BARNSLEY-born writer Harry Smith stole the show at the Labour Party conference this week with a speech warning of the collapse of the NHS.
Harry, 91, moved delegates to tears when he took to the floor to warn that his poverty-stricken past would become the future if the NHS did not survive.
Harry, who wrote the critically acclaimed Harry's Last Stand How The World My Generation Built is Falling Down, described his childhood a "barbarous time".
"I came into this world in the rough and ready year of 1923," Mr Smith said. "I'm from Barnsley, and I can tell you that my childhood, like so many others from that era, was not like an episode from Downton Abbey.
"Instead, it was a barbarous time, it was a bleak time, and it was an uncivilised time, because public health care didn't exist."
Mr Smith, who now lives in Toronto, Canada, recalled the "anguished cries" of a woman dying from cancer who could not afford morphine, and how his eldest sister had wasted and died from tuberculosis at the age of ten, and was "dumped nameless into a pauper's pit.
"We must never ever let the NHS free from our grasp, because if we do, your future will be my past."
** The full report is in the Barnsley Chronicle, dated September 26. **
