Red Lives - Communists and the Struggle for Socialism [1 ed.] 9781907464454

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B | Red Lives

manifesto

CPB

Red Lives Communists and the struggle for socialism

Red Lives | i

Published in 2020 by Manifesto Press Cooperative Limited in cooperation with the Communist Party Copyright Communist Party 2020 All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing, e.g. for the purpose of private study or research, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-907464-45-4 Typeset in Bodoni and Gill Printed by Solu4ions Ltd (TU throughout) London E16 4BS

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Acknowledgements The editors, Simon Meddick, Liz Payne and Phil Katz would like to express our thanks to all the contributors to this volume of Red Lives, who have given their time and work freely in the interests of ensuring these personal histories could be shared to inspire others. Personal recollections and connections have been the principal source for the writers of these biographies, which makes this collection so special. Therefore our thanks go to: Kolya Abramsky Bill Adam Mary Aldridge Brian Allbutt Arthur Attwood Meic Birtwistle Annie Banham Martin Brown John Campbell Colin Carritt Jennie Chesterton Joe Clark Tony Conway Andy Croft Mary Davis Lesley Discum Megan Dobney Lorraine Douglas Paul Dunn John Ellison Dan Evans Ann Field

John Foster John Fox Susan Galloway Tom Gill Alex Gordon Bill Greenshields Rob Griffiths Liane Groves Anita Halpin Jonathan Havard David Horsley Pat Jay Ben Jay Cad Jones Roger Jones Meirian Jump Chris Kaufman Phil Katz Ken Keable George Kerr Tam Kirby Peter Lazenby Martin Levy Eleanor Lewington Alex Maxwell Rosie McGregor Bevis Miller Laura Miller Tommy Morrison Kevan Nelson Cynthia Oughton Liz Payne Mike Pentelow Evan Pritchard Mike Quille Neil Rafeek Ruth Rickman-Williams Jane Rosen Jane Scott Tom Sibley Dr. Mike Squires Carol Stavris Dave Stavris Graham Stevenson

Keith Stoddart Rob Streader Ruth Styles The Vale of Leven History Project Mike Vine Michael Walker Lynne Walsh Rob Wilkinson Jim Whyte Tanya Wills Anita Wright Nick Wright The use of other material in newspaper articles, periodicals and publications are acknowledged throughout the book. A number of contributors have used the substantial reference material and photographs contained in Graham Stevenson’s website https://grahamstevenson. me.uk/ to supplement their work. Graham kindly gave collective permission to authors to reuse material from the site. Cover artwork: Robert Streader – graphic artist ‘in residence’ for the Communist Party centenary.

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Introduction The people you read about in this book shared a desire to bring to an end a society based on exploitation and oppression, to establish socialism. They came from across the decades, totalling a hundred years in struggle. You will find out about women and men, black and white, of all ages, who worked in every industry – from coal mining and science, agriculture and education to health and seafaring. They hailed from all the nations of Britain and more widely – from the Channel Islands, Ireland and as far away as India and Gibraltar and Canada. This is their story, told by comrades, friends and family, in their own words. Each shows commitment to a belief that the class struggle can change lives, improving the lot of all. They demonstrate bravery and sacrifice, alongside a depth of culture and political education. Many will have faced black-listing, surveillance, employer aggression, been forced to move home, and even had threats to their lives. One was rescued in Nazi Germany by the intervention of the British ambassador! This book illustrates how they coped and why they continued, despite adversity. The one thing that unites each and all, is pride in and ownership of, a ‘card’, they were members of the Communist Party, a revolutionary Party, striving for peace and socialism. There is a powerful bond that links Party members and this is apparent in every story here. No one forgets who introduced them to the ideas of socialism – that first exciting realisation that the world can be different – or to the Party itself, where they discover a level of camaraderie, egalitarianism and collective endeavour. These ‘Red Lives’ are a testimony to lives lived in hope and determination. We are sure that they will inspire you as much as they did the editors. In the words of Nicolai Ostrovsky: “Our dearest possession is life. It is given to us but once, and we must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, we might say; ‘all my life and all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world – the fight for the liberation of humankind”. How the Steel was Tempered (1936)

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A sense of value; a sense of purpose In early September 2019, in anticipation of its centenary, the Communist Party wrote to its membership asking for recommendations of past members, no longer living, who might be included in a collection of life histories. Red Lives is a selection of these. The editors did not seek well-known names, rather, we wanted to capture the experience and spirit of lay members, to reveal how their activism and communist politics developed over a lifetime. We were anxious to make sure that the voices of the biographers could be heard unaltered, and so the comrades and friends of these communists express themselves in their own words and using their own phrases. We took the view that only those changes that were absolutely necessary to ensure understanding would be made to the work passed to us. Communist Party members are volunteers and only contribute in so far as they feel able and of course, this changes through a lifetime. The Party reflects the political experience and understanding of its members, who, as this book demonstrates, are active in a staggering range of social, political and cultural arenas. Members are motivated by an understanding of the political struggle and events of their times, their individual education and collective study of Marxism and the sheer economic needs of their families and local communities. Many take a moral stand. There is no set way of ‘how to be a good communist’. Each adds to the definition, in her or his own way, but all struggle to build a just and democratic future. This has not been an easy book to assemble. Many of the biggest achievements recorded are small in ‘newsworthiness’ and the impact is localised. In other instances small incremental change led to big achievements, such as when communists fought a street by street battle to force government to open deep shelters, shielding millions from the misery of saturation day and night bombing of tightly-packed communities. In some cases, change is the work of an individual, but more often, the combined effort of many. Our challenge was to uncover these achievements so they could be shared. It may not have been easy, but it was a wonderful education for us. So many of the discussions and decisions of members in branches, districts, commissions, advisories and committees go unrecorded. At certain times when the party was facing repression, this was mostly for good reason. Outside of core minutes and congresses, there is no uniform catalogue for referencing decisions. Book archives and memoirs are dispersed. Some never made it beyond manuscript. In many cases the stories are being told here for the first time. The ‘how’ is as interesting as the ‘why?’. Well-trodden historical events are given a new perspective, as they are told by those involved. Many of the stories contained in this volume describe in an open and honest way the difficulties the Party faced during the early 1980s (and which were replicated across Europe), which led to the demise of the CPGB and its rebirth as the CPB – reformed and politically strengthened as a consequence. The biographies that make reference to these events are testament to the commitment of those who continued to recognise the Party as an essential element in any revolutionary transformation of society, and to lessons learned. Red Lives | v

This book is a record of lives lived with commitment and integrity, and the belief that the Party is a vehicle for revolutionary change. The biographies are related, as far as possible, using the words of individuals who knew the characters, were inspired by them or who were active alongside them. The resulting picture is a powerful riposte to the opponents of communism, who know so little about our ideas and what motivates working class activists. We hope that this book will help show the reality of thousands of ordinary working people, often vociferously independent in views and action, committed to a political vision, contributing to the decisions and overall direction of the Party. Individuals who recognise the importance of a disciplined approach to political action in confronting capitalism, and an understanding of their place in a worldwide communist movement. Equally striking is the richness of experience, cultural depth, boundless enthusiasm and commitment of working class people shining out from each story. The ‘Party the rich cannot buy’ has been financed for over 100 years by pounds raised by these people, certain in the knowledge that its vision is worth fighting for, and sticking with, despite adversity. There are no stars. They all are. This book is dedicated to the young communists who have grown in numbers in recent years. It is they who will continue and add to this story. Simon Meddick Liz Payne Phil Katz July 2020

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Bill Alexander 1910 – 2000 Bill Alexander commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and was for 30 years until his death a leading member of the veterans’ organisation, the International Brigade Association. In various capacities, from IBA vice-chair to secretary, he was a formidable defender of the honour of his comrades in Spain, doing battle in particular with anyone who used Cold War and anti-communist tropes to denigrate the memory of the 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles who went to Spain – and those 530 of them who gave their lives. Bill was the author in 1982 of British Volunteers for Liberty, a book that helped revive interest in the International Brigades as the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War approached. He also chaired the International Brigade Memorial appeal, which raised funds for the unveiling in 1985 of the magnificent memorial to the International Brigades, created by sculptor Ian Walters, on London’s Southbank. As a follow-up to British Volunteers for Liberty, he wrote No to Franco: The Struggle Never Stopped, 1939-1975, telling the story of how International Brigade veterans fulfilled their pledge to the Spanish people that they would continue the fight against Franco on their return to Britain. In 1996 he co-authored, with John Gorman and Colin Williams, Memorials of the Spanish Civil War. From 1989-96 Bill was the president of the Marx Memorial Library in London, home to an extensive archive of documents and artefacts on the Spanish Civil War and the British response to it. Bill frequently clashed with those who sided with George Orwell’s view of the war in Spain, as expressed in Homage to Catalonia, to criticise the role of communists and the Soviet Union. In ‘George Orwell and Spain’ – a chapter in Inside the Myth, edited by Christopher Norris – he wrote that Orwell had failed to learn the lessons of Spain, that the priority was to defeat fascism and defend the elected Spanish Popular Front government and not to violently pursue ‘hollow phrase-mongering’ revolutionary goals that threatened the war effort. Just as dismissive was Bill’s verdict on Ken Loach’s 1995 film Land and Freedom, loosely based on the Orwell memoir. He accused it of presenting a narrow and partisan view of the war that exaggerated the role of the few dozen British volunteers with the quasi-Trotskyist POUM militia at the expense of the International Brigaders. Born into a large, working-class family in rural Hampshire – his father was a carpenter – Bill Alexander joined the Communist Party in 1932, influenced by his mother’s politics and the sight of hunger marchers. His parents encouraged education and he gained entry to Reading University, where he studied chemistry. He then worked as an industrial chemist, but devoted much of his energies to his political and trade union activities, taking part, for example, in the October 1936 Battle of Cable Red Lives | 1

Street, which saw the police prevented from clearing a way for Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts to march through the East End of London. He joined the International Brigades in the spring of 1937 and was assigned to the 15th Brigade’s Anti-Tank Battery, an elite unit equipped with high-calibre Soviet guns. He became the battery’s political commissar, and was described by a comrade as: “a strict disciplinarian, but fearless”. Cited for bravery at the Battle at Belchite in September 1937, he was promoted to commander of the British Battalion at the Battle of Teruel, during which he was wounded in the chest and shoulder and eventually repatriated in June 1938. On his return to Britain he became Merseyside area secretary of the Communist Party until 1940, when he was accepted for a commissioning course at Sandhurst. He finished top of his year and served in North Africa, Italy and Germany, rising to the rank of captain in the Reconnaissance Corps. Resuming full-time Party work after the war, he was the Coventry secretary until 1947 (and stood unsuccessfully as a Communist in Coventry East in the 1945 general election). He then spent six years as secretary of the Midlands area, and another six years as secretary for Wales, became assistant general secretary of the party in 1959 – a position he held until 1967. He later taught chemistry in south-east London until retirement.

Drawing by Ken Gill

Vic Allen 1923 – 2014 Professor Vic Allen was a communist, academic, working-class intellectual, author, teacher, political organiser and revolutionary. His lifetime of commitment to national and international political activism was recognised at his funeral in Yorkshire in November, 2014, with the presence of a delegation from the South African National Union of Mineworkers. Professor Allen died in November, 2014, aged 91, after a lifetime of commitment to the working class both in the UK and internationally. Tributes included a contribution from Frances Baleni, general secretary of the South African National Union of Mineworkers. Professor Allen undertook missions to Africa, including South Africa, to help establish trades unions during the racist apartheid era. He organised political education courses in Britain attended by South African miners’ leaders travelling clandestinely. Baleni said: “Back then Black South African mineworkers had no names. We had company numbers. We were just a tool. Vic made it possible for us to train in the UK. We were taken to Trafalgar Square where anti-apartheid activists were camping day and night. That made me fully understand the meaning of empathy. Vic taught us to make sure we appreciated each other, never to leave anything to chance.” 2 | Red Lives

Professor Allen taught young apprentice Yorkshire mineworker Arthur Scargill at Leeds University day schools organised by the NUM for its young activists. Scargill worked at Woolley colliery in north Yorkshire. Vic Allen’s lectures and friendship were among his greatest political influences. Scargill went on to organise a strike by apprentices across the Yorkshire coalfield, later becoming President of the NUM before the momentous miners’ strike against pit closures of 1984-5. At Professor Allen’s funeral, Scargill revealed his involvement in a successful mission to smuggle £100,000 from the UK to the South African NUM, in batches of £10,000, to help the union organise, and another secret mission taking South African miners’ leaders to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro. “Vic was an intellectual giant, a writer without peer,” he said. At Professor Allen’s funeral his wife Kate Carey read some of the messages which had poured into the family home. She movingly described him as: “gentle, both soft and strong, human, dignified, inspirational, warm, loyal, steadfast and utterly dedicated both to causes and to the people he helped.” In a tribute to Professor Allen published in 2015 in the Leeds African Studies Bulletin, Alex Beresford wrote: “Vic initially came to the University as a lecturer in industrial relations in 1959, becoming senior lecturer in 1963, reader in 1970 and professor in 1973. His early work focused on social theory but, as a committed Marxist, his driving passion was the furtherance of workers’ struggles, in the UK and also across Africa. In the 1960s Vic was asked by the International Labour Organisation to produce a report on the state of labour struggles across sub-Saharan Africa. As an enthusiastic activist-academic, Vic accepted, only to be imprisoned for six months for his work with unions in Nigeria, for which he was accused of trying to overthrow the Nigerian state! “Later in his career, Vic worked closely with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in South Africa to produce a comprehensive and detailed three volume history of the union. As a result of his access to key union officials and archives, this history of the NUM stands out as one of the strongest and most insightful produced to date. In it, Vic explicates the intersections between capital, state and class power. While it details the brutal oppression of Black miners, it nonetheless offers an inspiring account of their struggles against the great injustices of apartheid. “Through his connections with the NUM, Vic met with Fidel Castro in a secret meeting between South African activists and the Cuban government in 1988. In the early nineties, Vic was summoned by his close friend, Cyril Ramaphosa, to join him on a trip to Johannesburg airport. To Vic’s surprise, Nelson Mandela was waiting for him in the back of the car and the two of them shared a long conversation about politics and a pastime they had both previously shared – boxing. “Vic’s work with the NUM was extremely influential. As a mark of gratitude and respect, he was given the Kgao ya Bahale award at a ceremony in London in 2010 by a delegation led by the then NUM President Senzeni Zokwana, General Secretary Frans Baleni, former NUM President James Motlatsi and former General Secretary Cyril Ramaphosa. The award, which is the highest honour bestowed by NUM, was Red Lives | 3

given to Vic ‘in recognition of his life’s work to help strengthen solidarity and working class consciousness.’ At the award ceremony, Vic was hailed by his South African comrades as a ‘true internationalist’; a fitting tribute to a man who dedicated his life’s work to workers’ struggles and who was highly regarded by all those he engaged with. “I will always remember the warmth and generosity of Vic’s spirit. He personally helped me to establish links with the NUM for my own research, for which I will be forever grateful.”

Jim Ancrum 1898 – 1946 James Ancrum was born into a working-class family in Felling, Co Durham, on 15 August 1898. He started work in the local colliery as a boy, but served in the Royal Navy from 1915 to 1918. He joined the Communist Party during the 1926 Miners’ Lockout. In 1929 Jim gained both a national and an international reputation through Workers’ International Relief (WIR), a Comintern initiative intended to prevent workers in dispute being starved into submission. That year, the 4,000 miners at Dawdon Colliery, also in Co Durham, were locked out over the employer’s demands for lower wages and worse working conditions. The Durham Miners’ Association (DMA) executive was in favour of accepting the new terms, but the local lodge was not. With a £30 donation from the WIR national committee, Jim started a feeding centre for the miners and their families, and then raised funds from around the country to keep it going. After 15 weeks, the miners returned to work with a partial victory. Jim repeated his WIR role during the Lancashire textile disputes in 1930. The same year, he led the Tyneside contingent of a Hunger March to London. In the early 1930s Jim was secretary of the Durham Miners’ section of the Minority Movement (MM), speaking at pit-head meetings. The MM was not a trade union itself but had been founded in 1924, with the aim of building up a militant trade union movement. The DMA executive was hostile to the MM, and in July 1931 Jim was temporarily expelled from the union for MM activity, although the specific offence was “dealing with Lodge business in Felling Square”. Jim was elected to the Communist Party central committee in 1929, and was sent to the Lenin School in Moscow at some point in the period 1931-32. The Party CC Minutes of 15 March 1931 record a significant contribution from him: “Before I joined the Party I used to back gee-gees, fill in the football coupon and go on to the pub. But when I joined the Party I thought I had to stop doing this and only associate with communists. But we must associate with people who back gee4 | Red Lives

gees, fill in the football coupon and go to the pub. Find out what’s troubling them and raise it as an election issue … we must not only deal with national issues, but get definitely on to the big issues affecting the workers in the localities.” Here is a clear sign of what made Jim Ancrum a force in the Felling area. He was a leading figure in the Felling branch of the NUWM, speaking regularly at outdoor meetings, where he described his casework on benefits advice and appeals over rents, repairs and preventing evictions. He organised the funding and equipment for the Felling contingent of the Means Test protest march to Durham in 1932, and led the Felling and Gateshead campaigns against the new benefit scales under the 1934 Unemployment Assistance Act. That involved 1000-strong indoor rallies, and a 5,000-strong march to the Assistance Board Area Office, where he secured a commitment that benefit scales would not be reduced where children were receiving free school meals. Jim was a Communist Party local election candidate from 1931, but it was this local profile that enabled him to win the 1935 by-election in his own Felling West ward – one of the poorest in the authority – and to hold on to it in 1937. His council work was largely an extension of his NUWM work, campaigning against the Means Test and benefit levels, taking up local dissatisfaction about council housing and job schemes, and arguing for more transparency in council business. At the same time, Jim was National Organiser for the NUWM, speaking and helping to create branches around the country. He was involved in organising the Tyneside contingent of the 1934 Hunger March, but could not persuade Felling UDC to support the 1936 March, despite increased trade union support for it. In 1939, before the outbreak of the Second World War, Jim was co-author, with other leading communists, of a Party pamphlet, The North-East Marches On, expounding the region’s history of struggle and the need for a united front. Local elections were suspended during the war, and Jim served as an Air Raid Precautions warden, a role which the Communist Party developed as a means of monitoring and taking up local issues and grievances. He died in 1946 of complications following an operation, leaving a widow, Frances.

