Ian Douglas Smith was born on 8 April 1919 in Selukwe, a small mining and farming town about southwest of the Southern Rhodesian capital Salisbury. He had two elder sisters, Phyllis and Joan. His father, John Douglas "Jock" Smith, originally came from Hamilton, Scotland; the son of a cattle breeder and butcher, he had emigrated to Rhodesia as an eighteen-year-old in 1898, and become a prominent rancher, butcher, miner and garage owner in Selukwe. Jock and his English wife, Agnes ("née" Hodgson), had met in 1907, when she was sixteen, a year after her family's emigration to Selukwe from Frizington, Cumberland. After Mr Hodgson sent his wife and children back to England in 1908, Jock Smith astonished them in 1911 by arriving unannounced in Cumberland to ask for Agnes' hand; they had not seen each other for three years. They married in Frizington and returned together to Rhodesia, where Jock, an accomplished horseman, won the 1911 Coronation Derby at Salisbury.