Early and Private Life
Smith was born in London, the son of Captain Evan Cadogan Eric Smith MC of Ashfold in Sussex and his wife, Beatrice Helen (née Williams). He was a scion of an old banking family: Smiths of Nottingham was founded in the 1650s, and merged with the National Provincial Bank after the First World War, and his father became its chairman. His mother was the daughter of Albert Williams and granddaughter of Sir George Williams, founder of the YMCA, and a great-granddaughter of Thomas Cook. His elder sister, Fortune, married Hugh FitzRoy, Earl of Euston (later 11th Duke of Grafton) in 1946; she was a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth II from 1953 and 1966, and has been the Mistress of the Robes since 1967.
Smith was educated at Eton, where he was Captain of the Oppidans and won the Rosebery Prize for History. He joined the Fleet Air Arm in 1942 and trained as an observer at HMS Daedalus. He served in the Second World War in a Swordfish squadron in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, then as a liaison officer to the U.S. Ninth Air Force, and then with a squadron of Barracudas in the North Atlantic. He flew as a navigator in an operation to dive-bomb the German battleship Tirpitz in Kvænangen fjord in July 1944. He joined the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable, and served in the Far East with 845 Naval Air Squadron, flying Avengers. He was in Ceylon at the end of the War.
After the War, he read history at New College, Oxford, where he later became an honorary fellow in 1979. He met his future wife, Christian Carnegy, in Oxford, where she was reading English. They married in 1952.
They had two sons and three daughters:
- Serena Mary Smith (married The Rt. Hon Nicholas Soames MP, son of Christopher Soames, Baron Soames)
- Bartholomew Evan Eric Smith (born 1 February 1955; founder of the Amber Foundation and West London Aero Club)
- Adam Carnegy Eric Smith (born 1953)
- Dido Smith
- Emma Smith, who pre-deceased him
Smith owned a property at No. 1, Smith Square, in his former constituency. However, he resided at Shottesbrooke Park, near Maidenhead in Berkshire, the ancient home of the Vansittart family which he inherited from his father's second cousin in 1962.
He died in Windsor. He was survived by his wife, their two sons, and two of their three daughters.
Read more about this topic: John Lindsay Eric Smith
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