He grew up in poverty in Yorkshire, and served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, later moving to Canada. Harry Leslie Smith was born on 25 February 1923, in Barnsley, Yorkshire, the son of an unemployed coal miner. After his father became unemployed the family moved to Bradford, then to Halifax.
After retiring, Smith began writing his memoirs and about social history. He has written four books about Britain during the Great Depression, the Second World War, and postwar austerity. He writes for The Guardian newspaper and has made a number of public appearances in the United Kingdom (including the 2014 Labour Party conference) and Canada as recently as 2015.
Smith joined the Royal Air Force in 1941 and spent several years in Hamburg, Germany as part of the allied occupation force.
The couple returned to Britain after he was demobilised and he worked in various jobs in Yorkshire. In the 1950s they emigrated to Canada, living in Scarborough in Toronto and later in Belleville, Ontario, and had three sons.
Smith made a career in the oriental carpet trade, specialising in designing and importing new designs from the Middle East, the former Soviet Bloc and Afghanistan. Friede died in 1999, and he started to write following this.
Since his retirement from business, Smith has been a writer of memoirs and social history.
He now spends his time partly in Ontario and partly in Yorkshire. Smith writes regularly for The Guardian commenting on politics and 20th-century history. He attracted attention in November 2013, writing that he would not wear the Remembrance poppy in future years because he felt the symbol was being used to promote support for present-day conflicts.
He addressed the September 2014 Labour Party conference, speaking in support of the National Health Service, and has spoken on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio and at the Bristol Politics Festival.
Smith runs a Twitter feed with over 57,000 followers commenting on a wide range of current affairs He has said that it was the global financial crisis of 2008 that inspired him to take his "last stand", writing and campaigning on income inequality, public services and what he sees as the diminishing prospects for young people.
"I want to use my time and whatever influence I have from the book to get the young in Britain to vote the only way we can: to save our social democratic institutions. I want us to make our last stand at the ballot box."
In October 2015, Smith appeared on the British Broadcasting Corporation Three documentary We Want Our Country Back, where he sharply criticised the far-right anti-immigration political movement "Britain First".