Keith Howard “Andy” Andrews 1907 – 2008 Andy Andrews died on 7 May 2008 aged 101 and the red banner at his funeral carried the legend “Trade Unionist, Socialist, Peace Campaigner and Internationalist – Loyal to the cause to the very last!” How true this was. Until near the end, he was a familiar character about Taunton town, selling Morning Stars from his mobility buggy, which doubled as a travelling campaign vehicle for his work with the Taunton Peace Group as he spoke out against the war on Iraq or collected signatures against Trident. “Buggies for Peace” read the message on the front. Andy rediscovered the Communist Party in his late nineties, receiving his new Party card on his 99th birthday on 15 February 2006. That year was a big one for him. He returned to Spain for the first time since 1938 in October for the veterans’ reunion on the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. He was Red Lives | 5

accompanied by trade-unionist and labour movement historian, Dave Chapple and told him on the return journey that it had been “the best week of my life.” At that time, the nearest Party organisation was in Bristol sixty miles away, but a local Somerset branch was founded on 9 June 2007, with Andy as its chair and his little bungalow the meeting place. One of its first activities was to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution – which Andy remembered hearing about as a boy of ten. He made a guest appearance at the Glastonbury Festival that summer, as the oldest surviving International Brigade member in Britain, exhorting the young people to reject the BNP and fight fascism until it was eradicated. Comrades in the Somerset branch soon learned Andy’s remarkable story. At 16 he joined the Army Medical Corps and was sent to India, becoming ‘red’ as soon as he set foot there. His lifetime commitment to anti-colonialism was sealed on the dockside at Mumbai, where he saw how destitute women labourers, babies strapped to their bodies, loaded heavy coal sacks onto the waiting steamships in the heat. “If this is the Jewel in the English crown,” he said, “I want nothing to do with it.” In the mid-1920s he was posted to Shanghai with an Indian regiment detailed to defend British interests. Here, in 1927, he witnessed the aftermath of a massacre of communists by troops of Chiang Kai-shek, the living and the dead piled high. Leaving the forces in 1931, Andy worked at Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital in Hammersmith. He joined first the Independent Labour Party, then the Communist Party, in Kilburn where he lived. There he was active in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and in struggles to keep the fascist Blackshirts off the streets. In early 1936, Andy and other comrades disrupted a 12,000-strong Mosley rally in the Albert Hall; on that occasion, he was beaten by thugs, thrown down the stairs and kicked by a police officer. Undeterred and committed to fighting fascism everywhere, he headed to Spain from August 1936 to March 1938, first serving in a field hospital on the Aragon front and later at Albacete and Teruel, coming under direct fire in the course of medical duties. He then went to northern France, where he was miraculously uninjured when a shell hit the armoured truck in which he was sitting. Evacuated from Dunkirk in a boat that was sunk, he was rescued by a trawler after spending hours in the sea. He really was a survivor. In 1955, Andy settled in Taunton, where he worked at the Musgrove Park Hospital. Always an active trade unionist, he put his energy into the COHSE branch of which he became secretary, a post he held until he retired in 1972. The branch grew from 5 to 105 members, an achievement for which Andy received his union’s badge of merit. He joined the Taunton branch of the Communist Party, taking on the role of secretary and working with several comrades also from the hospital. For his 100th birthday, Andy received messages from Tony Benn and CND’s Kate Hudson amongst many others but, of course, he flatly turned down the offer of a telegram from the queen. At the celebration he said he wanted less personal praise and more politics and urged those gathered to support workers in their struggles. On the day he died, he was the oldest member of the Communist Party. 6 | Red Lives

Mark Ashton 1960 – 1987 From friend and comrade Lorraine Douglas: “I don’t remember the first time I actually met Mark, I just remember his reputation preceding him. We quickly became friends and good comrades, very active as Young Communist League and Party members attending numerous demos, meetings and events, usually followed by some hard partying of the less political kind”. The early 80s were a turbulent time in the UK – Thatcher was in the ascendancy after the Falklands conflict but met significant and well-organised opposition – the Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp; riots in many inner-city areas against the growth in unemployment and the racist conduct of the police; the AntiNazi League’s successful mobilisation of a generation that put Fascism back in its box; the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone’s radical leadership that challenged Thatcherism; the continued growth of the Women’s movement, Lesbian & Gay liberation movement and anti-racist work, along with the 24/7 anti-apartheid picket at South Africa House and growing support for the Palestinians after the Sabra and Chatila massacre highlighted the plight of the refugees. At this time the CPGB and YCL were very active organising large public events and delivering impressive turnouts to demonstrations, and Mark was always there, if not leafletting or selling the paper then carrying the banner. We had an inkling of just how vicious Thatcher’s government was going to be as it embarked on the wholesale privatisation of publicly-owned industries and enforced compulsory competitive tendering in local government. Thatcher never forgave the NUM for bringing down the Heath Government in 1974. Narrowly avoiding a strike in 1981, she developed a strategy for defeating the NUM and by extension the wider trade union movement. The Tories had outlawed secondary strike action and abolished benefits for strikers’ dependents in 1980. In the run up to the strike they mobilised the police and stockpiled coal, and then provoked the strike in the spring of 1984 by announcing the closure of 20 pits and the loss of over 20,000 jobs in the coal mining industry. Mark immediately swung into action. With Mike Jackson he set up Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners – a story partly told in the hugely successful film Pride. Of course that film glossed over Mark’s politics and said nothing about the fact he subsequently became General Secretary of the YCL. Mark was tireless in his support – out ‘on the bucket’ around the London Lesbian & Gay clubs virtually every night of the strike. It was during the strike that Mark was diagnosed HIV+, in those days a death sentence. He was frightened but refused to let it interfere with his campaigning. During the strike and afterwards, Mark was frequently exasperated by identity politics. Mark was clear about the importance of equal rights, fighting discrimination and prejudice because they were tools used by the ruling class to divide us, rather than Red Lives | 7

supplanting class struggle with ‘new social forces’. He viewed all discrimination through the prism of class politics and understood that while discrimination occurred throughout society, its impact was always the most damaging to the working class. By making the links in this way he was able to counter the prejudices that existed against Lesbians & Gay men within the trade union movement, and vice versa – culminating in the NUM’s support which helped carry the resolution supporting Lesbian & Gay rights at the TUC. Communist miner’s leader Mick McGahey was pivotal in winning the TUC to this progressive policy position. After the defeat of the miners, divisions in the Communist Party developed to a critical state. The ascendant ‘Euro-Communists’ often claim Mark as one of their own. He was, however much more of a centrist, observing democratic centralism even when he had reservations about some of the policies that were emerging. At one point he talked about leaving the Communist Party because he couldn’t stand the in-fighting. I persuaded him to remain and he went on to become General Secretary of the YCL. Little has been written about Mark’s involvement in the Wapping dispute of 1986/7. This was the second great defeat for the working class under Thatcher’s reign. No coincidence that destroying the print unions was a political priority given their ability to stop the presses in support of the working class, something they did in support of the nurses and the miners – in breach of the anti-union legislation that outlawed secondary action. Mark was present at most of the Saturday night demonstrations and quite a few of the mid-week ones too. We regularly had the YCL banner (Party banners were conspicuous by their absence) and we upset the Trots with our re-write of ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’ – referencing the Brighton Bomb at the Tory party conference in 1984 (renditions can be bought with a pint). Mark hadn’t been well, suffering a number of opportunist infections and I saw less of him toward the end of 1986. Mark was at Wapping on the night of the police riot on the anniversary of the strike – 25 January 1987. I remember it was freezing and admonished him for only wearing his customary double denim and t-shirt. He grinned and said he was fine. A few days later he was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. When I visited him, he was surrounded by about a dozen friends and the nurses were good-naturedly moaning that his ward was like Piccadilly Circus. He was in good spirits. But he died the following week. I only knew Mark for about four years. He made a lasting impression on me as a friend and an outstanding comrade, and I think of him daily with love and Pride.”

Dr Mollie Barrow 1908 – 1970 Dr Mary (always known as Mollie) Barrow of Birmingham, was born on 31 January 1908. She married solicitor, George Corbyn Barrow, and for much of their middle life they lived at 184 Stratford Road, Sparkbrook, where Mollie operated a surgery and was deeply involved with the work of the local Communist Party branch. In 1940, Mollie, along with Jessie Eden and a deputation of 51 women from the Communist Party, were promised better Air Raid Precaution by the Earl of Dudley after 8 | Red Lives

a “three hour interview”. The campaign successfully sought electric lighting, first aid equipment, reinforced concrete shelters, and a doubling of teacher numbers. Her indomitable spirit was revealed in 1941, when Mollie was fined when attending to a man with a broken leg at a road junction off Stratford Road. Police at the scene were more exercised by the appearance of a crowd of Irish onlookers than in aiding the injured. Accused of assaulting an officer, Mollie countered that she had been keeping onlookers away from the injured man but the police were only obsessed with violently arresting someone for something. In the November 1945 municipal elections, Mollie polled well as one of the Party’s candidates, winning 1,796 votes in Sparkbrook. She was the author of You live here! A political guide to Sparkbrook and Balsall Heath published by the Party in 1946. One campaign the pamphlet mentions was that of Sparkbrook YCL to get waste land in Golden Hillock Road to be turned into playing fields. The campaign was not successful, but shortly after, Mollie donated the £100 cost (probably equivalent to £7,000 today, comparing wages values) of the tents that set up the Birmingham-based Communist (later Community) Camping Club, which held annual summer camps in North Wales from around 1948, founded by Jim Crump and continued by George Jelf. These tents were still in use in the 60s and 70s on the field in Talybont, giving many families from Birmingham and elsewhere the chance of a holiday. After the war, she also had a surgery in Goodrest Croft, Yardley Wood, where she lived in the adjacent house. Mollie was a very highly respected doctor, but her forthright manner and habit of plain-speaking was not to everyone’s taste. Patients fell into two categories, depending on whether they refused to consult any other doctor, or refused to consult Dr Barrow. Jane Scott recalls: “I was born in a nursing home in Priory Road, Yardley Wood in 1949. It was apparently a difficult delivery, presided over by the matron and Mollie Barrow. Matron Sandground told my mother afterwards that she had never seen an obstetric specialist work as skilfully as Molly did in delivering me. In the months following I had colic and hardly slept, and Molly called in every day to give me a feed and check up on my mother. Molly’s wise, common-sense words of advice on baby care, given at that time, became family lore and I still quote them occasionally when asked for advice on matters concerning my grandchildren. Mollie could be quite sharp-tongued but was also very kind. She cut a striking figure to me as a child, with a no-nonsense bobbed haircut which could well have been that way since the 1920s, and always a grey suit. During a home visit, when the medical business was done, she would stand with her back to the fire with her hands in the pockets of the jacket, and talk politics and current events.” She became much involved with Sparkbrook Community Association, formed in 1960 as a voluntary, non-party-political and non-sectarian organisation. Her activities here and as a GP brought her enormous respect in her community. Even today, she is spoken of with awe. Under her guidance, lack of space was recognised as having a detrimental effect upon the physical and educational growth of children and the Association, a registered charity, succeeded in obtaining grants from the Save the Children Fund to create four play centres. Red Lives | 9

Mollie was first the Vice-Chair, and later Chair, of the Sparkbrook Community Association, dying on 16 April 1970 and leaving it with a generous Charitable Trust to its perpetual benefit.

Clem Beckett 1906 – 1937 Clem Beckett was a champion speedway rider who, throughout his all too short life, put his political and trade union values ahead of fame or monetary rewards. On 12 February 1937, he made the supreme sacrifice while manning a machine-gun at the Battle of Jarama. He was killed fighting Franco’s fascists alongside fellow communist Christopher Caudwell – journalist, poet, Marxist philosopher and novelist (using his real name Christopher St John Sprigg) – with whom he had forged a strong bond of friendship despite their contrasting backgrounds. Born in Oldham in 1906, Clem became a blacksmith on leaving school and his radical politics were forged in the hardship and discrimination he suffered during the 1920s. He was saved from unemployment and poverty by his unique skills as a speedway motorcyclist and rider on the ‘Wall of Death’. He began his speedway career in 1928 at Audenshaw, when dirt-track racing was in its infancy, and he was soon the leading rider of his day. By the end of the year he held 28 records in the sport. When he won the Golden Helmet at the Owlerton Stadium, no fewer than 15,000 spectators watched him. His presence was in such demand that he would often have to hire a plane to fly to three different events in a single day. His fame spread across Europe. In 1929 alone he raced and gave displays in France, Germany, Denmark, Yugoslavia and Turkey. But at the height of his fame, angered by the growing exploitation in the sport, particularly the rising death toll among untrained youngsters, he formed a union for speedway riders, the Dirt Track Riders’ Association. He also wrote an article for the Daily Worker headed ‘Bleeding the men who risk their lives on the dirt track’. In doing so he earned the enmity of the promoters of the sport, the Auto-Cycle Union, who promptly blacklisted him. Undeterred, he became an exhibition rider, inaugurating the Wall of Death in Sheffield, in which he defied gravity by driving a bike horizontally around a circular wall. In 1931 he toured the continent, including Germany, where he witnessed the rise of fascism, and in the following year he visited the Soviet Union as part of a British Workers’ Sports Federation delegation. But blacklisting had made life difficult for him, and on his return he took a job at the new Ford factory in Dagenham, where he hoped his interest in mechanics could be put to use. He only lasted two weeks, as he was one of the first to try to organise a union in 10 | Red Lives

the plant and to publicise the unsafe working conditions in the factory. During this period Clem was also active in the campaign to gain access to open spaces, in what is now the Peak District National Park, and took part in the famous 1932 Kinder Trespass. His passion for mechanics and engineering led him to set up a motorcycle sales and repair shop on his own account in Oldham Road in Manchester. But, despite all the success, celebrity and wealth his dare-devil exploits won for him, Clem remained loyal and committed to his working-class origins and socialist philosophy. So, when in 1936 General Franco launched his fascist uprising against the Spanish Republic and Britain refused to sell arms to the Popular Front government, he offered to become part of the International Brigades. In November of that year he set off to join the anti-fascist forces, in which he was in turn a mechanic, ambulance driver and machine-gunner. He explained why he had gone in the most simple terms and honest way in a letter to his wife: “I’m sure you’ll realise that I should never have been satisfied had I not assisted.” Beckett died in the fighting in the River Jarama valley south-east of Madrid, where Franco tried unsuccessfully to cut the main road to Valencia, which was the capital’s life-line. He was one of 150 members of the British Battalion to be killed. His friend George Sinfield said: “As his section was ordered to retire, Clem kept his machine-gun trained on the advancing fascists, acting as cover to the retreat. The advance was halted but Clem lost his life.” Clem’s widow, Leda, captured the spirit of the man: “He went to Spain to face death because he loved life.” He had lived just 31 years.

Peter Blackman 1909 – 1993 Peter Blackman’s political journey is quite unique. Born in Barbados in 1909, his father was a stonemason, and his mother a laundress. The family lived on the grounds of the Anglican Church and because the church saw the potential of young Peter, he was given an education few of his Black peers in Barbados received, in the prestigious Harrison College. He excelled at languages, learning French, German, Greek and Latin as well as theology. In fact the church was grooming him for the priesthood and he travelled to Britain to study theology at Durham University. He became a priest and was sent to the Gambia in West Africa as a missionary in 1935. When he realised that Black priests were paid less than their White counterparts he challenged this racist rule, and when he did not succeed in overturning it he resigned as a priest and returned to Barbados. In 1937 he returned to Britain and now living in London, he threw himself into Black and radical politics. He became active in the League of Coloured Peoples eventually editing Red Lives | 11

its journal The Keys. More significantly he joined the Negro Welfare Association, which was led by Communists and in his next logical step, Peter Blackman joined the Communist Party. By the outbreak of the Second World War, he was often at Communist headquarters in King Street assisting in any way he could and, realising his potential, he was asked to work on the Party’s Colonial Information Bulletin. He spent the war years in a factory where parts of Wellington bombers were assembled for the RAF and was later promoted to factory floor manager. His skills as a writer had been recognised by the Communist Party and now the BBC, knowing of his prowess, asked him to broadcast on their radio services to the West Indies, alongside other Caribbean men and women living in London. However, his radio career was ended in the early 1950s once the Cold War began and Communists were expelled from the BBC. Having become a skilled engineer, he worked as an engine fitter for the railways at Willesden Works. He was an active member of the National Union of Railwaymen and was renowned among his workmates as a person who would always help with writing letters and anyone with learning difficulties. In 1949, when Paul Robeson made a successful tour of Britain, the Communist Party suggested Peter Blackman organise his tour and travel with him. He accompanied Robeson on his travels in European countries, including the World Peace Congress in Paris where he was introduced to the legendary Black American historian, academic and activist WEB Du Bois. Many years later, he spoke of his feelings when they visited the site of the Warsaw Ghetto saying: “German fascism and what it meant threw us right back on our haunches and made us ashamed in more ways than one to be human”. This experience led to Peter Blackman’s masterpiece, a long poem called My Song Is For All Men, published by Lawrence and Wishart both in Britain and the USA in 1952. This magnificent work pays tribute to the millions of people throughout the world who fought oppression, racism and fascism. Peter Blackman’s poetry is outstanding and thankfully some of the poems have been recently collected by Chris Searle and published as Footprints. His homage to the great Black Communist Claudia Jones In Memory of Claudia Jones is in the book as is his other masterpiece, Stalingrad, which acknowledges the struggles of the Soviet people and the Red Army and their resistance to the Nazis and shows how the battle of Stalingrad was a rallying cry to the people of the world at the time. He continued his activities in the Communist Party through the 1940s and 1950s but at some stage in the next decade, feeling his abilities were not being fully utilised by the Party, he left. He remained a socialist and trade unionist and in 1979, at a poetry reading in East London, he read Stalingrad to an enthusiastic audience which included the Communist dockers’ leader Jack Dash. When Communist musician Robert Wyatt heard him perform the poem he persuaded him to record it. Peter Blackman was for many years an active member of the Communist Party, who published his magnificent My Song Is For All Men. Whatever his differences in later years, he deserves to be recognised not only as a great poet but as an important Black Communist. 12 | Red Lives

Rutland Boughton 1878 – 1960 Rutland Boughton – composer, conductor and founder of the Glastonbury Festival – was born in Aylesbury in 1878. His father and uncle ran a family grocery business. The boy is said to have taught himself music, perhaps encouraged by his mother, a teacher, who played the harmonium. Even as a child he gathered his young friends together in an orchestra whose instruments included whistles and homemade zithers. After leaving school at 14, he took up a position with a concert agency in London, staying for six years gaining valuable experience of the music world. In 1898, he became a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music. His fees, otherwise unaffordable, were covered by Ferdinand de Rothschild, MP for Aylesbury. This was the only period in his life in which he had any formal musical training. In 1905 he moved to Birmingham to teach at the Midland Institute of Music. He continued to conduct and compose, his reputation increasing with his output. Boughton was described during his lifetime as “one of Britain’s greatest living composers.” His works included symphonies, concertos, chamber music, operas, songs, and ballets – exceptional creations drawing on the dialectical mythic themes of good and evil and the rich heritage of Britain’s legends and traditions. Among his compositions are five Arthurian music dramas: The Birth of Arthur (1909), The Round Table (1916), The Lily Maid (1934), Galahad (1944) and Avalon (1945). But his most famous work was The Immortal Hour (1913), a Celtic faerie tale, praised by Elgar as “a work of genius.” Boughton held music to be an art form belonging at the heart of the community, drawing people together – whether as performers, chorus, or audience. It had the capacity to inspire and change ideas. Rutland Boughton’s ideas were ones of a committed socialist. As a young man he was influenced by the works of John Ruskin, William Morris, George Bernard Shaw and Edward Carpenter. Boughton used words from Carpenter’s four-volume prose poem, Towards Democracy in his Midnight (Op 26, 1909). He became a well-known figure on the left of the music scene, conducting the Clarion Choirs of Yorkshire and Lancashire and founding the London Labour Choral Union in 1924. It was his vision of the central place of music in the community that propelled him towards the project for which he is most remembered – the first ever Glastonbury Music Festival. Not at Worthy Farm, Pilton but in the local Assembly Rooms, it opened on 5 August 1914 and showcased The Immortal Hour. Among those who gave financial support to the venture was the local Quaker Clark family of shoe manufacturing fame. Boughton’s dream had been to make Glastonbury the centre of the music universe, with a summer school and festivals at intervals throughout the year. He succeeded and these events continued in the town from 1914 to 1926. In the end, it was Rutland Boughton’s politics which brought about the demise of the Red Lives | 13

Glastonbury Festival. In 1926 he supported first the miners’ struggle and then the General Strike. He also joined the Communist Party and let that be widely known. Then, in December, he put on nativity musical, Bethlehem in Church House, Westminster. He gave it a contemporary setting, with Jesus born in a miner’s cottage and Herod as a hated capitalist protected by the army and police. It provoked a hue and cry, ably assisted by the Daily Mail. Boughton fell out of favour, at least in ‘respectable’ circles, and support for Glastonbury dried up. Undeterred, he moved to Gloucestershire where he lived for the rest of his life, prolifically writing music for more than three decades. He remained in the Communist Party for thirty years, leaving in 1956 at the time of the Hungarian Uprising. But he never changed his mind about the struggle for peace and socialism. Asked what he would like for his 80th birthday in 1958, he said that if his friends supported peace and nuclear disarmament, that would be the best present of all. Rutland Boughton had eight children – by his wife Florence and partners, Christina Walshe and Kathleen Davis. Jennifer, Ruby and Estelle became singers. Brian was an accomplished trumpeter. Joyance was “one of the most famous oboists of her generation” for whom both Benjamin Britten and her father composed. His grandson William Boughton was appointed director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra in 2019. Rutland Boughton died in 1960.

