In Memoriam, Victor Dey Smedmore

I had intended to return to my post about my grandfather, William Dey Smedmore, but today, January 29^th, 2012, is the 94^th anniversary of the death of his eldest son, my uncle Victor Dey Smedmore, who was killed in action January 29^th, 1918, in France during the Great War.

My grandfather, William, died before the War started, on July 2^nd, 1914. Would he have been in favour of his eldest son going to England to join a regiment? It’s hard to say. Victor sailed to England with other Jamaicans intent on joining up, as I wrote in a previous post, “Lest We Forget”. Victor joined the Life Guards – the picture of him above shows him in his regimental uniform -- and was sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force as part of the Household Battalion. He was killed in action near Arras on January 29, 1918. The family learned about his death from the War Office by this note which I found in my mother’s papers.

Although the note says that Victor was buried “at a point just North West of Monchy Le Preux, South east of Arras”, he has no known grave. I wrote to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and received this response from them:

"Trooper Victor Dey Smedmore, 1140, serving with the Household Battalion, died on 29 January 1918... He has no known grave and therefore he is commemorated by name, along with others from his regiment on Bay 1 on the Arras Memorial, France. The Arras Memorial stands in Faubourg-d'Amiens Cemetery, Arras, 2 kilometres north-west of Arras Railway Station and bears the names of over 35,000 men lost without trace during the battles of Arras."

Thanks to the kindness of Rory McGregor I do have photos of Victor’s name on the Arras Memorial as well as pictures of the area around. Here is a shot of the memorial showing Victor’s name,

and another of one of the hallways:

While doing research for a friend in the Jamaica Gleaner, I came across a story of the commemoration of the War Memorial at Wolmer’s School, which Victor had attended and found that his name is also commemorated there. 

The notice is from the Gleaner of November 13^th, 1923. The monument, erected by the Wolmer’s Old Boys Association, was designed by an old Wolmerian, Vernon Streadwick, and commemorates those men who attended Wolmer’s who had died in the Great War.

Perhaps it’s as well that my grandfather never knew about the War or the death of his eldest son. In my next post I’ll return to William Dey Smedmore and what I was able to learn about him from stories in the Gleaner.

Lest We Forget -- A Tribute to Those Who Served in the Great War

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn;
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We shall remember them. " -- Lawrence Binyon

The last item in Sarah Letitia Brown's Commonplace Book is a poem of three stanzas, written in my mother's handwriting, and headed "A Tribute to the memory of Victor Dey Smedmore, 1st Life Guards. Killed in action, Jan 29th 1918". At the top of the page she wrote "copy", so I do not believe she is the author of the poem, and I have no idea who that might have been.

The poem begins:

"We lift the voice lamenting from afar, while memory backward wends through buried years ..."

In my last post I had mentioned that I would comment on the contributions made by my grandfather to the commonplace book, but as November 11th comes closer I felt it was more appropriate to write about my uncle Victor and his sacrifice in the First World War, as well as the sacrifices of other Jamaican men who served in that conflict.

The very first post I did for this blog was about Victor. He was the eldest son of William Dey Smedmore and his wife, Amanda. He was born in 1886 in Port Royal, moved with the family to Kingston, and worked at D. Henderson and Company. He went to England in 1915, joined the First Life Guards, went overseas to France where he was wounded twice, and was killed in action January 1918. I often wondered why he decided to go to England to enlist when he could have enlisted in the West India Regiment but apparently there was a contingent of Jamaican men who did go to England for this purpose. The Gleaner reported on some of them on June 7, 1915:The men listed in the above Roll of Honour were members of the Kingston Parish Church, but there were apparently many more who went to England to join up. My curiosity was aroused as to when Victor sailed for England and thanks to new data on the subscription genealogy database, Ancestry, I found his name on a ship's manifest, that of the ss Coronado, sailing from Kingston to Bristol, arriving at that port on August 15th, 1915.

The names are a bit small to read so here they are:

-- Lester Cecil Jacobs; Karl Everard Laidman; L. Cochrane Shackleton; Huntley Hearne; Maurice Hearne; Victor Dey Smedmore; Alfred George Ayers.

Now, these names mean nothing to me, except for Victor's. It was apparent that they had all seven travelled together on the same ship with the same intent in mind. My question was, had they all enlisted when they got to England? I therefore began a search for the other six. The first source I checked was the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, in the assumption that some of them might, like Victor, have been killed in the War.

The first one I searched for and found there was Karl Everard Laidman, the son of Herbert Edmund and Mary Jane Armstrong Laidman of 65 Norman Road, Kingston, Jamaica. Karl was a private in the Royal Fusilliers, aged 19, and he was killed on March 31st, 1916, a bare eight months after he arrived in England to enlist. He is buried in Lapugnoy Military Cemetery, Bethune, France.

Karl was not the only casualty of that group besides Victor. I also found an A. G. Ayers on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, a trooper in the 2nd Life Guards, who died 26 February 1917 and is buried in St. Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen, France. What then of the other four?

I then searched the online edition of the Jamaica Gleaner to see if I could find any trace of them and I managed to find two more -- Lester Jacobs and Huntley Hearne. Both items were obituaries. Lester Jacobs died March 25th, 1971, at age 83, so I assume he was the Lester Cecil Jacobs listed on the ship's passenger list, though his war record was not mentioned. The obituary, which is brief, mentioned that he was the retired manager of Jamaica Retreading Company and that he was survived by a brother, Caryl, of Miami, Florida and other relatives. Huntley Hearne died April 13, 1964 and his obituary states that he was a "70-year old hero of the 1914 war and an acknowledged artist in the American advertising field". Huntley Hearne had been attached to the Royal Fusilliers and had been awarded the Military Medal for destroying a German pillbox.

