Smit

Smit is an archaic spelling of smid, the Dutch word for the worker in metal, and the catalogue files Smid, Smits and De Smit beside it as the same trade in different dress. The De Smit form carries a tussenvoegsel, one of the little prepositions and articles that open more than 20,000 Netherlands surnames; of everyone carrying one, 21.5 per cent have de and another 1.6 per cent den. The Netherlands leaves those particles lower case and skips them when alphabetising, so a De Smit files under S; Belgium has capitalised them since the 19th century and indexes under D, which is why Flemish directories carry such heavy D and V sections.

The word behind all of it is old. The smith in blacksmith comes from Old English smid and before that Proto-Germanic smithaz, meaning skilled worker; the black is firescale, the layer of oxide that forms on hot metal. Gaelic named the same man gobha, which gave the Scottish surname Gow. None of these borrowed from each other. They are the same obvious label applied independently in each language, which is why the same trade produced the commonest surname in Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a common one in most countries of Europe, and no single family owns any of them.

The material a Smit's namesake worked was wrought iron, not modern steel: carbon below 0.25 per cent, and up to 5 per cent glassy silicate slag drawn out into fine stringers through the metal. That slag made the iron tough, slowed rust, and melted during forge welding into a liquid glass that sealed the surface against oxidation, so two pieces heated nearly to white heat could be hammered permanently into one. The fibres ran in a direction, and any tool meant to take stress had to be forged with the grain rather than across it. Above 2 per cent carbon the metal was cast iron, brittle as glass and unforgeable.

What came off the anvil was everything a settlement could not buy elsewhere: gates, grilles, railings, tools, farm implements, cooking gear, nails, lengths of chain. The finer work in gold, silver, pewter and the finishing of fine steel belonged to the whitesmith.

By the 14th century the shoeing of horses had split away from general smithing. Farriers were a trade of their own in England by 1346, and in 1350 Edward III's London ordinance forbade them to charge more than they had taken before the pestilence, meaning the Black Death. The same year he made the court's ferrour des chivaux swear before judges to practise his craft properly and to stick to it alone. That specialisation paid: English armies rode into France with baggage trains carrying their own forges so the sergeant-farrier could shoe in the field.

The forge was not quite the male preserve it is remembered as either. Edward III put Katherine Le Fevre in charge of the king's forge within the Tower in 1346, to keep it up and carry on its work at the wages the office carried. Alice la Haubergere, whose byname means mail-maker, kept an armour shop in Cheapside in the early 1300s, and at York in 1403 Agnes Hecche was left her father's mail-making equipment in his will and ran the business on with her brother. Not one of these people was a Smit. They are English records of the trade, not of this family, and what they show is why the smith's byname was worth writing down at all: the man at the forge was the one person a settlement could not replace by sending to the next town, so a byname that useful stuck to him, and then to his children.

The Netherlands stopped comprehensive census taking in 1971, so the best full count of the name is still the 1947 census: 29,783 people recorded as Smit in a population of 9,519,000, a rate of about 0.313 per cent, or roughly 3,130 in every million. The most common Dutch surname in that data, de Jong, ran at about 0.580 per cent. That is a great many people sharing one word in a country whose surname stock is enormous: the Meertens database lists 94,143 distinct family names against some 23 million Dutch speakers in Europe.

The name was fixed in law rather late. Registration of hereditary surnames ran in the Netherlands between 1795 and 1811 and was compulsory by the end of it, the Napoleonic Code requiring that a person be known by a given name and a family name that would not change from one generation to the next. Most Dutch families had in fact carried surnames for centuries already, and the story that people took joke names in protest does not survive checking: Naaktgeboren, born naked, is far older than 1811 and comes from the German Nachgeboren, born after the father's death. In Belgium the top surnames are almost all patronymics, father plus son; the one clear exception is De Smet, the smith again.

An occupational byname is not a lineage. It was coined wherever there was a forge, which was everywhere, and the record shows it plainly. The pack lists four men called Jan Smit with no connection between them: a footballer born in 1983, a singer born in 1985, the theoretical physicist born in 1943 and the palaeontologist born in 1948. There are two composers named Leo Smit, the Dutch one born in 1900 and the American one born in 1921. There are two South Africans named Nicolaas Smit, the Boer general and politician of 1832 to 1896 and the rugby player of 1979 to 2014.

Nothing in the sources joins any of these pairs, and no page should pretend otherwise. The safest thing that can be said about two Smits picked at random is that their ancestors did the same job, and that is also the most interesting thing: it makes the name a record of a trade rather than of a household, and it holds for Smith in England, Schmidt in Germany and De Smet in Flanders in exactly the same way.

The one Smit in the record who founded something that outlived him is Fop Smit, 1777 to 1866, a naval architect, shipbuilder and shipowner, and founder of the company that became Smit International. It is a fitting turn for a metalworker's name to end up over a yard, and the clearest single answer to a reader asking what anyone called Smit ever built.

Around him the record runs from the Republic to the present. Aernout Smit, 1641 to 1710, is the earliest dated bearer in the record, a Dutch painter of the 17th century. Joseph Smit, 1836 to 1929, was a Dutch zoological illustrator, and Pierre Jacques Smit, 1863 to 1960, a Dutch natural history illustrator who worked in England. Johannes Olav Smit, 1883 to 1972, was a Dutch Roman Catholic bishop; Gabriël Smit, 1910 to 1981, a poet and journalist; Wisse Alfred Pierre Smit, 1903 to 1986, a poet and literary historian. Bart Smit, born 1940, was a Dutch toy store owner, and Joke Smit, 1933 to 1981, was a Dutch feminist and politician.

Dutch naming law is oddly fond of this surname: the standard worked example of how marriage names combine uses it, a Jansen who marries a Smit being free to become Jansen, Smit, Jansen-Smit or Smit-Jansen. The compounds in the record are that practice, not the illustration. Carry Pothuis-Smit, 1872 to 1951, was a Dutch suffragist and SDAP politician; Rie Smit-Vierdag, 1905 to 2005, was a freestyle swimmer; Arie Jan Haagen-Smit, 1900 to 1977, was a Dutch chemist. Two singers went the other way and buried the name entirely: the Dutch Sjoukje Smit performed as Maggie McNeal, and the South African Gert Smit, 1944 to 1998, as Gene Rockwell.

Where the name travelled it travelled hard. By the 1991 and 1998 figures the highest frequency of Smit in the English-speaking world was in New Zealand, at 97.18 per million, with Australia and Canada close behind, the United States well back, and Canada carrying it about three and a half times as thickly as its southern neighbour. Even so, that New Zealand rate is only about a thirtieth of the Dutch rate of fifty years before. Southern Africa fills more of the record than anywhere else outside the Netherlands: Bartho Smit, 1924 to 1986, the South African writer, poet, dramatist and director; Lionel Smit, born 1982, the artist; Flip Smit, born 1936, the demographer and educator; the rugby players John Smit and Riaan Smit; the Namibian cricketer JJ Smit. Angie Smit, born 1991, is a New Zealand middle-distance runner.