Ben Bradley 1898 – 1957 Had the parents of Ben Bradley been told, when celebrating his birth in January 1898, in what is now London’s Borough of Waltham Forest, that at the age of 31 he would be on trial in India for taking part in a ‘conspiracy to deprive the King-Emperor of the Sovereignty of British India’, they might have been at least slightly taken aback. But there he was, in spring 1929, together with thirty other defendants, almost all Indian, in Meerut and facing this charge. He was represented at the trial by Nehru, first future prime minister of independent India. What’s more, Nehru represented Bradley and his co trial list Young Communist League member from Cambridge, Phil Spratt, free of charge. Surprise for Bradley’s parents might have been magnified had it been added that their new born son would be found guilty, would be in prison for more than four years, and that on release he would then, unrepentant, take part in setting up a national Indian Communist Party. Indeed, Bradley went on to become a member of the presidium of the Communist International, alongside Pollitt and Palme Dutt. Ben Bradley’s father, an army pensioner, worked as a warehouse night-watchman and later as a time-keeper at a motor works. Ben was one of eight children, of whom two died in infancy. He entered an engineering apprenticeship at the age of 16 in 1914 and (with an interruption for service in the Navy during war years), continued in his trade in Britain until 1921. He was already drawn to socialist politics. He had read Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, was a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union from its foundation in 1920, and, faced with unemployment, was active in the National Unemployed Workers Movement led by Wal Hannington. 14 | Red Lives

His life took a new turn when in 1921 he signed up to a two-year contract with the Government of India for an engineering role there. In the Rawalpindi area, he supervised a large workshop – and was troubled by the wretched pay and conditions of those he was supervising. Back in Britain in early 1923, he joined the British Communist Party, and was soon active as a shop steward in an engineering works, leading a successful strike just before the 1926 General Strike. The Communist International offered a collective approach to encouraging the formation of communist parties in countries such as India, where there was not one already. The British Communist Party took responsibility for helping to form, organise and train leaders of the party in India. Building an existing Indian Workers and Peasants Party with socialism at its core was the first task. To minimise the risk of arrest, the work had to be clandestine. In autumn 1927, Bradley joined fellow Party member Philip Spratt, a Cambridge University graduate, in what was then Bombay. Soon Bradley was an Executive Committee member of both the Workers and Peasants Party and the All-Indian Trade Union Congress. He became a Vice-President of a newly formed mill-workers’ union, which had more than 50,000 members by the end of 1928. He had additional roles in rail workers’ unions. Bradley’s arrest with Spratt and Indian comrades in March 1929 constituted an historic attack on trade unionism in India as much as an attack on the Indian independence and communist movement. The Meerut trial for ‘conspiracy to deprive the King-Emperor of the Sovereignty of British India’ – a good cause if there ever was one – began at the end of January 1930. This trial without a jury ended in August 1932, after which five months of judicial deliberations followed. Bradley was given a ten year

s Portrait of 25 of the Meerut Prisoners taken outside the jail. Back row (l-r) KN Sehgal, SS Josh, HL Hutchinson, Shaukat Usmani, BF Bradley, A Prasad, P Spratt, G Adhikari Middle Row: RR Mitra, Gopen Chakravarti, Kishori Lal Ghosh, LR Kadam, DR Thengdi, Goura Shanker, S Bannerjee, K N Joglekar, P C Joshi, Muzaffar Ahmed. Front Row: MG Desai, D Goswami, RS Nimbkar, SS Mirajkar, S Dange, SV Ghate, Gopal Basak. Red Lives | 15

sentence. His was not the longest. But campaigns for release of the prisoners, in India, Britain and elsewhere were soon in overdrive. Convicted prisoners were released early. Bradley, released in November 1933, returned to Britain two months later. In London, with Reginald Bridgeman now international secretary of the League Against Imperialism, he became secretary of the British Section until the League’s winding up in May 1937. He took up engineering work again. The anti-colonial movement continued through broader channels as the fascist menace grew larger. Ben Bradley’s experience of prison was not yet done. Arrested in May 1940 for speaking in support of Indian independence at an Empire Day rally, he served a three month sentence. During the war he helped to produce a regular Colonial Information Bulletin entitled ‘Inside the Empire’. Bradley is one of those selfless characters that pepper the history of the labour movement, called upon to take big roles at critical times. When in the early months of the war, the Communist Party decided to reverse early policy of support and denouncing it as a war between imperialisms, general secretary Harry Pollitt was removed from his post. Far from this being a period when the party went into decline, it actually grew rapidly and in particular amongst its most natural of constituencies, in engineering factories and coal mining. At a time of enormous change, brought about by movement of members into the armed forces, of population change for war work and evacuation, Bradley took on the role of the day to day running of the Communist Party alongside Dave Springhall, Bill Rust and Palme Dutt. In the late 1930s Ben had met his future wife Joy, with whom he had a daughter Josephine in 1944. From 1946 he was the Daily Worker’s circulation manager. Tragically, Joy became terminally ill and died soon after their marriage. Care of Josephine had to be shared while Ben continued to work. In December, 1954 Ben changed jobs to become National Organiser of the BritainChina Friendship Association. He continued with a punishing schedule of work despite deteriorating health, and died on 1 January 1957. His funeral was attended by more than three hundred people, including Government representatives from China and India. An AEU man, a Meerut prisoner, ‘he had served India – and all colonial peoples’, and had worked, as he had once told a European mill owner in India ‘to restore the reputation of the British working class’.

Laurence Henderson Bradshaw 1899 – 1978 Laurence Bradshaw was an artist and life-long socialist. He joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s. His artistic practice – painting, engraving and sculpture – went hand in hand with his Marxism, collectivism and a sense of public service. His legacy, including the iconic memorial to Marx at his grave site, leaves an indelible mark on the communist movement in Britain. Bradshaw was born in Chester and attended Liverpool College of art, completing his studies in painting and sculpture in London. At the beginning of his artistic career in the 1920s he was assistant to Frank Brangwyn, a Welsh artist and craftsman who 16 | Red Lives

himself had worked in William Morris’s studios. He was prolific, and his work illustrates the scope and breadth of his talents. In the 1930s he undertook public works, including sculptural decorations at Worthing Town Hall and a mother and child stone relief for the Radcliffe Maternity ward in Oxford, now located by the Radcliffe Primary Care Building. Fascism was on the march in Europe. Bradshaw responded to the cause, producing art for the Aid to Spain Movement in support of the Spanish Republic. A striking example of this work can be found in the collection of the Marx Memorial Library (MML) – a hand-painted banner which reads ‘Hammersmith Communist Party Sends Greetings to Comrades Fighting in Spain’, listing two men killed – W Langmead and A Bird – and 19 others currently serving in the International Brigades in the Civil War. He also produced posters for Transport for London, promoting rural green line bus services, and then became official war artist for the Norwegian Government during the

s Lawrence Bradshaw working on his celebrated bust of Karl Marx, the cast of which marks the grave of the great thinker and revolutionary Red Lives | 17

World War. Having studied film with Eisenstein, he went on to produce three propaganda films for the wartime ministry of information. Bradshaw’s contribution was later recognised by a civil list pension from the British government. He became Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, and was elected Master of the Art Workers’ Guild in 1958. The striking memorial to Marx at Highgate cemetery is Bradshaw’s most famous work. In 1955 the Communist Party set up a Marx Monument Fund, appealing for support to erect a suitable memorial at the philosopher’s new burial site. Bradshaw was awarded the commission. He attempted to create: “not a monument to a man only, but to a great mind and a great philosopher”. The realist bronze bust of Marx’s head and shoulders, set on a simple marble pedestal, with the inscription ‘Workers of all lands unite’, was unveiled in 1956 at a ceremony attended by Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party, singer activist Paul Robeson, the Soviet Ambassador and JD Bernal, President of the MML. When Bradshaw died in 1978, Andrew Rothstein paid this evocative tribute to his work: “That same profound sympathy with the wretched and the exploited; his vigorous revolt against the conditions which condemned the human race to poverty and war, brought him very many years ago to Socialism and to a consistent and unfaltering Marxism…it was Laurence Bradshaw who put first into the small model, then into the plaster enlargement from which the bronze head was cast, into every line and massive detail of the whole work, his own passionate comprehension of Marx’s supreme intelligence and indomitable resolution”. Bradshaw was Chair of the British Soviet Friendship Society (BSFS) while Rothstein was President. He created numerous illustrations for its publications, including the 1970 front cover of the BSFS journal commemorating Lenin. A lasting tribute to Bradshaw’s work from the same year takes pride of place in the Main Hall of the MML in London. On 22 April 1970, a bronze relief by Bradshaw dedicated to Lenin was unveiled, inscribed with the words ‘1870-1924. LENIN. In this house, then the British Social Democrat’s ‘Twentieth Century Press’, Lenin, leader of the victorious October Revolution, edited Iskra, the first all-Russian socialist newspaper, in 1902-3’.

Noreen Branson 1910 – 2003 Noreen Branson was a remarkable, multi-talented comrade who devoted the whole of her adult life to the workers’ struggle – as a tireless activist, tradeunionist, women’s, peace and anti-fascist campaigner, researcher and prolific writer. She is perhaps best known for volumes three and four of the History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, from 1927 to 1941 and 1941 to 1951, and her regular contributions over sixtyfive years to the Labour Research Department’s magazine, which she edited for almost three decades from 1945 to 1972. Noreen came into left political activism and the 18 | Red Lives

Communist Party from an unlikely background. Born on 16 May 1910 to lieutenant colonel Alfred Browne in London, her paternal grandfather was an Irish and UK peer who became the 8th Marquis of Sligo. Her life was to change dramatically when, in August 1918, she was suddenly orphaned. Her mother contracted typhoid fever and died, and only eleven days later her father was killed in action in France. This had a profound impact and engendered intense anti-war sentiments from an early age. Eight-year-old Noreen went to live with her maternal grandparents in Berkley Square. They were wealthy businesspeople and traditional in outlook. She was duly raised in style and presented as a debutante at court in 1928. But life for Noreen did not progress the way those around her might have anticipated. While performing with a charity group to which she belonged, at the Scarlet Theatre in east London in early 1931, she met her future husband, the painter and poet Charles Branson, who had a walk-on part in the show. Within days they had agreed to marry and did so in June that year. Their only child, a daughter, Rosa, was born two years later. Later in life, Noreen recalled that at the time she met Clive, she was not much interested in politics. Clive, however, already held socialist views and spoke positively of the Soviet Union – the workers’ state – which surprised her. From the very outset he began discussing his perspectives with Noreen and lending her books. She needed little convincing. Yearning to be active politically, rather than just talking about things and being “disgusted with the Labour government” and the “defection” of Ramsey MacDonald, the couple joined the Independent Labour Party in Chelsea in autumn 1931. Now they were campaigning in the poorer parts of the borough, distributing a weekly street paper, Revolt, which they and a small group of associates produced, canvassing it in the rundown housing blocks in the less-affluent neighbourhoods. This work brought Noreen face to face with issues of unemployment, deprivation, and injustice that beleaguered the working class. Noreen was soon convinced that the Communist Party rather than the ILP was the organisation with which they both had more affinity. After a visit from a local CP activist, in July 1932 they became members, joining its Chelsea ‘local’ (sub-branch level group). Revolt became a CP paper! Before long Noreen and Clive decided to move to working-class Battersea, where they were soon playing an integral part in the life of the community. Noreen became secretary of the Party branch in 1936. Noreen’s communist work was not, however, to be confined to the local. General secretary, Harry Pollitt quickly spotted her potential for quite different work, dispatching her to Mumbai in 1934 with papers and cash for secret delivery to the Communist Party there. This was not her last such engagement. After attending the 7th World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1935, she undertook several undercover missions in Europe on its behalf. Her aristocratic background made her ideally suited to the task and she remained above suspicion. At home, she and Clive were immersed in anti-fascist work, both against Oswald Moseley and the blackshirts and in support of the Spanish Republic against the Red Lives | 19

combined forces of Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler. Noreen had joined the North Battersea Co-operative Women’s Guild and now represented it on the Aid Spain Committee, established in late 1936 by Battersea Trades Council. After organising recruitment for the Republican cause, Clive Branson himself went to Spain in early 1938. Captured by the fascists on 3 April, he was held prisoner for eight months. Noreen sent funds to buy cigarettes for all the detainees. It was what they most wanted, she said, and let them know they were not forgotten. With Clive away, Noreen began work as a professional researcher, first for Harry Pollitt, then with the Labour Research Department, where she specialised in welfare and social services. She joined the Clerical and Administrative Workers’ Union and was its delegate to St Pancras Trades Council, of which she later became secretary. As world war loomed, Noreen signed up as an air raid warden. Clive included her in his Bombed Women and Searchlights (1940), which now hangs in the Tate, one of the figures in the centre of the painting. Battersea was a key target for bombing raids and later V1 and V2 rockets aimed at the power station and strategic railway networks, and Noreen was bombed out. She moved to Hampstead. By this time, Clive had gone off to war. He died on the Burma front at Arakan in February 1944. Noreen published a collection of his letters, poems, and sketches as British Soldier in India. It was a fine tribute to him, graphically demonstrating the situation in the last period of British rule through the eyes of one wholeheartedly committed to the independence of the colonies. Noreen went on to become a prolific author. In 1958 she co-authored The British State, under the pseudonym Katherine Hood – with Roger Simon writing as James Harvey. 1960 saw the publication of her critique Room at the Bottom: National Insurance in the Welfare State, also as Katherine Hood. She contributed to Eric Hobsbawm’s History of British Society series writing Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (1971) with Margot Heinemann, and Britain in the Nineteen Twenties (1977). Her study of the rates rebellion in Poplar, Poplarism, 1919-1925: George Lansbury and the Councillors’ Revolt, came out in 1979. After the death of official Communist Party historian, James Klugmann in 1977, Noreen Branson offered to continue from 1926 where his unfinished work ended. The Party gladly accepted, and she narrated its history, in two very accessible, wellresearched and insightful volumes, published in 1985 and 1997, respectively. The extent to which they are still referenced by contemporary communist and labour movement authors testifies to the quality and longevity of her work. They are essential reading for anyone who wishes to learn about the Party in its economic, political, and social setting. No pen-portrait of Noreen Branson would be complete without reference to the Marx Memorial Library (MML). It was she and her husband who had the idea that a very rundown building in Clerkenwell Green, once the home of the Twentieth Century Press and one-time base for Lenin’s work in London, would make an ideal site. Noreen herself put up the money and negotiated the sale. A life-long involvement with the library followed including her vice-presidency. It was there that she undertook her last major public engagement in 1999, welcoming Bill Morris, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, at an event 20 | Red Lives

to recognise the union’s financial support of the library. The MML still holds the Branson Archive which includes invaluable records of her life’s work. A lasting memory of Noreen is how intelligent and well-informed she was, yet how patient in her dealings with others. Many too have recalled her musical talent, especially her wonderful singing voice and magnificent renditions of The Red Flag and Internationale. She died aged 93 on 25 October 2003, and is survived by her daughter, Rosa Branson, a painter, and fabric designer.

Felicia Browne 1904 – 1936 Felicia Mary Browne was born into a comfortably welloff family in Weston Green, a leafy suburb near Esher in Surrey. With her artistic flair showing at an early age, she was enrolled at St John’s Wood School of Art, aged only 16, studying there in 1920/21 and going on to the world renowned Slade School of Fine Art, in 1927/28. So far, so bourgeois, an outside observer may think. Yet Browne is not remembered especially for her art – though some sketches are archived in the Tate Britain, and an exhibition in 2016 opened them to the public, marking 80 years since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. She was a committed anti-fascist fighter, and the first British citizen to die in the war in Spain. Her body was never recovered from the railway line where she fell whilst tending to the wounds of an Italian comrade, as part of a militia unit whose aim was to blow up a munitions train near Tardienta, in Aragon. Browne had first-hand experience of the rise of fascism. In 1928 she decided to branch out and study metalwork and stonemasonry – in Berlin. Witnessing the growing popularity of Nazism, she got stuck into anti-fascist activities in the city, including street fights with Hitler supporters. She left Berlin in something of a hurry, even leaving behind her sculptures and tools. This was not an end for Browne but a beginning. Arriving back home, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1933. Naturally, her artistic work moved further to left. She quickly became an active member of the Artists’ International Association, which would later raise funds for the Republican forces in Spain. Browne contributed sketches to the Left Review and in 1934 won a prize for her design of the Trade Union Congress Tolpuddle medal. She continued her studies, both at Goldsmiths College and the Central School of Arts and Crafts. There was travel too, in Eastern Europe, visiting Russia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, sketching the towns, villages and the peasants living there. By early 1936, this accomplished artist was working as a scullion in a teashop. She spent some of her time trying to coax her workmates to join a trade union. A friend once asked her why she didn’t focus only on her art. She retorted: “If painting or sculpture Red Lives | 21

were more valid or urgent to me than the earthquake which is happening in the revolution, if these two were reconciled so that the demands of the one didn’t conflict with the demands of the other, I should paint or make sculpture.” Artist and activist Browne attracted the interest of MI5 and Special Branch who continued to monitor her until she left Britain in 1936. The new adventure was a driving holiday through France with her friend, photojournalist Dr Edith Bone. They travelled from Paris down to the south of France, then over the Pyrenees. Interestingly, in light of future events, this was a route that would be favoured by the many men and women who set out, illegally thanks to the Anglo-French non-intervention pact, to join the International Brigades and medical units. The two women headed for Barcelona, having said they wanted to attend the People’s Olympiad. This planned event was the response of the Popular Front government, and the Catalan Generalitat, to the forthcoming Olympic Games to be held in Berlin, under Hitler. It didn’t go ahead. Browne and her companion got to the city shortly before the military revolt against the democratically elected Spanish Republic. Violence engulfed Barcelona on 19 July 1936, and within a day more than 500 people were killed, with 3,000 wounded. The Spanish Civil War had begun, and only five weeks later, Browne would die for the Republican cause. Joining the fight was not easy and at first she was offered only administrative, translation, or propaganda work, but she persisted. She tried to enlist in the medical services, turned down because there were so many volunteers. The Daily Express correspondent Sydney Smith reported that she demanded to enlist, with the declaration, made to him on the steps of the barracks: “I am a member of the London Communists and I can fight as well as any man." On 3 August 1936, after several attempts, she was finally allowed to join the communist PSUC (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya), the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. With these credentials, she was finally permitted to join a unit of the Karl Marx militia. Still desperate to get to the front-line, she was put on patrol duty in Barcelona. In a letter to her friend Elizabeth Watson (which can be found in the Tate Britain archive) she describes her insistence on getting to the front-line, writing: “Apparently no chance of aviation school on account of my eyesight, Goddamn it!” The war escalated, and her unit was deployed to the town of Tardienta, Aragon, on the Zaragoza front, completing weapons training before going off to see action. On 25 August, when the unit had been in Tardienta for three days, she volunteered to join a small group of ten and was eventually accepted for this extremely dangerous mission. The unit began by driving, but to avoid detection, decided to walk the final 12 kilometres to a bridge over the railway line outside the village of Gurrea de Gallego. They were tasked with blowing it up to stop Francoist supplies to their army in the north. With the dynamite set in place, the comrades felt all was going to plan. But they were being closely observed by a troop of Francoists nearby. On their way back from the mission, the team came across a plane which had come down. They saw that the dead pilot was one of their own, and resolved to bury his body. As they were doing so, some 40 fascist soldiers attacked them. There was a firefight, and one of Browne’s comrades, an Italian, was shot. She went out 22 | Red Lives

to see to his wounds, coming under a hail of machine gun fire. Both she and the Italian fighter were killed. The bodies had to be left but comrades managed to grab some of their belongings, including Browne’s sketchbook, full of drawings of her fellow combatants. The book was passed to fellow fighter Tom Wintringham, who suggested to CPGB general secretary Harry Pollitt that they could still be used in the cause. Browne’s sketches made their way back to Britain, and in October that year, formed part of a memorial exhibition in London, created by Browne’s fellow art student Nan Youngman. The work was then sold by the Artists International Association, as an ‘Aid for Spain’ fundraiser. Youngman said: “Felicia was much more aware of the political situation than any of us.” In her book British Women and the Spanish Civil War (2002), historian Angela Jackson said: “[Felicia Browne’s] story has all the ingredients essential to heroic legend, the willing sacrifice of her life to save that of a comrade.” Felicia Browne, whose blossoming talent as a fine artist and sculptor was cut short by a fight she chose, lies forever in the soil of Spain. She was 32. Further information on Felicia Browne can be found at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/felicia-browne-22430

