Barbara Smoker obituary

My colleague Barbara Smoker, who has died aged 96, was president of the National Secular Society for a quarter of a century and a humanist activist for 70 years.

As a grande dame humanist, her style of campaigning, like her prose and her conversation, was direct and uncompromising. In 1989 she stood in front of a demonstration of Muslims calling for the death of Salman Rushdie with a simple placard saying Free Speech, and she remained firm even as she was physically attacked. She was a regular at Speakers’ Corner in London and at debates and podiums around the world, including on speaking tours across the US and India.

Barbara was born in Catford, south London, to Roman Catholic parents, Gilbert Smoker, a trader in clothing, and his wife, Amy (nee Morris). She had a convent education and as a child had intended to be either a nun or a devotional author.

However, when she reached the age of 18 during the second world war she went to serve in the Women’s Royal Naval Service in south-east Asia from 1942 to 1945, and after the war she made a living through secretarial work. In 1949, at the age of 26, the realisation that she was a humanist and no longer a Catholic suddenly struck her on a visit to the philosophy section of a public library – a moment, she told me, that was “like an enormous orgasm”.

In the 1950s she became a member of the Ethical Union (now Humanists UK) and the South Place Ethical Society, based at Conway Hall in London, and for the rest of her life devoted herself to advancing the cause of humanism.

Any concept of a conventional working career took a back seat to that preoccupation, and for most of the time Barbara survived by taking on temporary jobs, often secretarial in nature, while also generating cash through writing articles, entering and winning competitions in magazines and gambling on the horses. Of necessity, and of choice, she always lived frugally.

Eventually Barbara became president of the National Secular Society in 1972, and she held that post until 1996, representing the atheist viewpoint in print, on lecture platforms, on speaking tours, and on radio and television. Her book Humanism, commissioned as one of a series for school religious education courses, was published in 1973 and is still in print today. Her collected articles for the Freethinker magazine were published in 2002.

She was also chair of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (now Dignity in Dying) from 1981 to 1985, and supported many other causes and movements, including for nuclear disarmament, abolition of the death penalty, prison reform, decriminalisation of abortion, and gay rights.

Her memoirs were published in 2018 as My Godforsaken Life. She was a contented person, unencumbered by material possessions or regrets, but loved and supported by a wide array of nephews and nieces – the one advantage, she once told me, of her Catholic origins.