9 Years Ago, Today, Harry's Last Stand Was Published.

Today, 9 years ago my father's book Harry's Last Stand was launched. Below is my recounting of those days that were to turn Harry Leslie Smith into a household name among many on the left. Following it is an excerpt from Harry's Last Stand.

Standing With Harry (Excerpt)

Hey Dad:

Until recently, I never admitted the enormous stress I put myself under when Peter died, and I became your caregiver and legacy builder. I wrote off my anxiety, panic attacks, and my feeling of uselessness or lack of self-worth as a character flaw. I didn’t want to acknowledge that I had undertaken a huge responsibility in caring for you, while simultaneously helping you explore your past and create Harry’s Last Stand. But I will tell you now, I was overwhelmed from the moment we began 1923 until your death eight years later. My panic attacks were extreme experiences when we first began putting down on paper the history of your life. Sometimes, I couldn’t walk more than four hundred metres before anxiety overwhelmed me and made me think my heart was misfiring. I didn’t know it was panic, and neither did my GP, who ascribed these bouts of pain to angina for which he prescribed nitro-glycerine patches. I was in and out of the hospital emergency department half a dozen times for stress in the weeks leading up to your first book tour for Harry’s Last Stand scheduled for the end of May and the beginning of June in 2014.

It was just too much. I knew this was the moment where your story, your experiences, and your beliefs either attracted readers or everything sank beneath the waves like a poorly designed ship at launching. I was a mess, but you tried your best to keep me calm and said, “Doesn’t matter if we fuck up, we did our best.” I was so worried I had created a giant catastrophe for you that would leave you more broken emotionally than when we began.

That year, at the end of May, we flew into Manchester. For you, the city’s airport didn’t have pleasant memories, because in 1947 it was where you spent your last RAF posting before demob, in 1948. The RAF sent you there as punishment for marrying Mum because marriage to foreign nationals from former belligerent powers in World War Two, although not illegal, wasn’t encouraged. It was an attempt to demoralise you and let you know that a Labour government might be in London, but the military was controlled by officers, not from the working class. Your superiors gave you one task until your discharge papers came through which was smash with a sledgehammer thousands of surplus RAF radio receivers. So as each hammer blow destroyed hundreds of pounds of salvageable equipment, you tried to plot how you would provide a good life for your new wife on civvy street.

We didn't stay long in Manchester, only one night at an airport hotel where the wait staff believed we were on holiday. "It's nice that you are taking your old man on a vacation," I explained that you had authored a book about your life in the North during the Great Depression. "Bless, but I don't read books."

We left the following morning and took a bus to Bradford where your publisher had arranged a few interviews with northern newspapers so that you could ease yourself slowly into the burden of the tour.

On the coach to Bradford, you grew pensive. While gazing out at the rain-soaked moors as we drove down the M1, you said. “My whole life, I’ve hated buses, because they all bring back memories of when my family went to Bradford after we fled Barnsley ahead of the bailiffs in 1928.”

The few days we spent in Bradford were emotionally uncomfortable for you. You hadn’t been back to the city since you emigrated to Canada sixty-one years earlier. “Unlike Lot’s wife, I never looked back.” Yet you insisted on revisiting the doss you had lived in as a boy in St Andrew’s Villas. It was a place where all hope was abandoned, for your family and any others that found accommodation under its merciless roof.

In the cab over the noise of the windshield wipers, you said, “It hasn’t stopped raining over Bradford since my family came to this town in 1928.”

Standing in front of the doss where so much hurt had occurred to your family was too much for you to take in all at once and you wept. After you wiped some tears away with a handkerchief, you reflected the neighbourhood hadn’t changed much. “It is still bleak and stinks of human suffering.” We walked down the steep road and off in the distance. You pointed to an off-licence and said, “At seven years old, I pushed a beer barrow up this bloody hill to earn my scratch. I did that work without a proper meal in my stomach. Imagine because you have no other option to survive having to make your child work so hard that he can’t study for school because he’s exhausted."

Afterwards, we took another cab to Scholemoor cemetery where dark clouds hung heavy over a damp spring afternoon. There you visited a field where in times past pits were dug and thousands of indigent corpses were placed including your dad in October 1943. You whispered, “I got out Dad.” After that, you said no more. We stood silent separated by memories that you alone experienced and I tried to interpret through the lens of a well-fed childhood.

It began to spit rain that fell as hard as pellets. “Let’s go and get a beer, I am tired of remembering,” you said, deflated by your personal history.