Desmond Buckle 1910 – 1964 One of the Communist Party’s staunchest Black members was Desmond Buckle who was born in the British colony of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1910. On his father’s death eight years later, his mother Ellen, honouring her husband’s wishes, sent him to Britain. He wanted him to continue his education at a boarding school in Cornwall. After graduation, he began medical studies at London’s University College but never completed the course. In London, he became a member of the Gold Coast Students Association and joined the League of Coloured Peoples. By the mid 1930s he became an active member of the Communist-led Negro Welfare Association, which was a far more militant movement than the League of Coloured Peoples. So his logical next step occurred in 1937 when he joined the Communist Party, later declaring that he became: “...intellectually convinced of the correctness of the Communist Party’s aims and policies”. During the Second World War, Desmond Buckle’s talents as a writer led to him writing for the Party as he was recognised as an expert on African affairs. So in 1943 he became a member of the Communist Party’s Colonial Committee and continued his connections with African students in Britain. When the Party held a conference for the Communist Parties of the British Empire soon after the end of the war, he gave detailed reports on East and West Africa and the West Indies. In his report, he paid tribute to the role of the World Federation of Trade Unions, which always supported unions in those colonial areas as well as throughout the world and gave solidarity to national liberation movements internationally. The Communist Party had an International Affairs Committee of which he became an important member and he was elected secretary of their Africa Committee, editing its African Newsletter, which was circulated in Britain and Africa. His writing skills saw him contributing to World News and Views, the Daily Worker and Labour Monthly, Red Lives | 23

with articles on the struggles in the Gold Coast, Kenya, Algeria and South Africa. As an active communist he was involved in the international peace and trade union movements and was elected to the General Council of the World Federation of Trade Unions. In that role, he represented South Africa at sessions of the World Congress of Partisans for Peace in 1949, denouncing the racist governments crimes against humanity. In fact, he also represented South Africa several times including at a World Peace Congress. When Paul Robeson visited Britain in 1949, Desmond Buckle worked with him during his tour of the country. He wrote articles for publications in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic and was a member of friendship societies with Hungary, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and China. However, his knowledge of African affairs was one of his greatest attributes, which included sharing information and letters with Communists and liberation fighters in Algeria, Sudan, North Africa and his homeland, now renamed Ghana. His international work led to meetings with Cheddi Jagan, the Marxist leader of British Guiana, and the radical Indian Krishna Menon. Buckle wrote Africa in World History for the Communist Party’s History Group in 1959 – an early Marxist historical account of the continent. With all his skills, Desmond Buckle needs to be remembered as a life long Black Communist who gave everything to the struggle. When he died of stomach cancer in London on 25 October 1964, R. Palme Dutt best summed him up in his obituary in Labour Monthly: “In the fight for national liberation against imperialism Desmond Buckle fulfilled a foremost and honoured role during the more than thirty years I have known him. He was one of the first African Marxists, a member of the Communist Party and a close friend and associate of all African and West Indian fighters”.

Elinor Burns 1887 – 1978 Elinor Burns of Loughborough was active in the labour movement from 1917 when she joined the Independent Labour Party. Before that she was a prolific writer of books, pamphlets and articles on the franchise, women’s education and equal pay. Married in 1913 to Emile Burns (18891972), with whom she had two children, Susannah and Marca, Elinor became a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, joining in 1923 from the ILP. Emile had been a founder member in 1920 and was for many decades a significant figure in the Party’s educational and ideological work. Elinor joined Edmonton Co-operative Society in 1919 and the London Cooperative Society (LCS) at its formation. Active in the Women’s Co-operative Guild, 24 | Red Lives

Elinor was a well-known important figure in the co-operative movement for the rest of her life. She became one of the CPGB’s most respected figures in the co-op movement – a member of the LCS management committee from 1941 and its nominee on the Food Control, Insurance Tribunal and similar bodies during the war. During this period, Elinor was a well-known and powerful voice at the national Cooperative Party Congress. In the 1920s, Elinor wrote a series of extensive briefing books for the Labour Research Department about British colonialism, including in Egypt, Ireland, China, West Africa, and Malaya. During this period, she was also connected with the League Against Imperialism. A member of the CPGB’s London District Committee from 1936, she served as Treasurer of the Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School from 1936-38, when she was particularly anxious to raise funds to spread classes in Marxism around the country. Elinor was elected to the Executive Committee (national leadership) of the Party at its 16th congress in 1943. She and others established the first formal Communist Party National Women’s Advisory Council in 1944 “to study all problems affecting women and to develop co-operation with other women’s organisations”. Elinor was a regular feature writer for the Daily Worker on co-operation issues during the war. Post war, for nine years, she was a member of the management committee of the Peoples’ Press Publishing Society, publisher of the Daily Worker, and for a long period its vice-chair. She went back to her roots as a trained economic historian in 1947, making one of the first post-war Marxist analyses of wage drift in the Labour Monthly of March 1947. She was also a key figure in the CPGB’s National Cultural Committee. The Burns family was under constant MI5 surveillance throughout their lives, little distinction between interest in Elinor or Emile being shown in its reports (MI5 files KV2/1763). The family home was suspected as being used for secret Party work. Their joint visits abroad, including to Prague, Berlin, Warsaw and Copenhagen excited much attention from MI5, although its searches of their bags never revealed anything of interest. Elinor also made her own journeys to the German Democratic Republic to advise on setting up a co-operative movement there. Elinor’s grasp of the big issues facing co-operation was revealed in Marxism Today in August 1958 in her piece on challenges faced by the movement. The end of rationing had seen a rapid growth in consumption in the late 1950s and 1960s, and self-service shops and supermarkets began to spread throughout the country. Both Elinor and Emil had very serious periods of ill-health in the early 1950s, with long absences from Party work. Photographs from this period are evidence of the effect this had. Elinor was approaching 70 as the 1956 Party congress loomed and now simply recorded her occupation as “housewife”. Elinor lived rather more quietly in her elder years, though remaining active in her Party branch. It was not quite as common when she died at 91 to live to such age as it is today. She outlived Emile by six years; both had given great service to their Party and to the wider labour movement. Red Lives | 25

Alan Bush 1900 – 1995 One of the many hypocrisies of the fluffy metropolitan liberalism which is so dominant in capitalist culture is the belief that on the one hand artists must be granted exceptional licence to enable ‘artistic freedom’ to flourish; and on the other hand, that any artist that tries to integrate socialist political awareness into their art, no matter how skilful, must be censored, ostracised, ignored and dismissed. Art is liberating, you see, but that’s exactly why the workers mustn’t be let near it. There is no better example of this dynamic than in the life and work of the composer Alan Bush. Born in 1900, Bush was one of the many 20th century artists, musicians and poets who were inspired by the Russian revolution, and disgusted by the exploitation and oppression of Western capitalist states, which were so quick to go to war but which were reluctant or unable to feed, clothe and provide work for their populations. After many years as a socialist in the Labour Party after the First World War, he joined the Communist Party in 1935 and remained an active, committed communist until his death in 1995. His career included over 50 years as a professor of music in London, successfully integrating Marxist principles into musical and choral composition. He developed and articulated theories about art and music, drawing on various political and cultural thinkers in the Marxist and progressive socialist traditions – William Morris, H G Wells, Lenin, Bertolt Brecht, and other thinkers and artists from the Soviet Union. But they weren’t just theories. Bush was also a cultural activist, and put his creativity, commitment and communist beliefs into expressive, accessible music throughout his life, from his songs for the Hunger Marches of the 1930s (which he also joined), to radical operas like Wat Tyler (1950), to more internationalist works such as the Turkish Workers’ Marching Song (1985) and Mandela Speaking (1985). Throughout his life Bush was also involved with a huge variety of humanitarian and progressive causes. Perhaps the most obvious and long-lasting example of his practical integration of communist politics and music is the Workers’ Music Association. Shortly after joining the Communist Party, Bush became a founder member, the first Chairman and then a lifelong President of the WMA. He helped shape and guide it into a highly successful organisation for developing and promoting workers’ choral music and song, and for the general musical education of the working class. During the war, Bush’s music was temporarily excluded from broadcasting by the BBC, until pressure from other composers forced the BBC to end its ban. But since then, and to this day, the musical – particularly the operatic – establishment has exercised a less public, more insidious form of censorship, by continuing to neglect, ignore and dismiss his music, obviously for the kind of political reasons that English cultural elites pretend to believe should be kept out of art and culture. 26 | Red Lives

So his large body of work has been widely performed in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and many other countries across the world – except for England. In 1950 he wrote a full-length opera recounting the story of Wat Tyler, who led the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It did not receive its full British premiere until 1974, and has not been staged since. His other three operas – Men of Blackmoor, about the resistance of nineteenth century Northumbrian miners to the exploitation of coal-owners; Sugar Reapers, about the Guyanese anti-colonial independence struggle; and Joe Hill: The Man Who Never Died, about the American labour activist and songwriter – have never been staged in England, neither before his death in 1995 nor since then. It would seem that the selfcongratulatory national pride of the English cultural establishment does not extend to staging the operas of an outstanding English composer, if that person is a communist and committed to opening up cultural life to working-class communities. Yet such hypocritical narrow-mindedness itself shows just how threateningly relevant Bush’s integrated approach to culture and politics really is. Especially in his choral work, he focused and fused his artistic creativity and political awareness on the encouragement of a non-violent mass expression of legitimate grievances against capitalist society, in an entertaining as well as enlightening way. As such, he was the best exponent in twentieth century England of the core principles of cultural democracy, applying them to music in theoretical and practical ways. This commitment has enduring relevance for all artists and musicians, especially in these times of growing gaps between rich and poor and the climate emergency and coronavirus crises, which are all exposing the fundamental shortcomings, injustices and contradictions of capitalism. His deep political sincerity, artistic integrity and personal conviction that “as a musician and as a man, Marxism is a guide to action” remains a shining example to musicians and artists of all kinds. As does his struggle as a committed democrat and communist, in his own words: “to create a condition of social organisation in which science and art will be the possession of all”.

The Oxford Carritts This is the story of five brothers. During the 1930s, Winifred Carritt and her five sons all joined the Communist Party. Her husband, Edgar Carritt, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at University College, Oxford, was sympathetic but was never a member, and neither were his two daughters. In those turbulent times such radical political commitment was not unique amongst the Oxford (and Cambridge) university intelligentsia. But it was remarkable within a single family. After the war, Winifred and her three remaining sons continued to be active in the movement through the 40s and 50s and, although they never lost their commitment to the cause of socialism, their activity declined as the twentieth century rolled on. This is the story the five brothers. The Carritt family home at Boars Hill Oxford became a Mecca for left wing intellectual debate in the years of the mid-thirties, with poets Wystan Auden and Stephen Spender, Labour leader Dick Crossman, and the Carritt brothers, joining with Red Lives | 27

local trade union activists such as Abe Lazarus amongst the regular visitors. The Carritts’ near neighbours on Boars Hill were the Thompsons. EP Thompson (1924 1993), was later to become noted as a leading communist historian and peace campaigner. His older brother Frank, also a member of the CP, was parachuted into fascist-occupied Bulgaria in 1944 where he supported the resistance as a British SOE liaison officer. However, when it became apparent that Soviet forces were advancing towards Bulgaria, it is alleged that the SOE in London effectively abandoned Frank. Despite a brave defence he was killed by Bulgarian fascists in June 1944 shortly before the liberation of the country by the Red Army. The Thompson boys and the Carritts spent much time together and Frank’s girlfriend, the novelist Iris Murdoch, visited too. Throughout this turbulent period, and particularly during the nineteen twenties and thirties, fascism was gaining an ever greater foothold in Europe. Not only were the Jews and gypsies in Germany being persecuted, but Communists and Communist sympathisers too were in fear of their lives. One such family, who had long been a target of persecution, was Heinrik Mottek, his wife Wilhelmina, and his daughter from an earlier relationship, Liesel. Heinrik was the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, the main liberal newspaper in Weimar Germany. The family fled to the UK sometime around 1930. Heinz was clearly suffering from a mental breakdown and Edgar Carritt provided financial support to the family and medical help for Heinz. Later Heinz and Wilhelmina moved to Suffolk, but Liesel stayed in Oxford, sometimes at the Carritt’s Boars Hill home.

Michael Carritt 1906 – 1990 Michael went to school at Sedburgh in Cumbria and then to Queens College, Oxford where he read Classics. As the eldest son he was the first to leave Oxford and, on gaining his degree, secured a post in the Indian Civil Service, the I.C.S., in 1930 at the age of twenty five. During his time in India, his progressive leanings gradually hardened into active subversion on behalf of the Indian Communist Party (CPI). Michael’s ability to intercept information on behalf of the CPI was facilitated by his promotion as a Special Officer in the Political Department of Government in Calcutta, the function of which was to combat political subversion and terrorist conspiracies. But Michael did not rush into the clandestine role that he was eventually to play. Initially, he used the “intelligence” he received to enable him to get advanced information of court cases of a political nature where, by acting through an intermediary, he was able to exert some influence over the case. During 1934 Michael came to realise that his commitment to the Indian people needed to be more than simply bending the rules of courtroom procedure. When he went home on leave to England later that year, he made contact with the League Against Imperialism, who gave him contacts and instructions for when he returned to India. Further good fortune came Michael’s way when he was appointed Under Secretary to the Chief Secretary in the Political and Appointments Department, which included responsibility for coding and decoding confidential messages from London and Delhi, 28 | Red Lives

and for monitoring political subversion and the movements of political suspects. Michael was thus in an ideal position to forewarn political activists if their cover was about to be blown or in any other way they were about to be compromised. His contacts at the CPI were mainly P C Joshi, general secretary of the party, who for a while used Michael’s flat in Calcutta as a safe house where he masqueraded as Michael’s personal bodyguard. Later Michael spoke with A.K.Ghosh who eventually succeeded Joshi to the Secretariat. As well as advising the Indian underground of impending police raids, Michael was able to import, through diplomatic channels, vast quantities of banned nationalist literature. But by 1937 Michael was beginning to worry that sooner or later his luck would run out and his cover would be blown. Michael resigned in 1938 feeling that he could do little more for the nationalist cause; that he was only really acting as a courier and was excluded, quite naturally, from the mainstream of political decision making in the Indian Communist Party. At the same time, political mobilisation in Europe was at fever pitch and the Spanish Civil War was already claiming the lives of many volunteers including Michael’s own brother Anthony. At home, Michael continued as an active member of the Communist Party in Bradford, assisting Ben Bradley on developing Party policy on India, authoring an India League pamphlet in 1940 and a Communist Party pamphlet on the subject in 1941. During the war, he held the responsibility for developing a substantial group of Indian Communist students in Britain and he continued to write about India until independence. For much of the 1950s, Michael taught philosophy for the Workers Education Association in Brighton. Towards the end of that decade he became University Staff Tutor in Philosophy at Oxford. He ended his career as a lecturer in the Centre for Continuing Education at Sussex University. Michael died at the age of 84 in 1990 in Merton, near Bicester in Oxfordshire. Gabriel Carritt went to school at Sedburgh in Cumbria then to Christchurch, Oxford where he read English. After Oxford, he went to Columbia University in the US where he was involved in active support for striking Kentucky miners and was badly beaten by company police there. He toured Alabama and Georgia as part of a recruitment drive for black students in the National Student League, and publicised the case of the young black Americans, “The Scottsboro Boys” who had been sentenced to death on rape charges. It was his experiences in America that caused Gabriel to join the Communist Party. From the US he moved to Silesia where he taught in a school largely taken over by the Hitler Youth and spent much of his time and energy trying to convince them of the wrongness of their cause. In 1937 he became Secretary for the League of Nations Youth. He once broke into a secret trial in Essen of the Bundische Jugend (Youth Movement) to protest the two years that the accused had been held without being informed of the charges against them. When the Spanish civil war began, he and John Gollan, then general secretary of the Young Communist League, walked through the Pyrenees to find out what was needed in aid. The result was the British Youth Foodship Committee, which collected food and Red Lives | 29

clothing for the Republic. In all the Young Communist League filled 29 ships with aid. Back in England he stood as a communist and anti-appeasement candidate in the Westminster Abbey constituency by-election and polled 32.6% of the votes cast. In the Second World War, he served with the Royal Artillery where he was withdrawn from a radar course as “unsuitable” and, even though he had completed an officers’ training course, was told his Party membership precluded him from receiving a commission. When the Daily Worker was denied permission to have a correspondent at the Second Front, Bill organised a protest letter that resulted in the signatories being questioned by intelligence officers. He fought in Burma with the Welsh Fusiliers. However, he was airlifted home to stand as Communist candidate for Westminster Abbey in the 1945 election polling 17.6% of the vote. Later, he and his second wife Dr. Joan McMichael were elected to Westminster Council. In 1946 he was one of five communists tried and convicted at the Old Bailey for leading a campaign which put homeless people into empty luxury flats. In danger of being imprisoned, a major defence campaign ensued and they were merely bound over to keep the peace for two years. The government rapidly announced a new programme to build social housing. Until the 1960s, Bill worked for the Communist Party full-time, including a difficult spell as Daily Worker foreign editor. In his last decade of work, he was a liberal studies lecturer at the London College of Printing. He died aged 90 on May 7th 1999.

