George Arthur Smith was born in Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire, England, in 1890, the son of Samuel and Sarah Smith (née Whitworth). The family home was at 64, Wakefield Road, Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax, in the Upper Calder Valley of West Yorkshire.
His father was a grocery warehouseman in a co-operative store, and George was the eldest of three children in the family.
George became a fender fitter for a fender manufacturer, and then, on the 19th April 1913, he boarded the Carmania at Liverpool and went to seek his fortune in the United States of America with his friend Thomas Ackroyd, also of Sowerby Bridge. They settled in Rochester, New York state.
Ackroyd returned to Yorkshire at Christmas 1914 and Smith decided to follow him the following spring. Consequently, he booked second cabin passage on the Lusitania and was on board when she left the Cunard berth at Pier 54 at New York, just after mid-day on 1st May 1915.
Before he left for home, he had written to his parents of his intentions: -
Dear Mother and Father,
Today is my last Sunday in America, for a time, at any rate, and I am having a week’s vacation before sailing. I shall be at home in a few days after you get this. We are having some awfully warm weather here just now; just like the middle of summer in England.
I am going to make trips to all places of interest round about here in case, for some reason or other, I do not come back to America. It will be Whitsuntide holidays just after I land home. Some of the people here have never heard of Whitsuntide. I guess everything will look different than when I left home.
Perhaps George Smith’s thoughts about not going back to America were prophetic, for he was listed amongst the missing when the liner was sunk, six days later on the afternoon of 7th May 1915 by the German submarine U-20.
When news of the sinking reached Sowerby Bridge, firstly his friend Thomas Ackroyd and then his parents travelled to the Cunard offices in Liverpool to seek out any news of him. Some hope that he might have survived came when a Cunard list showed a George Smith amongst the survivors, as George Arthur Smith generally signed himself in this way, but eventually this survivor proved to be third class passenger George Smith travelling from Canada to his home in Scotland.
No trace of George Arthur Smith was ever found. He was aged 24 years.
Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, 1891 Census of England & Wales, 1901 Census of England & Wales, 1911 Census of England & Wales, New York Passenger Lists 1820 – 1957, Cunard Records, Halifax Evening Courier, PRO BT 100/345, Deaths at Sea 1871 – 1968, Graham Maddocks, Geoff Whitfield, Michael Poirier, Jim Kalafus, Cliff Barry, Paul Latimer, Norman Gray.
Copyright © Peter Kelly.