C4.2

Solomon Charles Kaines Smith and Irene Cremer Kaines Smith nee Harris Irene Cremer Kaines Smith was born Irene Cremer Harris in South Stoneham, Hampshire, on 11 March 1881, to Frederick and Lydia Harris. She was baptised on 24 August at Westend in Hampshire. She had an older sister and her father was at that time a hay and corn merchant, though he later worked at H.M.'s Portsmouth dockyards. Irene married, on 20 September 1898, George Frederick Neale Arthur, a man from a distinguished military family. For whatever reason the marriage ended quickly as she filed for divorce on 22 August 1899 and he went on to remarry in 1905 after serving in the Boer War. Solomon Charles Kaines Smith was born on 3 August 1876 in Wakefield South Australia. His father Arthur William Smith was a doctor born in Halifax in Yorkshire; his mother was Elizabeth Susan nee Kaines. He was baptised on 12 November in Norwood, South Australia. He had one sister, Mary Harriet, known as Maisie, and when the children were very young their father died, in 1879, after which their mother came back to the UK. His grandfather, after whom he was named, was a Warwickshire man born in Sutton Coldfield who became a general practitioner and surgeon; Solomon, his mother and sister were living with him in 1881 in Carlton Place, Halifax, when Solomon was four years old. Solomon attended St Paul's School and graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge with a First Class in Classics in 1898; his MA was awarded in 1902, after which he became a university extension lecturer. During the Great War he was a Major on the General Staff of the Censor's department at Salonika, advising the Greek government. He was awarded the MBE in 1919 as well as being mentioned in despatches. He married Irene Cremer Arthur on 26 October 1910 at the journalists' church of St Bride's in Fleet Street, London - he described himself as a journalist, (his brother-in-law was an Australian newspaper proprietor). Solomon and Irene had a daughter, Irene Bridget Cremer Kaines Smith, born on 8 October 1905. By 1911, claiming to have been married for eight years to Irene, Solomon was now the editor of the Oxford and Cambridge Review, and they lived in Fitzgeorge's Avenue, West Kensington. Solomon went on to become an eminent art historian, and from1906 onwards it is possible to discover more than twenty books by him on the history of European art, British artists and on contemporary drawing. Between 1924 and 1927 he was the curator of the City Art Gallery in Leeds; in 1927 he became the Keeper of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, a position he held until 1941. He was a Life Trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. In 1950 he wrote the guide book for Stoneleigh Abbey and it is possible that it was through him that the Leigh Papers were ultimately deposited at Stratford. Irene died at 14, Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon on 3 June 1942, and Solomon died on 29 June 1958 in Bath, where his daughter was living. The engraving at the foot of their grave, from the Book of Proverbs 3.24, the King James Version, reads