Noel Carritt 1911 – 1992 and his first wife Liesel Carritt Noel went to school at Sedburgh in Cumbria and then to Oriel College, Oxford where he read Zoology. At Oxford, he was a founder member of the October Club, the first university communist society. In 1933, soon after graduating, Noel married Liesel Mottek. Liesel was the daughter of Heinrik Mottek, a senior editor at the left leaning Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper in Weimar Germany, who had been granted asylum in the UK under a system of financial guarantees provided by Noel’s father, Professor Edgar Carritt. The marriage was in part arranged in order for Liesel to obtain British citizenship. Without marriage to a British national she would, sooner or later, have been interned or returned to Germany where, as a member of the German Communist Party, she would have faced incarceration and death. Marriage of convenience or not, there was certainly affection in Noel and Liesel’s relationship initially. They visited the Soviet Union in 1934 with a party of students on the Russian motor vessel Smolny bound for Leningrad. On their return, Noel was looking to begin his career in teaching and he secured a post at a school in Sheffield. In September 1947 she married Norman Hidden, a writer and teacher. But Liesel was restless and during the next seven years she took herself off to Germany on several occasions returning to Norman Hidden as and when she felt like it. Eventually, she left Norman for good and returned to Leipzig in the German Democratic Republic where she taught English and stayed until her death in the 1970s. Noel Carritt travelled to Spain in October 1936. He went first to Albecete where new 30 | Red Lives

volunteers received basic training. Militarily, there was confusion and disorder as few preparations had been made for their arrival, but slowly, the brigade developed into a competent fighting force under the leadership of Wilf McCartney, a veteran fighter of the First World War. In February 1937, Noel’s battalion went into action at Jarama, an area of countryside near to the strategic supply routes between Madrid and Valencia. Jarama in February was cold and wet and miserable. The Brigade was up against far stronger and better armed fascist forces and Brigade casualties were extremely high. By the end of the campaign, of the 500 International Brigaders at the start of the engagement, just 160 were left standing, a terrible death and casualty rate. Noel had been at Jarama for about eleven days when he was wounded in the hand by a bullet from the fascist guns. After treatment at a field hospital, he was sent back to Valencia for further treatment. Whilst convalescing, Noel heard that the Brigade needed ambulance drivers, and he asked to return to the front in that capacity. This was no sinecure as ambulance drivers and stretcher bearers were constantly in the front lines, and often unable to take effective cover when recovering dead or injured soldiers. They were at the mercy of strafing air attack and ground fire and there was no respect for medical evacuation. On 6th July 1937 the Brunete campaign began. Brunete is a small town about twenty miles west from Madrid. The Republican offensive was vital to the International Brigade. During a sustained aerial attack by fascist planes, Noel’s ambulance was damaged although he and the casualties inside were unscathed. Eventually they were rescued and taken to the hospital at El Escorial. Whilst there he heard that his brother Anthony was missing. Noel searched all the hospitals and field stations in vain to find word or sight of his brother. Finally, he had to accept that Anthony was dead. After the Brunete campaign, Noel was transferred to the base hospital at Huete, where Peter Harrison, his close friend from Boars Hill was the chief administrative officer. Whilst at Huete, Noel was appointed to the role of Political Commissar, in addition to his routine driving duties and responsibility for general hospital administration. He briefly tried his hand as an assistant anaesthetist under Brigade surgeon, Dr Jolly, on the strength of his degree in Zoology but he soon decided that he was not cut out for medical work. Since his brother’s death, the strain on his parents was considerable the longer Noel remained in Spain, and he applied for leave and returned to England at the end of 1937. On his return to the UK he worked for the TUC in London which is where he met Florence May Simkins, a shop steward with the Tailor and Garment Workers Union. In 1941 Noel and Liesel were divorced, clearing the way for Noel and Florence to marry. Noel was refused entry to the Royal Navy at the start of WW2, probably on account of his MI5 record and his service in the International Brigades. Instead he worked for Fairey Aviation on engineering war work. After the war he returned to teaching becoming Head of Biology at Dr Challenor’s Grammar School at Amersham, Bucks. He retired in the 1970s and died at Checkendon, Reading, Berks in 1992 aged 81. Red Lives | 31

Anthony Carritt 1914 – 1937 Anthony went to Bradfield School in Berkshire and then began a farming career before his life was cut short in Spain in 1937. Anthony was the least political of the five brothers and it is not known if he ever joined the Communist Party. Nevertheless, in the Spring of 1937 he decided to make the commitment to volunteer with the International Brigade as an ambulance driver. Shortly after his arrival in Spain he met up with his brother Noel at the hospital at El Escorial. The attack began on 6 July 1937. A great many men and officers were lost to the Battalion in the early days of the campaign and during the fight for “Mosquito Ridge”, a key section of high ground between Brunete and the outskirts of Madrid, Anthony was killed during a particularly intense bombing raid by Nationalist fighter aircraft. Despite exhaustive efforts by his brother Noel to find how and where he had been killed, his body and the remains of his ambulance were never identified.

Brian Carritt 1921 – 1942 Brian Carritt, the youngest of the family, was also critically influenced by the prevailing mood amongst his family and the political activists who visited the family home at Boars Hill. Whilst at Eton, he helped to organise the hunger-marchers en-route from the north east to London. His experiences on the marches encouraged him to become an ardent communist. His older friend at Eton, Lewis Clive, was killed during the Spanish conflict.

Trevor Carter 1930 – 2008 Trevor Carter was one of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s most important Black members from the mid 1950s until its dissolution. He was born in the British colony of Trinidad on 9 October 1930. His father was a carpenter and a strong trade unionist. At school, he related in an interview that some of his teachers were Marxists. This, combined with his father’s union activities, made a great impression on him. After visiting different parts of the USA as a seaman, he decided to migrate to Britain. He arrived in London in 1954 and within days joined the YCL and then the Communist Party. He stayed with Jamaican communist Billy Strachan who was a great influence on him. Through him, Trevor Carter met such outstanding people as Palme Dutt, Cheddi Jagan and Kay Beauchamp. Strachan was also leader of Caribbean Labour Congress in London, of which he became a member. Trevor said that joining the Communist Party was a similar experience for him as the feeling of elation Paul Robeson described when he first went to the Soviet Union. 32 | Red Lives

In 1956, he was summoned to do his national service but, not wanting to fight in Britain’s colonial wars, he approached Idris Cox explaining this. Cox explained the Party’s policy was to join up, so unhappy with this response, he spoke to his cousin, Claudia Jones who suggested he talk to Palme Dutt. The latter, after listening to him, ensured that Trevor Carter was sent abroad to attend events in the Soviet Union and the Socialist countries. After hearing that his wife, the outstanding actress Corrine Skinner Carter, had suffered burns on a film set, he returned to be with her. Together, the Carters, with Claudia Jones and other Caribbean Londoners, became involved in the cultural life of the community, and from this sprang the Notting Hill Carnival. Trevor wrote that the Communist Party in the 1950s was the natural home for those willing to fight for their rights, as there was racism in the Labour Party. He said that YCL and Party meetings were like a magnet for him in those days and made him aware of Africans, not just as stereotypes, but understanding Mau Mau in Kenya, was a liberation struggle. His involvement in colonial work led to Cheddi Jagan, the first Premier of British Guiana, asking him to help in educational work there. He worked with Peoples Progressive Party members, but as the political situation worsened with police repression and the opposition Peoples National Congress violently attempting to destabilise the country, Carter had to return home. He studied part-time for several years to qualify as a teacher, and after graduation began work at a Secondary School in Hackney. With others he formed the Caribbean Teachers Association. This led to him becoming involved in the 1982 Rampton Report, which investigated how the education system was failing Black children. Eventually, he rose up the ranks of the Inner London Education Authority to become Head of Equal Opportunities Still an active Communist, in 1986 he wrote Shattering Illusions – West Indians in British Politics. He examined his own and other Caribbean activists’ experiences in politics in the Communist Party, the Labour Party and in the unions. Many Black militants feeling sidelined in those organisations left or drifted away, becoming more involved working with Black youth and fighting police brutality. In the book he called for Black and white unity in the common struggle. Trevor Carter remained a member of the Communist Party until the end. When interviewed in 1999, he was obviously very proud of his years in the Party and recognised how it shaped his political development. He died in 2008 and his contribution to the Communist Party at home and abroad deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated.

Alex Clark 1922 – 2008 Born on 2 January 1922, Clark was the oldest child in a family of seven boys and three girls. He attended school at Swinhill, Shawsburn and Larkhall Academy. His father, also Alex, was a working miner, and Clarke’s mother, Annie, were both excellent singers, and many nights were spent in the home with all the family involved in a sing-song. Red Lives | 33

Clark started work first as a grain miller in 1936, then moved into mining with his father when he was about 17. In 1939, tragedy struck when John, Clark’s younger brother, was killed in an accident at Swinhill pit. When he went to collect John’s wages he discovered his brother had just been paid for half the shift that he was on when he was killed. He moved to work in Douglas Colliery, known locally as Ponfeigh, but before leaving Larkhall, Lanarkshire, had become a member of the Communist Party in 1942, and on moving to Rigside he joined many other communists in one of the biggest branches of the Party in Scotland. Alex had fine tenor voice, and during the war years spent much of his spare time singing at concerts for the forces. During this period, he met and married Jessie McCulloch in 1946. Their Rigside home became famous as a centre of political activity, and also the scene for many excellent parties. Later the rest of the family moved to the area, where at one time there were five of the brothers in the same pit. He was Branch Secretary of the 100-strong Rigside Communist Party branch from 1948. As also the NUM branch secretary, he organised outings to the theatre and even brought drama to his village, at one time with the Theatre Workshop, an interest of his that would assume significance later in his career. He was also active on the board of the local Co-operative Society. Clark became the full time Area Secretary of Stirling and Clackmannanshire CP in 1953. Then Clarke was appointed the Scottish Organiser of the Party in October 1955, effectively the number two in Scotland. He became the Glasgow Area Secretary from 1957-62 and was then the Assistant Scottish Secretary and Treasurer. He was election agent for Hugh MacDiarmid when the poet stood in Perth and Kinross against Sir Alec Douglas-Home in 1964. A keen admirer of MacDiarmid’s work, he would later speak movingly at the poet’s funeral. In the mid 1960s Clark was for a time seriously ill, as a result of which he had a lung removed and, while this curtailed his singing somewhat, it did not stop him working. From January 1969, he was the full-time Scottish and Northern Ireland secretary of the acting union, Equity. There he developed contacts with trades councils, local and regional councils, churches and businesses, as well as other trades unions, to encourage young poets and dramatists and for their work to be seen and heard in the movement. His efforts to widen trade union interest in this field eventually led to the STUC setting up a post for arts officer. It was the most natural thing in the world for them to ask him to take up the post. In this job, he continued to work with all sorts of bodies to encourage cultural development. His favourite quote at that time was from William Morris, who said: “I don't want art for a few any more than I want education for a few or freedom for a few.” 34 | Red Lives

Clark worked with many people in the trade union movement to set up Glasgow’s International Festival of the Arts, which became Mayfest. Clark was a founder member and later became honorary president. He was also always a willing and dedicated worker for the Daily Worker, later the Morning Star. At a very difficult time for the paper in the 1980s, he took the chair at PPPS meetings and became a member of its management committee. Clarke was the recipient of the Glasgow Lord Provost’s award for public service in 1987, but refused the OBE in 1995. He was further recognised when he won an award of £10,000 from the Goodman Awards for the Arts. He gave £8,000 to the Glasgow Film Theatre and £2,000 to the Arran Theatre Trust. Scots comrade Jim Whyte recalls: “I first met Alex in 1954 at a YCL weekend school held in the Party premises in Falkirk. He and Jessie lived at the premises and provided accommodation for me and Sandy Constable overnight. I was at once captivated by him, he oozed charm. Alex was one of the most warm and friendly people you could hope to meet, and he had a singing voice that tore at the heart strings. A rendering of Burns’ songs by Alex left one transfixed. All the Clarks could sing but Alex was in a class of his own. Informed opinion has it that he turned down the opportunity of a professional singing career. Alex’s interests in the Arts went well beyond his singing talents. He was knowledgeable in the works of great painters and a night at the Proms was his ultimate pleasure. It was therefore fitting that when he moved on from full time Party work that he went on to work for Equity where he was quick to make his mark with Mayfest, his answer to that upstart Edinburgh Festival.” His list of directorships included Mayfest, the Jazz Festival, as well as the aforementioned Glasgow Film Theatre and Arran Theatre Trust. He was also a trustee of the James Milne Memorial and the Hugh MacDiarmid Memorial Trust. Clark never really retired, and when he moved to Arran he became one of CalMacs best customers, travelling to meetings of the Arts Council, the STUC, and visiting the theatre whenever he could. He died on 6 June 2008, aged died aged 86.

Andrew Clark 1931 – 2013 Andrew was born into a mining family in Stonehouse in Lanarkshire. He followed his elder brother Alex to become a miner in Pontfeigh Pit at the age of eighteen. Within four years he was pit delegate and had increased the readership of the Daily Worker to over 50 a day. In 1952 he succeeded Mick McGahey as chairman of the Scottish Miners Youth Committee and headed the giant 1953 Miners Gala march through Edinburgh alongside Aneurin Bevan and Abe Moffat. In 1962, when the Pontfeigh pit closed, he moved down to the Yorkshire coalfield where his youth, energy and clear-headed politics gave support to the emerging strength of the left. He brought the same clarity to his work in building the circulation of the Morning Star during the industrial struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s when he returned in 1967 to become Scottish Representative of the Morning Star. Every day he ensured Red Lives | 35

bundles of 25 or 50 papers reached dozens of yards, factories and depots across central Scotland and every pit in the Scottish coalfield. These papers were the lifeblood of solidarity, a key tool in mobilising workers for the one-day strikes against the Industrial Relations Act and to defend the Upper Clyde shipbuilders and the miners in the strikes of 1972 and 1974. Organisationally, Andrew Clark was responsible for winning support from the STUC for the establishment of the Scottish Morning Star Campaign Committee in 1977, and for many years chaired by the STUC’s Depute General Secretary. In the great miners’ strike of 1984-5 Mick McGahey’s son Michael, later victimised for his part in the strike, remembers Andrew breaking through police blockades and appearing on the picket lines at 5am with copies of the one paper that gave the truth about the dispute. At the time McGahey’s pit, Bilston Glen, had a daily readership of 100. McGahey cherished Andrew’s encouragement and support for younger miners such as himself. Like his elder brother Alex, Andrew was a lifelong communist, but became concerned from the late 1970s at attacks by the Communist Party’s journal, Marxism Today, on the trade union movements leading eventually to support for the politics of New Labour and Tony Blair. In 1985 he was expelled from the CPGB for speaking in support of the editorial line of the Morning Star at the 1985 PPPS AGM. He then joined the thousands of other expelled and excluded communists in the Communist Campaign Group and became the chair of its Scottish Committee. On the re-establishment of the Communist Party in 1988 he became chair of the new Scottish Committee and was a member of the British executive for ten years. He was at the centre of campaigning against Tory privatisation and Poll Tax. He was convinced that only a Scottish Parliament loyal to the trade union and labour movement could act for the working people against big business. Locally in his community at Stonehouse, Andrew was always looked to for leadership and advice and was chair of the Community Council. He was sustained in all of this by his wife Minnie and children Mary, John and Ann. At his funeral a tribute was read on behalf of Grahame Smith, the General Secretary of the STUC: “During his active political life he supported and reported on all Scotland’s landmark working-class moments – perhaps most importantly during the 1984-5 miners’ strike when the Morning Star was a clarion voice amid a sea of media negativity. Andrew also contributed enormously to democracy in Scotland and will be remembered for his contribution to our movement’s campaign to create a Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.”

Syd Clay 1927 – 2014 Syd Clay was born on 6 August 1927 in Thornaby-on-Tees. Leaving school in 1941, he was a telegram boy for a week, then worked for 22 years on the railways – from around 1948, as a shunter at Middlesbrough docks. He joined the NUR in 1942, and after several years became assistant branch secretary, then branch secretary and a member of the Darlington district council. 36 | Red Lives

After one branch meeting in 1952, Syd was recruited to the Communist Party. He then helped establish the Party’s Teesside Rails group of about 20 comrades, which turned both the NUR branch and the Darlington district council into “debating societies of a political nature”. The group developed a ‘railwaymen’s charter’, to address industrial changes, but also got the branch to take up other issues, such as West German rearmament, which in turn were injected into Middlesbrough Trades Council, to which Syd was for many years a delegate. In the Middlesbrough Party branch, Syd took on most roles, including branch secretary more than once. He served on the Teesside District Committee and Secretariat, and some time around 1960 moved into the second-floor flat in the District premises in Grange Road, Middlesbrough, turning the large attic into an unofficial club for local kids. Through the Party, Syd was also involved in the British-Soviet Friendship Society, which aimed to foster trade and cultural links with the USSR. The Middlesbrough branch generated correspondence on East-West trade in the local paper, the Evening Gazette, which developed into big political arguments on the letters page. Syd’s experiences during the war, when he had delivered ‘missing in action’ telegrams, and witnessed the impact of German bombing raids on Middlesbrough, made him a lifelong peace campaigner. At first, his activity was expressed through Party events such as slogan painting and small demonstrations, but with the rise of CND he took part in the last big Aldermaston-London march, in 1963. Syd attended the World Festivals of Youth and Students in Bucharest (1953), Warsaw (1955) and Moscow (1957), where he experienced “a new culture” first-hand, and ordinary people’s desire for peace and friendship with other nations. In Moscow, representing the NUR, he spoke at a big meeting of railway workers, and was deluged with embraces and presents for saying that British railwaymen would constantly fight for peace in Malaya, where Britain was waging a brutal colonial war. In the early 1960s, when Party district secretary George Short retired, Syd stepped in on a voluntary basis, but found the role too much along with his other activities. Eventually the district was merged with the North East Coast. In 1963, in the wake of this, and because of insecurity at the docks, Syd left the railways, and moved to London, working mainly as a driver. While there, he was in the Stanmore and Ealing Party branches, but was disappointed that they lacked industrial workers. Returning in 1968 to Teesside, Syd had a variety of jobs, mostly in factories, where he continued trade union activities, now in the TGWU. When his last employer, Hardy Spicer, closed in 1981 – despite his proposal for a survival plan – Syd took on the voluntary role (‘expenses only’) of TUC Northern Regional Organiser for Centres of the Unemployed, helping develop their advice, education and Red Lives | 37

campaigning work and supporting such initiatives as the 1985 ‘Giz a Home’ march from Whitley Bay to Blackpool. The funding for his role was withdrawn in 1990 and Syd finally stepped down in 1992. In 1972, Syd had got involved with the Teesside Pensioners Association, recognising the need to fight for the rights of the elderly before reaching retirement age. He was general secretary from about 1978 to 1992, during which time he played a major part in organising the many campaigns, rallies and mass lobbies that helped to bring pensioners’ concerns to public notice. Syd was awarded the Harry Cowans Certificate for meritorious service by the TUC in 1992, and the TGWU silver medal for services to the union in 1993. He joined the CPB on re-establishment in 1988, but declined nomination to the District Committee. He became Teesside branch chair, but illness during the last 10 years of his life limited the contribution he could make. Syd never married but was a well loved uncle, not only to his nephew and nieces, but many other children. He died on 13 January 2014, wanting no funeral. He never thought of himself as important and would probably have been surprised to learn that anyone would be interested in his activities. “Joining the Party … [was] a decision that I took in life that I never regretted because the Communist Party gave me something that no other party or organisation was capable of doing, and that was the ability to interpret society and the events of the day, but not only interpret them, but it showed the way forward so that we could ultimately change society. In that respect I am in debt to the Communist Party and I'm thankful for the privilege that was given to me to join the CP in those days.” “My philosophy has always been, though, to remember that whatever quality of life you enjoy today, it wasn’t given on a platter. Every advance we have made has been fought for by working people and their representatives. There are those who will take it away from you if they are given a chance.”

Dora Cox 1904 – 2000 Dora Roberts was born in London on July 24, 1904. Young Dora left school at 15 and trained for secretarial work. After attending a Socialist Sunday School, she joined the CPGB and the Young Communist League as a founder member in 1920 and 1921, respectively, volunteering for typing work with the Party. After helping to organise two youth delegations to the Soviet Union and celebrating the tenth anniversary of the October 1917 Socialist Revolution there, Dora spent several years attending a trade union college in Moscow, also assisting the Communist International with secretarial duties. On her return to London, where she helped the Party with translation work, she met and married Idris Cox in March 1931. He was by this time a member of the CP's central committee and political bureau, with particular organising and propaganda responsibilities in the National Minority Movement. Dora Cox edited the women’s page of the NMM’s paper, The Worker, and was already being described by the security Service (MI5) as ‘one of the more important members’ of the CPGB and ‘worth a warrant’. This attention to her may well be explained by MI5's 38 | Red Lives

belief that Dora was: “employed in shadowing Arcos employees who are engaged on work of a secret nature”. Arcos was the Anglo-Russian Cooperative Society in London raided by police in 1927 on the pretext of searching for stolen War Office documents that were never found. In 1932 she began work in a woollen mill in Burnley where she was reported as: “taking a keen interest in all that affected her fellow workers and playing a leading part in recruiting them into the United Clothing Workers' Union”. After a brief spell back in London, Dora and Idris moved to his native south Wales in mid-1933, first to Pontyclun and then to Cardiff. They also spent time in Tonypandy, where Dora worked closely with National Unemployed Workers Movement organiser, county councillor and novelist Lewis Jones before leading a 15-strong Welsh women's contingent on the 1934 Hunger March to London. When Idris was appointed editor of the Daily Worker in 1935, she stayed behind in Cardiff with their first child John, before joining him in Highbury and then a ground-floor flat in Balham. Within a year, the family was back in Cardiff where Idris had been assigned to the post of organising secretary for the South Wales district of the CPGB. The campaign against the Means Test and unemployment benefit levels continued, with Dora as one of the speakers at a rally organised by the Abertillery Trades and Labour Council. In the great ‘Aid for Spain’ campaign to support the Spanish Republic and the International Brigades against General Franco's fascist-backed rebellion, Dora took John in his pram to collect on the streets of the city. She also assumed the terrible responsibility of visiting the families of International Brigade volunteers to inform them that their husband, son or brother had been killed in Spain. After a brief period in London again where Dora helped out in the Party’s King Street headquarters, the Cox family were back in Cardiff after the outbreak of World War Two. Dora volunteered at the Party’s Cardiff office and bookshop and campaigned locally for the provision of Haldane shelters and other air-raid protection measures. Seven months’ pregnant with daughter Judith, she addressed a women's emergency conference in London in October 1940, warning Londoners that there was no adequate protection for evacuees sent to south Wales. This was probably the busiest period in Dora's political life, even though she had two young children and Idris was frequently at meetings in London and many other places besides. She helped organise political education classes, a People’s Convention event and a big rally featuring the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury after Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. There followed public meetings with Pollitt, Palme Dutt and Willie Gallacher and leafleting to establish a group of CP members and supporters – to which Dora would be attached _ at the local Royal Ordnance Factory. In particular, she worked closely with Annie Powell of the Rhondda to campaign across south Wales for women to join the armed forces or go into essential war industries. By 1943, the Cardiff branch had grown to a membership of 300 and Dora was heading the propaganda and political education work for the South Wales CP district. After the war, the family continued to live in Cardiff, where Dora led the Welsh committee's work among women from the Party office. The mail at all three premises Red Lives | 39

was routinely intercepted. Checks revealed the good news, including successful fund-raising bazaars and International Women’s Day initiatives; but there was also the negative impact of anti-Soviet Cold War propaganda and widespread workingclass resentment at the CP's criticisms of the 1945-51 Labour government. Idris was transferred to work in the Party's international department. Times were difficult as Dora tried to sell the house and Idris looked for a new family home in London. She told one correspondent that the rising cost of living ‘is sending me nearly dotty’ and ended up working as the office manager for a local building contractor. Before joining Idris in Brixton Hill in March 1952, Dora wrote to him at Party centre about very successful British-Soviet Friendship Society events to welcome back a delegation from the Soviet Union. With the family reunited in London, Dora found work as a medical secretary for Lambeth Hospital Management Committee, joining NUPE. Their mother wrote fondly to an old friend and comrade, Andrew Rothstein, of her tiredness from housework and full-time employment, leaving her only enough energy to attend meetings of the local Co-operative Guild. The family retired to Talywaun, near Pontypool, where Dora remained active with CND - John became vice-president in the 1970s – and took part in the local miners support group during the 1984-85 strike. She died in January 2000, leaving behind John, Judith and their own personal MI5 files.

