Background
Ted Smith came from a relatively poor background. His father Arthur was a plumber, and his parents ran a bakery and grocery shop.
chairman teacher conservation pioneer
Ted Smith came from a relatively poor background. His father Arthur was a plumber, and his parents ran a bakery and grocery shop.
He attended Leeds University, and studied English, where he was taught by Bruce Dickins.
He is primarily known for his work in founding the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, and in extending the Wildlife Trust movement across Britain to form what is now the Wildlife Trusts. He spent much of his adult life working firstly as a teacher in Leeds and then Norfolk, and then as an adult education tutor in Lincolnshire. The nature conservation movement started as a very elite movement in the United Kingdom, led by wealthy aristocrats or academics such as Charles Rothschild who initially envisaged a national network of nature reserves.
After the Second World War, however, Smith drove the movement towards different goals and methods, most notably in recognising the threat from post-war agricultural methods and forming nature reserves that were accessible to the public and scientists.
This was joined with the creation of more local wildlife trusts. Smith directly helped found the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust as its first Honorary Secretary, and helped spark the foundation of other early trusts such as those in Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust and Leicestershire Wildlife Trust.
He particularly championed the creation of the nature reserve at Gibraltar Point, which provided a blueprint for his ideas compared to the less publicly accessible nature reserves founded by earlier conservationists. Later in life he became Chairman and then President of the Lincolnshire Trust, holding the latter position until his death in 2015.
He also became the Chairman of the England Committee of the Nature Conservancy Council (now Natural England) and first General Secretary of the Royal Society of The Gibraltar Point nature reserve was dedicated to him in 2010.
He was a lifelong member of the Liberal party and its successor, the Liberal Democrats.