Charles Howard Smith (1 September 1875 – 5 January 1965) was a British trade union leader. Born in Birmingham, Smith was educated at Birmingham Blue Coat School. He worked as a copy-holder for a printer, but learnt shorthand in his spare time, and this enabled him to find work as a journalist with the ''

Birmingham News ''The Birmingham News'' is the principal newspaper for Birmingham, Alabama, United States. The paper is owned by Advance Publications and was a daily newspaper from its founding through September 30, 2012. After that day, the ''News'' and its two ...

''. A friend of his manager was involved in the Amalgamated Engineering and Stores Association, and in 1907, when its conference was held in Birmingham, he asked Smith to take the minutes. The union remembered his service, and from 1910 he took the minutes at each meeting of the executive. He took on an increasing amount of the general secretary's work himself, and in 1914 he left the ''News'' to take this full-time role. In 1915, Smith took the union into a merger which formed the Post Office Engineering Union (POEU). He was noted for his skills in administration and negotiation, and achieved agreements on subsistence payments and job security which endured for many years. He retired in 1938, moving to

Ramsgate Ramsgate is a seaside resort, seaside town in the district of Thanet District, Thanet in east Kent, England. It was one of the great English seaside towns of the 19th century. In 2001 it had a population of about 40,000. In 2011, according to t ...

, where he died in 1965. In 1962, the POEU began funding an annual scholarship to

Ruskin College Ruskin College, originally known as Ruskin Hall, Oxford, is an independent educational institution in Oxford, England. It is not a college of Oxford University. It is named after the essayist, art and social critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) an ...

, which it named after Smith.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Charles Howard 1875 births 1965 deaths General secretaries of the Post Office Engineering Union Trade unionists from Birmingham, West Midlands