Helen Crawfurd 1877 – 1954 Helen Crawfurd was Scottish and very active in suffrage and socialist politics in her native Scotland. She had been an enthusiastic member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), but had broken with that organisation in 1914 when its leadership abandoned the fight for the vote and enthusiastically supported the war effort. Helen was shocked at this volte face, and hence together, with her friend Agnes Dollen, formed the Women’s Peace Crusade. This body campaigned throughout Scotland to end war and to oppose conscription when it was introduced in 1916. Crawfurd was also active together with Mary Barbour, in opposing the rent increases introduced early in the war and was involved in the 1915 Glasgow rent strike. She was then a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Her fervent support for the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia highlighted her political difference with the social democrats of the ILP. With such an understanding, it was but a short step for her to join with others in the ILP who campaigned for affiliation to the newly formed Communist Party. Included within the group with whom she worked were Emile Burns, Shapurji Saklatvala and T. Walton Newbold. In 1920 she travelled to Moscow to attend the second congress of the 40 | Red Lives

Comintern. She stayed in Soviet Russia for three months during which time she met Kollontai, Krupskaya and Lenin. In 1921 Crawfurd was elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist Party and was put in charge of ‘work among women’. She had been impressed with Lenin’s views on women, which contrasted sharply with the backward views she encountered ‘even within the Party’. Crawfurd was the editor of the ‘women’s page’ in the CP journal The Communist which she subtitled in parenthesis: ‘A Page for Women (which men can read with advantage)’. Crawfurd remained active in the Party until she died, but her work was noteworthy in many other organisations. She was secretary of the British Committee of Workers’ International Relief (WIR) an organisation founded in 1921 by Willi Munzenberg to alleviate famine in Soviet Russia, during the counter revolutionary wars of intervention. It supported workers and their organisations during periods of hardship, as for example in Germany during the period of post-war poverty due to hyper-inflation. It also extended support to British miners after their defeat in the 1926 General Strike. Crawfurd’s conversation with Lenin on imperialism must have been influential in her decision to become involved in the League Against Imperialism (LAI). She attended the founding conference of the LAI and was elected to the executive committee of its British section. Crawfurd died in 1954. Her activism is chronicled in her unpublished autobiography which was deposited many years ago in Marx Memorial Library and remained largely unread until, courtesy of a grant awarded to the library, it has been digitised and is now widely available to researchers.

Fanny Deakin 1883 – 1968 Black Country man, Unison activist turned PhD student and Midlands Communist Party Chair, Andrew Maybury, on reading the bare bones of Councillor Fanny Deakin’s life, felt that: “It’s not possible to stop yourself from being amazed by it. Single-handedly, for a Communist to win over a whole community to the extent that decades after her death people are still wowed by her. She was clearly both single-minded and so full of integrity that people believed in her. What a lesson for today’s politicians!” Born on 2nd December 1883, Fanny Rebecca Davenport spent her early years at her parent’s farm on Farmers Bank, Silverdale, a mining village near Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, which is today near to Keele Golf Course. She married Noah Deakin in 1901, when her address was “Racecourse Back Lane, Silverdale”, and she and her husband moved to Wolstanton, today on the north side of Stoke-on-Trent. Throughout her life, she was noted for her campaigns for better nourishment of young children and maternity care for mothers. On leaving school, she worked on the farm Red Lives | 41

where her family lived, but her lifelong vocation came to her after being the first woman to be elected onto Wolstanton Council as a Labour member in 1923. During the General Strike in 1926, she was a major figure in local activity in support of the miners. One observer recalled seeing her: “...coming up past St Giles Church in Newcastle-under-Lyme at the head of these miners – 200 or 300 miners … Fancy, one woman – and she’s leading them!” She herself used to say: “I'm fighting for the mothers.” If she had a coat of arms they’d put it in Latin: Fighting for the mothers. In 1927 she retained her seat, this time standing as a Communist. She was very popular with local people, who nicknamed her “Red Fanny” after she visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and 1930. Of her five children only one survived into adulthood. In an era of high infant mortality she campaigned for better maternity care of women and free milk for children under five. Along with unemployed miners, she went to Downing Street to see Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, to demand that local councils give free milk to pregnant mothers and children up to the age of five. Her selflessness was displayed when a comrade was found guilty of supposedly inciting a riot of the unemployed. Fanny gave him an alibi but found herself charged with perjury, and spent nine months in Winson Green Prison. It only seemed to help her electoral chances! Re-elected to the now merged Newcastle Council in 1934, again as a Communist, she became a County Councillor. She played a key role in several committees relating to maternity and child welfare. During the war years she could be seen working with others in the Catholic Church, showing children how to put on gas masks. In 1941, she became the first Communist in the country to be appointed an Alderman, in this case for the Newcastleunder-Lyme Borough, with the honour being extended to Staffordshire county level in 1946. The following year, she achieved what most local people remember her for, when a maternity home was opened bearing her name for use by the women of the Borough. Her advocacy of mother and child welfare issues was marked by the naming of the Fanny Deakin Maternity Home by the Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council. She is still popularly remembered through the many children born there, and also due to a GP ward named after her in a local hospital. Although Fanny died on 24th March 1968, she is still regularly remembered locally. In 1991, Joyce Holliday wrote Go See Fanny Deakin!, in which Fanny Deakin appears as heroine in a play centred on the mining community of Silverdale. It was subsequently broadcast by BBC local radio. Joyce Holliday also wrote Silverdale People which includes a biography of Fanny Deakin.

Charlotte Despard 1844 – 1939 Picture a short, conservatively dressed Victorian woman, on stage with others protesting at the vivisection of a little brown dog (Vivisection: dissection of living animals). From 19031910 vivisection prompted a major struggle in London after a little brown dog was operated on for a medical class without being anaesthetised first. A series of riots known as the Brown Dog riots ensued, with (male) medical students clashing with suffragettes, trade unionists and police. At the forefront of arguing against this barbaric treatment of 42 | Red Lives

animals was Charlotte Despard (nee French), during her lifetime a Communist, suffragist, pacifist, Sinn Fein activist, novelist and anti-vivisectionist. Charlotte Despard was the daughter of a Royal Navy Captain, and the sister of a military commander during World War I and then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, thus pitting her against her brother in both of these areas of struggle. She had very little formal education, although she did go to a finishing school. She married a businessman in 1870, and travelled with him until he died in 1890. She never had children. Charlotte Despard’s husband died when she was 46, and she took up charitable work, as many woman of her class did at that time. But the charitable work changed her in ways which neither her family nor her friends had expected – she became radicalised. Horrified by the poverty she saw in London, she moved into Battersea during the week to be closer to one of the charity ‘shops’ and devoted her time and money to organising for the poor – including a health clinic, a soup kitchen for the unemployed, and youth and working men’s clubs in the slum areas in which she worked. Politically left, she became good friends with Eleanor Marx and was a delegate to the Second International. During the Boer War she campaigned against this “wicked war of this Capitalistic government.” Because of her pacifism Charlotte Despard refused to become involved in the recruitment campaign during World War I, which put her in opposition to both her brother and sister. In 1906 she joined the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society and was imprisoned twice: once after going with others to the House of Commons in 1907 and

s Charlotte Despard speaking at a Trafalgar Square Rally Red Lives | 43

once after a demonstration outside of 10 Downing Street in 1909. Becoming frustrated with the slowness of progress, she then joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, a more radical organisation. Having strong views about freedom, she became unhappy with what she perceived to be the autocratic way the WSPU was run, so in 1907 she joined in forming the Women’s Freedom League, whose motto was “Dare to be Free.” After meeting with Mohandas Gandhi in 1909, she became identified with the passive resistance strategies of women, for example chaining themselves to the railings in the Palace of Westminster. In addition, she became involved in a “No taxation without representation” campaign, during which her furniture was seized several times in lieu of fines and taxes. In 1908 she joined, with others, to form the Irish Women’s Franchise League and later helped form the Prisoners’ Defence League to support republican prisoners. In the 1927 Public Safety Act she had the honour of being classed as a dangerous subversive because of her opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. She lived in Ireland for many years and returned to England every year. After the Russian Revolution she attended a conference of the Labour, Socialist and Democratic Organisations of Britain, during which she spoke, in part saying: “Let us … do something … whereby in combination we shall be able to show our power and make the power of the people tell.” Later she was an active member of the Battersea Labour Party. She stood for Parliament when she was 74, but her anti-war views were unpopular and she was not elected. In 1930 she toured the Soviet Union, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and became secretary of the Friends of Soviet Russia. In 1933 her house in Dublin was burned down by an anti-communist mob. Charlotte Despard was active well into her 90s, giving anti fascist speeches in Trafalgar Square in the 1930s. She died 10 November, 1939, at age 95 and was buried in Belfast, having lived a life of activism that never wavered. There are two streets named after her – one in Battersea, and one in Archway. She appears, along with others, on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London. And, oh yes, a statue of the little brown dog was erected in Battersea Park in 1965.

Mary Docherty 1908 – 1983 Mary Docherty joined the Communist Party in 1926 at the age of 18, and remained a member for 74 years. Her death, aged 92, broke one of the last direct links with the days of “Red Fife”, those remarkable inter-war years of revolutionary activity in the coalfields inspired by the Russian Revolution. Born in 1908, to Janet Docherty, Mary was one of three girls. Her mother worked at the Empire Theatre in Cowdenbeath and was often the sole breadwinner. Mary’s father William, a miner, was blacklisted for his role in the 1921 Miners Strike and did not work again until the outbreak of WW2. A foundation member of the CPGB, he influenced Mary greatly. She was raised in the Socialist Sunday School and taken to 44 | Red Lives

political meetings from an early age. Mary joined the Party at the outset of the 1926 Miners Strike and was involved when the local councils of action, based on the Russian Soviets, were set up in Fife to coordinate what became a general strike. During the strike these bodies took control of road transport and distribution in key areas of Fife. Known as the Chicago of Fife, Cowdenbeath was a town built on coal, with 21 pits within a radius of three miles. In her first political role as literature secretary for the Cowdenbeath branch, the teenage Mary helped produce and sell 20 weekly pit papers, including The Pan Bolt, The Mash and The Flame. In the late 1920s Mary was the organiser of the Young Pioneers, the Communist children’s organisation, running pioneer branches in Lochgelly, Glencraig, Bowhill, Lumphinnans, Lochore and Cowdenbeath. Until 1928, working class men and women still did not have the right to vote or stand in elections. The Fife education system and school board elections were a key political arena open to the Communist Party and Mary led this work. As well as teaching the children songs, poems and plays, Mary organised the pioneers’ campaigns against corporal punishment and for free school meals. They also campaigned on the school curriculum. One of the children’s slogans was: “We do not want Boss Class History in school: we want working class history”. In 1928 the Young Pioneers succeeded in winning May Day as a holiday in central Fife schools. Mary produced the Pioneers’ school paper to detail which teachers were too fond of the strap. Mary organised a demonstration by pupils against one particular teacher’s excessive use of corporal punishment. This was Jennie Lee, also raised in Cowdenbeath, who later became a Labour MP, and Minister for the Arts. Mary was nominated by the YCL to visit the Soviet Union during 1929-1930, where she met delegates from around the world. She attended a children’s international meeting at the Lenin Stadium in Moscow, and was made an honorary member of the Moscow Pioneers. While there she was treated and cured of tuberculosis at the Lenin Sanatorium on the Black Sea coast. In the early 1930s, Mary entered domestic service in Edinburgh, the main source of employment for working class women of her generation, helping to support her family with the money she sent home each week. The restrictions of “living in” did not completely prevent her political activities, but she often found herself in trouble as a result. She returned to Fife again as a domestic servant in the mid-1930s, helping the CP to electoral success in local government and parliament, supporting the Spanish Republican cause, and agitating against the rise of fascism. Mary worked in the Crombie Munitions Depot during WW2, and afterwards as a children’s nurse in Rosyth. When Willie Gallacher was elected as Communist MP for West Fife in 1935, Mary became a full-time worker for the Party. That ended with his defeat in the 1951 general election. Mary found work in the bakery of the Cowdenbeath Cooperative Society, where she stayed until retirement. At various times in the Party she was a branch secretary, leader of the Women’s Group, and Fife Party Treasurer. Mary was an unsuccessful Council candidate in 1952, yet the Red Lives | 45

party had a presence on the town and county council with 13 councillors at the height of its strength. One of these was her mentor, Bob Selkirk, a blacklisted miner and highly respected communist councilor in Cowdenbeath, with whom she worked closely. Mary never sought positions for herself, and reserved the strongest criticism for those in the movement whom she regarded as self-seeking. She cared for her mother Janet until her death at the age of 100 in 1983. Mary was like a mother to her younger sister, Frances, whom her parents adopted as a baby in the 1930s. In her older years although increasingly crippled by arthritis, Mary was determined to stay active. On election days, her sheltered housing was the base for party campaign workers. In her last year of life she insisted on folding the 2500 CP newsletters distributed in her ward. Mary’s small home was familiar to journalists, researchers and academics from around the world interested in communist and labour movement history. When the CPGB split, she became a member of the Communist Party of Scotland, continued to raise funds for the Morning Star, and spoke regularly at International Women’s Day events. In her eighties, Mary began writing her autobiography, one of the very few working class women to record her own life. She published A Miner’s Lass when she was 84, and her second book, a life of the communist Bob Selkirk, at 88, raising the funds and then organising their sale from her armchair. These books now form a valuable part of both Communist Party and Scottish labour history.

Mikki Doyle 1916 – 1995 Mikki Doyle, who was born Mikki Leventhal in 1916 in New York, to an eastern European Jewish family. Her father worked on the socialist Yiddish daily Forverts (The Forward) founded in 1897. Published in New York, its influence was at its height during World War I, with a daily circulation of 200,000 in 11 local and regional editions. Just imagine the family at home, debating and exchanging their thoughts and, when the young Mikki became influenced by Communists, she took her views home and, no doubt, was already able to stand her corner quite vocally. Her first husband, whom she met when she was 16, was an ex-Wobbly English Communist sailor. Her children were born in the Depression, the elder when she was 17. As a girl, Mikki had been inspired by the life of Sojourner Truth, a woman born into slavery and the genius of the underground slave railway, who suffered brutally but never surrendered. Truth’s lifelong struggle against injustice made Mikki determined to fight racism and women’s oppression. Her very dear friend, Ken Gill (in the Independent, 12 December 1995), describes Mikki’s life before she came to England: “The Second World War saw her in a variety of occupations (including that of bus driver), but brought the bitter experience of two broken marriages. Her life was dominated by intense political activity which included campaigns from the Spanish Civil War to the execution of the Rosenbergs. She took her children on picket lines against racist bosses, and they were raised in a house where ‘the woman question’ was always to the fore. “In 1949 she met and married the Glasgow-born Charlie Doyle, a loving companion 46 | Red Lives

Ken Gill

until his death in 1983. He was her one-way ticket to Britain when he became the first deportee under the McCarran Act. McCarthy purges had taken him from the leadership of the Gas, Coke and Chemical Workers Union to an Ellis Island prison. Mikki married him by proxy while he was in gaol, then accompanied him to London. “After a couple of years in industry, Mikki went into advertising. She had no training or experience but always said it was ‘easy, because of years writing political pamphlets and just being an American’, Following a short spell as Cuba’s trade attaché, she joined the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) in 1967 until she retired in 1985. “Mikki was the paper’s women’s editor. She said: ‘when the feminist movement started the Women’s Page was full of the usual shopping, fashion and cosmetics crap. We got rid of all that.’ She was determined to get women’s pages out of the ghetto and was a founding member of Women in Media. “I met Mikki at one of their meetings in autumn 1972. Understandably, the sisters’ main concern was how to break the ‘glass ceiling’ and there was a deadly hush when I suggested broadening their remit to include more women like ‘tea ladies’ and secretaries. Talking (and smoking) after the meeting, Mikki asked me which CP branch I was in, and I said I wasn’t in the party. A week later my local branch secretary (Jack Gaster) popped round and I had my party card by new year.” Ken Gill summed her up well: “Her feminism was deep and practical. In the Seventies she was criticised for her refusal to be anti-man .... Most of all, she was a big personality. She could dominate discussion by her simple, sometimes vulgar and usually funny interventions.” Despite the collapse of the Communist world Mikki never lost her faith in working people, her belief in Socialism and the ability of women to win equality.

