Pte 58046 James George Smith

• Age: 25
• From: Middlesex, London
• Regiment: The King's (Liverpool Regiment) 17th Btn
• K.I.A Monday 9th April 1917
• Commemorated at: Arras Memorial
  Panel Ref: Bay 3

James George Smith was born in the June quarter of 1891 in St Luke's, London, which is a district on the borders of Islington and the City of London. He was the eldest son of George Smith and his wife  Caroline (nee Fergusson) who were married in Bethnal Green in 1889.

The 1901 census records the nine year old James living with his parents and siblings at 53 Bartholomew Close, Smithfield, London. His father was 43 and the proprietor of a coffee shop, his mother Caroline was 40 years old. James had an older sister called Caroline aged 11, and three younger brothers - Charles aged 7, Alfred 4 and Walter aged 2. Also living at the coffee shop was a waitress called Lilian Page and a 14 year old niece called Elizabeth Hole.

By the 1911 census the family had a coffee shop at 9 Newbury Street, Cloth Fair in the City of London. George and Caroline and daughter Caroline are all working at the coffee shop. James is working as an artificial flower cutter, Charles is a porter at a chemical manufacturer, Alfred is a van guard for a provisions merchant, and Walter is at school. The family also have a general servant called Emily Lambert aged 18.

James married Leah Margaret Dolan on the 2nd July 1916 at St Marks, Old Street when he was 25.  James gives his father as George Smith, bootmaker, deceased.  They both give their address as 30B Sutton Dwellings.

Sutton Dwellings are a series of residential buildings in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea often called London’s first housing estate.  At the beginning of the 20th century the 4.5-acre area bounded by Leader Street, Cale Street, and College Street was home to many overcrowded small houses.  In 1908, the William Sutton Trust, established by philanthropist William Richard Sutton, purchased the area.  They demolished the houses and built 14 red-brick residential buildings, designed by architect E.C.P. Monson, for social housing.  The buildings, which housed 2,200 people in 764 apartments, were completed in 1913, and are now protected historic buildings, thanks to a years-long campaign by residents, with support from celebrities including Felicity Kendal and Eddie Izzard.

James enlisted in the London Divisional Cyclist Company as Private 294. He was subsequently transferred to the 17th Battalion of The King's Liverpool Regiment as Private 58046. He was killed in action on 9th April 1917 which was the opening day of the Battle of Arras. Heartbreakingly his wife Leah gave birth to a son James Alexander on the same day. His son was baptised on 29th April 1917 in St. John, Hoxton, his parents’ residence 11 Alma Street, and his father’s occupation given as packer. According to the pension card, Leah was notified of her husband’s death three weeks later, on 19th May 1917.

17^th,  19^th & 20th  Battalion at the  Battle of Arras 09^th April 1917

Everard Wyrall records the events of the day  in Volume 2 of his History of the King's Regiment (Liverpool).

The 89^th Brigade formed up for the attack with the 19^th King's on the right and the 20^th King’s on the left. The 17^th King’s supplied the “mopping up" parties and he 2nd Bedfords were in close support.

It was just after 3pm when the advance began “According to scheduled time the waves advanced in good style and with determination; everyone was cheerful and in the best of spirits”

That advance is described by others as magnificent. From the OP’s the observing officers saw a wonderful sight – long lines of men advancing steadily up a long and gradual slope towards the enemy’ front line. Then suddenly they disappeared. The observers quite pardonably, imagined that the German front line had fallen into the hands of the assaulting troops and that the latter were on the way to the enemy’s support line. Alas something very different had happened. When the advancing troops had reached the summit of the long slope up which they advanced the ground suddenly dipped before the German front line , and when the observing officers thought they  were already in the Bosche lines they had not, as a matter of fact, even reached the wire. What the observers took to be the front line was really the support line; the front line could not be seen  - it lay just behind the crest of that slight rise in the ground.

The attacking waves of the 19^th King’s got within 100 yards of the German wire but were then held up. They were faced by three belts of entanglements, practically untouched by our artillery, and nothing could be done but to dig in or else take shelter in the many shell- shell-with which “No Man’s Land" was pitted. By this time the battalion’s losses were very heavy, and when darkness fell “A" and “B" Companies (about 140 in all) lay in shell-holes, two or three hundred yards north east of St. Martin, but just south of the Cojeul River, and “C" and “D" Companies (140 all ranks) were along the river bank, but on the northern side about 150 yards north east of St. Martin.

The first waves of the 20^th King’ advanced at 3.7pm. At 4pm Lieut Beaumont, commanding “A" Company, reported that he had had some forty casualties in passing through the enemy’s barrage. The next message, timed 4.40pm, stated that the position of the battalion at that period was on a crest in front of the enemy’s wire and about 100 yards from it. On the right the 21^st Division was observed to have penetrated the enemy’s front line, but in the left the right Battalion of the 21^st Brigade (the Wilts) was on the St. Martin- Neuville Vitasse road; the left flank of the 20^th King's was, therefore, “ in the air”.

Urgent messages were sent up from Battalion Headquarters to “push on, keeping in touch with right” But little else could be accomplished until those formidable belts of wire had been cut sufficiently to allow the rapid passage of the attacking troops, headed by their bombers.

At 9:30 that night 89^th Brigade Headquarters ordered both the 19^th and 20^th Battalions to withdraw, the former to the two sunken roads running south east from St. Martin, the latter to north west of St. Martin; the guns had been ordered to cut the enemy’s wire during the night in preparation for another attack during the 10^th April.

Of the 17^th King’s  - the “moppers up" – there is little to relate. There was nothing to “mop up" so that they did not function. Yet they had shared all the perils of the advance, and when  after they had fallen back and at midnight held the following positions, “B", “C", and “D" Companies in and around the sunken road north of Boiry-Becquerelle and “A" Company in trenches west of Henin, they lost 2 officers and 16 other ranks killed, and 3 officers and 48 other ranks wounded.

James' body was either not recovered from the battlefield or was subsequently lost as his name is commemorated on the Arras Memorial in France.

The ARRAS MEMORIAL commemorates almost 35,000 servicemen from the United Kingdom, South Africa and New Zealand who died in the Arras sector between the spring of 1916 and 7 August 1918, the eve of the Advance to Victory, and have no known grave. The most conspicuous events of this period were the Arras offensive of April-May 1917, and the German attack in the spring of 1918. Canadian and Australian servicemen killed in these operations are commemorated by memorials at Vimy and Villers-Bretonneux. A separate memorial remembers those killed in the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. Both cemetery and memorial were designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with sculpture by Sir William Reid Dick. The memorial was unveiled by Lord Trenchard, Marshal of the Royal Air Force on the 31 July 1932 (originally it had been scheduled for 15 May, but due to the sudden death of French President Doumer, as a mark of respect, the ceremony was postponed until July).

His name appears on the London War Memorial online, but not on the St. John Hoxton Memorial. 

His widow Leah, of 96 Nicholas Street, Hoxton, Shoreditch, was awarded a pension of 18/9d a week for herself and child from December 1917. 

She remarried in 1925 to Alfred Broadhead, and had two sons.

In 1939 Leah, 49, is living with her husband at 14 Shacklewell Road, Hackney. Their two sons are at school in Welwyn, Hertfordshire. 

Leah died in Hackney in 1955, aged 65.  

His son James Alexander, 22, is living with Smith relatives in Britannia Walk, Shoreditch, working as an export packing case maker.  He married and had a family, and died in 2007. 

We currently have no further information on James George Smith, If you have or know someone who may be able to add to the history of this soldier, please contact us.