The 1860s

Edward began in the navy as a master’s assistant. By the time he and Mary married at Plymouth in 1865 he had risen through the ranks to become a ship’s master and was fresh from an adventure on the steam sloop Rinaldo (from 1861 to February 1865). 

He had served on the North America and West Indies Station and narrowly avoided ‘fevers of a remittent and ephemeral type, diarrhoea, rheumatism, and boils’, according to a House of Commons report on the health of the Royal Navy in 1864. On 8 October 1862 the Rinaldo arrived in New Orleans and in February the following year dropped anchor at Hamilton, Bermuda. 

[Interestingly, a contemporary in the Rinaldo was John Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, thirty years later the famous nemesis of Oscar Wilde but in 1862/3 an eighteen-year-old midshipman. He recalled life on board the sloop: ‘our men used to sing nightly on the forecastle, laying [sic] off New-Orleans, and surrounded by half-a-dozen Federal ships, “The Bonny Blue Flag,” the Southern Rebels’ song.’]

Back in England in July of 1865, and now married, Edward was briefly in the newly-commissioned Scorpion, in home waters, until January 1866, when he and Mary probably returned to Plymouth. Edward applied for a Master’s Certificate of Service in February 1866, giving Lazarus’s address, 5 St James’s Place, Plymouth, as his current place of residence. He must have received a posting shortly afterwards as they were at the naval base of Sheerness, Kent later that same year, where their first daughter was born. 

The 1870s and 80s

In April 1870, as noted in The Times (12 April), Edward was appointed navigating lieutenant to the Mersey, one of the ships Mary Mackenzie’s brother Alfred had served in ten years earlier and the longest wooden warship built for the Navy. 

It must have been in this ship that Edward and Mary sailed for Ireland (leaving behind their infant daughter Ethel Maud in the care of the Roberts family at St James’s Place). The Mersey was the Royal Navy flagship at the naval base of Queenstown (now Cobh), near Cork. The family lived at number 2 The Park, Queenstown from   1870 to August 1872, during which time they had two more daughters. Shortly afterwards, in September, the now expanded family returned to Plymouth.

In 1872 Edward was promoted to the rank of staff commander. The era of the entirely wooden fighting ship was drawing to a close and in September 1874, according to The Times, he was appointed staff commander in the Sultan, one of the new broadside ironclads, part of the Channel fleet. 

In June 1877 he was staff commander in the Hector, another ironclad battleship (and later, in 1899, the first naval vessel to be fitted with a wireless transmitter). The Hector formed part of the Southern Reserve Fleet between 1868 and 1886.

When the 1881 census was taken, Edward and Mary were back in Plymouth at an address close to Mary’s sister Catherine: 2 Moor View Terrace, with a servant and a Cornish nursery governess (called coincidentally Mary H. Roberts, although no relation) and their five daughters. Edward was described as a ‘Staff Commander, RN Active Lieut’ , aged fifty. He was perhaps awaiting another posting as the following year, so reported the London Gazette, he was staff commander in HMS Duncan RN barracks, back at Sheerness, Kent. 

Three years later, on 22 June 1884, Edward died. He and Mary were living at 4 Banks Terrace, in Sheerness dockyard. He left £675 to his widow.

In 1891 Mary Mackenzie was living at Porstea, Hampshire, on her husband’s naval pension, and was still living on private means in 1911, with her daughter Edith, at 1 Auckland Road, East Southsea. She died in 1918, at Portsmouth – her age given as eighty-nine: she was actually eighty-two. She was Lazarus’s last surviving child.

Mary and Edward Smyth had five daughters (setting a trend repeated in the next generation with my great grandfather and his brothers), of whom three seem not to have married. They were some of my great grandfather’s many  cousins.

Ethel Maud Dunlop Smyth

The first child, Ethel Maud Dunlop Smyth, was born at Sheerness on 1 November 1866. Mary and Edward seem to have left young Ethel Maud in the care of Lazarus – or perhaps more likely Mary’s sister Ellen Fanny – while they were in Ireland, as the four-year-old was at her grandfather’s house in St James’s Place, Plymouth, when the 1871 census was taken. Ethel Maud is given as just Maud here, which I suppose suggests she was known by her middle name.

In 1898 Maud married Henry Baker Hall, a surgeon in the Royal Navy – making her a third-generation naval wife. In 1901 this couple were living in Nelson Road, Great Yarmouth (not so far, in fact, from Lazarus’s address of 1848). Maud worked as a governess and their son, Guy Baker Hall, was born here in 1902. 

In 1911 they were at Catherington, Hampshire but returned to Devon at some point. By 1938 they were at 20a Leigham Terrace, Plymouth, when Henry died, at the Royal Naval Hospital, leaving his wife and son the substantial sum of £8700 1s 1d. Maud lived through the Second World War and the blitz bombing of Plymouth, which largely destroyed the town familiar to Lazarus and his children. She died in 1949 at the age of eighty-two. 

