Lothrop Lewis ("de B." in the Army) de Bernière Smith

• Matriculated: 1913

• Born: 24 August 1893

• Died: 3 Septmeber 1916

• Regiment: Rifle Brigade

• Grave/Memorial: St Clement’s Churchyard, Leysdown, Isle of Sheppey, Kent

Family background

b. 24 August 1893 as the third son (of four boys and one girl) of Johnson Mallett de Bernière Smith (b. 1852 in New Orleans, d. 1930) and Margaret Zoë Smith (née Ford) (b. 1852 in Brooklyn, d. 1927) (m. 1877 in Suffolk County, New York). At the time of the 1891 Census the family was living at 2 St Katherine’s, St Pancras, with three servants; and at the time of the 1901 and 1911 Censuses the family lived at 4, Gloucester Gate, Regent’s Park, London NW1, with four servants.

 

Parents and antecedents

De Bernière Smith’s father was born in New Orleans, the son of Lothrop Lewis Smith (1817–1872) and Margaret Isabella Mallet (1821–1908). Lothrop Lewis Smith was born in Gorham, Maine, but at some time he moved to New Orleans and in 1853 bought a plot of land in what is now known as the Garden District. Here he had a Greek Revival house built, in which he lived until he moved from New Orleans in 1859. From 1873 it was the home of Isaac William Patton (1828–1890), Mayor of the City of New Orleans 1878–1880.

The de Bernière name almost certainly came into the family through de Bernière Smith’s paternal grandmother. The Mallett and the de Bernière families both lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and intermarried. The Malletts were descended from four Huguenot brothers who had fled France for Connecticut after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685); and the de Bernières were descended from John De Berniere, a Lieutenant Colonel in his Britannic Majesty’s 60^th (Royal American) Regiment of Foot, also of Huguenot ancestry, who brought his large family to North Carolina. One branch of the Mallett family moved to North Carolina, where Peter Mallett (1744–1805), de Bernière Smith’s great-great-grandfather, was a merchant and the commissary with responsibilities for provisioning North Carolina state militia and Continental troops during the American Revolution. His son, also Peter (1795–1830), married, as his second wife, Ellen Madeline de Berniere (1801–1828).

De Bernière Smith’s mother was one of the four daughters of John Bruce Ford (b. 1816, d. 1894 in Brooklyn) and Mary Lloyd (1822–96), who was living at home at the time of the 1880 Census. John Ford was a publisher in Brooklyn, NY. According to this census John Ford was born in England and his wife in Wales; they were married in 1840 in Liverpool. In the 1841 Census John Bruce and Mary Ford were living with her father, Edward Lloyd, a farmer of Llanfyllin, and her younger sister Margaret, who went on to marry Sir John Puleston (see below). Their eldest daughter, Emily, was 33 in 1880 and was born in England but their second daughter, Fanny, aged 29, was born in New York, and so they must have emigrated to the United States between1847 and 1851. John Ford became a naturalized American citizen on 3 April 1858. Both of de Bernière Smith’s parents were living with his maternal grandparents at this time and Johnson Mallett was employed as a ‘Clerk in Store’.

Johnson Mallett de Bernière Smith and his family moved to England in 1883 shortly after the birth of their daughter, Mary Mallett. The family appears in the society pages of various newspapers, most likely due to their relationship to Sir John Henry Puleston (1830–1908), the Welsh journalist, banker, Conservative politician and chancer who rose to the rank of Unionist Colonel during the American Civil War. His wife, Margaret (neé Lloyd; 1827–1902), was the sister of Mary Ford. At a memorial service to Sir John, Johnson Mallett de Bernière Smith and his wife were described as his nephew and niece. He followed in the family tradition and in 1915 was the Manager of the China & Japan Trading Co. Ltd, an Anglo-American Company whose offices were at numbers 4 and 5, East India Avenue, London E14. He was also a director of the Chloride Electrical Storage Company. On 9 February 1926 he received his Naturalization Certificate making him a British citizen. When he died in 1930 he left just over £3,000.

 

Siblings

Brother of:

(1) Bruce Ford de Bernière Smith (b. 1880 in Brooklyn, d. 1969); married (1911) Sophie Ethel Anne Grant (1884–1969); no record of children;

(2) Mary Mallett de Bernière Smith (b. 1883 in Brooklyn, d. 1974); married (1915) Norman Frederic Hallows (1887–1960); one son;

(3) Mallett de Bernière Smith (b. 1886 in London, d. 1973); not married;

(4) John Puleston de Bernière Smith (b. 1895, d. 1929 in Malta); not married.

