Lieutenant-General Sir Henry George Wakelyn Smith, 1st Baronet, GCB (28 June 1787 – 12 October 1860) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. A veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, he is also particularly remembered for his role in the Battle of Aliwal, India in 1846, his subsequent governorship of the Cape Colony, and as the husband of Lady Smith.

He was born in Whittlesey, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, the son of a surgeon and major in the Wisbech, Whittlesey and Thorney United Battalion. The east end of the south aisle of St. Mary’s church was at this time partitioned off and used as a schoolroom, the vicar or curate teaching. It was here that Harry Smith received his education from the Rev. George Burgess, then curate.

During a review of the unit by General Stewart, he got into conversation with the youth and offered to procure him a commission. A short time later a commission as a second lieutenant with the 95th Rifle Regiment arrived. A chapel in the town's St Mary's church was restored in his memory in 1862, and a local community college also bears his name: Sir Harry Smith Community College.

Harry Smith—for throughout life he adopted the more familiar form of his Christian name—was educated privately and was commissioned on 8 May 1805, and then promoted Lieutenant on 15 August. His first active service was in South America in 1806 during the British invasions of the Río de la Plata. He distinguished himself at the Battle of Montevideo in 1807, but first came to real prominence during the Peninsular War. Smith served throughout these campaigns with the 95th Rifles in which he served from 1808 through to the end of the war at the Battle of Toulouse in 1814. In 1810 he was appointed ADC to Colonel Beckwith. Early in 1812, on 28 February, he was promoted Captain, having already the previous March joined the 2nd brigade Light Division as major to the Major-Generals staff. On 7 April, the day following the storming of Badajoz a well-born Spanish lady, whose entire property in the city had been destroyed, presented herself at the British lines seeking protection from the licence of the soldiery for herself and her sister, a child of fourteen. The latter, Juana Maria de Los Dolores de León, had but recently emerged from a convent; but notwithstanding her years she was married to Harry Smith a few days later. She accompanied him throughout the rest of the war.

At the close of the war, Harry Smith volunteered for service in the United States, where he was present at the Battle of Bladensburg on 24 August 1814, and witnessed the burning of the capitol at Washington; which, as he said, "horrified us coming fresh from the Duke's humane warfare in the south of France."

Returning to Europe he was a brigade major at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and afterwards rewarded as Assistant Quartermaster-General to the division. During the occupation of France he was sent to be Mayor of Cambrai in Picardy. With the restoration of peace in France he returned to divisional ADC at Glasgow for Major-General Reynell, GOC Western District of Scotland. Smith impressed Reynell, who helped his appointment as ADC to the Governor of Nova Scotia, Lieutenant-General Sir James Kempt in 1826.

Smith was promoted Major in the army by the end of 1826, but remained unattached to a regimental posting, and was still unattached when raised to Lieutenant-colonel in July 1830. In 1828 Smith was ordered to the Cape of Good Hope, where he commanded a force in the Sixth Xhosa War of 1834-36. In 1835 he accomplished the feat of riding the 550 miles from Cape Town to Grahamstown in less than six days; after he had restored confidence among the whites by his energetic measures, he was appointed governor of the Province of Queen Adelaide, where he gained influence over the native tribes, whom he vigorously set himself to civilize and benefit.

But though Sir Benjamin D'Urban, the high commissioner, supported Smith, the ministry in London reversed his policy and, to quote Smith's own words, "directed the Province of Queen Adelaide to be restored to barbarism." Smith himself was removed from his command, his departure being deplored alike by Bantu and Boers. Many Boers, largely in consequence of this policy of Lord Glenelg, began the migration to the interior known as the Great Trek.