Emma Smith

Emma Smith (21 August 1923 – 24 April 2018) was an English novelist, who also wrote for children and published two volumes of autobiography. She gave encouragement to Laurie Lee while he was writing his bestselling memoir of his childhood, Cider with Rosie. Early life and fame Smith was born as Elspeth Hallsmith in Cornwall, daughter of a bank clerk, Guthrie Hallsmith, D.S.O. and his wife Janet, a nurse. Her father suffered a nervous breakdown and left the family, after which Smith only saw him three more times in his life. She received a "negligible" private education up to the age of 16, when she decided to take up a job at the War Office. During the Second World War, she volunteered to work on the canals as a boatswoman. Later on, her experiences as a trainee boatswoman on the Grand Union Canal would become the basis for her debut novel, Maidens' Trip. In September 1946, Smith, still only 23, went off to India with a team of documentary film-makers that included the poet Laurie Lee, who served as the scriptwriter on the team. During the trip, Cider with Rosie, Lee's classic account of growing up in rural Gloucestershire, was in its embryonic stages. Emma Smith was one of those who would later encourage Lee to complete what became one of the best loved accounts of childhood in English literature. After nine months in India, Smith returned to England in 1947 and set down to write her first book. Maidens' Trip (1948) proved to be a critical and a commercial success and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. With the proceeds from it, she moved to Paris, where she took a room in the Hotel de Tournon, and drawing on her memories of India, typed up her second novel. It was reprinted by Bloomsbury in 2011. It was while working on her second novel in Paris in 1948 that Smith was photographed with her typewriter on the quay at the Ile de la Cité by the French street photographer Robert Doisneau, who was commissioned by Paris Match. After it had appeared in the magazine, Doisneau continued to use the photograph in his collections.