WWII veteran and social activist Harry Leslie Smith dies
159 views · Published 3 December 2018 · 1:46 · Indexed 23 October 2026
Channel: AP Archive · 2018 · News & Politics
(28 Nov 2018) LEADIN: British World War II veteran and political activist Harry Leslie Smith has died. He was 95. He was a passionate advocate for human rights and had toured refugee camps to highlight their plight. STORYLINE: Harry Leslie Smith was not your average nonagenarian. Despite his advancing his years, he remained an active campaigner for human rights. Smith was the son of a coal miner and started work at 7 doing manual labour at a brewery. In 1941, he joined the RAF. Nothing prepared him for what he would see while crossing over Europe with other British troops during the Second World War. "I had the opportunity to see the refugees, at their best and their worst, when they were flooding through Europe away from the north where Hitler was bombing and blowing up their homes," Smith said. More than 75,000 Germans and Austrians, many of them Jews, arrived in Britain during the 1930s as refugees from Nazi persecution. More than 70 years later, Smith came face to face with another refugee crisis on his doorstep when he visited the sprawling refugee camp in Calais, known as "The Jungle". It inspired him to tour the most prolific refugee spots in Europe - Turkey, Greece and the Balkans. His book, "Don't Let My Past Be Your Future" was a plea to today's generation to learn from the bitter and bloody history of the past. With a popular podcast and over 130,000 followers on Twitter, it seemed he has a chance of influencing at least some of them. "Sometimes I'm at a loss but I've decided that I will continue to the end and fight as best I can to make them (young people) aware that they have the answer in their hands," he said. "As I've said before, they have to be made to vote because that's the only way we can change things. It's our only power." He came to public attention in 2014, when he made an emotional and memorable speech about the UK's National Health Service at the Labour Party conference in Manchester. His son John said on Twitter that Smith died on Wednesday morning. He had been hospitalised in critical condition in Canada following a recent fall. Former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband tweeted that Smith was "one of a kind who never wavered in his fight for equality and justice. We should all carry his passion, optimism and spirit forward." Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Archive Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/APArchives Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/APNews/ You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/25207bcc9f7f27b7094ef31625379946
