By Elliott West
“My memories stretch back almost a hundred years. And if I close my eyes, I can smell the poverty that oozes from the dusky tenement streets of my boyhood”.
Harry Leslie Smith
Introduction
Life was very different for people living in Britain before the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948. A picture that was eloquently and emotionally portrayed when Harry Leslie Smith addressed the Labour Party Conference in 2014. The idea of providing healthcare services that are free for all at the point of delivery was then merely an aspiration. Smith’s childhood in Barnsley, South Yorkshire certainly wasn’t a walk in the park, revealing an upbringing in the 1920s where poverty and illness was a stark reality.
Harry lived with his parents Albert, an unemployed coal miner and Lillian Dean with his sisters in slum conditions. Despite his parent’s best efforts, neither could shield them from the harshness of poverty. Smith’s sister, Marion, caught tuberculosis, a disease that tortured her, leaving her an invalid and had to be tied to a bed, and looked after by her mother until the weight of responsibility became too much. She was then taken to the workhouse infirmary and died at the age of 10 in 1926, buried in a pauper’s pit. A tragic end to a young life that had been showered with constant love and attention and whose parents staved off starvation with a constant supply of bread and drippings. A death that could have been prevented with the right medicines and doctors but they didn’t have any money and so the cards of common illness ran riot through the slums that all inhabited in the area, endearingly referred to as home. This story is not unique, it was commonplace at the time, literally making those that lost loved ones, numb in their resilience.
A Humble Survivor
Harry Leslie Smith was a humble man who spent his entire life trying to educate people on the sheer importance of the NHS and how his life had been completely changed as a result. The Attlee government of 1945-51 brought hope to Britain which was ravaged by the scars of war with bombed-out buildings and an unrecognisable landscape. The formation of the NHS was not only monumental but it helped stamp out common diseases with standard medicines. Smith who was a Great Depression survivor and who served in the RAF during the Second World War, quickly became an activist against postwar austerity, for the poor and the preservation of social democracy, emigrating to Canada in 1953 with his future wife Friede.
Harry was a prolific author, writing five books about life in the Great Depression, the Second World War and post-war austerity and had columns in The Guardian, Mirror, New Statesman, Morning Star and International Business News. He turned to writing as a means of consoling his grief with the death of his wife in 1999 and his middle son Peter in 2009. An avid writer of memoirs, and social history and would divide his later life between Ontario and Yorkshire.
Politics
Harry supported the Labour Party through the good times and the bad times. A regular at the annual party conference, he endorsed Jeremy Corbyn’s run for the Labour leadership and described him as “a very honest-minded man”. Despite Corbyn’s woes as a leader, Smith still backed him and even believed that Jeremy wasn’t antisemitic during the bitter row that broke out in the party, especially amongst Jewish Labour voters. Smith would also campaign on the refugee crisis, attacking the use of the Calais Jungle to temporarily house them and would highlight the increased dependency on food banks.
Afterthoughts
Harry Leslie Smith died on 28 November 2018 at the age of 95 in Belleville, Ontario, Canada from pneumonia. This former oriental rug importer was just an ordinary man but extraordinary and inspiring in so many ways. Through his speeches and writing, he opened our eyes to a bygone age, his youth. A stark reality that only transpired nearly a century previously. At a time when poverty was rife, food scarce and diseases led many to an early grave. A time when the NHS was merely a pipe dream.
It is very easy in these modern times to lose sight of the gift of life and it is only when it is extinguished that we wake up to our loss. Harry helped us to widen our horizons and look at the bigger picture. A mouthpiece for those at the bottom of the social ladder who have to endure a living nightmare on a day-to-day basis, wondering where their next meal will come from. Homeless or housed, both have their challenges and once committed to the social poverty trap, it’s very difficult to escape the snare.
