My mother, Lyn Smith, who has died aged 91, was an oral historian, author and lecturer working at the Imperial War Museum, the BBC and the Open University. This was despite leaving school at 16 and not returning to education until her 30s.
Over five decades as a freelance with the Imperial War Museum’s sound archive, she recorded thousands of hours of testimony relating first-hand experiences of conflicts from the Boer war to Libya. Her hundreds of interviewees included veterans of all ranks, diplomats, war brides, reporters, refugees, prisoners of war, scientists and evacuees. She wrote seven books, including Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust (2005) and People Power: Fighting for Peace from the First World War to the Present (2017), drawing on IWM projects in which she was involved.
Born in Portsmouth, Lyn was the second of five children of George Fee, a sailor and later a postman, and Lena (nee Moss), formerly in domestic service. At the outbreak of the second world war, George was recalled by the Royal Navy and Lena and the children were evacuated from Dulwich in south London to West Sussex, eventually settling at Fittleworth. Lyn left Horsham high school to become a post office telegraphist and then a shop assistant in Brighton. There she met Peter Smith, whose parents ran the wool shop where she worked, and which Peter took over after his father’s early death. The couple were married in 1959 and in 1964 settled in Kingston near Lewes.
Soon after, Lyn enrolled in the National Extension College for A-levels. She then joined the first Open University cohort to do a humanities and social sciences degree (1975), followed by a master’s in Russian studies at Sussex University (1977). She was then commissioned by the BBC to write programmes about Anglo-Soviet relations, initially for Radio Brighton and subsequently for the World Service (1978).
Shortly after, Lyn was employed as a freelance at the Imperial War Museum, and began lecturing at the OU and the Workers’ Education Association. In the 1980s she began teaching at the London campus of Webster University (later part of Regent’s College, then University), and she taught at its base in St Louis, Missouri, for several semesters in the 90s and 2000s.
Lyn’s interests included music, art, books, gardening and crafting, and enjoying the countryside around her home. She took particular pleasure in travel, from her first solo trip to France aged 19 to later tours to the Soviet bloc, China, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, all rarely visited at the time. Peter supported Lyn in all her endeavours, acting as researcher, route-planner and travel companion.
He died in 2018. Lyn is survived by her three children, Alison, Katy and me, and by two grandchildren, Martha and Iris.
