My mother, Lyn Smith, who has died aged 91, was an oral historian, author and lecturer working at the Imperial War Museum, the BBC and the Open University. This was despite leaving school at 16 and not returning to education until her 30s.
Over five decades as a freelance with the Imperial War Museum’s sound archive, she recorded thousands of hours of testimony relating first-hand experiences of conflicts from the Boer war to Libya. Her hundreds of interviewees included veterans of all ranks, diplomats, war brides, reporters, refugees, prisoners of war, scientists and evacuees. She wrote seven books, including Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust (2005) and People Power: Fighting for Peace from the First World War to the Present (2017), drawing on IWM projects in which she was involved.
