British politician (1928–2010)
Sir Cyril Richard Smith (28 June 1928 – 3 September 2010) was a British Liberal Party and Liberal Democrat politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Rochdale from 1972 to 1992.
Smith was first active in local politics as a Liberal in 1945 before switching to Labour in 1950; he served as a Labour councillor in Rochdale, Lancashire, from 1950 and became mayor in 1966. He subsequently switched parties again and entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1972, winning his Rochdale seat on five further occasions. Smith was appointed the Liberal Chief Whip in June 1975 but later resigned on health grounds. In his later years as an MP, Smith opposed an alliance with the Social Democratic Party and did not stand for re-election in 1992; however, he remained loyal to the Liberal Democrats upon the parties' merger. Throughout much of his career, he maintained a high profile in the media and became a well-known public figure.
In later years, Smith's public esteem was considerably marred by the allegation that he had been involved in a cover-up of a health risk at a local asbestos factory. In 2008, there were calls for Smith to be stripped of his knighthood after it was revealed that he had asked the asbestos company Turner &amp; Newall to prepare a speech for him in 1981 in which he declared that "the public at large are not at risk from asbestos". It was later revealed that Smith owned 1,300 shares in the company. In 2008, Smith said that 4,000 asbestos-related deaths a year in the UK was "relatively low".
As early as 1979, a local underground magazine, the "Rochdale Alternative Press", alleged that in the 1960s Smith had spanked and sexually abused teenage boys in a hostel he co-founded. The story was repeated by the magazine "Private Eye". After his death, the allegations were denied by his family. The Press Office of the leader of the Liberal Party, David Steel, commented at the time, "All he seems to have done is spanked a few bare bottoms". After his death, formal allegations of child sexual abuse were made against him, leading authorities to conclude that he was a prolific sex offender.
In 2012, after his death and following allegations of child sexual abuse, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) formally admitted that Smith should have been charged with such abuse during his lifetime. In November 2012, Greater Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood said there was "overwhelming evidence" that young boys were sexually and physically abused by Smith.
In April 2014, it was reported that there had been 144 complaints against Smith from victims as young as eight years of age. Attempts to prosecute Smith had been blocked. Public authorities including Rochdale Borough Council, the police, and British intelligence services have been implicated in covering up Smith's alleged crimes. In 2015, it emerged that Smith had been arrested in the early 1980s in relation to some of these offences; however, a high-level cover-up reportedly led to destruction of evidence, Smith's rapid release within hours, and the invocation of the Official Secrets Act to prevent the investigating officers from discussing the matter. In February 2017, Greater Manchester Police reported that their investigation into historical child sex abuse at the former Knowl View School in Rochdale, requested by the Home Office in 2014, had found no evidence of a cover-up or corruption. 
Early years.
Cyril Smith was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, a mill town near Manchester that is known as the birthplace of the co-operative movement. Smith described himself as "illegitimate, deprived and poor". Though he never knew the name of his father, he commented, "I suspect I know who he was." Smith lived with his mother Eva, grandmother and two half-siblings, Eunice and Norman, in a one-up one-down cottage (demolished in 1945) on Falinge Road. Eva Smith, was a domestic worker for a local cotton mill–owning family.
Smith was educated at Rochdale Grammar School for Boys. After leaving school, he began work at the Rochdale Inland Revenue Tax Office. In the 1945 general election, aged 16, he gave a public speech in support of Liberal candidate Charles Harvey. Smith said he was given an ultimatum by his manager in the tax office to either choose the civil service or politics. He left his job at the tax office and then worked as an office boy at Fothergill &amp; Harvey's mill in Littleborough. The mill was owned by the Harveys, a notable Liberal family, but Smith claimed the director Charles Harvey knew nothing of his job application.
Smith was a lifelong member of the Rochdale Unitarian Church. Contemporaries remembered him expressing, as a teenager, the desire to be both mayor and Member of Parliament (MP). Smith served in many roles, including as Sunday School superintendent, trustee, and chair of the trustees. His Unitarian faith intersected with his Liberal politics. Smith credited the church with "helping develop his fiercely independent and anti-establishment streak".
Political career.
Early career.
Smith joined the Liberal Party in 1945 and was a member of the National Executive Committee of the Young Liberals in 1948 and 1949. From 1948 to 1950, he was Liberal agent in Stockport, but after the party suffered poor election results in 1950 and 1951, he was advised by the losing Liberal candidate for Stockport, Reg Hewitt, to join the Labour Party.
In 1952, Smith was elected a Labour councillor for the Falinge ward of Rochdale. By 1954, he was chairman of Rochdale Council's Establishment Committee. In 1963 Smith switched committee roles to be responsible for Estates which included overseeing residential and town centre development. He was appointed the Labour Mayor of Rochdale in 1966, with his mother, Eva, acting as mayoress (she retained her job as a cleaner in Rochdale Town Hall whilst in the post). In her work as a cleaner at the town hall, Smith's mother was banned from entering the police station – likewise based in the building – because she would search through its bins for information to help her son.
