Ernest Fitzwilliam-Smythe

Ernest Fitzwilliam-Smythe FACS (Fellow of the Athena College of Surgeons) is a major character in the New Millennia series. He plays a prominent secondary role in The Hidden Nation, serving as senior medical practitioner for the W.U.F, and an outspoken adviser for The Brethren.

Early Life
Ernest Fitzwilliam-Smythe was always destined for the medical profession. He was born into a world where the New Millennia Civil War was at its most fierce, but was spared emotional torment in being too young to remember the worst of it.

He grew up in the domesticity of the Housing District with his mother, a skilled battlefield nurse of the National Army; his father, one of Kingston’s premier butchers; and his older brother, Maxwell. From the age of ten, he was aiding his brother and father at the family butchers, given the task of sewing meat together with string. A familiarity with the suturing process and a growing obsession with biology sewed the seeds of aspiration for young Ernest — he wanted to be surgeon. Like his brother, a similarly aspiring pharmacist, he spent his teens shadowing his mother and building up the qualifications necessary to pursue an education in medicine.

Medical Career
Ernest was accepted into Athena College in 1989, homing his craft under the tuition of Professor Rosen Valerie. Unlike his brother, Ernest struggled with the workload and practical experience of surgery and soon found himself ostracised by a cohort of a greater intelligence and an abundantly of apathy. During examinations, Ernest would often get so nervous his hands would shake and his suturing would become misplaced. Then he discovered smooth jazz and alcohol remedied this stress, putting him at ease, and soon elevating him to the standard of his peers.

Just when things looked to be getting better, the fighting started again. In 1994, his father’s butchers was targeted by a series of insurrectionist raids, and after a failed attempt to seek retribution, Ernest’s father was killed and his body buried at sea. Working alongside his widowed mother and brother, he began getting real surgical experience in the battlefield hospitals, specialising in amputations to starve off the spread of gangrene. All the while, Ernest was becoming increasingly engrossed in psychiatric science, believing that if alcohol and jazz could calm his nerves, then there must have been other scientific ways in which one could alter their personality and actions. His drinking swiftly became alcoholism, and before long he was becoming desensitised to its effects. When breakthroughs in his psychiatric work failed to materialise, Ernest became addicted to greater and greater substances.

Then finally a eureka moment. After a few tests on the rats that infested his apartment, Ernest discovered that he could alter the traits of animals through trans-orbital lobotomies. The battlefield hospital gave him plenty of human subjects to test on, most of them too delirious and unaware of what was going on. He noted his findings as he managed to transform docile men and women into angered zombies of their former self — it was an outstanding success.

Relationship with Joan Arkwright.
In the Autumn of 1994, he became increasingly infatuated with Joan Arkwright, a pharmacist student, two years his senior. He wrote her poetry and would stay up late practising for his conversations with her. In one meeting with her, he recalled comparing himself to God in his ability to tweak people's mind through psychiatric method. His infatuation would come to an abrupt end on Christmas Day 1991, when, at a family dinner, Joan was re-introduced to him as his brother's new girlfriend. A heartbroken Ernest spent the rest of the holidays in a deep depression, before coming to a realisation that his mind-altering science might be able to condition Joan to loving him instead of his brother.

Ernest made plans to alter her mind. On the night of 6th January 1995 he set forth to Joan's house's to preform the procedure. When he knocked at the door, his brother answered. Overwhelmed by anger and his inhibitions quelled by a cocktail of drugs and alcohol, he took to his brother with his own silver hammer, knocking him out and killing him with four strikes to the head. Joan tried to run, but Ernest pinned her down. She pleaded for her life, offered him sexual favours in fruitless desperation. The lobotomy took place shortly after, although under the strength of straddling her to the ground, Ernest pushed too hard and forced his lobotomy needle deep into her skull. He left the house at around 1am, having killed Joan and Maxwell in cold blood.

Ernest’s skills were in his ability to evade detection. He claimed he found his brother dead on arrival, and managed to swap his cell evidence with that of a bovine tuberculosis patient. The record therefore states that Maxwell Fitzwilliam-Smythe was cruelly struck down in his prime by the respiratory disease. Joan was a bigger issue, as upon news of her death, her family wanted a full enquiry. When they found evidence of the lobotomy, and tied it to Ernest, he was stripped of his practising license and banished from Kingston.

