Early Life
Duncan Smith was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, in 1954. He is the son of W. G. G. Duncan Smith, a Group Captain of the British Royal Air Force, who was highly decorated in World War II, and Pamela Summers, a ballerina. They were married in 1946. Duncan Smith's maternal great-grandmother was a Japanese woman living in the then Peking, Ellen Oshey, who married Pamela's grandfather, merchant seaman Captain Samuel Lewis Shaw, from Ireland. Other relations include Canadian CBC wartime broadcaster Peter Stursberg, who was born in China, and whose 2002 book No Foreign Bones in China records the story of the Anglo-Japanese couple, and his son, current CBC vice-president Richard Stursberg. Through Captain Shaw, Duncan Smith is also a distant relative of George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright and socialist.
Read more about this topic: Iain Duncan Smith
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Most vices ... demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful—if strenuously led—as Christian’s in The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)