Geoffrey Bache Smith

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Geoffrey Bache Smith
Born	October 18, 1894 England
Died	December 3, 1916(1916-12-03) (aged 22) Somme, River Somme, Pas-de-Calais
Education	King Edward's School
Alma mater	University of Oxford
Genre	Poetry

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Geoffrey Bache Smith (18 October 1894 - 3 December 1916) was an English poet and close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien. He was a member of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS) along with Robert Gilson, Christopher Wiseman and Tolkien.

A student at Birmingham and Oxford, he wrote several pieces of poetry during his studies, which he shared with his friends within the TCBS.

Entering WWI like the rest of the TCBS, Bache Smith died after the Battle of the Somme. His poems were published posthumously by Tolkien in the collection "A Spring Harvest", eager to share his friends work with the world. He would also write the foreword.

Biography

Geoffrey Bache Smith was born on 18 October 1894. His parents were merchants from the English countryside and he had a brother. Bache Smith studied at King Edward's School in Birmingham, where he showed an early interest and talent in literature and poetry. In 1912, he obtained a History Exhibition at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, where he moved in October of the same year to continue his studies.

Bache Smith met Tolkien and the rest of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society at King Edward's. The group of friends named themselves the Immortal Four. Bache Smith was a very close friend of Tolkien's, and it is likely that his passion for literature and poetry had a great impact on the fantasy writer. Showing great literary curiosity, he was most interested in poets such as William Butler Yeats as well as ballads of the Middle Ages and stories of the Mabinogion. Smith planned to dedicate his life to literature after the war.

War broke out while Bache Smith was still a student at Oxford. This disrupted his studies and he joined the Oxford Officer's Training Corps (OTC) of the University of Oxford. The TCBS met for the last time at Wiseman's home over the Christmas holidays of 1915, a meeting Tolkien later describes in a letter as "The Council of London". They formed a common goal to realise after the war: to awaken the eyes of decadent England and reinstall value in works of art and beauty. Bache Smith joined the 19th Lancashire Fusiliers Battalion and was sent to France in 1915. His corps was hit hard by the harsh winter of 1915 and he found himself involved in intense combat in 1916. Despite this, Bache Smith published "Songs of the Downs" in the Oxford Poetry literary magazine, where Tolkien also published a poem: "Goblin Feet".. After advances were made on the Somme, Bache Smith was appointed intelligence officer, and then adjutant.

Following the death of the first TCBS member, Robert Gilson on 1 July 1916, Bache Smith wrote to Tolkien, encouraging him to keep the TCBS and their mission alive despite their loss. Several days later on July 6, he arrived in Bouzincourt, where he sought Tolkien. They spent the next few days together, talking of poetry, the war and what the future held; Tolkien states that he vividly remembers these conversations after the war.

One year later, in the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme, Bache Smith served as adjudant for the battalion camped near the village of Souastre. On November 29 1916, the battalion was bombarded and Smith was hit by shrapnel. The wound seemed insignificant at first but soon became septic. On December 2, his injuries were deemed serious and Bache Smith passed away at 22 on December 3 at 3:30 AM. He is buried in Warlincourt Halte British Cemetery. Shortly after his death, Geoffrey's brother was killed in Mesopotamia.

After returning from the front, Tolkien convinced Bache Smith's mother to publish the poems written by her son. He wrote a preface for the collection of poetry, titled "A Spring Harvest", and it was published in 1918

Quotations

During the first months of 1916, Bache Smith wrote to Tolkien, urging him to continue the TCBS and to continue the task the group had set for themselves if ever he himself should never return from the war :

"My dear John Ronald,

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."

Posterity

Bache Smith only achieved recognition after his death through J. R. R. Tolkien, who became famous for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. His friendship strongly influenced Tolkien's life and works, and he only began writing The Hobbit after he had made sure "A Spring Harvest" was published.

In Cinema

Bache Smith is a prominent character in Dome Karukoski's 2019 biopic Tolkien. The film focuses on Tolkien's early life. Bache Smith is played by Irish actor Anthony Boyle.

In Comics

The French comic "Tolkien. Illuminating the Darkness" written by Will Duraffourg and Giancarlo Caracuzzo and published by Soleil in 2019 depicts Tolkien's youth and puts a large emphasis on the TCBS. Bache Smith is featured often and the comic contains several passages of his poetry.

Bibliography

Poetry

• Geoffrey Bache Smith, A Spring Harvest. Poems, London, Erskine Macdonald, 1918.

Other Reading Featuring Geoffrey Bache Smith

• A. St. John Adcock (1920), For remembrance: soldier poets who have fallen in the war, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1920 (revised and expanded edition), chapter 5. (Contains excerpts from the poems "A Preface for a Tale I never Told", "We who have Bowed Ourselves to Time", and "Anglia Valida in Senectute".) [read online]
• Mark Atheton, There and back again: J R R Tolkien and the origins of the Hobbit, London/New York, I.B. Tauris, 2012. ISBN 1780762461 Search this book on . (In its first appendix, the book offers a selection of poems by Bache Smith.)
• Frederic W. Ziv (éd.), The Valiant Muse: An Anthology of Poems by Poets Killed in the World War, Putnam’s Sons, 1936. (Contains the poem "The Burial of Sophocles".)

Further Reading

• Anderson, Douglas A., “Smith, Geoffrey Bache (1894–1916)”, with Michael D.C. Drout (éd.), J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, New York, Routledge, 2006, pages 617–618.
• John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, HarperCollins, 2003.
• Malcolm Graham, Oxford in the Great War, Pen & Sword Military Ltd, 2014.
• Isabelle Pantin, "TCBS", with Vincent Ferré (dir.), Dictionnaire Tolkien, Paris, CNRS Éditions, coll. « CNRS Dictionnaires », 2012, 670 p. (ISBN 978-2-271-07504-8 Search this book on .)
• Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond, "Smith, Geoffrey Bache", The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, Volume 2 : Reader’s Guide, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, pages 938–42.

See Also

• J. R. R. Tolkien
• Tolkien (film)
• The Hobbit
• Edith Tolkien

References

External Links

• A Spring Harvest numérisé through images by the British Library, online at the Europeana portal
• A Spring Harvest, text-based online edition by Andrew Dunning (2015)
• A Spring Harvest, audiobook by The Librivox Project, at the Internet Archive

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