WHSmith plc (LSE: SMWH) (known colloquially as Smith's) is a British retailer, headquartered in Swindon, Wiltshire, England. It is best known for its chain of high street, railway station, airport, hospital and motorway service station shops selling books, stationery, magazines, newspapers, and entertainment products. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. It has been innovative over the course of its history, being the first chain store company ever in the world and was responsible for the creation of the ISBN book catalogue system.

In 1792, Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna established the business as a news vendor in Little Grosvenor Street, London. After their deaths, the business — valued in 1812 at £1,280 — was taken over by their youngest son William Henry Smith, and in 1846 the firm became W H Smith & Son when his only son, also William Henry, became a partner. The firm took advantage of the railway boom by opening newsstands on railway stations, starting with Euston in 1848. In 1850 the firm opened depots in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. The younger W H Smith used the success of the firm as a springboard into politics, becoming an MP in 1868 and serving as a minister in several Conservative governments.

General Sir Horace Lockwood Smith-Dorrien GCB, GCMG, DSO, ADC (26 May 1858 – 12 August 1930) was a British soldier and commander of the British II Corps and Second Army of the BEF during World War I.

Horace Smith-Dorrien was born at Haresfoot, a house near Berkhamsted, the 12th child of 16. He was educated at Harrow, and on 26 February 1876 entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, passing out with a commission as a subaltern to the 95th (Derbyshire) Regiment of Foot. On 1 November 1878, he was posted to South Africa where he worked as a transport officer. In this role he encountered, and fought against, corruption in the army.

Smith-Dorrien was present at the Battle of Isandlwana during the Zulu Wars on 22 January 1879, serving with the British invasion force as a transport officer for the army's Royal Artillery detachment. As Zulu forces overran the British forces, Smith-Dorrien narrowly escaped on his transport pony. As such, Smith-Dorrien was one of fewer than fifty British survivors of the battle (many more native African troops on the British side also survived). His observations on the difficulty of opening ammunition boxes led to changes in British practice for the rest of the war, though modern commentators argue that this was not as important a factor in the defeat as was thought at the time. Because of his conduct in trying to help other soldiers during his dramatic escape from the battlefield, he was nominated for a Victoria Cross, but, as the nomination did not go through the proper channels, he never received it. He took part in the rest of that war.

Wystan Hugh Auden ( /ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up around Birmingham in a professional middle class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.

Nicholas Simon Lyndhurst (born 20 April 1961) is an English actor. He is best known for his roles as Rodney Trotter in Only Fools and Horses, Gary Sparrow in Goodnight Sweetheart, and as Adam Parkinson in Carla Lane's series Butterflies. Lyndhurst also prominently starred as Ashley Philips in The Two of Us, as Fletch's son Raymond in Going Straight, the sequel to the classic British sitcom Porridge, Jimmy Venables in After You've Gone, and Freddie 'The Frog' Robdal in the Only Fools and Horses prequel Rock & Chips.

Born on 20 April 1961, Nicholas was a child student at Corona Theatre School. He appeared in a succession of television commercials and children's films in the late 1970s. Lyndhurst first gained national recognition at the age of seventeen in the sitcom Butterflies written by Carla Lane, in which he played the character Adam Parkinson. He then played Raymond Fletcher the teenage son of Norman Stanley 'Fletch' Fletcher played by Ronnie Barker in Going Straight before achieving national stardom in the series Only Fools and Horses in which he played Rodney Trotter, the younger brother of the main character Derek "Del Boy" Trotter. In Only Fools and Horses Nicholas was immortalised by the catchphrase aimed at his character 'Rodney, "you plonker".