Stefan Terlezki published his memoirs last year and they told a quite remarkable story. He was born in that part of the Ukraine which through the vagaries of history was embodied in Poland between the two world wars. Welcoming the Soviet takeover, Terlezki quickly came to recognise his mistake, but worse was to befall when, as a result of the German advance, he and his father were conscripted for forced labour. He was actually sold to a farmer at Voitsberg in Austria. Freed by the Russians in 1945, he found himself bound for the Far East to fight for the Soviet Army against Japan. He made good his escape and after several adventures found his way back to Voitsberg where he hid until the British took over that part of Austria. Subsequently he made his way to Britain to serve as a coal miner in South Wales, but by way of the colliery canteen, he trained at the Cardiff College of Food Technology and Commerce and eventually became a successful hotelier.
His political career was largely in local government, but after an unsuccessful attempt to get into the House of Commons in 1974, he was picked by the Conservative party to fight Cardiff West in 1983, and with the Labour vote split, after a fierce campaign, found himself elected. Predictably he was defeated four years later, but he was rightly proud of his achievement and of his adopted nation.
Staunchly Europhile, he served on the British delegation to the Council of Europe and to Western European Union from 1985 to 1987 and as a result was asked to serve subsequently on the Convention Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman Treatment of Prisoners.
Stefan Terlezki came from a Ukrainian Nationalist family. His father spent a quarter of a century in a Siberian gulag and was reunited with his son in 1984, forty two years after they had been parted at the railway station in Antoniwka, which the Nazis had taken over: his sister was also exiled to Siberia. He was born at Oleshiw in 1927, but grew up in Antoniwska where he attended High School. After three years of forced labour on an Austrian farm, where he reckoned he stayed alive only because potatoes were plentiful, he had no intention of fighting for the Soviet Union - hence his decision to make his way west after his escape. He was fortunate to escape capture by Soviet troops, although in one skirmish with them he was wounded, and subsequently was rescued in another encounter by the quick wits of a British sergeant who passed him off as the brother of his Austrian girlfriend. Since he had no papers and spoke only basic German with a heavy Ukrainian accent, he was more than fortunate.
He worked briefly for the British army in a bakery, but was then recruited to work in the mines in South Wales. Graduating to a canteen in a miners' hostel, he completed his education at college in Cardiff and after a spell in the hotel trade, became the owner of the Cedars Hotel, Llanishen in Cardiff in 1960. He had married in 1955 and became a British subject in the same year. Three years later he was elected to the Cardiff City Council, where he chaired the Licensing Committee 1975-8, the Environment Services Committee 1978-80 and the Housing Liaison Committee 1978-80. He was elected to the South Glamorgan County Council in 1973 and served on the South Wales Police Authority 1975- 80 and the Welsh Joint Education Committee 1975-85. He had fought Jim Callaghan in Cardiff South East in February and October 1974 and was subsequently Chairman of the local Keep Britain in Europe campaign 1973-5. He was selected to fight Kingswood, but was forced to stand down because of his involvement in several court cases, and in the European Assembly elections in 1979 he contested South Wales unsuccessfully. Rather to everyone's surprise but his own, in a five way contest in 1983, marked by a fierce war of words with Jeffrey Thomas, a Labour MP who had joined the SDP, he captured the largely working class constituency of Cardiff West with 38 per cent of the vote. Four years later, he was out, his political career at an end. He was made a CBE in 1992.
A robust right winger and cold war warrior, hyperactive and vocal, he belonged to the European Affairs Forum. He was an advocate of capital punishment for violent rape as well as murder, supported the return of corporal punishment, demanded action against the Paedophile Exchange and backed Enoch Powell's Unborn Children (protection) Bill. Throughout he remained a staunch pro-European. Amongst other campaigns, he was most memorably against sporting links with the Soviet Union. He blamed the decline of the mining industry on "Scargill and his stormtroopers" and was sharply critical of the BBC's role during the Miners' strike.
Before he entered Parliament he had chaired Cardiff City Football Club 1975-77 and in Parliament he advocated photo passes as a way of putting an end to football hooliganism and violence. Terlezki had an almost Prescottian talent for mangling the English language, but his courage and sincerity could not be doubted.