| Major Arthur Algernon Dorrien Smith |
| THE TIMES |
| Tuesday, 31 May 1955 |
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Obituary
MAJOR DORRIEN-SMITH TRESCO ABBEY AND ITS GARDENS
Major Arthur Algernon Dorrien-Smith, of Tresco Abbey, Isles of Scilly, died there early yesterday morning at the age of 79.
The elder son of Mr. T. A. Smith-Dorrien-Smith, of Tresco Abbey and Ashlyns Hall, Hertfordshire, he was born on January 28, 1876, and went to Eton in 1889, where he was at Miss Evans's. He left in 1894, and joined the Rifle Brigade. He served in the South African War, 1899-1902, was mentioned in dispatches, and received the D.S.O., as did his brother, E. P. Dorrien-Smith, in the same campaign. In 1904-5 he was an extra A. D. C. to Lord Northcote, Governor-General of Australia, and retired in 1906, joining the Special Reserve. In the 1914-18 War he served on the staff, and was mentioned in dispatches.
Circumstances, combined with his own tastes, went to make Major Dorrien-Smith a notable horticulturist. He was the third of his race to be Lord of the Isles of Scilly, a position of historical interest, associated first with the Blanchminsters in the fourteenth century and later with the Godolphin family, whose members were Seigneurs of the islands under the Crown from 1687 to 1831. The climate of the islands, which includes a singular immunity from frosts, is peculiarly favourable to the growth of sub-tropical plants, and Major Dorrien-Smith's father, whom he succeeded in 1918, took advantage of this to make a horicultural paradise of the Tresco Abbey estate. On Major Dorrien-Smith's succession to the seigneurial rights, he at once proved himself a brilliant exception to the general rule that horticultural enthusiasm is rarely transmitted from father to son. A long tutelage, moreover, found him better equipped as a practical plant cultivator than his father had been when he succeeded his uncle, Augustus Smith, in 1872.
In 1831, when the Crown lease of the Scillies was relinquished by the Godolphins, Augustus Smith was granted a lease of the islands for 99 years from October, 1834. He paid a premium of £20,000 odd for the lease, and, applying his ample means with a benevolent despotism, began the overhaul of which the property was sadly in need. He repaired and rebuilt farmhouses and cottages, of which many were of a primitive kind, with an especial eye to sanitation, as it was understood then, and enforced a standard of education. Augustus Smith, who built Tresco Abbey, was the first to attempt the cultivation of sub-tropical plants such as are often seen in south Cornwall, and he laid the foundation of the famous collection, the fame of which his nephew
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and great-nephew did so much to enhance.
When Augustus Smith became Lord of the Isles of Scilly he found them swept by wind from every quarter, and he began the experimental planting of shelter beds and plantations, which, continued and extended for a century, have helped to make the gardens of Tresco Abbey famous. The Australasian trees and shrubs that his predecessors planted at Tresco have flourished to such purpose that Major Dorrien-Smith made more than one journey to Australia and New Zealand to look for further likely subjects for his garden. Not that all he ventured proved successful because, with all the shelter provided for them at Tresco, some plants are unable to support the gales; but acacias of many kinds flourish there, together with aloes and agaves, Norfolk island pines, camphor trees, Banksia and many species which in this country are usually found only in greenhouses. Many South African plants, too, found the islands congenial, and the New Zealand flax has naturalized itself on the western cliffs.
The growing of flowers - and especially early daffodils - for market, which was begun by his father long since, became, under Major Dorrien-Smith's encouragement, an important island industry, and in a measure displaced the older and less profitable business of growing broccoli and early potatoes. Much of the mimosa which reaches Covent Garden in the early spring comes from Tresco, and early tomatoes are an important Scilly Island crop. The flowers are grown in fields intersected by tall hedges of Escallonia macrantha, which break the winds, and without which cultivation would be impossible. It is to the credit of the Dorrien-Smith family that they should have helped the Scilly islanders thus to turn their benign climate to advantages.
The name Dorrien first came to be coupled to that of the Scilly branch of the Hertfordshire family of Smith by the marriage in 1845 of Colonel R.A. Smith, grandfather of the subject of this notice, to Mary, granddaughter of Thomas Dorrien, of Haresfoot, in Hertfordshire. He assumed the name Smith-Dorrien, and the famous General Sir H. L. Smith-Dorrien, who died in 1930, was one of his sons. When another son, Thomas Algernon Smith-Dorrien, succeeded his uncle Augustus as Seigneur of the Isles of Scilly in 1872, he assumed for himself alone the additional name of Smith. In 1922, and on the termination of the original lease of the islands to Augustus Smith, the Duchy of Cornwall resumed possession of all the Scilly Islands except Tresco, and granted a fresh lease to Major Dorrien-Smith.
He married in 1909 Eleanor Salvin, the fourth daughter of the late E.S. Bowlby, and there were four sons and three daughters of the marriage. Three of the sons were killed during the 1939-45 War, and only the second, Lieutenant-Commander Mervyn Dorrien-Smith survives.
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