Smith's mayoral duties were filmed for the BBC's "Man Alive" documentary series, in an episode titled "Santa Claus for a Year". In 1966 he was appointed chairman of the Education Committee overseeing the introduction of comprehensive education in the district. In the same year he was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen's Birthday Honours. According to his autobiography, Smith was found guilty of an offence relating to public lotteries and bound over to keep the peace for twelve months.
In 1966, Smith resigned the Labour whip when the party refused to vote for an increase in council house rents and sat with four other councillors as independents until 1970. His subsequent return to the Liberal Party, and his election as a Liberal MP, caused surprise after his role in opposing Ludovic Kennedy, the Liberal candidate in the 1958 Rochdale by-election. Controversy was sparked by Rochdale Liberals when the parliamentary candidate, Garth Pratt, was deselected to make way for Smith's return to the party.
During the 1960s Smith was active on many Rochdale Council committees regarding youth activities. These included: Rochdale Youth Orchestra, Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop, governorship of 29 Rochdale schools and chairmanship of the Youth Committee, Youth Employment Committee and the Education Committee.
Member of Parliament.
Having been Liberal candidate in Rochdale at the 1970 general election when he took the party to second place, Smith won the seat at the 1972 by-election with a large swing from Labour to the Liberals, and a majority of 5,171.
Smith was appointed as the party Chief Whip in June 1975, and faced pressure from the press in the wake of a scandal involving party leader Jeremy Thorpe. Smith was in hospital when Thorpe sacked him, just before he himself was forced to resign. Speaking to Granada Television in 2003, David Steel reflected on events in the 1970s with the conclusion: "Cyril was not an ideal Chief Whip because he did not handle a crisis well and had a tendency to say anything to a news camera." Smith was the only Liberal MP during his parliamentary career to advocate the return of the death penalty. One of his constituents was jailed for sixteen years for the sexual murder of a child, in what turned out to be a miscarriage of justice. The man's mother repeatedly approached Smith for help, but he declined to take the case on.
In 1978, Smith approached former Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath to discuss forming a new centrist party. In 1980, Smith described UK unemployment figures of two million jobless people as "a disgrace", stating: "They represent a sick society, and are not acceptable to live with." In 1981, he was involved in moves to create "a party with a new image" but, according to the "Rochdale Observer", at the foundation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981 he warned Liberal colleagues to move with caution. Smith was quoted as being "opposed to an alliance at any price". He would later express the view that the Liberal Party would have been "better off" without being "shackled to the SDP". After David Alton's 1988 bill to reduce the time limit for abortions was talked out by MPs, he referred to other members as "murderers in the womb". The speaker of the House of Commons forced Smith to apologise for the comment.
Asbestos.
In 2008, the "New Statesman" accused Smith of improper conduct in his connection with the company Turner &amp; Newall (T&amp;N), which was based in his constituency, and was once the world's largest manufacturer of materials using asbestos. In the summer recess of 1981, Smith wrote to Sydney Marks, head of personnel at T&amp;N, informing him that EEC regulations were coming up for debate in the next parliamentary session. A House of Commons speech Smith delivered was almost identical to one prepared for him by the company. He said "the public at large are not at risk from asbestos" in his speech about a substance then long-known to be lethal if inhaled. A year later he revealed he owned 1,300 shares in T&amp;N. Interviewed in September 2008 by a local BBC news programme, Smith responded to the claims he had helped cover up the dangers of asbestos as "absolute rubbish". After his death, he was described by journalist Oliver Kamm in his blog in "The Times" as "a corrupt, mendacious mountain of flesh".
The controversy led, in November 2008, to a parliamentary early day motion that Smith be stripped of the knighthood he had been granted in 1988. Kevin Maguire of the "Daily Mirror" supported the idea.
Later years.
After leaving Westminster and the death of his mother Eva in 1994, Smith was invited by a lifelong friend, a public relations manager at the Cunard Line, to become a guest lecturer on the cruise liner "Queen Elizabeth 2". Smith liked to spend his holidays at Lytham St Annes, a seaside resort near Blackpool.
In February 2006, Smith was taken to hospital after collapsing at his Rochdale home. He had been weakened by dehydration and low potassium levels.
Smith died of cancer in a Rochdale nursing home on 3 September 2010. He had made detailed plans for his own funeral, which was held in the Great Hall of Rochdale Town Hall and included David Alton, the MEP Chris Davies, and former MP Paul Rowen as speakers. Of all the many tributes, the then-current leader of Rochdale Council summed him up: "He simply was politics for Rochdale." The service was led by the minister of his local Unitarian church, of which he had been a lifelong member.
Smith's younger brother Norman followed him into local politics, as councillor, mayor, and president of the local Liberal Democrat chapter.
Popular image.
Smith's large size and capacity for blunt speaking and popular touch made him one of the most recognisable British politicians of the 1970s and 1980s. His nickname, "Big Cyril", was the title of his autobiography. Smith made many popular television appearances: he sang "She's a Lassie from Lancashire" on his friend Jimmy Savile's early-1970s TV show "Clunk Click", appeared in an advert for a "greatest hits" album by 1980s pop group Bananarama, and sang a duet with Don Estelle in a 1999 recording of the Laurel and Hardy song "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine". Like several other prominent British MPs in the 1980s, he was regularly parodied in the satirical