General Sir Horace Lockwood Smith-Dorrien was a senior British Army officer. One of the few British survivors of the Battle of Isandlwana as a young officer, he also distinguished himself in the Second Boer War.
Background
Horace Smith-Dorrien was born at Haresfoot, a house near Berkhamsted, to Colonel Robert Algernon Smith-Dorrien and Mary Ann Drever. He was the twelfth child of sixteen; his eldest brother was Thomas Algernon Smith-Dorrien-Smith, the Lord Proprietor of the Isles of Scilly from 1872 – 1918.
Education
He was educated at Harrow, and on 26 February 1876 entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He had hoped to join the 95th Rifle Brigade of Peninsular War fame. After passing out he was commissioned in 1877 as a subaltern to the 95th (Derbyshire) Regiment of Foot, later to become the Sherwood Foresters.
Career
Next came duty during the Zulu War of 1879 and in Egypt three years later and again in 1884/1885; he was known above all for his prowess on the race course and the polo field. Smith-Dorrien attended the Staff College and in 1889 began a decade of service in India; ten years later he was with Sir H. H. Kitchener at Omdurman and followed the sirdar to Fashoda. For the next two years, Smith-Dorrien fought in the Boer War, being promoted major general. Lord Roberts dispatched him to India in November 1901 as adjutant general, and later Smith-Dorrien commanded the Fourth Division at Quetta. He came home in 1907 to the Command at Aldershot, and five years later was appointed to the Southern Command at Salisbury.
Given command of the II Army Corps on August 17, 1914, Smith-Dorrien led this unit as part of the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French. The II Corps bore the brunt of the German advance at Mons, while Sir Douglas Haig's I Corps was strangely separated from the main body of British troops. Worse yet, Sir John French was some twenty miles from the front at St. Quentin. The plight of the British Expeditionary Force was critical: out of touch with Haig's I Corps, without instructions from the field commander miles away, Smith-Dorrien for almost one week was left to his own devices. French finally ordered his two corps to retreat southwest, but even this late stratagem failed as Haig and Smith-Dorrien were split into two forces by the forest of Mormal, causing a gap of fifteen miles between their inner flanks. On August 26 the exhaustion of his troops and the nearness of the enemy forced Smith-Dorrien to abandon the ordered retreat and to stand at Le Cateau; that same day French's chief of staff, Sir Archibald Murray, fainted at an inn in St. Quentin on hearing of the German advance. French at first praised Smith-Dorrien for this valiant act, but later in his book 1914 denounced what he termed "the shattered condition of the Second Corps" after Le Cateau.
At the end of 1914 French and Smith-Dorrien had another confrontation; the British commander in chief supported the desire of the French to mount a broad offensive the following year, while his corps commander counseled that he husband available regulars and await the eventual build-up of men and munitions. Early in 1915 Smith-Dorrien was given command of the Second Army, and in April relieved French troops in the southern portion of the Ypres salient. This unit took a terrible pounding from German-concentrated fire, and Smith-Dorrien pleaded, to no avail, with French to affect a slight retreat to more defensible positions. Relations between the two men were soon strained to the breaking point. On April 22 the Germans launched the first major gas attack at Ypres, breaking through the northern parts of the salient defended by French and Algerian troops, thereby exposing the left flank of Smith-Dorrien's forces. General French at once ordered British counterattacks over the next five days, and only with heavy losses was Smith-Dorrien able to hold Ypres. By April 27 the corps commander could condone
such bloodletting no longer and in a bitter note to headquarters asked for an end to the senseless slaughter and a retreat to more secure positions. That same afternoon, French instructed Smith-Dorrien to hand over command of all forces in the salient to General Herbert Plumer, and ordered him home on May 6 without "reason or explanation." Smith-Dorrien's diagnosis of the situation at Ypres proved to be correct: British forces thereafter drew back just as the corps commander had recommended.
In England Smith-Dorrien was given command of the First Army for home defense for six months in 1915, but he had to decline an offer to lead an expedition to German East Africa owing to a severe bout of pneumonia, from which he did not fully recover before the end of the war. Smith-Dorrien served as governor at Gibraltar from 1918 to 1923, and he died at Chippenham Hospital as a result of a motor accident on August 12, 1930. He declined to the end to discuss the circumstances of his curt dismissal by Sir John French on May 6, 1915.
Membership
Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Connections
On 3 September 1902 (on leave between being Adjutant General, India and taking command of 4th Division), he married Olive Crofton Schneider (1881-1951) at St Peter's, Eaton Square, London. She was the eldest daughter of Colonel John Henry Augustus Schneider and his wife, Mary Elizabeth (née Crofton) Schneider, of Oak Lea, Furness Abbey. Her brothers were Henry Crofton Schneider and Major Cyril Crofton Schneider. Olive's mother was the stepsister of Gen. Sir Arthur Power Palmer GCB, GCIE, who died in 1904.
The Smith-Dorriens had three sons:
Grenfell Horace Gerald Smith-Dorrien (born 1904) served in the army, reaching the rank of brigadier. He was killed by shellfire on 13 September 1944 during the Italian Campaign, whilst commanding the 169th (London) Infantry Brigade. His grave is in the Gradara War Cemetery, in the Commune of Gradara in the Province of Pesaro and Urbino.
Peter Lockwood Smith-Dorrien (born 1907) was killed in the King David Hotel bombing on 22 July 1946.
David Pelham Smith-Dorrien a.k.a. Bromley David Smith-Dorrien (29 October 1911 – 11 February 2001) appears to have been an actor in the 1930s. He joined the Foresters in 1940. After the war, he worked to keep alive his father's reputation, designing a first-day cover commemorating the Battle of Le Cateau and helping his father's biographer A. J. Smithers. He is buried in Kennington Cemetery.