Isobel Grey, Baroness Merton (born 1860) was a British aristocrat and the wife of Richard Grey, Baron Merton.
Biography[]
Isobel Turnbull was born in Manchester in 1860, and she came from an upper-middle-class family of doctors. She received a strong education for someone of her social standing and breeding, serving as a nurse during the Second Boer War. She married Dr. Reginald Crawley in 1885, bearing him a son, Matthew Crawley. In 1912, her son became the heir to his distant relative Robert Crawley, 7th Earl of Grantham after Lord Grantham's cousins died during the sinking of the RMS Titanic. She and her son moved to the village of Downton near Lord Grantham's Downton Abbey estate, and Turnbull volunteered as a medic at the local hospital before helping to run the convalescent hospital set up at Downton Abbey during World War I. In 1918, clashes with the hospital's co-manager, Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, led Turnbull to leave Downton to volunteer at a Red Cross hospital in France. Her son died in a car accident in 1921, but he bore the Crawley family a new heir, George Crawley. In 1925, she remarried to Richard Grey, Baron Merton, a friend of the Crawley family, becoming a baroness and stepmother to Lawrence Grey and Timothy Grey.