Sydney Smith (photographer)

Sydney Smith (5 April 1884 - 3 October 1958) was a British photographer, notable for his pictures of people and scenes in the Ryedale area of North Yorkshire.
Born in Pickering, North Yorkshire, Smith was the youngest of twelve children born into a family of builders. At the age of fourteen he began work as a delivery boy, and then apprenticed as a joiner in Middleton. Despite poor eyesight due to a childhood affliction with measles, he developed a love of photography. He opened a photographic business in the 1900s, and in 1912, shortly after marrying his wife, Maud, he moved this shop to a converted a coffee house at 13 Market Place. Maud ran the shop while Smith fought in World War I, and after his return from the war he "gave up photography in order to run a garage on Park Street", though he continued to "spend all his spare time taking photographs". Many of his photographs are preserved in the Beck Isle Museum in the same town.
Smith's son Edmund was killed in a factory explosion in 1945. Smith retired in 1956, and had an unsuccessful operation the following year to address his failing eyesight. In 1958, he "opened a hospital window, which he mistakenly thought was on the ground floor, and fell out". He died shortly thereafter at the age of 74; Maud lived until the mid-1990s.<ref name="Clitheroe"/>

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