I found a few references to Maurice Hearne, who I assume was Huntley's brother, mainly to do with his career as a cricketer. It would seem, then, that he also returned safely from the war. The only one that I could find nothing definitive about was L... Cochrane Shackleton. My searches in the Gleaner brought up articles on a Dr. T. F. Shackleton but this didn't seem to match the Shackleton on the passenger list ... then I noticed that his age was given as 42, whereas the other six men were all younger, between 18 and 29. Was this the doctor? It doesn't explain the differences in first names yet the Gleaner of September 25th 1916 noted that Dr. T. F. Shackleton had been posted to England to the Royal Army Medical Corps. I'm afraid this will remain a mystery!

"But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known,
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain." -- Lawrence Binyon

Victor Dey Smedmore, a Casualty of the Great War

Victor was my uncle, but I never knew him. He was born 21 February 1886 at No. 2 Sime Street Port Royal, Jamaica, where William Smedmore, his father, was employed as an Admiralty writer -- a clerk attached to the Royal Navy -- at the dockyard. He was the eldest son in a family of nine, expected to chaperone his sisters whenever they were invited out. I know that he was educated at Wolmer's Boy School, the oldest school in Jamaica, and that he worked as a clerk at Henderson & Co. at the corner of King and Harbour Streets in Kingston, but apart from that, knew very little about him, except that he had fought in the First World War and had been killed in action.

When I started researching my family history I decided to find out more about Victor. I wrote to the Household Cavalry Museum at Combermere Baracks, Windsor, Berkshire, and requested copies of his service papers. I found out that some time in 1915 Victor sailed to England and on August 18, 1915 he joined the First Life Guards as a trooper and was given the regimental number 3900. The 1st and 2nd Life Guards with the Blues and the Royals, make up the Household Cavalry. They have a long and illustrious history dating back to just before the Restoration of King Charles II, when a royal mounted bodyguard was formed in Holland to protect the body of the monarch. Together they are known as the Household Cavalry.

On 1 September 1916, Trooper Victor Dey Smedmore was transferred from the 1st Life Guards to the Household Battalion, where his regimental number became 1140. He embarked with the British Expeditionary Force from Southampton on 8 November 1916 and disembarked at Le Havre, France, 9 November 1916. On Army Form B. 103, Casualty Form -- Active Service, his qualifications are listed as "Bomber, Lewis Gunner". While in London he had spent 18 days in the Life Guards Hospital, from 1 January 1916 to 18 January 1916, with bronchitis. On 30 January he came down with nephritis in the field and was admitted to the General Hospital at Rouen on 2 February 1917. From there he was transferred to England 4 March 1917. He was admitted to the London General Hospital on 5 March 1917 where he remained for 29 days, and was discharged on 3 April 1917.

Victor remained in England until 13 July 1917. He was promoted to the rank of Corporal 25 April 1917 with the Reserve. On 14 July 1917 he was posted as a Trooper to the Household Battalion and embarked from Southampton once again, disembarking once more at Le Havre on 15 July 1917. He was wounded in the field (B.W.-R. Arm, i.e. bullet wound, right arm) on 12 October 1917 and admitted to hospital in Arques. He was apparently wounded again 3 November 1917 (G.S.W.-L. Forearm, i.e. gunshot wound, left forearm) at Boulogne. On 13 November he "joined from Boulogne" at Havre and on 25 November 1917 rejoined the Battalion from Base. In my research into the Household Battalion I came across the book, A Short History of the Household Cavalry, published by the Museum, where I found the following account:
"1917: At the 3rd Battle of the Scarpe River (May 1917), the Battalion fought for 14 days in the capture of Roeux Village, a subsidiary action in the greater battle of Arras (1917). In the 3rd Battle of Ypres (1917), the Household Battalion added the honours of Broodseinde, Poelcappelle and Passchendale to the Household Cavarly's battle honours during the month of October 1917. The Battalion was disbanded in January 1918. In 12 months it had suffered a total of 20 officers and 437 men killed in action." The final entry on Victor's Casualty Form -- Active Service for Trooper Victor Dey Smedmore is "Killed in action, 29.1.18." No place is mentioned.

Back in Jamaica, Victor's younger brother, Owen Smedmore, received a letter, dated 13 June 1918, from a Staff Captain at the War Office which stated that "Trooper V. Smedmore is reported as buried at a point just North West of Monchy Le Preux, South East of Arras". This letter was apparently in response to an enquiry made by Owen through the West Indian Contingent Committee. However, in response to an enquiry I sent to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, I received the following:
"Trooper Victor Dey Smedmore, 1140, serving with the Household Battalion, died on 29 January 1918... He has no known grave and therefore he is commemorated by name, along with others from his regiment on Bay 1 on the Arras Memorial, France. The Arras Memorial stands in Faubourg-d'Amiens Cemetery, Arras, 2 kilometres north-west of Arras Railway Station and bears the names of over 35,000 men lost without trace during the battles of Arras."

I couldn't help wondering why Victor left Jamaica to enlist in a regiment in England. His father had died in July of 1914, and as the eldest son he was now responsible for his widowed mother and his eight siblings. However, if you read the newspapers of the time you realize that there was a tremendous surge of patriotism among the people of the Empire. Those who did not join up or claimed to be conscientious objectors, were looked on as cowards. Victor was one of many young Jamaican men who sailed to England to join regiments there and many of them did not come back.