F E Smith - First World War

First World War

Smith had joined the Territorial Army by commission into the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars, in which Churchill was already an officer, in 1913, and was a captain in the regiment before the outbreak of the First World War. On its outbreak he was placed in charge of the Government's Press Bureau, with rank of full Colonel and responsibility for newspaper censorship. He was not very successful in this role, and in 1914–1915 served in France as a Staff Officer with the Indian Corps with ultimate temporary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He and his successor as 'Recording Officer' (a Colonel Merewether) later collaborated on an official history entitled The Indian Corps in France (published 1917).

In May 1915 he was appointed Solicitor General by H. H. Asquith, and knighted. He soon after (in October 1915) succeeded his friend Sir Edward Carson as Attorney General, with the right to attend Cabinet. Early in 1916 he was briefly placed under military arrest for arriving at Boulogne without a pass, and had to be 'appeased' by a meeting with General Sir Douglas Haig.

As Attorney General, it was his responsibility to lead the prosecution for the Crown in major cases such as the trial in 1916 of the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement for treason. Sir Roger had been captured after landing from a Kaiserliche Marine U-boat on Banna Strand in Tralee Bay in north County Kerry, south-west Ireland, just a few days before the Easter Rising in late April 1916.