Birthday salute to veteran secular campaigner Barbara Smoker
Thursday, 6th June 2013
Barbara Smoker with author Michael Holroyd
Published: 6 June, 2013
A BIRTHDAY party for a 90-year-old veteran campaigner was held by Conway Hall Ethical Society on Sunday.
Barbara Smoker said the Holborn event felt “like a memorial but with the corpse in attendance”.
A regular at Conway Hall Ethical Society, she is a former president of the National Secular Society and former chairwoman of the British Voluntary Euthanasia Society, now Dignity in Dying.
The party, attended by 150 guests, celebrated a life devoted to secular beliefs and the work of a pioneer of campaigns over the death penalty, nuclear disarmament, the legalisation of abortion and voluntary euthanasia.
The biographer of George Bernard Shaw, the writer Michael Holroyd, gave a keynote speech.
