HIS MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT IN EXILE 

TO: SPYMASTER GENERAL 'M' 
FROM: Lt. Cdr. Ian Fleming, Officer in Charge of Recruiting Resisters 
REPORT: Brian Smedley 
PROSPECTIVE STATUS: Active agent. 

Smedley was brought up in the industrial North, darkest Anglesea and the idyllic factory town of Bridgwater, Somerset. Young Brian spent his earliest days around the turn of the century hauling Hovis bread up the cobbled streets and blissfully ignoring the forces of imperial decline that inevitably lead the world to the First World War. Smedley was educated in the fearsome Dr Morgan's Grammar School for Boys, where he and his comrades were regularly flogged to within an inch of their lives by sadistic prefects, forced to play rugby in a swamp against boys twice their age and drilled in the rigid disciplines of mathematics. 

In 1916, Brian and his friends Eugene Byrne, Kim Newman and Alex Dunn escaped briefly from school and enlisted in a line regiment so they could enjoy the more relaxed, hygeinic and healthy atmosphere of the Western Front. Tragically, Eugene, Kim and Alex were mown down by machine-gun fire when the infantry was ordered over the top in at Ypres, and young Brian's bottom was riddled with shrapnel as he tried to drag their corpses back for a proper burial. 

Invalided home, Smedley returned to Dr Morgan's to complete his education and became interested in a new form of music that was just making its way across the Atlantic. With some  friends, Brian formed The Dangerous Ragtime Brothers and was in the forefront of the West Country's burgeoning music scene all through the twenties. The group broke up with some acrimony, however, in an argument about their first gramophone recording. Though Smedley later formed other groups - Red Smed and His Hot Buttered Crumpets, The Jazz Rascals - he turned down an opportunity to tour with the then-unknown George Formby in order to get more involved in politics. During the General Strike, he whipped together the remnants of the DRBs to perform for rallies in support of the workers and was battered with a rubber hose when arrested at a demonstration. Though never a member of the communist Party, he recognised in socialism the only force that was standing against the rising spectre of fascism in Europe. 

His decision to join the Labour Party was heavily criticised by Revolutionary communists, but Smedley remained in touch with all factions of the Left, a rare figure who could be respected by bomb-throwing anarchists and tea-making vicars alike. Leading his masked band of anti-fascists, the Sheep Worriers, Smedley clashed with the BUF during an attempt by the blackshirts to march through Hamp. With a bounty placed on his head by a local Mosleyite Councillor, Smedley was forced to flee the country and spent the mid-to-late 30s travelling the world, lending his organisational skills and ukelele-playing to the Republican Cause in the Spanish Civil War, the fight against Mussolini in Abyssinia and the anti-appeasement movements that grew throughout Europe as Hitler's aggression became more obvious. 

It is believed that a liaison with a comrade heroine during the siege of Madrid lead to the birth of a daughter, Caramela. It was at this point that Smedley composed his most famous song, the revolutionary rallying cry 'No Marzipan!' Granted a full pardon by Bridgwater MP Vernon Bartlett, Smedley was the first to call Neville Chamberlain a 'gurt wazzock' after Munich and founded the Bridgwater-Czech Friendship Society in the wake of the Nazi annexation of Czechslovakia, using his 1910 vintage charabanc to help refugees escape to freedom in Somerset and arranging for the billeting of many happy Czechs on many less happy Bridgwaterians. 

When war broke out, Smedley attempted to re-enlist but was refused a position in uniform because of his high blood pressure and old arse-wound. With a German invasion of Britain imminent, Smedley devoted all his energies to helping the refugee Czechs who were on Hitler's death lists escape to Ireland and then onwards to fulfilling lives in the utopian democracy of opportunity across the seas - after all, if they didn't like Greenland, they could always go to New York. When England fell, Smedley was in Dublin with a troupe of Slovak dancing contortionists. It is our recommendation that he be smuggled back into the home country, since his experience, local knowledge and contacts, dedication to anti-fascism, profound love for the people of Sedgmoor and nimble ukelele fingers make him the ideal man to organise, lead and inspire the Resistance Movement. 

With men like Brian Smedley on our side, Britain will be free again.

ENDS