More Deaths than One

About this Book:

With a foreword by Gina Campbell, QSO

For the first time in eighty years an English coroner tells his story. Over quarter of a century Ian Smith dealt with deaths every day. Into the beauty and peace of Southern Lakeland, many and varied tragedies intruded.
A teenager killed by her parents; a building run by a local authority poisoning its residents; a woman murdered by her husband, a story which spans five decades; and world speed record holder Donald Campbell, his boat and his body recovered 34 years after his death.
“More Deaths Than One” tells these stories and many others as well as that of a quiet man doing a job which could at any moment bring him into the spotlight of the national and international press.
It will give you an insight into our one remaining taboo – death and how we deal with it.

Reviews:

Do read this book as you will have the privilege of reading what effort and research of great interest goes into every case where “An inquest will be held shortly” Gina Campbell QSO.

Westmorland Gazette review:

Unique memoir of Lakeland Bluebird coroner
Darren Shield, Westmorland Gazette.

A CORONER has taken the unprecedented step of publishing a memoir of his fascinating career.
Ian Smith, HM Senior Coroner for South and East Cumbria (retired), was thrust into the limelight of the national, and often international media, through his involvement in many major events, and details these in his book, “More Deaths than One”.
Perhaps the most notable of these events was determining the cause of death of Donald Campbell, the man who famously and tragically died while attempting to break the world water speed record on Coniston Water in his legendary “Bluebird” boat, whose body was only recovered as recently as 2001.
Mr Campbell’s daughter, Gina Campbell, wrote the foreword for the book, and told of her bemusement at hearing from Mr. Smith in 2001.
“I was surprised because I thought the cause of death was blatantly obvious,” she wrote. “But Ian being the man he is explained in detail his duty in law.”
Mr Smith explains only a doctor or coroner can legally certify the cause of a death, and a death that a doctor could not certify was always referred to a coroner, which meant: “sudden unexpected deaths, deaths resulting from violence, deaths in police custody or prisons.”
Mr Smith’s book is the first book in eighty years to tell a coroner’s own story.
Referring to the Lakeland location in which Mr. Smith’s experiences took place, he said: “You might imagine that nothing sinister or distressing would happen in this lovely rural idyll set with lakes and protected by mountains.”
As well as his involvement with “Bluebird”, just a few of the famed topics of which the author speaks of are the influence of the notorious Harold Shipman on how deaths are registered, Carol Ann Park aka “The Lady in the Lake” and the Grayrigg Train Crash.
Mr Smith gives the reader a glimpse into his mindset very early in the book: “You might expect a coroner to be morose and introverted but the truth is different.”
“A group of coroners is therefore a happy band of people giving constant subconscious thanks for the fact that they were not killed in a car crash on the way to the meeting nor died of an unanticipated heart attack on the way up the stairs.”