Richard Gordon Smith

Richard Gordon Smith was an English gentleman, naturalist, and sportsman who enjoyed traveling abroad, visiting France, Norway, and Canada in his early years.

Richard's father was John Bridson Smith, the youngest in a family of nine children, and his mother was Annie Lawrence of Cheltenham.

He must have been a man of some means because he traveled first class, keeping a series of eight large leather-bound diaries in which he recorded his experiences.

He called these his "Ill-Spelled Diaries", and they are full of idiosyncratic and chauvinistic observations of things he encountered, his impressions of Japan, the Russo-Japanese War, and the daily life of the people.

[3] In the preface he states:[1] THE stories in this volume are transcribed from voluminous illustrated diaries which have been kept by me for some twenty years spent in travel and in sport in many lands--the last nine of them almost entirely in Japan, while collecting subjects of natural history for the British Museum; trawling and dredging in the Inland Sea, sometimes with success, sometimes without, but in the end contributing to the treasury some fifty things new to Science, and, according to Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, 'adding greatly to the knowledge of Japanese Ethnology.