Harry Leslie Smith shot to an unlikely social media stardom in his 90s after publishing his bestselling memoir-cum-polemic in defence of the welfare state, Harry’s Last Stand four years ago. He won a mass following in Britain’s left, became a regular commentator in newspapers and a fixture at speaking events in Britain and Canada. He sent more than 80,000 tweets and had over quarter of a million followers, sharing his views on fighting austerity and privatisation, opposing western military interventions, and challenging racism and fascism. He became known as the conscience of the Labour Party.
Born on 25 February 1923 in Barnsley, Yorkshire, into acute poverty, he had a troubled childhood, fought in WW11, saw the misery and carnage of Hamburg, and took a German wife, with whom he emigrated to Canada in the early 1950s, where he worked selling and designing Oriental rugs. After she died in 1999, he backpacked around Europe, visiting places he had known during the war.
He was a Sun Pisces conjunct Uranus with a ‘healing’ and creative Water Grand Trine of Uranus in a revolutionary trine to Pluto in a confident and adventurous trine to Jupiter in Scorpio; with an enduring Fixed T Square of Mercury in Aquarius opposition Neptune square Jupiter. Such an accentuated Jupiter would make him idealistic and give him the ability to have an impact on thinking out in society. His Mars in pro-active Aries was in a hard-edged opposition to Saturn square Venus in Capricorn – Mars Saturn describing his punishingly difficult childhood. His humanitarian 9th Harmonic was exceptionally strong; as was his ‘obsessive dream’ 11H; and his leaving-a-legacy 17H.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/28/harry-leslie-smith-obituary
Great to see a genuinly good person featured among all these crooks. He somehow reminded me of my grandmother – similar age, similar background (my grandmother was at auxiliary forces during WWII, and saw many of mass evacuated people from Carelia come through her station), very similar worldview. And while I grew up with my grandmother’s stories on what real poverty was and is in those countries with real social policies, this was being forgotten especially in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s (Pluto in Sadgittarius?), when many people were buying to that “Secret” type selfhelp craze.