Affiliation with The Brethren.
In the W.U.F, Ernest found swift employment as a battlefield medic, albeit now for the Rebel side. As the insurrections of the mid-1990s came to a close, Ernest rose to prominence as the foremost doctor for the cause. He was given his own hospital in the ruins of an ammunition factory, naming it The Sanatorium, and began training medical hopefuls once the fighting had stopped. One of his patients would be the future chancellor-nominee of the W.U.F, the war-hero Troy Ferron. Ernest’s connection with Ferron enabled him to gain the trust of the burgeoning resistance group, The Brethren, being indoctrinated by Aran Shrimp and given operation under the code-name, Doc.

In the group, Doc made close ties with the ex-smuggler Zachariah Wardley, as given his old profession, he was able to provide him with all the luxuries of his old life in Kingston, including (among other things), prime beef, jazz records, and a cornucopia of drugs. Looking to continue this relationship, Doc started attending Zachariah’s meetings with a zealous reformist group, becoming a prominent member. Unbeknown to him, the group was actually last bastion of the extremist sect, The Alabaster.

The Hidden Nation


Upon Nathan Bilson’s arrival into The Brethren, Doc takes a particular interest in him, spotting his potential for violence and seeing him as another mule for his drug addiction. He shows Nathan an uneasy among of preferential treatment, most evident when he’d rather cater to Nathan’s flesh wounds than save a dying Aran Shrimp from a gunshot to the abdomen.

When the group plans for a raid on Beeding to free the captive Jonathan Reeve, Doc takes the opportunity to confide in Nathan a hidden agenda — to either find a way to synthesise the Dutch Courage stimulant, or to bring him a sample to ease his withdrawn cravings. Doc strikes a personal connection with Nathan, as he can see a lot of his younger self in him — they bond over the mutual deaths of their brothers, but neither is aware that they each killed them. To aid the mission, Doc gives Nathan placebos under false-pretences that the tablets are morphine. In Beeding, Reeve is poisoned and the morphine proves to be a decoy, so Nathan feeds him Dutch Courage to stem the pain instead. When they return, Doc becomes frustrated that the needs of Reeve has hijacked what he sees as his Dutch Courage and privately debates about letting the old man die.

A week later, after rations are hampered and the group is left starving, Doc begins to get agitated. When Shrimp is killed in a riot, Doc processes his corpse into meat and feeds it to the guests attending his funeral. After the cannibalism is uncovered, Doc is shunned from the group and sent out to the wilderness, with his protege, Raymond Oosthuizen, taking his place as senior practitioner.

Doc materialises in Beeding some time later, having been camped out there to try and get some Dutch Courage. He gets into a fight with Nathan, who’s there to destroy the generators and cut power to the arms manufacturers. When Nathan plants the bomb, Doc attempts to intervene, inadvertently getting involved in the ensuing explosion and damaging his hearing. Doc goes mad as he comes to terms with his inability to listen to both jazz and the screams of his patients. Nathan believes Doc is killed when a steel beam falls on him, but unbeknown to everyone else, Doc escapes.

Dapper Gambino, leader of The Brethren, leads the Rebel army into victory in the Seventeen Hour War, although his victory comes at a price — he led hundreds into a bloody ambush at the doorstep of Davenport Manor. The next day, Doc reemerges, and aided by his associates from The Alabaster, systematically kills the remaining expendable witnesses to the Manor Massacre. He takes to the public forum and presents a narrative of betrayal, suggesting that Dapper knowingly killed his own men for a better grasp of power following the war. He even claims that Nathan, by that time a certified war hero, was killed by Dapper, and that his martyrdom should be preserved in the continued ascension of The Alabaster as a political organisation. He, and his Alabaster cronies, demand obedience through displays of public violence against dissenters, and gradually Doc is accepted as the new ruler of the island of New Millennia, as chancellor of The Alabaster

The Lost Dream
Despite being alive during the events of the novel, Doc does not directly feature. His continued presence is alluded to by Victoria who suggests he might be the identity of the mystery announcer.

Trivia

 * Doc suffers from amblyopia in his right eye.
 * Doc's favourite song is "Makin' Whoopee" by Eddie Cantor

Behind the Scenes

 * Doc is based on the Sir Harold Gillies, a WWI otolaryngologist, who was widely considered as the father of modern plastic surgery.
 * His appearance is similar to that of James Purefoy.
 * Doc's murder of Maxwell and Joan with a silver hammer mirrors the lyrics of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" by The Beatles
 * Tomas Heasman has stated that Doc is "probably an incel."