A few days later, we were in London to begin the official promotion of your book. We took a cab from King's Cross to Bloomsbury and checked into a posh hotel your publisher generously booked for us. Later, the publisher’s managing director explained to me that he wanted you to experience how authors were treated before corporate penny-pinching did away with book launches replete with luxuries for the talent. “Enjoy, because it will never happen again for him in this business.” He was right.

A dinner was held in your honour at the Garrick Club the night before the publication of Harry’s Last Stand. The guests were employees from your publishing company, your agent, the chief book buyer from Waterstones, and Bella Mackie from the Guardian, who fawned over you like an adoring grandchild. But then again, she felt she had discovered you as she promoted your essays to the editors of the Guardian where she then worked. Your support for Corbyn eventually cooled her support for you and contact during your last years trailed off. You were politely ignored in hopes that you either would change your views on Corbyn or get the message, your writing was not appropriate for a newspaper that was most comfortable in the centre of politics.

Throughout the dinner, I sat beside you, but it was your night, so I kept my personality in a supportive role to your book. No matter how integral I was to the Harry’s Last Stand project, I realised that for it to be successful, I should only appear as an inferior cast member, while you assumed the role of a democratic Cincinnatus, come back to Britain to remind your country that compassion was pragmaticism. That night, the Guardian published an excerpt from the book. In real-time, I watched your fame on social media grow, while Amazon books sales soared to number 32 in the nonfiction section. No other book of yours would ever go that high again in online sales. When the dinner was over, we returned to our hotel room. Elated, we had a nightcap and danced together. We believed we had established a strong beachhead, or at least a compelling argument for society to revisit Labour’s socialism from 1945. Dancing with you that night reminded me of one Christmas Eve when Peter, me and you drunk on Port wine, danced to 1940s jazz tunes until 4 in the morning.

Over the next few days, you did a round of BBC regional interviews and even a BBC radio program with Baroness Trumpington, who was once a cabinet minister under Thatcher, and whose claim to fame was giving the finger to another member of the House of Lords over ageism.

Despite offering her a Polo mint, you detested Trumpington from the moment you were introduced to her. "That woman has given the up yours to social equality since she was born."

“She’s simply a rich, bloody Tory who only understands suffering like a hunter understands the suffering of a rabbit from his side of the gun barrel.”

You weren’t wrong, she was a snob and out of touch with the reality of poverty. She died a few weeks after you, and I surmised if there were a heaven, she’d be complaining about how disappointing eternity was if it meant being near you forever.

While you argued with her on Radio Two about the horrors of austerity, I sat in a makeshift green room with your publicists and the baroness’s son. He was an unpleasant arrogant fellow that, aside from hello and goodbye, said nothing more to me. He was content to whinge about the state of some private golf courses to your publicist.

After the interview, selfies were taken so that they could be used to promote your book and the one the Baroness had just written. All of us stood together with fake smiles slapped onto our faces while a BBC production assistant snapped pictures for us from her mobile. On leaving, the baroness invited you for lunch at the House of Lords, but you smiled and said nothing.

During this book tour, Owen Jones interviewed you. Before this, you had admired his writing and intelligence. But during the interview, what struck you the most about him was “he has an abiding kindness about him, but also ice in his veins.” After your death, he was generous with his time and spoke well of you at your London memorial in February 2019. I was so overwhelmed due to the video he sent to cheer you up on your deathbed. I blubbered as if I was a 5-year-old schoolchild whose lunch was nicked when I tried to thank him for this kindness.

It was an exhausting regime of interviews, train trips, and television appearances. But during it, you shrugged off your growing weariness. Every waking moment was used to hone your skills at being interviewed. Every morning and before bed, you studied your handwritten notes because they guided you like a politician’s talking points. You were mentally and physically drained by it all. Your legs ached, and sometimes you could only go a few feet due to peripheral vascular heart disease. I was apprehensive that, another blood clot was developing in your leg like what happened in Portugal only five years previous.

You toughed it out because you wanted to make the book a success. But you also wanted to please me. You thought you owed it to me to push on regardless because I helped you cope with Peter’s death and the grief that came with it.

Harry’s Last Stand.

His death approached like it had done for my sister in 1926 and my wife in 1999; it came like a thug in the night to torture him. He didn’t have an easy life, nor did his end provide him the tender mercy of an easy death. Instead, my son had to beg wordlessly to be no more, because the disease had stolen his voice. When he died, grief came to sit and brood in my heart. I was spent with sorrow. After Peter was cremated, I returned to Portugal and hoped that I would soon join my wife and son in death. Of course I didn’t, because life never works out as you want it, even when all you want is to leave it.

