Famed anti-poverty activist Harry Leslie Smith dies in Ontario hospital at 95
Humanitarian and author Harry Leslie Smith, a Second World War veteran who dedicated the last years of his life to defending the marginalized and the poor while warning against the threat of nationalism, has died.
Smith’s son, who had been issuing regular medical updates to his father’s 250,000 Twitter followers, said the 95-year-old died early Wednesday morning.
“I have spent the last 8 years with Harry on his beautiful odyssey to not make his past our future,’’ his son John wrote on Twitter. “It was (an) honour to be his son and comrade.’’
Smith was hospitalized in Belleville, Ont., after suffering a fall and contracting an infection, the younger Smith added by phone Wednesday.
On Twitter, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn called Smith “one of the giants whose shoulders we stand on.’’ Corbyn led a tribute to Smith in the British parliament Wednesday.
Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was among the chorus of supporters extolling Smith’s dedication to championing the poor and persecuted in his final days.
Smith’s mission was born of his own suffering during the Great Depression and the Second World War.
In his writing in several publications and books, Smith recounted growing up in squalor in Yorkshire, England, and hearing the sound of his father’s boots among the coal miners who made their daily pilgrimage beneath the surface of the earth.
In 1926, he lost his sister to tuberculosis, a disease he attributed to the lack of sanitation in the slum in which his family lived, too poor to afford proper medical care.
His youth was punctuated by hunger and homelessness as the Great Depression took hold.
He witnessed the rise of fascism during the Second World War as a member of the British air force, and was deeply affected by watching a stream of desperate refugees flee Germany.
Amid the destruction and bloodshed, however, Smith found the great love of his life — a young German woman named Friede Edelmann, his wife of more than five decades before her death in 1999.
As the couple raised three children, Smith, who split his time between England and Canada, came to see his hardscrabble youth as symptomatic of the geopolitical tides shaping societies for good and for ill.
And as he entered his twilight years, Smith cautioned against what he saw as a resurgence of the same destructive forces that wrought havoc in the early 20th century — the dismantling of social-welfare systems, the inequities of unchecked capitalism and the rising threat of nationalism.
The nonagenarian embraced social media and podcasting to spread his warnings across the globe, and his progressive polemics gained particular resonance among many millennials.