Jack and Janet Dunn 1915 – 2002 and 1923 – 2018 Jack was born in Bloxwich, near Walsall, on 23 February 1915. His father was a coal miner and his mother looked after the eight children and the house – what there was of it. Janet was born in Lesmahagow, Scotland, on 25 January, 1923. Her father was a coal miner and her mother looked after the six surviving children and the house – what there was of it. The Kent coalfield was the youngest in the country and, as there were no local coal miners, they had to recruit miners from other coalfields and that’s why Jack and Janet’s families arrived in Kent to live. The families moved to local villages and pit villages, as they moved between working at different coal mines. Some of the moves, for Janet’s father and family, were associated with being blacklisted for trying to help form the Miners’ Federation (‘The Fed’). Red Lives | 47

Jack’s family moved to Coventry when the big factories opened in the early 1930s. But, Jack stayed in Kent and became a lodger with a local family, something that was quite common at the time. One of the reasons Jack remained was because his father used to physically abuse the boys. This fed Jack’s sense of injustice in the conditions that mining families found themselves in. Both Jack and Janet passed the 11 plus examination to go to grammar school, but like most working class families at the time, their parents couldn’t afford the school uniforms, so they went to the local secondary instead. Both were bright and did well at school though, while Jack expected to become a miner, Janet wanted to be a nurse. Jack started at the pit aged 14 and at the age of 16, in 1931, led his first strike underground. Boys often worked on supplies, bringing in tubs of timber and other materials from pit bottom to different parts of the pit. There was no effective union and employers and underground supervisors could be harsh. There was a form of contracting known as the Butty system. A butty was a man who had come up from the ranks of workmen, saved some money, as his business required capital to provide tools, timber, horses etc. He was a sub-contractor, and an intermediary between master and men. Jack’s butty wasn’t paying the boys properly and so Jack organised a strike, the first ever by boys. And, they were successful in getting better and more regular payments. This was a seminal experience for Jack and it wasn’t long before he was agitating with others to get the ‘Fed’ recognised by pit employers. Throughout the 1930s Jack became more involved in union affairs and became a delegate for Snowdown colliery. Jack wanted to become a fighter pilot during WW2, but was not allowed to join the RAF, as he was in a reserved occupation. Jack transferred to Betteshanger colliery, near Deal, and it was during WW2 that the miners there went on strike, but Jack opposed the action, because there was a bigger enemy than the coal owners to fight, a certain Mr Hitler. The National Union of Mineworkers was formed in 1946 and Jack was soon to become the branch secretary for Betteshanger colliery. He had joined the Communist Party and was a very successful organiser and agitator. The union’s influence grew, as did that of the CP. Betteshanger became the highest paid pit locally and was recognised for its militancy. Janet was too young to train as a nurse, and at 17 years of age was an assistant nurse who helped troops on the beach at Dover who were returning from Dunkirk in May 1940. Shortly afterwards, Janet went to Guy’s hospital in London to train and found the work quite tough, both physically and emotionally. The hours were long and there wasn’t much food, plus there was lots of studying to do. Janet had one day off a month and was paid £30 per year. After qualifying, Janet went to work at Waldershare Park, near Dover, a large country house which had been converted into a hospital during the war. 48 | Red Lives

Casualties from the war were brought to the hospital, including RAF pilots, many of whom had terrible injuries. On one occasion, Janet was nursing the grandson of the poet, Lord Tennyson, who had been shot down. Janet was very attractive and not long after she was asked if she would marry him. Janet declined, as she wanted to marry a miner. Not long afterwards, Jack and Janet met and they were married on 11th November, 1944 and lived in a pit house in Mill Hill, Deal. It was at a dance, when Jack was singing, that he first saw Janet and he decided, there and then, that he was going to marry her – he was besotted. In fact, Jack used to sing with the ‘Big Bands’ that used to tour the country, playing at local dance halls. Bands like Harry Hall and Joe Loss used to ask local singers if they wanted to get up and sing a song or two. Jack always obliged and was so popular that he was offered his own show on Radio Luxembourg, which was big at the time. Jack also liked to play snooker and was a very good player. At one time he played Joe Davies, and gave him a good game. He may have had a bet on himself, as he was also quite a gambler and loved the horses and greyhounds. In the 50s, Janet and Jack were active in the committee that campaigned to get the American government to give Paul Robeson his passport back, so he could travel abroad. When Paul Robeson eventually came to Britain in 1957, Janet and Jack were part of the welcome committee. And, when Paul Robeson sang that year at the Albert Hall, they were there to hear him and met him after the concert. Janet worked as a district nurse, and in 1960 Jack became the general secretary of the Kent area NUM. The Kent miners supported many progressive causes and their union banners were often spotted on demonstrations locally and nationally. Alan Jinkinson, who became general secretary of NALGO and, later, UNISON, said that he was amazed when a coach load of Kent miners went up to support him as the Labour candidate in the famous Orpington by-election in 1962. Jack and Janet were both central to the organisation of the anti-Vietnam war weekend in Deal in 1969, when 600 French miners and their families, from the Pas de Calais coalfield, came over on ferries to join in meetings, dances, a lively demonstration and some general merriment. It was an excellent example of international solidarity, with many local miners’ families hosting foreign guests for the first time. In 1961, redundancy notices were handed out to some Betteshanger miners and a stay-down strike was organised, with men staying down the pit and being supported with food and water supplies by the union and its supporters. The strike ended successfully when it was agreed to open up a new coal seam, that would keep everyone employed. Jack went on to become the chair of the south east region of the TUC (SERTUC) and was able to help organise and support many progressive causes over the years. This ability was increased when Jack Dromey was elected as secretary of SERTUC and they enjoyed an excellent relationship that proved very productive. Naturally, Jack was very involved in the 1972 national miners’ strike and helped to organise ‘floating’ pickets on the river Thames, to prevent coal movements from and between power stations. Jack was always interested in adult education and the Kent NUM used to sponsor a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, to support a miner during their two year Red Lives | 49

course. He also supported the WEA (Workers Education Association) and many miners and their families had the opportunity to go to WEA evening courses to study a variety of subjects. Both Janet and Jack were keen internationalists and were active in a number of organisations. For example, Janet helped to host a group of Czech children who came to Deal, through the auspices of the Britain-Czech friendship league. A group from Kent then went to stay for two weeks in Prague and the Tatra mountains. Janet also helped to organise a camping trip for miners’ children near Amien in France, in the late 50s, and Janet and a number of other CP members went to supervise the children. In the ‘84-’85 miners strike, Janet helped to establish the first kitchen to supply meals to miners and their families, at the Welfare Club in Mill Hill, Deal. This idea was soon replicated around the country. At a meeting of the Cambridge Union, in 1984, both Jack and Janet were the main speakers. Janet went first to talk about the mining community and the effects of the strike. After a couple of minutes of looking at her carefully prepared notes, she slapped them down on the podium and said: “I’m going to talk to you from my heart and my guts”. Needless to say she was phenomenal. Say family members: “At the end of the meeting a young woman came up and gave Mum a hug, she handed Mum an envelope which she said contained her student grant cheque for that term. She took Mum’s hand and said: “For the first time in my life you’ve made me feel proud to be working class”.” Interestingly Dad said to the audience that he could say hand on heart that he had never found it harder to follow a speaker in his life! Jack retired in 1979 and died in 2002 and Janet died in 2018. They were both life long members of the CP and big supporters of the Daily Worker and Morning Star.

Dr Robert Dunstan 1878 – 1961 The life of Robert Dunstan appears as evidence that the close bonds between left-wing activists in the Labour party, and Communist Party members locally, that first dated from the 1920s, never quite went away. Says Brian Allbutt: “The notion of a united front between all manner of socialists historically, seems so rooted in the politics of the West Midlands, yet given the authoritarian way communists have so often been treated by leaders and administrators of the labour party it seems, at times, counter-intuitive to even suggest this. And yet, our Party was based on those who were socialists who meant what they said.” Dunstan was a Communist who enjoyed wide support among Labour Party members in Birmingham in the 1920s, so strong that he gained national credibility. 50 | Red Lives

Even Poplar’s George Lansbury, who would later become the leader of the labour party stated: “I would be glad to support Dr Dunstan’s candidature at any time. The Communists are not our enemies but our friends.” Dunstan’s memorable phrase, “this rotten and benighted city” annoyed landlords and delighted supporters equally, yet it was nothing but an accurate description of the atrocious slums and back street factories of early 20th century Birmingham. Having joined the CP at its foundation, Dunstan steadfastly remained an active member of Labour, there being no ban on such a position for much of the first decade of the CP’s existence. In such a capacity, he stood against Neville Chamberlain as the Labour/Communist candidate for the Birmingham West parliamentary in 1922 and 1923. He was about 2,500 behind in his first attempt, closing the gap to only 1,500 in the second. Robert Dunstan played a significant national role as a much in demand speaker in the General Strike, publishing The Soldier’s Conscience in 1926, for the Communist Party. He was expelled from the Labour Party in 1928 after the Liverpool Labour conference decision, but only after Edgbaston constituency Labour Party, the dominant area constituting Birmingham West, refused to expel him on a 50-19 vote. This merely resulted in the local Labour Party being disaffiliated from the national Labour Party by edict from London. The resultant creation of a local Labour Party in West Birmingham by Labour’s head office was a right-wing creature that never ever quite faded over the next decades. Indeed, in the developing wave of unionisation of large factories and the organisation of tenants’ associations, spheres that Labour’s administration had no control over, left unity mushroomed. For the general election of 1929, the Party asked Dunstan to stand as a Communist against an official Labour candidate (the Liberal won) in Bethnal Green South West, receiving just short of 8% of the total vote, but well over a fifth of Labour’s vote. Dunstan also had the satisfaction of not coming last, being a few votes above the conservative! This had been a seat contested by Joe Vaughan, a former Communist mayor, who would return as a Communist candidate in 1931 to almost win the seat. Dunstan had been born in 1878, the only son of a wealthy Birmingham doctor but, due to his strong socialist convictions, his father cut him off from all family financial support. He and his second wife, Margaret, a Scotswoman who was also a doctor, both spent much of the 1930s beavering away, earning their living from medicine and he also from the law, which he was also qualified in. They relocated towards the south-west after his retirement in the 1940s. In the meantime, West Midlands Labour Party became especially scrutinised and controlled by administrative means as the Cold War developed. Left unity grew stronger in the 60s and 70s, but once the big factories closed it was harder to maintain. Robert was a frequent visitor to King Street, CP headquarters during the 1950s, catching up with old comrades. Maintaining their convictions to the end, the couple finally retired to Torquay where Robert died in 1961 from complications following a hernia operation. Red Lives | 51

Tom Durkin 1933 – 2020 The following was co-authored by Graham Stevenson (shortly before his death in May 2020) and Phil Katz. Says Graham: “I first became aware of Tom Durkin in the late 1960s when, as a member of the YCL Executive Committee and national youth committee of the engineering union, TASS, I began spending more time in London. Suddenly, the giant with snow-white hair who had no need of a megaphone on demos was identified to me. Tommy was an astonishingly confident organiser, whose marvellous booming speeches, though appearing entirely extempore, were crafted from constant reading of politics, literature and history. I learned that, on arriving in Britain in the early 1930s from Ireland, his desire to break out of poverty saw him walk every inch of the way from Liverpool to London to find work. Having left school at the age of 13, he devoted his life to self-learning. Once in the capital, he found this in the building industry and eventually became a leading rank and file organiser for UCATT and one of its predecessors, the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers (ASW).” Tom joined the Communist Party in 1940 and worked for a period full-time for the Party, serving in the army during the war. At an Anti Nazi League protest in the late 1970s, at the desecration of a Jewish memorial, he spoke movingly of his experience of arriving as a soldier at Auschwitz at the end of the Second World War. For a long time he was a London District Committee member and on its Secretariat. During the 1970s, Durkin, who by now had also become president of the Brent Trades Council, played a leading role in the major disputes of the decade. He was prominent in the national strike of building workers of 1972. His lack of sectarianism was shown when, in 1976, SWP Right to Work marchers were arrested at Staples Corner, Tom turned up outside Hendon magistrates’ court with the Brent Trades Council banner to show his solidarity. He helped set up the Willesden International Friendship Club, which led to the Brent Community Relations Council. He was a founder member of the Brent Community Law Centre and the Unemployed Workers Centre. More famously, he played a major part in the famous Grunwick dispute in 1976, when 137 workers walked out of a film processing plant in Willesden. The national impact of the dispute led the then Labour government to set up a Cabinet Committee. The strike was centred on the lack of union recognition at the plant and involved the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff union, which represented the strikers. Despite APEX, most activity was co-ordinated by a broad Grunwick Strike Committee, mainly due to Durkin’s role. The Committee was an exemplar of how alliances can be made across political divides, that then often do not seem as profound as they once did. Tom was ably assisted by future TGWU leader 52 | Red Lives

and MP, Jack Dromey. The Committee was able to mobilise national solidarity including by mineworkers and essentially, local postal workers. Every morning Tom was on the picket line. A leaflet written immediately after the strike by Tom Durkin, entitled ‘Grunwick: bravery and betrayal’ pointed to the lessons that workers should not be divided nor prevented from providing solidarity through mass pickets or secondary action, whether by referrals to Acas, commissions of enquiry or the law courts, but should continue their industrial action. Only strong action by workers could secure success on the ground. Tom was not afraid to tread where others feared. He took to the columns of Marxism Today in an article entitled “Goodbye to Détente” in May 1981. His conclusion was a delight: “ … may I say a word to some of our anti Soviet critics. You are fully entitled to your views but temper them occasionally with a little self criticism.” In 1985, he was expelled from the CPGB for supporting the Morning Star. He supported the women at Trico fighting for equal pay and was a member of the south-east regional TUC, playing a vital part in the first People’s March for Jobs in 1982. He commandeered a lorry to collect wood for the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, protesting against the siting of American Cruise missiles at the airbase. Tom was for a decade or more a Brent trades council delegate to the Greater London Association of Trades Councils, which often met at the top of TUC congress house, in the general council chamber. There was no better auditorium than this to best appreciate Tom’s sharp mind and wonderful oratory. Tom again came into his own during the 1984 miners’ strike, when he ensured thousands of pounds were raised for the Kent miners’ hardship fund. Coal miner’s picketing coordinators such as Ken Evans and Johnny Speight, were given offices in Brent – housed in the Local Economy Resource Unit from where they conducted a year long solidarity campaign. This included picketing coal trains in Drayton. Tom’s Communist Party connections helped to encourage train drivers to respect pickets that some cold, grey mornings had only two people and banner slung over a rail line. Tom was especially proud of his craft as a highly skilled carpenter and was in his element when describing how he helped build lift shafts in wood, for the big National Cash Register factory in north London. The tolerance of error, from basement to floor six, was less than half an inch. “I helped achieve that”, he would beam. But if you wanted to see Tom beam and hear his voice at its best, you waited for the passionate speech in favour of a united Ireland or opposition to apartheid. Unbeknown to most, in the late ‘80s, Tom played an important role in providing cover and support to young communists who left Britain for South Africa to take part in the clandestine operation Vula. This operation resulted in the crucial reintroduction of South African communist party and ANC leaders inside the country, for the first time in decades. Vula was later exposed by the apartheid regime and many operatives were arrested, but not before a critical mass had built up, to coordinate anti apartheid structures in key townships, forcing the legalisation of the SACP and ANC. He was a strong supporter of the Morning Star and member of the Communist Party until his death at the age of 87. Red Lives | 53

Jessie Eden 1902 – 1987 Annie Banham, Birmingham CP branch activist and real Peaky Blinders fan has thought long and hard about the real Jessie: “I have to switch off the historical accuracy radar! But I think there is a whole group of women in history like Jessie, who should have a wider profile today and I can also see similar traits in all these different women from different eras. They all understood instinctively that they had a right to be treated with dignity, equality and respect, without resorting to divisive or negative stereotypes. She’d say to us today, I’m pretty sure: ‘Trust your instincts – if it feels wrong, it probably is. Find your voice. There’s no need to shout, or to be a great orator, but speak to and listen to others, share your experiences and find some common ground. Recognising your right to be treated with dignity is as important as recognising your own strengths and abilities. Be brave. Be proud. Be persistent. Collective actions can change bad situations.’” Jessie Shrimpton was born on the 24 February 1902 to a ‘jeweller journeyman’ and a suffrage campaigner. They lived in an area today known as the Jewellery Quarter, near the Lucas Electrics factory in Hockley, which would be responsible for Jessie becoming famous. A short-lived marriage left her with the name Eden for more than two decades. Already a firebrand in her 20s, the Birmingham Post interviewed her as part of its 50th anniversary coverage of the General Strike: “One policeman put his hands on my arm … but the crowd howled … ‘Hey, leave her alone’ … and pushed the policemen away … I was never frightened of the police or the troops because I had the people with me, you see.” Already a TGWU shop steward for the only section of women unionised in Lucas, Jessie marched her ‘girls’ out. Her father was on strike too, and her mother hung a red flag from the front window of their home. Five years later, Jessie would go down in history by leading ten thousand nonunionised women out on a week’s strike, which eventually prompted mass unionisation amongst women and young workers in the new industries of the Midlands. Work study supervisors picked her: “...the fact was that I’d always worked quickly...they obviously wanted to set the time by me and the others would have to keep up with it.” TGWU officials, she said, “looked at me amazed when I brought the application forms filled up”. A rank and file committee of forty, representing ten shops, was set up and the women eventually simply walked off the job forcing Lucas to back down. “VICTORY! BEDAUX SYSTEM SMASHED!” splashed the Daily Worker on 29 January 1932. So jubilant were the women that work was impossible, so they were “released shortly before the usual hour”, singing their hearts out as they went. During later major cutbacks at the firm, Jessie was made redundant but received victimisation pay from the T&G and its gold medal. She was sent by the Communist Party to Moscow, 54 | Red Lives

to help rally women workers build the Moscow Metro in 1934, gravitating towards the Comintern’s Lenin School. When she returned it was to lead a successful mass rent strike of nearly 50,000 tenants in 1939 in Birmingham. In a single ten day period, she recruited 35 women to the Communist Party. For more three decades she was leader of the city’s federation of council house tenants. Jessie contested the August 1945 general election in the Handsworth constituency, winning 1,390 votes, or 3.4%. In the November 1945 municipal elections, she did stupendously well – just short of winning with 2,887 votes. In 1948, Jessie married Walter McCullough, who had walked from Glasgow in 1930s to find work as a carpenter. He oversaw building of the Midlands Communist Party’s Star Social Club and its accompanying Key Books from 1969-1971, lost to the movement when the CPGB liquidated. Walter died in 1978. He and Jessie were childless but adopted a son. Jessie herself died aged 85.

Dick Etheridge 1909 – 1985 Born in 1909, Dick Etheridge was workless during the Depression until he ended up helping out at his father’s all-night café near Birmingham’s main train station. He resisted the instructions of police who used to order him to turf out destitute people who nursed a cup of tea all night in the dead of winter. The experience set him off on a life time of trying to do good for ordinary people. He left Labour over the Spanish Civil War and joined the Communist Party, before beginning work at the Longbridge factory in 1941, which was then very lightly unionised. After Dick arrived at the plant nothing would be the same again. Recruiting the entire 20,000 workers to any union during the war years he became the convenor or lead shop steward from then on, for three decades. But he was also especially active in building the Communist Party’s Austin Motors branch, the largest factory branch it ever had, reaching 350 members in 1942, and with a high proportion serving as shop stewards. Its Daily Worker sale was relatively off-the-scale. John Upton, a long-standing member of the Communist Party and a retired Unison official recalls how all pervasive was the influence of Longbridge: “My father was apprenticed there after the start of WW2 before he joined the army, and in 1944 participated in the Normandy landings. He was an AEU member all his working life. He told me about the struggles to unionise in the 1930s when many workers were employed for only part of the year and then laid off. As a young NALGO activist in the 1970s, I met experienced trade unionists who had worked at Longbridge. In common with many others, we applied ourselves with some success to develop effective union organisation, based on the same principles – strong steward organisation, high levels of membership Red Lives | 55

and effective collective bargaining. In this way, union organisation in the factories inspired the new ‘white collar’ trade unionism of the 1970s.” In 1946 Etheridge was elected to the AEU’s Birmingham District Committee, which he remained on until 1965 when the District was divided up. He was then elected President of the new Birmingham West District, and he retained this position until 1975. In 1958, and on five subsequent occasions, he was elected to the AEU National Committee, its prime annual policy conference. Following the Austin-Nuffield merger, shop stewards of the amalgamating companies formed a combine committee, the BMC Joint Shop Stewards Committee. In February 1956 Etheridge became Chair of this Committee. Later in that year the Committee played a major role in a 16-week strike over failure to consult on 6,000 redundancies that resulted in the first ever compensation payments agreement, and subsequently influenced the introduction of statutory notice and contract provisions. Dick led 50,000 workers in a complete close down of the Midlands. In 1968 when the British Leyland Motor Corporation was formed, a corresponding shop stewards’ combine committee was created. This was the BLMC Combine Trades Union Committee, of which Etheridge became chair. After the war he had a major role in formulating communist party policy for the motor industry. In 1950 he contested the Birmingham, Northfield constituency in the general election as a communist and served on both the Birmingham City and Midlands committees of the Party, and from 1961 until 1973 was a member of its national executive. Writing about Etheridge, Graham Stevenson recalled: “In 1969, I was just about to turn 19 years when I went on the Midlands CP district committee, chaired by Etheridge. He was a giant amongst Midlands engineering workers. You could have knocked me over with a feather when this blunt man with a heavy local accent, known for his command of mass meetings of tens of thousands, sought me out in a break. He told me this long, hilarious tale. It’s too long to relay here but it ends, talking of the wasps: “them bugger’s are organised!” I later found it was one of his favourites to address to a giant meeting.” Dick’s ironic humour was so redolent of the industrial heartlands of the West Midlands, the punch lines of which contained lessons or directions for union members. He died in 1985 and his personal archives remain to be explored completely.

