A few days after the declaration of World War 1 in 1914, Horatio Nelson Smith (the nephew of the company founder T. J Smith) met with an envoy of the French President in London. The company was awarded a contract to supply £350,000 of surgical and field dressings, to be delivered in five months. This was by far the largest order the firm had handled. It was delivered on time, but the disastrous course of the war made further demands on the resources of Neptune Street while it was still working on this order.
On the Saturday after the fall of Antwerp in October 1914 (where the Belgian army lost the whole of its medical supplies) H. N Smith was asked to meet Cmdr. Vigneron of the Belgian Army Medical Service. Supplies were needed for the following Monday, and the entire team in Hull worked without a break throughout the weekend. Ten tonnes of dressings were loaded onto special trucks at 9.30am and were in the hands of the Belgian authorities by 8.00pm that night.
Hospital ward, Duchess of Sunderland Hospital, Calais, 1917
Through the war, the company supplied dressings not only to the armies of Britain, France, Belgium and Serbia, but, on their entry, also to the American Army and the American Red Cross
Mobile operating theatre
The demands of war forced rapid expansion. By the end of the war in 1918 T. J. Smith Limited had grown to accommodate most of Neptune St in Hull, the site of our current facility