state the year of his arrival to be 1834.

On December 1, 1835, one year after what is generally supposed to be his arrival in Canada, John Meredith married Sarah Pegler (1819–1900), a few months after she had turned sixteen.

[citation needed] Both her parents lived at King's Stanley, near Stroud, Gloucestershire, where the Pegler name has been found in great numbers since at least the mid sixteenth century.

He stopped at the township of Westminster in Upper Canada, eight miles from London, Ontario, where he bought a bush farm and settled down to commence his new life.

In the fifties, sixties and seventies, what seems today an excessive rate of interest was commonly charged on loans and Mr Meredith was not slow to collect his twenty-five per cent on the money he advanced.

He imported horses from England and Ireland (one of his first cousins there was married to a niece of the famous Irish trainer Henry Eyre Linde J.P., of Eyrefield Lodge, on the Curragh, who Llewellyn had known well) and bred them on his farm 'Ardaven', outside London.

The remaining three brothers entered the financial world, the most prominent of whom was Sir Vincent Meredith, President of the Bank of Montreal.

Richard Martin Meredith was a founder, Chancellor and the first chairman of the board of governors for the University of Western Ontario, where he endorsed the R.M.

Their father's first cousin, Edmund Allen Meredith, was the 3rd Principal of McGill University in the 1840s, and a nephew of the 29th Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, Richard MacDonnell.

Unlike their father's first cousin John Edward Redmond (1806–1865) and his family, in politics the London Merediths, as a group, did not feature as prominently.

He was honorably retired after a series of electoral defeats, but later declined the invitation of Prime Minister Sir Charles Tupper to join his Cabinet.

In 1916, Sir Vincent Meredith had been created the 1st Baronet of Montreal for his wartime services to Canada, but as one of the five who died without children this title became extinct on his death.

His son, Richard Martin Meredith, presented a chime of eleven church bells along with the tower clock to St. Paul's Cathedral (London, Ontario) in memory of his parents.

Along with most of his family, John and his wife were buried at the Meredith Monument at Woodlands Cemetery in London, Ontario, the plot being marked by a tall celtic cross.