John Smith (Conservative politician)

Sir John Lindsay Eric Smith CH CBE (3 April 1923 – 28 February 2007) was a British banker, Conservative Member of Parliament, and Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire. He was involved with many architectural, industrial and maritime conservation charities. He founded the Landmark Trust in 1965.

Smith was born in London, the son of Captain Evan Cadogan Eric Smith MC of Ashfold in Sussex and his wife, Beatrice Helen (née Williams). He was a scion of an old banking family: Smiths of Nottingham was founded in the 1650s, and merged with the National Provincial Bank after the First World War, and his father became its chairman. His mother was the daughter of Albert Williams and granddaughter of Sir George Williams, founder of the YMCA, and a great-granddaughter of Thomas Cook. His elder sister, Fortune, married Hugh FitzRoy, Earl of Euston (later 11th Duke of Grafton) in 1946; she was a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth II from 1953 and 1966, and has been the Mistress of the Robes since 1967.

Smith was educated at Eton, where he was Captain of the Oppidans and won the Rosebery Prize for History. He joined the Fleet Air Arm in 1942 and trained as an observer at HMS Daedalus. He served in the Second World War in a Fairey Swordfish squadron in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, then as a liaison officer to the US Ninth Air Force, and then with a squadron of Fairey Barracuda in the North Atlantic. He flew as a navigator in an operation to dive-bomb the German battleship Tirpitz in Kvænangen fjord in July 1944. He joined the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable, and served in the Far East with 845 Naval Air Squadron, flying Grumman Avengers. He was in Ceylon at the end of the War.

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