Honour him by taking up his mission
I LAST saw Harry almost a year ago. We took a train to Barnsley, where he was born in the slums, to make a film for the Mirror’s Wigan Pier Project.
Harry shouldn’t really have come. He was recovering from pneumonia but hadn’t wanted to let anyone down.
He began to tell me about being sent with sister Marion as a child to scrabble for fragments of coal on the slagheaps. He spoke about her death from tuberculosis, strapped to the bed because they had no painkillers.
Then he told of the day he borrowed his aunt’s bicycle, taught himself to ride and pedalled into the hills, leaving poverty behind for a few brief hours.
That story, with its little kernel of hope, became our short film.
“I felt like a bird flying away,” Harry said. “The feeling of freedom just took me. It was an exotic feeling.”
MESSAGE
I first met Harry in 2014, talking to him about his first book Harry’s Last Stand. “I want to tell people austerity is the problem, not the answer,” he said. He embraced social media to do it.
I invited him to speak at our Real Britain event at a Labour conference. I thought everyone should hear his message about our NHS. I’d also invited then leader Ed Miliband’s aides and when they heard him they asked him to speak on the main stage. His speech brought the conference to life.
Harry liked Ed but he wasn’t radical enough. When Jeremy Corbyn took over, Harry felt his plans were closer to the vision of his generation in 1945.
His mission remained his beloved NHS but in his final months it was the treatment of refugees that haunted him most. Last year he said he would be “spending the last years of my life touring the refugee hotspots of the world to find a solution”.
He was to fly to London last week to journey through France, Spain and Italy. It was to be his last stand. He fell in Canada before getting to the airport.
Today, when it’s tempting to feel the world is colder and lonelier without him, we need to remember that our NHS, and every child fleeing poverty or persecution, are safer because Harry lived. The rest is up to us.
Ta-ra, Harry, and all the best.
■ You can see Harry’s film at wiganpierproject.com/films.php