The Rev. John Smith (1799 – 3 March 1870) was the Rector of St Mary's church in Baldock in Hertfordshire and is noted for being the first person to transcribe the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Smith was the first to decipher the complete text of the Diary of Samuel Pepys while a student at Magdalene College, Cambridge where the Diary is kept (others had previously deciphered sections of it). Smith laboured on the Diaries for three years, from 1819 to 1822, and had assumed that they were written in code. He broke the code by comparing the section in the Diary concerning the escape of Charles II from Worcester Castle with the longhand version of the same event Pepys published later. Later Smith was told that the diary was actually written in a shorthand system devised by Thomas Skelton and that the