Christopher Leighton Smith

Christopher Leighton Smith (1859–1950) was a Scottish nobleman and landowner in Fife and Aberdeenshire and an influential diplomat.

Leighton Smith was born in Aberdeen in 1859, the son of an Episcopalian bishop and an English mother. He attended Marlborough College and St Andrews University. The Leighton Smiths had been landowners in the region around Fife and Aberdeen since the early part of the seventeenth century. However, Christoper turned his back on the traditional family sources of income, and began his career in the Foreign Office in 1884 at the age of 25; a step which was to prove the beginning of a long and celebrated life dealing in foreign affairs.

He died in 1950, and is buried in Aberdeenshire on his family estate.