Alec Smith

Alexander Douglas Smith (known as Alec Smith; 25 May 1949 – 19 January 2006) was a Zimbabwe National Army chaplain and son of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith. His father Ian Smith had married Janet Watt in late-1948, after returning from war service with a facial disfigurement resulting from crashing his Hurricane whilst taking off from an airfield in Egypt. Watt was a South African school teacher who had previously been married to Piet Duvenage, a South African who had died as the result of a sporting accident while playing rugby. At the time Watt met Smith, she was struggling to support herself and two young children on a modest teacher's salary. Ian Smith adopted Watt's two children, Robert and Jean, from her earlier marriage and brought them up, as his own, with Alec. Alec's relations with his mother were always more difficult than those he had with his father. Early life and education Smith grew up on the family farm in Selukwe (now Shurugwi), a small mining and farming town with a population in the 1950s of around 8,500 (8,000 Black and 500 White).