Lt. Geoffrey Bache Smith (3rd Salfords)

[Colin Fraser]

While researching the 19th Lanc. Fus. (3rd Salford), I found that the Battalion Signals officer was Geoffrey Bache Smith.

Smith was one of JRR Tolkien's closest friends, being part of his 4 person circle in public school. This was the TCBS (Tea Club and Barrovian Society), "a fellowship of unusually talented, well-educated and idealistic schoolboys who met to trade ideas and indulge in clandestine tea breaks, and who ultimately shared the conviction that they would somehow change the world. The core members of the group were Tolkien’s closest friends, Christopher Wiseman, a fledgling composer, Rob Gilson, a would-be artist and architect, and Geoffrey Bache Smith, an aspiring poet." Smith and Gilson both died in the Somme battle. Gilson on the first day.

Of the friends, Tolkien and Smith attended Oxford while the other two went to Cambridge. As a result, Smith and Tolkien became closer. There is a school of thought that Tolkien's epic Lord of the Rings was stimulated by Smith's poetic and literary influence being added to Tolkien's mythology and language interests. I have even seen a site that states that the 4 hobbits of LOTR were patterned on the TCBS.

In his last letter to Tolkien before being wounded in late November 1916, Smith wrote:

"My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight -- I am off on duty in a few minutes -- there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the T.C.B.S. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four! A discovery I am going to communicate to Rob before I go off tonight. And do you write it also to Christopher. May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot.

Yours ever,
G. B. S."

www.councilofelrond.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Bios&file=index&req=viewarticle&bartid=44

news.webshots.com/photo/2388439760085649622XzgQYM

oxfordinklings.blogspot.com/2008/08/early-years-and-tcbs.html

There is a lot of info on the 19th Bn in Garth's book "Tolkien and the Great War."

Colin

Attachments:

[shred]

Tolkien's trilogy and The Hobbit remain as some of my all time favourite books. For some reason I had always surmised that they were based on the Second World War, so it is interesting to read about the 4 Hobbits being based on the TCBS.

Geoffrey Smith was hit by shrapnel on the 29th November 1916 he died of wounds on the 3rd December.

Name: SMITH, GEOFFREY BACHE
Initials: G B
Nationality: United Kingdom
Rank: Lieutenant
Regiment/Service: Lancashire Fusiliers
Unit Text: Adjt. 19th Bn.
Age: 22
Date of Death: 03/12/1916
Additional information: Younger son of Thomas and Ruth Annie Smith, of Grove Crescent, West Bromwich.
Casualty Type: Commonwealth War Dead
Grave/Memorial Reference: III. G. 2.
Cemetery: WARLINCOURT HALTE BRITISH CEMETERY, SAULTY

[Colin Fraser]

The 4 hobbits theory is just one theory but an attractive one.

Equally interesting is this quote I found by Tolkien in a private letter: "My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself" (J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography page 89, Chapter VIII. Humphrey Carpenter)."

In any case, it appears that Smith was a major literary influence on Tolkien, as was his experience in the trenches during the Somme campaign. As my whole family loves Tolkien's LOTR trilogy, its especially neat to find that his close friend Smith was one of my Great Uncle's battalion officers.

Colin