In 1903 Bruce Ford applied to the American Consul in London for a passport to travel to Russia, giving his occupation as correspondent. In 1905 he started to work for the China & Japan Trading Co. Ltd in Shanghai and remained there until 1916, when he returned to the UK. He joined the British Army and was gazetted 2^nd Lieutenant in the Labour Corps in December 1917, subsequently serving as a Lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment until he was discharged in 1920. In August 1920 he joined the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary, which had started recruiting in July, and was posted to B Company; he was demobilized in January 1922. During the Second World War he was an air-raid warden in Portsmouth.

Mary Mallett was a bridesmaid in the Chapel Royal for the wedding of Minnie Puleston, daughter of Sir John Puleston, where she is described as a cousin of the bride (actually second cousin). She in turn was married in the Royal Chapel of St Katherine’s in Regent’s Park, with the consent of the Patron, Queen Alexandra; the first marriage in the chapel for 60 years.

Norman Frederic Hallows was registered as a medical doctor in July 1913, having graduated from Keble College, Oxford, with MB, Ch.B the same year. He worked on the Red Cross staff in the Balkan Wars (1912–13). He was awarded the 1914 Star and served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps at No. 11 General Hospital in Boulogne, and was later promoted to Captain and posted to the Connaught Hospital, in Walthamstow (now closed). He was a distinguished middle-distance runner, briefly holding the Olympic 1500-metre record, made in the heats, only to come 3^rd in the final, the winner equalling his record time. He became resident medical officer at Marlborough College.

Mallett de Bernière Smith was Sir John Puleston’s godson. He was educated at Marlborough School and Keble College, Oxford, and at the time of the 1911 Census he was a schoolmaster at Yardley Court, a preparatory school in Tonbridge. He became a Lieutenant in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps serving in France, where he was attached to the 8^th (Service) Battalion in June 1915. He was one of eight officers of the Battalion wounded in Sanctuary Wood on 30 July, the first day of the fighting around Hooge when the Germans used flame-throwers for the first time. The Battalion suffered heavy casualties and had difficulty in evacuating the wounded from the wood. (For details of the action at Hooge, see B. Pawle.) He was eventually evacuated to England on HMHS Dieppe, which some weeks earlier had carried his wounded brother Lothrop. Mallett’s wounds were so severe that he did not return to the front; instead he was employed as a recruiting officer in Surrey and Kent for the rest of the war. He did not marry.

John Puleston de Bernière Smith enrolled in the Royal Navy, aged 12, and began his training at the Royal Naval College, Osborne, Isle of Wight, in 1905. He first went to sea on 15 September 1913 as a Midshipman on HMS Bellerophon, a dreadnought battleship (1907; scrapped 1921). In January 1916 he was appointed Acting Sub-Lieutenant and shortly after was transferred to the battleship HMS Hindustan, a pre-dreadnought battleship (1903; scrapped 1923), missing the Battle of Jutland (31 May–1 June 1916) (see G.M. Johnson); after a year he was transferred to HMS Barham, a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship (1914; torpedoed  by UB-331 on the afternoon of 24 November 1941 with the loss of c.870 lives when hunting Italian convoys off the Egyptian coast west of Alexandria), on which he served for the rest of the war. In March 1926 he was promoted Lieutenant-Commander. All his reports show him to be an excellent officer, cheerful and popular with the men, but firm. His reports note that he spoke fluent French, was an excellent ornithologist and was keen on sports. He died in the Royal Naval Hospital, Malta, of peripheral nephritis and myocarditis brought on by alcoholism. He is buried at Kalkara Naval Cemetery, Malta. At the time of his death he was a Lieutenant-Commander on the battleship HMS Warspite, a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship (1913; scrapped 1950–57 after running aground on the Cornish coast).

 

Education

Smith attended Mr Vickers’s Preparatory School at “Scaitcliffe” (now Bishopsgate School), Englefield Green, Egham, Surrey, from 1904 to 1907 and then Charterhouse School from 1907 to 1912, where he was a contemporary of E.A. McNair. After that he worked abroad for a year with a French tutor, Mlle de Hériaut, in order to bring his spoken language up to the level needed for entry into the Diplomatic Service. He won the Poole Prize for Natural History. He matriculated at Magdalen as a Commoner on 14 October 1913, having passed Responsions and successfully taken an Additional Paper on the French politician and historian Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) during Trinity Term 1913. This allowed him to take one part of the First Public Examination (Holy Scripture) in Trinity Term 1914. On 28 July 1914, in all innocence of the impending war, he and his friend Pritchard left London for Heppenheim, on the edge of the Odenwald, in Hessen, central Germany, in order to take a course in forestry as part of his proposed degree in Biology. They arrived there on 28 July and spent the following day at work with the local Forstmeister, but when, on 2 August, they heard that the train service to England was about to cease, they boarded a train and headed for home via Holland, arriving in London on 4 August, the day when war was declared.