In 1939, Maud was living at 20A Leigham Terrace, Plymouth with her son Guy, the director of a lending library company. Guy married a Dorothy Wellington at Plymouth in 1945; they don’t appear to have had any children. He was the executor for his cousin Frances Stephens when she died in 1957 and Guy himself died at Plymouth on 2 May 1976 (according to probate records).

Alice Mary Smyth

Mary and Edward had two daughters born in Ireland, at Cork – Alice and Marion. 

Alice Mary arrived on 17 December 1870 and was born at home, 2 The Park, Queenstown. She grew up in Plymouth though, after the family returned there when she was two years old. She must have moved to Portsea with her mother, after the death of her father.

In April 1896 Alice became a colonial army wife when she married James Sweet Hodding (Jim, 1867–1930). He was a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant, born in Cananore and serving in the Madras Infantry. Amongst the witnesses at their Portsea wedding were Mary’s sister Olive Spencer Smyth and brother-in-law Henry Baker Hall.

Lieutenant Hodding was promoted through the British Indian Army ranks and was eventually made a major in the 80th Carnatic Infantry, as announced in the London Gazette of May 1906. Three sons were born in Madras, although one died in infancy. 

By 1911 the family was back in England, at Kingston upon Thames, although shortly after this they emigrated to Vancouver, Canada.

Before her death in Vancouver in May 1967, at the grand age of ninety-six, Alice must have been Lazarus’s last surviving grandchild, although she probably had little contact with her many relatives in England. She is buried in Colwood, just outside Victoria, BC.

The two sons of Alice and Jim Hodding who survived infancy were James Douglas Hodding (1899–1916) – a Royal Fusilier who fell at the Somme in July 1916, aged just seventeen – and Aubrey Vyvyan Hodding (1900–71), who also served in the First World War, in the Canadian Mounted Rifles. His line comprises the only descendants of Mary Mackenzie Roberts. They still live in Canada.

Marion Amy Gardner Smyth

Marion Amy Gardner Smyth was born at Queenstown in Country Cork on 29 August 1872, just days before her family returned to England. A nurse, Mary Anne Fielder, registered her birth on 4 September but she must have either been confused by the excitement of the occasion or did not know the mother’s maiden name, as it was given on the record as ‘Mary Smyth, formerly Mackenzie’ (it had been given correctly as ‘formerly Roberts’ by Edward at the birth of their first daughter, Alice two years earlier).

Marion herself became a nurse and in 1901 was an unmarried hospital nurse in Portsmouth. In 1911 she was aged thirty-eight, still a spinster and living at the coastal town of Leigh on Sea, Essex, in a small bay-fronted terrace, at number 2 North Street. She apparently shared this with another nurse, a sixty-eight-year-old widow, Marianne Bird. Mrs Bird appears to have died in the autumn of 1921 and the following year, in May 1922, a Marion A. Smyth, aged fifty-one, sailed from London to Sydney on the P&O liner SS Baradine. Was this her? 

In September 1939 she was living with her sister Olive at 4 Hardenwaye, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. She is listed as a state registered nurse but was presumably retired.

Olive Spencer Smyth

Olive Spencer Smyth was born Plymouth on 2 October 1873 and baptised on 6 February 1874 at Plymouth St Andrew. Spencer was a family name – her father’s uncle was Spencer T. Smyth (1792–1879) harbour master at Great Yarmouth and in the 1870s feted as one of the last surviving officers of Trafalgar. 

In 1891 Olive was a pupil at the Royal Naval School for Girls (Kilmorey House) at Isleworth, Middlesex. On 15 February 1902 The Nursing Record listed her as a new member of the League of St Bartholomew’s Hospital Nurses, in the City of London.

 When the 1911 census was taken she was still in London, living at 3 Mount Carmel Chambers, Dukes Lane, off Kensington Church Street, and still single. (A neighbour at number 15 in this apartment block of mostly spinsters was Miss Evelyn Sharp, the novelist and Suffragist, and sister of the noted folk-music collector Cecil Sharp.) By 1921 though she was boarding up in Holloway, at 15 Beacon Hill and working for the Public Health Department in Woolwich.

When war came in 1939, Olive had moved out to High Wycombe with her sister Marion, where she worked as an assistant organiser for the London County Council. She died at High Wycombe in 1955, at the age of eighty-one.

Edith Mackenzie Smyth

Edith Mackenzie Smyth was born in Plymouth in 1875 and baptised on 12 May 1875 at Plymouth St Andrew. She died unmarried in Portsmouth in 1950. She was also the last person in the family to have Mackenzie as a middle name. This originated with James Mackenzie (1721–69) who was Edith’s 3xgreat grandfather. It is perhaps unlikely Edith knew where the name came from, other than it was one passed down through the maternal line of her family.

Kate Muriel Smyth

Kate Muriel Smyth was the last daughter in this family, named no doubt for Mary’s sister Kate (Catherine). She was born in 1877 and baptised on 14 February 1877 at Plymouth St Andrew, but died aged just three in 1880.