4 minute read
Normand landings: part 1
Arthur Henry Cyril Smith's story
We trace the footsteps taken in June 1944 by four ancestors of those working in today’s bloodstock industry.
Although the quartet of men had very different wars, all four stories are of bravery, honour, love, misfortune and sadness.
Arthur Henry Cyril Smith: Father of Laura Green, photographer, Tattersalls
Douglas Mann: Grandfather of Ed Harper, Whitsbury Manor Stud
Charles Francis Birch: Grandfather of Danny Molony, senior spotter, Tattersalls, and Hon Peter Stanley, New England Stud
Luke Theodore Lillingston: Grandfather of Luke Lillingston, Mount Coote Stud, and Georgina Bell, Tattersalls
IN AUGUST many of us will be in Deauville buying, selling or watching the sale of beautiful, high-bred yearlings.
We will also enjoy the finest of Normandy hospitality, drink some fantastic French wine and eat wonderful food; we may visit the beach, the racecourse, the casino, the clubs and bars, the shops and the market, enjoying all that the town has to offer through its summer season.
Deauville in August 1944 was very different – the town’s race meetings had been moved primarily to Paris, the yearling sale was transferred to Tattersalls Francais’ base at Neuilly-sur-Seine, and the town, with its casino and magnificent villas, was occupied by the German army.
The background sounds to daily life that month were not those of enthusiastic auctioneers making the most of their opportunity to create high-value equine sales, but the bombing and fighting of armies as the Allied troops moved across Normandy and fought the German resistance.
On August 17, we will be standing in the Deauville sale ground for Day 2 of this year’s Arqana August Sale, 80 years ago to the day the British launched Operation Paddle, moving towards the Seine.
Deauville was subsequently liberated on August 22, with the allies moved into Cabourg, Dives, Houlgate, Villers-sur-Mer, Trouville and Honfleur between August 21 and 24.
The D-Day landings, which had been enacted some ten weeks earlier on June 6, had seen the largest-ever amphibious invasion; the recent 80th anniversary was much celebrated to remember both those who had lost their lives and those for whom lives were irrevocably changed.
Many of our colleagues and friends in today’s bloodstock and horseracing worlds had ancestors who took part in the landings and the subsequent battles across Normandy; we follow four, very different, war-time stories.
On June 6, when the order was given for the D-Day landings and the long-planned Operation Overlord swung into its mighty action, Arthur Henry Cyril Smith, father of Tattersalls photographer Laura Green, was a Temporary Acting Leading Seaman and aboard the destroyer HMS Orwell, part of the 17th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet.
Smith had joined up in 1941 as a 22-year-old and, despite having been brought up in Birmingham, as far from the sea as you can be in the UK, he was drafted into the Navy.
“I am sure that it was a mistake,” laughs Green. “I think he wanted to fly and be in the Fleet Air Arm, but he ended up in the Navy.
“My grandparents were bakers, providing bread and necessities and with a very decent business; they did not want him to go to war.
As food producers it was a protected role, and my grandmother even directly lobbied the Navy to try and stop him from joining up.
Ignoring the pleas of his mother, Smith went to war aboard HMS Orwell and spent much of those years in the north Atlantic with the Arctic Convoys protecting the merchant ships sailing to Russia with supplies. It was a mission that not only had to deal with the threat from German air, submarine and naval forces, but also freezing temperatures, drift ice, fog, strong currents – the route was described by Winston Churchill as “the worst journey in the world”.
What could be seen almost as a period of respite, HMS Orwell was deployed to Plymouth in April 1944 to prepare for the D-Day landings.
“Dad was at the ill-fated Slapton Sands D-Day practise when 100s of seamen were killed by very real enemy fire,” adds Green.
HMS Orwell was sent to Normandy and Smith was aboard for H-hour, the ship tasked with the role of protecting troops on Gold Beach, firing into the German defences on the cliff edge. The destroyer remained in the seas off the Normandy coast in its role as guardian until September whereupon it returned to its Arctic duties.
“Dad, who had been a draftsman before the war, was involved in car racing after. He died in 2008 and was posthumously awarded the Arctic Star,” says Green with pride.
