Many people visited Exmouth during its busy fashionable phase two centuries ago. Two figures who you might have seen walking about the town then were Lady Byron and her daughter, Ada Lovelace.

Born in County Durham in 1792, Anne Isabella (nicknamed ‘Annabella’) Milbanke certainly got off to a good start in life. As the only daughter of Sir Ralph Milbanke, she would one day inherit the title Baroness Wentworth herself, although would never use it. Well-connected and from a wealthy family, she was also very clever. Unusually for a female of that time, her parents recognised her intelligence and helped her develop it, hiring a former Cambridge University professor to tutor her in the classics, philosophy, science and maths. She grew up to be a gifted, confident and religious woman. It was her misfortune that she would soon find herself eternally linked to the most scandalous figure of the age.

Born four years earlier in London in 1788, Lord Byron was well-connected too and is still regarded as one of the greatest poets in the history of English literature. Overcoming the impediment of a deformed right foot, Byron packed an enormous amount into his life, writing great and acclaimed poetic works, travelling extensively, hob-knobbing with other literary stars, such as the Shelleys, arguing political causes from his seat in the House of Lords and even fighting in the Greek War of Independence.

But he was also renowned for being a disreputable and scandalous figure, described by one of his many lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, as “mad, bad and dangerous to know” and forever indulging himself in one form of mischief or another. Charismatic and famously handsome, Byron was the early 19th century equivalent of a superstar by the time he married Annabella in 1815.

It is not hard to see why Byron would have wanted to marry Annabella. Marrying her not only offered an opportunity to clear his debts but the veneer of marital respectability might have helped to restore his increasingly battered moral reputation. This didn’t work. But why would the pious and respectable Annabella have wanted to marry him? The answer must lie to some extent in Byron’s considerable personal magnetism. She was well aware of Byron’s reputation but seems to have genuinely believed she could serve as a positive moral influence on him. This didn’t work either.

Having declined one proposal of marriage from him, she relented and the couple married in 1815. Their daughter, Ada Lovelace, was born just under a year later. But the marriage was a disaster. Byron proved an unworthy husband having numerous affairs with actresses and many others. Annabella grew more and more convinced over time that he was mad. She also suspected, probably with some justification, that he was involved in an incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. The Byrons separated in 1816. Byron himself eventually died of fever while fighting in the Greek War of Independence in 1824, aged 36.

What became of Byron and Annabella’s daughter, Ada Lovelace? Ada never knew her father. He had been disappointed when she was born a girl and never tried to win custody of her after leaving when she was a baby. Ada was plagued by ill health throughout her life but like her mother grew up very intelligent and had a particular faculty for mathematics. This and her friendship with Charles Babbage, a man today widely regarded as ‘the father of computers’, enabled her to become a major figure in the birth of computer technology.

At nineteen, Ada would marry and go on to have three children. Tragically, she was not destined to live long and would die of uterine cancer in 1852, predeceasing her own mother, Lady Byron, who died in 1860, aged 67. Ada, Countess of Lovelace was just 36 when she died, exactly the same age as her father had been.

Despite this, Ada’s legacy through her contribution to the world of computers is still with us today. She is sometimes described as the world’s first computer programmer. In the 20th century, the computer programming language Aida was named in her honour.