Smith seems to have had a talent for football and could play the piano reasonably well, and in the view of Magdalen’s Science Fellow, Robert Theodore Gunther (1869–1940), he had “the best qualities” for his chosen study of Biology: “I well remember his joy in nature which welled up during a walk [on] which I took him soon after his arrival here.” But if, like W.A. Fleet, Smith was not outstanding at anything – sporting or academic – he clearly had a fund of natural American charm and a restrained joie de vivre which allowed him to get on with almost anybody. Thus, on 20 September 1916, Smith’s father wrote to President Warren thanking him for his and Lady Warren’s kind expression of sympathy and assuring them that their letter was

particularly welcome and comforting, not only as expressing your fondness for the dear boy but because you had observed, and appreciated, certain traits of his character which we know so well and which his natural reserve, almost shyness, would not generally disclose. He had indeed a very lovable nature and an inherent cheerfulness combined with a really fine mind and, as you say, a discriminating taste, and we had great hopes for his future.

In the obituary that appeared in the Extra Number of the Oxford Gazette on 16 November 1916, Warren described him as “quiet but singularly bright, intelligent, and amiable” and, following Gunther, as “a real naturalist”.

At Oxford, along with many other Magdalen men, he was a member of the Apollo University No. 357 Masonic Lodge.

 

War service

On arriving in London, Smith, who was 5 foot 7½ inches tall and had spent his year at Oxford in the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps, received a letter from the War Office, asking him if he would accept a Commission if he were to be offered one. According to a long, emotionally charged, and erratically punctuated letter that Smith’s mother wrote to President Warren on 14 November 1916 – in which she thanked him for allowing her to tell him “these sacred details – of a young life, in whom you have always been so kindly interested” – her son had loved Magdalen for the “neverending joy” it had given him and had spent a “more than happy” year there. Nevertheless, he left without taking a degree in August 1914 and joined the Special Reserve of Officers on 6 August. Then on 15 August he was attached to the 6th (Reserve) Battalion, the Rifle Brigade (The Prince Consort’s Own), part of the Thames and Medway Garrison (cf. W.N. Monteith), and joined the unit at Queenborough, south of Sheerness, on the Isle of Sheppey, as a Lieutenant.

Smith was subsequently transferred to the 1^st (Regular) Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, which had been in France since 28 August 1914 as part of 11^th Brigade, in the 4^th Division, and left for France on 26 January 1915. The Battalion’s War Diary is, however, extremely scrappy: it rarely mentions names and does not record Smith’s arrival. But he probably reported for duty when it was holding positions in Ploegsteert Wood, opposite an enemy position known as German House, the recipient of frequent shelling but otherwise leading a very routine life throughout February and March. On 24 April, the 1^st Battalion marched to Steenwerck in northern France, where it entrained for Poperinghe, a few miles to the west of Ypres. It spent 25 April in huts in Vlamertinghe, half-way between Poperinghe and Ypres, and then, at 18.00 hours, marched via the stone bridge north of Ypres to Sint Jaan, just to the north-east of Ypres, where it spent the next three days under constant shelling. On 28 April it dug in near the village of Zonnebeke and the nearby Haanebeeke, and the normally uninformative author of the War Diary informs his readers that during the month of April, his unit had suffered the following number of casualties: 50 killed in action, 185 wounded, 23 missing, and 102 sick (no details).

According to Appendix XVII of the Diary, the Battalion was shelled all day on 3 May, but the threatened German attack into the valley of the Haanebeeke never materialized. But while the 1^st Battalion was leaving its trenches on the night of 3/4 May 1915 after eight days of near-continuous shelling, Smith was dangerously wounded – another event about which the War Diary is silent. However, on 12 May 1915, his Company Commander, Captain (later Lieutenant-Colonel, DSO) Henry George Morton (from 1920 Pleydell-)Railston (c.1886–1936), described what had happened in a letter to Smith’s parents:

On May 3^rd we had a terrific shelling all day, and suffered a great deal, and at midnight carried out a pre-arranged retirement from the dangerous salient we were in. Your son, after getting through all that very hard 8 days, led his platoon back, and on the march back by St. Jean [Sint Jaan], near Ypres, a shell burst at the head of his men, and your son [together with two or three of his men] was badly wounded. He fell back in the arms of the C.O., Major [later Brigadier-General, William Walter] Seymour [1878–1940], and was at once put on a stretcher, and taken to the clearing station quite close [by].

