War veteran and activist who built huge Twitter following
Born: February 25, 1923;
Died: November 28, 2018
HARRY Leslie Smith, who has died aged 95, was a British former serviceman in the Royal Air Force who did his service during the Second World War and the occupation of Germany immediately following the Allies’ victory in 1945. A Yorkshireman, born in Barnsley and raised in Bradford and Halifax, Smith moved to Canada with his wife Friede – a German woman whom he had met while based in Hamburg – and settled down to a life as a carpet salesman with the couple’s three sons.
The first eight decades of Smith’s life were dignified but nondescript, dedicated to blue collar work and family. Friede died in 1999, and the subsequent twin shocks of the global financial crash of 2008 and the death of his son Peter in 2009, aged just 50, pushed Smith into a defiant and inspirational final act of his life. Still sharp, inquisitive and possessed of a campaigner’s enthusiasm, he began to write and publish books, and took to Twitter to offer insight upon the modern world through the eyes of someone who had survived both the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Over the final half-decade of his life, the world paid attention to Smith’s words, delivered as they were with a fine eloquence and an often cutting dismay at the political folly he witnessed around him. If Twitter followers are any indication of a person’s standing in a world of technology which is far removed from the poverty Smith knew growing up, then the more than quarter of a million followers of his account @Harryslaststand – where he described himself as a “Survivor of the Great Depression, RAF veteran, activist for the Welfare State” - show that he had become a truly international figure at the time of his death.
Smith wrote seven books - five of them self-published through online outlets beginning in 2009, and two through professional publishers – and was a prolific newspaper columnist. He wrote of his romance with Friede in post-war Hamburg, a Romeo and Juliet tale where each was distrusted by their partner’s people, in Love Among the Ruins; his later works were Harry’s Last Stand: How the World My Generation Built is Falling Down and What We Can Do About It (2014), and Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future: A Call to Arms (2018).
The final book bore a jacket quotation from the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (“Harry Leslie Smith is a vital and powerful voice speaking across generations about the struggle for a just society,” it read), reflecting the avowed commitment to the politics of the left which Smith’s writings and discussion were steeped in. His politics were shaped by the experience of his own history, and the witness he had borne to how the establishment of the welfare state and the NHS immediately after the Second World War had lifted families like his out of poverty.
Remembering his own arrival back in England with a German wife, Smith was also a fierce advocate for refugees’ rights and dignity, and he spent the final year of his life touring the refugee camps of Europe in preparation for his planned next book.
“I’m a socialist in the manner of Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath, fighting for the little guy,” he told the Guardian in 2014. “I believe it is my duty to tell the younger generation that our current politics isn’t right.” The same year, his speech in defence of the NHS at the Labour conference earned a standing ovation and went viral.
Born in Barnsley on the 25th of February 1923 to unemployed coalminer Arthur and his wife Lillian, Harry Leslie Smith endured crushing poverty amid the Great Depression, and witnessed the death of his older sister Marion in 1926 from tuberculosis.
He was a barrow boy before he was ten and left school without being literate (although he took elocution lessons at the age of 14 “to better myself”), getting a job in a greengrocer’s before signing up for the RAF.
After the war he worked odd-jobs in Yorkshire, and following migration to Canada – where he lived for the rest of his life, although he travelled frequently after Friede’s death, including to Yorkshire and Hamburg – worked as an Oriental rug buyer and salesman for the Toronto department store Eaton’s. The family settled first in Scarborough, Toronto, and then moved out of the city to Belleville, Ontario.
Smith married Elfriede ‘Friede’ Edelmann in 1947, and is survived by the couple’s youngest and eldest sons. He exercised every morning, thanks to his RAF training, but was hospitalised with pneumonia on the 20th of November 2018, and died eight days later. “I'm not a politician, a philosopher, a historian or economist,” he said in a 2014 interview. “I'm an eyewitness to history.”
DAVID POLLOCK
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