Early Life
Duncan Smith was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, in 1954. He is the son of W. G. G. Duncan Smith, a Group Captain of the British Royal Air Force, who was highly decorated in World War II, and Pamela Summers, a ballerina. They were married in 1946. Duncan Smith's maternal great-grandmother was a Japanese woman living in the then Peking, Ellen Oshey, who married Pamela's grandfather, merchant seaman Captain Samuel Lewis Shaw, from Ireland. Other relations include Canadian CBC wartime broadcaster Peter Stursberg, who was born in China, and whose 2002 book No Foreign Bones in China records the story of the Anglo-Japanese couple, and his son, current CBC vice-president Richard Stursberg. Through Captain Shaw, Duncan Smith is also a distant relative of George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright and socialist.
Read more about this topic: Iain Duncan Smith
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)