It was during the short tenancy of the Revered Guy Eric Smith and his wife Mabel in 1929 that the story of Borley Rectory began to unfold in earnest, when it became public knowledge by courtesy of the Daily Mirror and Mr V. C. Wall.
As far as I can ascertain, Guy Eric Smith was born in February 1885, in Calcutta, and was christened on March 23, the son of Eldred Melville Smith and Ellen Mary Smith.
He studied at Calcutta University and later worked in the Civil Service. On November 1, 1924, at St John's, Calcutta, Guy married Sarah Helen Mabel Hart, daughter of Montague Hart. Mabel was a year older than Guy and it is interesting to note her full Christian name, for throughout the Borley Rectory period she was always known as Mabel Smith.
Mabel Smith became ill, and in due course the couple left for England where Guy decided to enter the Church, and proceeded to study for Holy Orders at the Chichester Theological College. He was ordained in 1926, and from then until 1928, he held a curacy at Great Clacton with Little Holland. He was then appointed to the Rectorship of Borley, spending in its isolated Rectory a winter and a spring that neither of them would be likely to forget. In spite of spending some £200 trying to tidy up the Rectory and its archaic facilities, they left after only nine months, moving initially into lodgings in Long Melford from where Guy Smith continued his duties as Rector of Borley.
Guy was of Eurasian extraction, of ample proportions, bespectacled, smooth haired, and a cultured good-natured man by all accounts. Mabel seems to have been a lady of rather frail health, which wasn't helped much by the cold and rather dilapidated state of their new home, nor by some of the things that were to happen there.
Many years later, Mabel stated that they had no fear of ghosts at Borley, having recourse to a higher authority for their beliefs and their faith. However, there are frequent references that suggest that she was frightened by happenings there on more than one occasion, and indeed, Guy Smith once admitted having withheld news from his wife of strange events that had befallen him when alone in the house, for fear of frightening her.
It was a curious period, and Iris Owen and Pauline Mitchell in their report suggested that when Harry Price came to Borley, following Guy Smith's appeal to the Press, he walked into a full-blown poltergeist situation. Up to a point that was true, because Borley Rectory certainly went through a period of somewhat violent physical disturbance, including the smashing of a number of household objects such as a vase, a candlestick and, during the Foysters' time, more items, though the Smiths seemed to have escaped the actual physical assaults that were alleged to have been suffered by Marianne and Francois d'Arles.
It is also certainly true that whilst the Smiths were the victims of various curious happenings they were also, after the Daily Mirror article of June 1929, pestered by the sightseeing brigade with which the people of Borley have had to contend ever since.
The Smiths stayed such a short time at Borley that there is little to tell about them while they were there. There is, however, rather more to relate, especially about Mabel Smith, from the years after they left Borley.
Mrs Smith claimed, in a letter written many years after their time at Borley, that she and Guy had lived there for over three years but in fact it was a mere nine months, from October 1928 to July 1929. For the rest of that period, they lived in lodgings in Long Melford, from where Guy Smith carried out his parish duties. Many reports suggest that they were driven out by ghosts but, taking a cross-section of evidence, it seems that there was no single factor responsible for their abandoning the Rectory, but more a mixture of problems itemised as follows:
1. The Rectory was in a very poor structural state, difficult to heat properly with no gas or electricity. The sanitary arrangements were, for a house of such size, appalling, with broken drains adding to the problems.
2. Mabel Smith was quite ill whilst at Borley, due to a combination of the state of the place and the probability that she was scared of being in the Rectory, as some locals remember her being.
3. Whether the Smiths believed the Rectory to be haunted or not, it was a fact that no maid would remain in the place, Mary Pearson being the only one who seemed to have stayed for any time at all.
4. Following the publication of V. C. Wall's article in the Daily Mirror in June 1929, the Smiths were harassed by sightseers, Smith having to summon the police on once occasion to remove uninvited visitors from his garden.
5. It is apparent, more particularly from Guy Smith's testimony than from his wife's, that the couple were subjected to poltergeist disturbances and some visual phenomena, the latter chiefly reported by Mrs Smith such as the figure leaning over the gate.
It is when one adds up these individual problems and allies them to Guy Smith's death in 1940 and the way in which that affected his widow, that one begins to understand what was probably behind most of Mrs Smith's denials and erratic memory about Borley in her later years. The tone of her letters to Harry Price about the time of Guy's death tells us a great deal about her own feelings.
She was quite plainly very attached to her husband, and his death was a shattering blow to her. This may well have compounded a generally distasteful memory of Borley, and subconsciously Mrs Smith might have tried to block out the episode by sheltering behind a smokescreen. But assuming that to be so, the results could be odd, as evidence shows. Her lapse of memory upon the subject of Borley was not total but selective.
For example, though she could remember Charles Sutton's visit to Borley Rectory - the more remarkable for the fact that the Smiths were not at the Rectory at that time - she had no recollection of either Dom Richard Whitehouse's or Sidney Glanville's visits at Sheringham and Sevington, Kent, after the Smiths had left the Sudbury area in 1930.
On those occasions, the couple's comments clearly seemed to indicate that they were quite prepared to accept that the place was haunted. In addition, Guy Smith's comments in a letter to Lord Charles Hope in November 1929 are interesting:
'You and the others know the place is haunted, and I am sure you will agree it was no place for my wife to reside in, seeing that no maid would stay there.'
From this, it can be seen that Guy Smith believed the Rectory to be haunted during his tenancy, and whilst his wife's views made a complete U-turn in later years his views showed no evidence of changing from then until his death.
Then again, there was the 'wine into ink' episode during Price's visit to the Foysters. Mrs Smith's version of this was that it had occurred during her husband's time at Borley, but she may well have mistaken an event from the Foyster period, very possibly because Price made reference to it in a letter to Guy Smith, who would very probably have shown the letter to his wife.
Another example of Mrs Smith's contrariness concerns Price's first book, The Most Haunted House in England. When it was published and Mrs Smith received a copy, she was most enthusiastic about it and indeed congratulated Price on his work, wishing her husband were still alive to read it, yet after the war she stated that she had burned the book without reading it.
This echoed further contrariness in that during the heyday of Price's investigation of the Borley Rectory occurrences the Smiths thought very highly of Harry Price; indeed, the tone of correspondence between Guy Smith and Harry Price suggests that they were on the most amicable terms.
After the war, however, Mabel Smith was wont to blame Price for much of the Borley episode, unfortunately giving his enemies some very misleading ammunition for their attacks on his integrity.
Guy Smith died in August 1940 so unfortunately a balanced latter-day view of the Borley story from the Smiths' standpoint, died with him. Harry Price's recording of the Smith period was of course mainly, though not solely, concerned with events rather than people and indeed most of his accounts have revealed very little about the Smiths themselves.
It could be stated that apart from the details in Underwood and Tabori's The Ghosts of Borley the information in R. J. Hasting's report gives just about the only extensive portrayal of the Smiths.
After leaving their lodgings in Long Melford in April 1930, Guy and Mabel Smith moved to Sheringham in Norfolk, where they were visited by Dom Richard Whitehouse, following one of his visits to the Foysters, during the height of the disturbances.
By the time Sidney Glanville called on them in 1937, they had moved again, to Ashford in Kent, where Guy Smith was Rector of Sevington for a while, serving a community more concerned with railway engines than ghosts. They were still there in 1939 when Borley Rectory caught fire, and are said to have claimed that on the night of the blaze there some live coals fell out on to their own hearth and nearly caused a fire there as well.