I
was told by her niece that when Hannah entered a room, everyone stopped
talking and looked at her. And that she knew that she was beautiful, which clearly annoyed her niece.
Hannah had huge dark eyes and curly chestnut hair and creamy skin. And she was tall. Her sisters were all short blue-eyed and blond. My mother always wondered. Hm.
Did Hannah ever go to Scotland, to Aberdeen? I
do not know.
Hannah and Campbell married in August 1915. Less than 3 months later, Campbell was
dead, blown up on a field in Belgium in the Battle of the Somme, in his
Gordon Highlander kilt on Nov 10, 1915.
I have a
photograph of him in his kilt, I have been looking at it every day since
Hannah's nephew gave it to me in 1985 when he was moving out of his
palace. Campbell was 36 when he died, but he looks a good 10 years
older. He does not look like a robust young soldier. Hard for me to
understand why a portrait painter with a delicate constitution could be
considered for active duty.
Hannah's nephew, my father's first
cousin, was the Rt Rev Maurice AP Wood, an Anglican Bishop of Norwich.
The Bishop was named after his uncle Edward Maurice Baldwin Cambie, who had fallen at the age of 22, 6 weeks before the Bishop was born in
1916.
So many died from 1914 to 1918, so many mowed down by the guns of Europe.
Campbell
Lindsay Smith was not my grandfather, or anyone's grandfather. Hannah
married another man with pale blue eyes, Hubert Cecil Dodgson in Jan
1919. My father was born 9 months later.
The picture above is of
an oil by Campbell Lindsay Smith, I do not know who owns the copyright;
my family or his, should when I think about it. I hope I have permission to show
it. I find the picture extremely disturbing: it is as if he foretold
his own death in a field.
Two portraits below, I hope I have permission to post them. I don't know if he ever painted Hannah. or if he even drew her, or she him. I hope so, and that somewhere in an attic, 100 years after his death, some token of their love will be found.
