John Essex Grey-Smith (see Afternote, below) was born on 10 May 1887 at St Kilda in Victoria, Australia, one of four children of William Belcher Grey and Dora Josephine Smith of Melbourne.

 He joined the Royal Navy’s officer training establishment, based on the hulks HMS Britannia and HMS Hindustan moored at Dartmouth, as a teenage officer cadet on a colonial scholarship and was subsequently promoted midshipman in October 1903.

In the year after the formation of the Royal Australian Navy in 1911, he was appointed to the cruiser HMAS Melbourne, then building at Birkenhead. He left her to join HMS Cambrian, a cruiser of the Grand Fleet’s 4th Light Cruiser Squadron, as First Lieutenant on 13 July 1916.

The following year, whilst the ship was on passage from Scapa Flow to Greenock, he was on the fo’c’sle supervising the getting out of her port paravane in a heavy sea when he and a seaman were swept overboard at 12.23am on 17 March 1917. The seaman was washed back onboard but, despite a 35-minute search, John could not be found.

John is commemorated on the Plymouth Naval Memorial, at the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance and on a memorial plaque in Melbourne’s St Paul’s Cathedral. He is also commemorated on the parish church and civic war memorials at Bovey Tracey, in Devon. His connection with the town is through the Reverend Walter Vere-Stead, vicar of the parish from 1897 until his death in 1907, who may have been a relative or family friend and acted as John’s guardian whilst a cadet in training at Dartmouth.

Afternote: Although the family surname was Smith, it appears to have been often combined, and frequently hyphenated, with John’s father’s third forename, Grey. John’s name was recorded in the Navy List throughout his career as John Essex Grey-Smith.