Instead of dying, I began a spiritual odyssey of sorts. Having spent years running away from my past, I started to seriously explore it and tried to unravel the anguish that my generation endured before the creation of the welfare state. With the world around me collapsing, I came to the frightening realisation that the economic failure of 2008 was doing what the crash of 1929 had done to my generation.

Throughout the financial crisis, the government has reacted towards the banks like a co-dependent spouse when confronted by a weekend piss-up that caused a car

wreck. It had taken a ‘lads will be lads’ attitude towards those who created the 2008 meltdown and the following recession, despite the disastrous impact they had on millions of lives.

Today, the dust still hasn’t cleared from that disaster, and most executives in the City and on Wall Street only mention it with as much circumspection as former SS officers once skirted their responsibility in the holocaust: ‘We were just following orders.’

Fortunately there are some in the banking industry that do see the crisis and how both the industry and governments dealt with it as a watershed moment for irresponsibility and a ‘let’s pass the buck’ philosophy. One of them is Andy Haldane, the executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, who admits that the bank rescue was poorly managed: ‘... what we saw was the upside being harvested by the financial sector and the downside being taken by wider society. That is unjust and wrong and intolerable ...’

Yet this social and financial inversion, where wealthy enterprises were shored up with government money that could have been spent on affordable housing, infrastructure maintenance, school and hospital budgets, services to pensioners and job training for the unemployed, persisted throughout the recession to other corporate sectors of our economy. When our economy was at its most fragile, our government provided £43.5 billion in subsidies to private enterprise, excluding tax grants. The money was given with little or no oversight to car manufacturers, arms merchants, the oil and gas sector, pharmaceutical companies and big agriculture. It was handed over with-

out question or debate, despite the fact that our corporate sector had a cumulative cash surplus that was in the billions of pounds.

It was crass, inhumane, and malicious of this government to show no mercy to the unemployed, the disabled and the disadvantaged during the financial crisis. That it continues to behave like a bully to those down on their luck makes me think that the government’s cruelty is deliberate.

They want to change society to reflect only the interest of our corporations and the 10 per cent of the population who profit inordinately from a system that chastises people, through lack of opportunity, for being poor or ordinary workers. Private for-profit firms like ATOS are used by the government to ferret out so called benefit cheats and malingerers, while the bedroom tax is used like a pike to keep the economically disadvantaged in line, through punitive cuts to their benefits or rent subsidies.

However, when it comes to the corporations of this country, garlands and cash are tossed to them for their fortitude in keeping the value of their shares strong through cost-cutting measures like job redundancy. Over the next few years, our exchequer is slated to hand out another £310 billion to industries that sit on a £800 billion cash surplus. Moreover, only one in four of these giant industrial oligarchies pays tax to the exchequer as they have created offshore havens for their capital. Obviously, the government has decided that the wealth and health of private corporations is worth more to them than the well-being of our schools, hospitals and infrastructure.

We worry about these things on a theoretical level, but for those at the hard end of society, I worry on a personal level. The effects of poverty can neither be overstated nor reversed. As long as I shall live I will remember the cold I endured as a boy when I slept in an unheated garret with my sister, Alberta. We spent our nights there because there was no room in our parents’ sleeping quarters for us. We slept in filthy rags and hugged each other for warmth. Sometimes my sister sang me to sleep in an effort to quell the hunger which gnawed at our bellies, while bugs crawled over our flesh.

In the morning Alberta and I would scrounge for food in our parents’ room, but usually there was nothing to eat. So Alberta would go and beg for a slice of bread from a neighbour who was just as down on their luck as us. While I waited for my breakfast, I’d repeat the nursery rhyme: ‘Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to give the poor dog a bone. But when she got there the cupboard was bare, and so the poor doggie had none.’

Our poverty drove my mother slightly mad. She suffered from panic attacks and erratic mood swings. Mum didn’t know what to do or who to turn to. Finally at her wits’ end, she barked: ‘One more day like this and it’s to the poor house with ya, because I can’t feed thee anymore.

Better to be raised by strangers than your useless old mum.’ My mum’s angry pronouncements terrified both my sister and me. I was horrified by the idea that I might be sent away and imprisoned in a workhouse because my parents were at the end of their financial rope.

As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts because I really need your help this month. Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. This month is proving to be real scramble to get next months together. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John