‘Oldest rebel’ battled right to the last
Harry Leslie Smith NHS campaigner and writer BORN: FEBRUARY 25, 1923 - DIED: NOVEMBER 28, 2018, AGED 95
HE CALLED himself the “world’s oldest rebel” and even as a nonagenarian, Second World War veteran and political activist Harry Leslie Smith was still raging against the machine.
Smith became one of the biggest social media stars in British politics for his speeches on the NHS.
Within years of recording a party political broadcast for the Labour party during the 2015 general election campaign, he had sent more than 80,000 tweets and accrued over a quarter of a million followers.
His widely shared tweets were on a variety of topics: fighting austerity and privatisation, opposing western military interventions and challenging racism and fascism.
He was increasingly preoccupied with rising xenophobia and toasting his 95th birthday earlier this year, Smith vowed to “see 100 and the end of Donald Trump”.
The son of a miner from Barnsley, he joined the RAF in 1941 and lived through the Great Depression.
Having witnessed the refugee crisis that followed the end of the Second World War, he became a passionate advocate for displaced people. Smith, who in his later years divided his time between Yorkshire and Canada, would still regularly meet refugees from around the world and advocate on their behalf.
On Twitter in October 2017, he said he was spending the last years of his life touring hotspots of the world “to find a solution to the crisis”.
Harry’s Last Stand Refugee Tour raised more than £55,000 via a GoFundMe page.
He shared their stories in books and wrote several other titles including Harry’s Last Stand, Love Among The Ruins, 1923: A Memoir and The Empress Of Australia. Smith, an RAF wireless operator during the war, maintained abandoned Nazi airfields for allied aircraft after the end of the conflict, and while in Hamburg met his wife, Friede.
The couple married in 1947 and later moved to Canada together. Friede died in 1999 from cancer. He is survived by his sons, Michael and John and by his two grandchildren.