major-general, and returned to India in November. In December 1869 he finally came home, and lived at Tobarcooran, Carnmoney, Belfast. He was promoted to be lieutenant-general on 1 Oct. 1877, but remained unemployed. He was made a colonel-commandant of the royal artillery on 2 Aug. 1880, and he was placed on the retired list, with the honorary rank of general, on 1 July 1881. He died at Carnmoney, Belfast, on 12 July 1887. He erected in the churchyard of Carnmoney a lofty Irish cross of mountain limestone, designed from the finest examples extant, and probably the most beautiful specimen of Irish ecclesiastical art in the country. His grave is at the foot of this cross.
Smythe's latter years were chiefly given to an earnest advocacy of ‘home rule’ for Ireland so far as it was compatible with union with Great Britain. It was his constant endeavour to promote the material development of his country. He took an interest in agriculture, and devoted himself to the study, and encouragement of the study, of the Irish language; and he left by his will the reversion of 3,000l. to the Royal Irish Academy in trust, the interest of which was to be applied to the promotion of the use of the Irish language. He left also the reversion of an equal sum, together with his residuary estate, to the representative body of the church of Ireland. He married, on 15 Dec. 1857, at Carnmoney, Sarah Maria, second daughter of the Rev. Robert Wintringham Bland, J.P. There was no issue of the marriage. His widow survived him.
[War Office Records; obituary notice by General Sir J. H. Lefroy in the Proceedings of the Royal Artillery Institution, vol. xv. 1887; Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society; Annual Register, 1887; private sources.]
SMYTHIES, CHARLES ALAN (1844–1894), bishop of Zanzibar and missionary bishop of East Africa, born in London on 6 Aug. 1844, was second son of Charles Norfolk Smythies, vicar of St. Mary the Walls, Colchester, and Isabella, daughter of Admiral Sir Eaton Travers. When he was three years old his father died of consumption, and in 1858 his mother married the Rev. George Alston, rector of Studland, Dorset.
After attending the schools at Milton Abbas and at Felsted, which he entered in January 1854 and left in December 1857 (Beevor, Alumni Felsted. p. 7), Smythies entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1862, and graduated B.A. in 1866. In 1868 he went to Cuddesdon Theological College, Oxford, at that time under the presidency of Dr. King, the present bishop of Lincoln. In 1869 he was ordained to the curacy of Great Marlow, and in 1872 took up work at Roath, a suburb of Cardiff, under the Rev. F. W. Puller, on whose resignation in 1880 Smythies was appointed to succeed him as vicar.
In 1882, on the death of Bishop Edward Steere [q. v.], Smythies declined the offer of the bishopric of the universities mission to Central Africa; but, after a year's fruitless search and many refusals, the committee of the mission renewed the offer to him, and he accepted the perilous charge. He was consecrated bishop at St. Paul's Cathedral on St. Andrew's day (30 Nov.) 1883, and in January 1884 left for Zanzibar, the headquarters of the mission.
The diocese covered roughly thirty thousand square miles, and, apart from the character of the country and its climate, Smythies had to face difficulties due to the new colonial policy of Germany, within the sphere of whose influence nearly all the mission stations lay. From the first Smythies devoted himself to the selection and training of natives as clergymen, taking enormous pains to discover their vocation and to give them such mental and spiritual education as should qualify them to become the evangelists of their own people. He was equally careful to keep them free from that veneer of English civilisation which so often mars the work of native clergy in foreign missions.
He visited all the nearer stations of the missions every year and the remote stations once in two years. This involved five journeys on foot, performed for the most part without white companions, to Lake Nyasa, which is four hundred and fifty miles distant from the coast.
In 1888, with a view to the suppression of the slave trade, the coast of East Africa was blockaded by the combined warships of England and Germany. This led to much excitement and disturbance among the natives on the mainland. The situation became in fact so grave that the bishop was strongly urged by the English government to withdraw his missionaries from the scene of danger. This he not only declined to do, but he set out himself for the interior of the disturbed district to strengthen the hands of his clergy and their converts. The journey nearly cost him his life. The steamer on approaching the shore was fired upon, and a threatening crowd surrounded the house in which he took shelter. He was saved from violence by the goodwill and courage of the insurgent chief, Bushiri.