As a result of the shell-burst, a shrapnel bullet struck Smith on the left-hand side of his chest at approximately the level of the seventh rib, punctured the thoracic cavity, and lodged near the base of his left lung. As the wound was serious, Smith could not be moved from the Casualty Clearing Station to the Base Hospital at Boulogne until 10 May 1915, where, on 16 May 1915, he underwent resection of the rib and drainage, the first of four operations on his chest. On 3 June 1915 he returned to England on the former ferry the HMHS Dieppe (1905–41; struck by a mine off Tobruk, Libya, on 18 March 1941 and sank with the loss of 78 lives) and was sent to a hospital at Sussex Lodge, Regent’s Park: but he still had the drainage tube in his chest on 5 July 1915, and it was not until 23 August 1915 that he was considered strong enough to have the shrapnel bullet removed.

After this, he made a slow recovery and on 11 November 1915 he was sent to a convalescent home at “East Looe”, Canford Cliffs, Bournemouth, where he remained for a good three months. Although the wound eventually healed sufficiently for the tubes and bandages to be discarded in mid-February 1916, the wound took over a year to mend and it was easy for Smith to get out of breath and lose power on his left-hand side. He was awarded a wound gratuity of £166 13s. 4d. and was moved from the convalescent home near Bournemouth to one in Newbridge, County Kildare, Ireland. On 10 May 1916 he appeared before a Medical Board and was given a further six weeks leave, during which a naval friend – Vice-Admiral Sir Reginald Godfrey Otway Tupper (“Holy Reggie”; 1859–1945), who was the Commanding Officer of the patrol area around the west coast of Scotland – obtained permission from the Admiralty and the War Office for Smith to accompany him from 20 May to 10 June 1916 on a sea voyage as a guest in his Flag Ship – the Armed Merchant Cruiser HMS Alsatian (from 1919 SS Empress of France). Smith then paid a short visit to Ireland, and having now been convalescing for about a year, on 24 June 1916 he was declared fit by another Medical Board for a month’s light home duties even though his left lung was not yet fully inflated.

So on the same day he rejoined the 6^th Battalion of his old Regiment at Eastchurch, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent (cf. R.W.B. Levett). Here he was put in charge of the detachment of about 70 men that was based under canvas at the little village of Leysdown-on-Sea, on the north-eastern side of the Island, where there was plenty of light work to do and he could live entirely out of doors. His mother would describe how much her son loved the time he spent on the Island because his circumstances there enabled him to give free rein to his “passionate love for the beautiful – and his neverending joy, in trees and flowers” in her letter to Warren of 14 November 1916:

It was all so beautiful, & characteristic of the boy – The tents were of pale green, dotted about on a lovely green meadow, with the sun on both sides – with a wall of trees for shelter, from the East. It was close to these trees [that] de Bernière had pitched his tent – He had planted a garden all around his tent – with every sort of wild flower the Isle could afford him – also, masses of the purple Sea Lavender – of which he was so fond. He had built an arbour – first under the trees, and planted all around it, wild flowers, and vines – which covered it. Here he used to entertain his friends, from East Church – who used to ride over, often, to bathe in the Sea, and have tea in his arbour – The floor of the arbour, was paved with the beautiful, blue shells, with which, that part of the coast is covered – a pale, opalistic, blue – which is as lovely as a mosaic. You can imagine the scene – The sky above, of azure, with its Heavenly blue, of fleecy white clouds – of the Sea, rolling in with its seamless murmur – onto the beach! The sunsets – at Leysdown – are [so] noted for their beauty – so I was told – by a friend of de Bernière’s – at Leysdown – that he took the keenest delight, in looking at, and noting the lovely tints – etc, the sunsets disclosed – he used to discern beauty, where no-one else had thought of looking for it.

His obituarist at Charterhouse, to whom Smith’s mother had probably sent a similar letter, also wrote of Smith:

He was very fond of plants and flowers, and planted round his tent all the different wild flowers which he could find in the island [of Sheppey]. The village children would come in the afternoons to visit him and to listen to the gramophone, and the poor all knew and loved him for his happy smile and his courtesy. […] Among the wreaths placed upon his grave was one from some poor people living in a tiny cottage near the camp, made from their humble garden flowers – a touching tribute to the affection which he inspired.

