[1] While at university he founded the Birmingham Socialist Society and met poet Louis MacNeice, at the time an assistant lecturer in classics.
[1] His flamboyant character and lifestyle was to cause some concern among other spies, who according to MI5 criticised his behaviour as not showing "the stability or competence that should distinguish a party member".
[1][2] Throughout their marriage, Smith strongly supported his wife's writing, encouraging and sustaining her during Manning's frequent despondency and discouragement about her success.
Smith was exempt from military service due to his work with the British Council, though it is likely that his poor eyesight would have meant failing the required medical.
[5] During their 13 months in Romania, Smith and Manning witnessed the approaching war, including the abdication of King Carol and the rise of Fascism.
[2] The Smiths participated regularly in the café society, but Manning often went home early, leaving her new husband to expound earnestly but naively on the merits of communism, including how much better Jews would be well treated in a Russian-occupied Romania, and excusing the Soviet pact with Hitler, and the Red Army's invasion of Finland.
[2] Typically when choosing what to pack Smith chose his books rather than work suits,[7] which he needed for his ongoing lecturing for the British Council.
[3] At the end of the war in 1945, Smith returned to the UK, where he was appointed as a radio producer in the BBC features department by Laurence Gilliam.
Important work from his BBC days include The Easter Rising, 1916 (1966) about the Irish uprising, and The Pump (1972), a documentary about a major heart operation.
[10] Smith continued his socialising ways, spending hours in the pub with seasoned drinkers such as Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, Bob Pocock, and Bertie Rodgers, always in the public bar, never the saloon, due to his Marxist principles.
[15] Guy Pringle, Smith's fictional counterpart, was portrayed by Kenneth Branagh in the 1987 BBC television adaptation of the Fortunes of War.