HERO’S DAUGHTER

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 52, Issue 3750, 1 May 1936, Page 5

HERO’S DAUGHTER

DEATH OF FLORENCE BAIRD SMITH. A strange fate befell Florence Baird Smith, who has just died in London. Her father and grandfather were famous men, and she herself lived through a great historical episode; but she could remember nothing of all this. Her mother was the daughter of Thomas De Quincey, who wrote The Confessions of an Opium Eater. Her father was Colonel Richard Baird Smith, chief engineer at the Siege of Delhi, the man whose “indomitable courage and determined perseverance” overcame the doubts and fears of the general commanding. Although badly wounded Baird Smith stuck to his post, and after breaches had been made in the walls Delhi was taken by assault on September 14, 1857. He died four years later, when De Quincey had been dead two years. Florence Baird? Smith was born at Roorki a few weeks before the Mutiny broke out, and before she was five she lost both her famous grandfather and her heroic father. It must often have grieved her to think that she could not remember her father, but her comfort was that history would not forget him.