Smith’s convalescent leave was extended on 24 July 1916, and because the month of August was “warm, and delightful”, his mother could tell Warren on 14 November that “de Bernière – improved, rapidly – and his lung, had begun to expand”. That period of convalescent leave must also have been extended, for on the night of Saturday 2 September 1916, while two Zeppelin raiders got through to London and the home counties and triggered a general black-out over much of southern England, Smith and another officer – Lieutenant (later Sir) Frederic (“Eric”) W. Metcalfe (1886–1965) – had gone into the town of Sheerness to have dinner at the Fountain Hotel and then go the theatre there.

At about 23.10 hours they were hurrying back to Leysdown-on-Sea at c.10–12 m.p.h. on Smith’s “Blue Indian” 3 h.p. motor-cycle, showing shaded acetylene lights at the front and rear as ordered by a sentry because, technically, they were on duty. But on a left-hand bend on Halfway House Road, between the canal and Sheerness East, Smith moved too far over to the right in order to avoid tram-lines on his left-hand side and clipped the bottom corner of the off-side mudguard of a taxi-cab that had pulled up on the other side of the road. Ironically, the cab-driver, John Walter Kite (1864–1921), of 186, High Street, Sheerness, had been told by a second sentry to extinguish his lights because he was not on duty, had seen Smith’s motor-cycle approaching him, and had pulled over to the nearside kerb. Although the impact was slight, Smith hit his head on the taxi’s door-handle and was thrown onto the road, suffering a compound fracture of the skull which rendered him unconscious and proved fatal. His friend Metcalfe, who was riding on the carrier of the machine, was badly injured and fractured a leg, but was able to help the cab-driver get Smith into his cab and give evidence at the subsequent inquest while lying on a stretcher. After the accident, Kite drove the two officers to Sheerness Military Hospital, Well Marsh, Sheerness, by 23.30 hours, but Smith never recovered consciousness and died, aged 23, of his injuries at 05.00 hours on the morning of Sunday 3 September 1916. At the inquest that was held at the Military Hospital on the afternoon of Tuesday 5 September, the jury reached a verdict of accidental death and exonerated Kite from all blame. Metcalfe survived the war, became a distinguished civil servant, was knighted in 1949, and served as Clerk to the House of Commons from 1948 to 1954.

Smith is buried in St Clement’s Churchyard, Leysdown, which is all that remains now of St Clement’s Church, where Smith attended Holy Communion and read the lesson during his stay on the island. On 12 September 1916, Metcalfe, who had been sent home to recuperate, wrote a long letter to Smith’s parents in which, among other things, he told them how their son’s funeral had been attended by “every Officer and practically every man” from both camps on the Isle of Sheppey, “which testifies to your son’s universal popularity with us all. He was such a dear fellow, straight and frank and charming.” He added:

His death is an irreparable loss to us, but I do, as you wish, think of him always as happy and at Peace. I am thankful that he was so well and gay when he was called away, and that his crossing to the other land was painless and peaceful. His memory will be always a precious thing to me: one doesn’t often get a friend [as] frank and gay and charming as he was.

In her letter to Warren of 14 November 1916 Smith’s mother gave the following account of her son’s obsequies:

We put him to rest, in the bosom of Mother Earth, with his scarred breast – with only part of his left lung – and, minus four pieces of ribs! He had been four times under the Surgeon’s Knife, and was never heard to utter a murmur – or make any complaint – he was a Martyr – not a willing one – for his Country – and the Honour of his College.

The grave is inscribed: “The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God” (see The Book of Wisdom, 3:1). Smith died intestate, but his estate was later valued at £246 18s 9d.

 

Bibliography

For the books and archives referred to here in short form, refer to the Slow Dusk Bibliography and Archival Sources.

 

Printed sources:

[Anon.], ‘Court Circular’, The Times, no. 38,787 (26 October 1908), p. 11.

[Anon.], ‘Collision between Motor Cycle and Taxi-Cab’, Sheerness Times, [issue number unknown] (6 September 1916), [pagination unknown].

[Anon.], ‘Fatal Collision on Halfway House Road’, Sheerness Guardian and East Kent Advertiser, no. 3,021 (9 September 1916), p. 9.

[Anon.], ‘Oxford’s Sacrifice: Short Notices: Magdalen College’ [obituary], The Oxford Magazine, 35 (Extra Number) (10 November 1916), pp. 16–17.

[Anon.], ‘The Late Lieut. L.L. de Bernière Smith, The Rifle Brigade’, The Carthusian, 12, no. 397 (April 1917), p. 66.

Günther (1924), p. 469.

 

Archival sources:

MCA: PR32/C/3/370-378 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letters relating to L.L. de Bernière Smith [1912–1916]).

MCA: Ms. 876 (III), vol. 3.

OUA: UR 2/1/85.

WO339/16570.

WO 95/1895/2

ADM/196/146