Dai Dan Evans 1898 – 1973 “A person of great enthusiasm and tremendous physical strength – sort of Tolstoyan figure of a man – used to play rugger for Swansea at one period and with all the blue in his face that shows a man has been cutting coal all his life – little bits of coal fly off, and embed themselves in the skin”. This was the description of Dai Dan Evans given by documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings in 1942, when making the anti-fascist film The Silent Village. Evans, the local miners’ agent, appeared in the film which was set in the village of Cwmgiedd in the Swansea Valley and told the story of the Nazis’ destruction of the Czech mining village of Lidice. So who was this ‘Tolstoyan figure’ who so impressed the man from the Crown Film Unit? 56 | Red Lives

David Daniel Evans was born in 1898 in Abercraf at the very top of the Swansea valley, on the edge of the Brecon Beacons. He shared the year of his birth with the organisation which subsequently absorbed his time and effort for nearly all of his working life – the South Wales Miners Federation, better known as the ‘Fed’. Like most of the young boys and men of his area, he began work at the age of 14 in Waunclawdd colliery as a collier’s assistant. The area at the time was part of the Anthracite coalfield, which had been expanding rapidly with the development of British imperialism and increased access to markets in Europe, firstly, and then across the world. According to the 1911 census, over 80% of the population spoke Welsh in his part-industrial, part-rural locality of small towns and villages. The outbreak of war in 1914 transformed the world and village life. ‘Dai Dan’, as he quickly became known, attempted to enlist in the British Army in early 1915 but was turned down due to his age. The following year, he joined the Independent Labour Party and registered as a conscientious objector on political grounds rather than as a pacifist. Such was the flux of ideas swirling around the world, even in relatively isolated Welsh villages, points of view could rapidly develop and change. The Bolshevik Revolution and the development of independent working class education through classes run by Nun Nicholas for the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) made him a convinced Marxist. Subsequently, he joined the Communist Party. In his own words: “I would say the three books that have affected me mostly, that have given me the character of my philosophy, my economic understanding, my political understanding are The Communist Manifesto; Wage, Labour and Capital; and Money, Price and Profit, all by Marx”. Such was his commitment to political education that throughout the inter-war period he continued to lead education classes in the Swansea and Dulais valleys while still working for the Fed as a full-time official. In 1923, he emigrated to Canada to work in the lignite mines of Alberta. During this period he attempted to enter the USA illegally, only to be imprisoned and deported in 1926. Returning home, he began to work again at the Gurnos pit, later taking part in the 1926 strike committee. After the lockout had ended, he started as a faceworker in the International Colliery, Abercraf and remained there until 1937. During this period, he was elected Fed lodge chairman and then secretary, later becoming a member of the Amalgamated Anthracite Combine Committee. In 1936, he was elected to the SWMF executive council. Thus, he went from rank-and-file member to the South Wales leadership within ten years. However, this was an era of decline for the coal industry as a whole, the South Wales coalfield alone losing 241 pits between 1921 and 1936 and, consequently, the Fed losing almost half its membership which fell to 113,000. Red Lives | 57

Dai Dan was part of the collective effort which broke company unionism in the South Wales coalfield to stabilise and increase Fed membership. In particular, he was one of those selected by the executive to lead the campaign against the South Wales Miners Industrial Union (SWMIU) at Bedwas colliery in the summer and autumn of 1936. He later recalled getting up at 5 o'clock in the mornings to go and meet the miners coming off shift to wait for the train to take them away. There would be around 15 minutes when the opportunity arose to make a speech to the Bedwas men, who were the ‘hard core of the scab union’ in south Wales. Through a combination of skilful propaganda, clandestine recruitment, a small but significant ‘stay-down’ strike and negotiations in which the Fed made ‘no-strike’ concessions to the colliery company, a majority of the Bedwas miners were won over in a ballot. When Fed president Horner signed an agreement incorporating the SWMIU in Taff-Merthyr colliery, the details of the company union’s debt bail-out could not be revealed to his general secretary Oliver Harris. As Dai Dan explained decades later: “Old Ollie wouldn't think of compensating the buggers”. Thereafter, Dai Dan’s activities could be simply gauged by his progress onwards and upwards, from his appointment as the miners agent for the Anthracite District to his election as general secretary of the South Wales Area NUM in 1958. However that would miss some important points. As the area’s chief administrative officer, he played a vital role in bringing non-manual colliery officials and staff in South Wales into the COSA section of the NUM. Before retiring in 1963, he had played an important role in improving services at the Talygarn Miners Rehabilitation Centre and introducing the house-coal pooling scheme for miners’ widows. But it was after the key political aim of the union had been achieved with the nationalisation of the coal industry that Dai Dan made a unique contribution to working-class life in Wales, beyond ‘straightforward’ political and economic objectives. He instituted the bilingual South Wales Miners’ Eisteddfod in 1948, giving new expression to a Welsh cultural tradition going back to the 12th century. His aim was to satisfy the collective need for cultural activities, but based on working-class self-organisation. Almost every year for the next four decades, miners and their families would flock to Porthcawl to enjoy competitions in music, poetry and prose. Despite the end of the deep coal mines in South Wales, the initiative still lives on as the annual Welsh Open Brass Band Championship. His second major achievement in the political, cultural and social sphere was the establishment of the South Wales Miners Gala. Comprising a march, rally and musical competitions, the first took place in 1953 and was addressed by Aneurin Bevan, Horner and Paynter. Most years brought delegations of miners from around the world, many of them from proCommunist union federations and countries such as the Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania and China. This became the major outdoor fixture in the trade union calendar and survived until the last event in Swansea, in 1988. These two institutions alone would be enough to testify to the breadth and depth of Dai Dan’s political vision. There are other illustrations, too numerous to mention. His service to the working class in his own community included spells as president of the Ystradgynlais Welfare Hall and chair of the Abercraf Library. 58 | Red Lives

As a Communist educated in those NCLC classes in the Swansea Valley, and in his own modest way, he put into practice Marx’s edict to the trade unions: “Apart from their original purposes, they must now learn to act deliberately as organising centres of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation”. In his own modest way a principle he attempted to follow and implement. At Dai Dan’s memorial meeting following his death in 1973, the orations were delivered by his successor and comrade Dai Francis, Will Paynter, Welsh CP secretary Bert Pearce and Labour MP Caerwyn Roderick. Dai Francis declared: “Dai Dan does not need a stone memorial. He will be remembered as one of the many of his generation who made enormous personal sacrifices so as to make the South Wales miners’ union one of the most politically and intellectually advanced sections of the British working class”. Ystradgynlais Male Voice Choir sang the hymn Blaenwern’, beginning with the verse: Dyma gariad fel y moroedd, Tosturiaethau fel y lli: Twysog Bywyd pur yn marw Marw i brynu'n bywyd ni. Pwy all beidio â chofio amdano? Pwy all beidio â thraethu'i glod? Dyma gariad nad â’n angof Tra fo nefoedd wen yn bod. Behold the oceans of love, Behold the floods of kindliness: A pure Prince of Life is dying Dying after buying life for us. Who will fail to remember him? Who will not sing his praise? Here is love not forgotten In the heavens of future days.

Jack Evans 1920 – 1997 Jack was born an only child, in Cardiff on 11th July 1920. His father being a chemist made them a relatively prosperous family, but sadly his father died when Jack was just 4 years old, so his mother moved to live with her sister in Weston-super-mare. His mother died when Jack was just 7 years old, so he was then brought up by his Aunt who already had one son called Phillip. The aunt’s family was wealthy so they had a live-in maid with whom Jack became very close. Jack attended a local private school in Weston-super-mare: Lewisham School, and went on to study at Bristol University. His studies were interrupted due to the outbreak of the second world war. He served as a commando in North Africa, Italy and northern Europe. Experience of war especially in Italy had a profound effect on Jack and politicised him. Red Lives | 59

Jack married Doreen Molly Minifie at the Methodist Chapel in Uphill where her mother had been the organist, on 26th April 1942. He had known Molly since he was a schoolboy. After the wedding Molly returned to live with her parents and Jack returned to the forces. Upon demobilisation, Jack returned to Bristol and with Molly set up home in a flat in Manor Park Redland. They had two children, Judy born January 1947 and David, July 1948. In 1950 they moved to 131 Bishop Rd, Bishopston, Bristol, where they lived together for the rest of their lives. Jack returned to Bristol University and obtained his Batchelor of Arts degree and a diploma of Education. Jack’s first teaching job was at Redland Hill house, a private boys school, rising to become joint headmaster. Jack then moved to Lawrence Weston Comprehensive School where he remained until he retired in 1985. Jack’s life was then shaken when Molly died in 1982. He moved in 1987 to share a house with his daughter’s family at 170 Bishop Rd. After the war Jack became active in the University Student Socialist Society becoming its chairman in 1946 when he joined the Labour Party. In 1947 Jack and Molly attended the World Youth Festival in Prague. Also In 1947 he was involved in a counter demonstration at the opening ceremony of “Meet South Africa” hosted by the Bristol City Museum, entitled “Meet the real South Africa”. This action even predates the formation of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. In 1948 Jack joined the Communist Party. Jack was an active trade unionist through out his life. He held positions in the NUT both locally and nationally, including Bristol President, National Executive member (1979-1982) and regional secretary. He was also active in the Teacher’s Benevolent Fund from his retirement until his death. He served the wider trade union moment as president, vice president and executive member of Bristol Trades Council over many years. He also was a member of South West TUC executive. He is reputed to never have missed a single GCHQ rally and single-handed collected thousands of pounds through his bucket for the miners’ strike. He was a staunch supporter of the local Arrowsmiths print workers strike, offering advice and practical assistance during what was Bristol’s longest running dispute. In all winds and weathers, Jack both ran and helped running stalls to raise funds, publicise the dispute and explain to whoever would listen the effects of the anti-union laws. He was cheerful and the pickets always looked forward to him coming on the line with a few good stories. He was certainly a welcome addition to the dispute and very early won the trust of the Arrowsmith pickets. In all he did his communism and support for the Morning Star shone through. He was also a regular attender at both the Levellers and Tolpuddle rallies. Jack was a lifelong member and supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear 60 | Red Lives

Disarmament, attending many of the early Aldermaston marches and supporting Greenham Common. He infamously ignored the advice of both the NUT executive and the Broad Left, and chose to move a successful resolution affiliating NUT to CND. He used his allocated 4 minutes for the proposer’s speech to talk about the four-minute warning of a nuclear attack – including taking a loud ticking clock to the rostrum. Jack was a true internationalist supporting numerous solidarity campaigns including the Anti-Apartheid Movement. In 1969 Jack took direct action, being arrested for spreading tacks on the pitch of the Bristol memorial ground in protest against the visiting South African Springboks. He always led the way on the annual SOWETO walk in Priddy, raising over the years many thousands of pounds for the ANC’s Solomon Mahlangu College in Tanzania. Finally, he was pleased to speak on Bristol College Green on the occasion of the first free and democratic vote in South Africa. Jack also supported medical aid for Vietnam, Chile Solidarity, Cuba Solidarity and CARDRI (Campaign Against Repression & for Democratic Rights in IRAQ). Finally, Jack would regularly go as a tutor at the English language school in the German Democratic Republic. Jack was an active member of the communist movement from when he joined in 1948 until his death in 1997. He was originally in the CPGB until he became a founder member of the CPB. He was branch secretary of Bristol North Branch, a member of the District Committee and Secretariat. In early life he had been District Secretary of the West of England YCL. He was a local delegate on several occasions to both district and national congresses. He stood on behalf of the party in local elections and was one of those brave band who regularly spoke at “speakers’ corner” on the Bristol Downs. The Daily Worker and then the Morning Star was his passion. He was never without some copies. In the immediate postwar days, he used to collect them daily off the train at Temple Meads. Like many Party members in those days he had his own delivery round and used to regularly sell them in the street. Being a popular local teacher, one of his pupils spotted him selling the paper and enquired of a teaching colleague: “... were teachers’ salaries so bad that Mr. Evans had to have a paper round to make ends meet?” Jack was also an enthusiastic Morning Star Bazaar supporter and a regular at the l’Humanitè Fete in Paris. Away from politics Jack had several interests and loves. Clearly his family came first, along with dogs, rugby, hockey and travel. He was delighted for example, to visit a free and democratic South Africa. He loved walking, so it is fitting that his final resting place is at the view point, Ebbor Gorge, Somerset. It was a fitting tribute to his role in the Bristol labour movement that his overflowing funeral was attended by all three Bristol Labour MPs – Dawn Primarola, Roger Berry and Doug Naismith. He was not an international or national leader, nor a great philosopher or writer, but without comrades like Jack there would be no movement, no organisation and no mass pressure for change. Specifically, in Jack’s case, there would be no money to pay for the publicity and literature and no one to sell the papers, the pamphlets or give out the leaflets. Red Lives | 61

Albert Fava 1912 – 1993 Albert Fava grew up in the Spanish/Gibraltar border town of La Linea. As a young man he was part of the Spanish Republican movement which, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-38), stood firm against the fascist-led military insurgency to overthrow the elected Popular Front government. This insurgency was led by General Franco and actively backed by the military might of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Fava’s role in this struggle was to help with arms provision and provide political and basic literacy education to the largely peasant volunteers and conscripts in the people’s popular army. “Fortress Gibraltar” was a British colony established by the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 as a result of military conquest. It is a small peninsular of land no more than two and a half square miles in area at the southern tip of Spain and has been the subject of constant political tension between the UK and Spain for centuries. For many years Gibraltar was seen to be of key military importance in defending British and US interests against a perceived Soviet threat. But to be an effective naval dockyard it had to rely heavily on a cross border Spanish workforce which outnumbered the Gibraltarian employees, as well as being dependent on imports from Spain of food and other necessities. In the immediate post-war years (1945-1950) Gibraltar became an important centre of trade union and anti-colonial struggle whilst the British authorities, backed by the Labour Government, acted to restrain and undermine growing demands for democratic and social change. During these dramatic events, the General Secretary of the Gibraltar Congress of Labour (GCL) Albert Fava became a leading figure before being deported by the British authorities, although he had committed no crimes and had done nothing to threaten Gibraltar’s security. Fava was a trade union activist whose main political education was in the CPGB. Fava was evacuated to Britain in 1940, like many Gibraltarians not working in occupations directly related to the war effort against Hitler. Soon after evacuation Fava, with a wife and three children to support, obtained work in Swansea’s engineering industry. He quickly became involved in the local trade union movement and was elected by his workmates as a shop steward in 1941, by which time he was established as a leading figure in the local Communist Party. In early 1943, the Fava family had moved to Stirling. He soon took up leading positions in the Scottish CP, first at factory level and then, in 1945, at national level as an elected member of the Scottish Committee. By 1948 Fava had seven years of CP training and activity under his belt. He was a highly rated cadre when he left in the early summer of 1948 to take up the position of General Secretary of the newly formed GCL, Gibraltar’s first mass indigenous trade union open to all Gibraltarians. Fava was well equipped for the job, and with the full support of a small group of activists he set about transforming the GCL, quickly introducing administrative and structural reforms to create, by 1948 standards, a modern structure with a sound financial base. The union quickly grew its membership to become Gibraltar’s largest ever union. As Creech-Jones, a Colonial Office minister wrote to the British TUC General Secretary: “As a result of Fava’s personality, energy 62 | Red Lives

and knowledge of trade unions, membership increased and members began to pay their subs more regularly … Great activity was set on foot and Fava attempted to introduce many trade union practices employed in the UK”. These qualities, commended themselves to the Gibraltarian working class. But to the unelected omnipotent Governor and the local grandees, Fava’s success in advancing democratic demands and strengthening trade unionism spelt danger, a view shared by British government ministers. By late 1948 the Cold War was well underway. The British Labour government and the Gibraltarian upper crust saw the fascist Franco as an important ally in their struggle to hold back self-government for the people of Gibraltar as well as containing communism in what was seen as a strategically important Mediterranean region. It is well to remember that at this time any left-wing activists – indeed any Gibraltarian nationalist who questioned the right of the British and their appointed Governor to rule the roost – was labelled a communist or a fellow-traveller duped by the communists. With Fava’s encouragement the GCL campaigned for both national self determination and in solidarity with the Spanish unions against the draconian repression visited upon them by Franco’s government, including the execution of a number of trade union leaders. So, one way or another the British authorities agreed with Governor Anderson that Fava had to go, and in October 1948 he was summarily deported to Britain at three days’ notice, without due process or right of appeal. At all stages the British authorities were anxious to stress that the deportation was for political not trade union reasons. Fava was exiled, they insisted, not because of his trade union role but because of his activities as a communist. The problem for the authorities was two-fold – communist activity was not illegal and in practice it was impossible to divorce Fava’s politics from his trade union work. The Governor wrote to Creech-Jones: “There is adequate evidence that he is maintaining a political correspondence with communist elements abroad, and I am satisfied that under cover of genuine trade union activity and in accordance with the usual communist infiltration into local labour organisations, is endeavouring to sow the seeds of discord and to make mischief in local industrial circles. He is energetic, efficient and intelligent. I regard it as of first importance that he should be removed before, and not after, he has been able to do an appreciable amount of damage. I have discussed with the Minister of State who concurs in the action proposed.” Note here there is an absence of anything resembling a smoking gun, let alone concrete evidence. The Governor never published his evidence even when challenged by the GCL leadership and refused to allow any independent scrutiny of the sources for his allegations. The Secret Service files contain just two examples of overseas correspondence which are entirely devoid of political content. In its annual report for 1949, the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) reported this: “Mr Albert Fava, the General secretary of the Gibraltar Council of Labour has been expelled in spite of protests from his union … He is not allowed to return there. Mr Fava, who was an active shop steward whilst he was in Britain during the war, is acknowledged to be generally responsible for the remarkable growth of Red Lives | 63

trade unionism since his return to Gibraltar. The reason given for his expulsion is that he is a communist and engaged in communist activities. No suggestion was made that he was guilty of any illegal act or abnormal political activity.” “The case is mentioned in some detail because it bears a significant resemblance to the vastly more numerous cases of banishment and deportation of Malayan trade unionists during the period of intense trade union recruitment in Malaya after the liberation and up to the time when the present hostilities broke out. There is no method by which a Governor’s action can be challenged in law.” Fava remained loyal to the call for Gibraltar’s right to self-government, attacking both imperialist Britain and fascist Spain for claiming sovereignty over the peninsula. In Gibraltar he is still widely remembered in trade union and progressive circles. Thus, in October 2018, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Fava’s deportation, the T&GWU (Gibraltar Branch) branch published a 58-page pamphlet exposing the roles of the British government, Arthur Deakin, the leader of the T&GWU, and the British TUC general secretary, Tewson, in bringing about the unlawful deportation of Albert Fava. Fava died in 1993 but he is far from forgotten in his native Gibraltar. In recent years a block of council flats has been named after him. The plaque in the entrance hall reads as follows: “Alberto Fava (1912 – 1993) anti-fascist and anti-colonialist. Fought in support of the democratically elected government of Spain in 1936. In 1948, held the position of Secretary General of the Gibraltar Confederation of Labour, the largest Gibraltar trade union at the time. Despite his British nationality the Governor expelled him from Gibraltar as a subversive under the Aliens and Strangers Order. During his term as Secretary General, his union proposed, for the first time in Gibraltar’s history, a social insurance system, old age pension, family allowance, sickness and accident benefit, redundancy compensation, public health service, health and safety legislation, unemployment benefit, and civilian participation in the legislative process.” The self-determination group, which campaigns for Gibraltar’s independence, made their first “Gibraltar Award” to Albert Fava’s relatives in recognition of his contribution to the political and economic development of Gibraltar.

Bill Freeman 1941 – 2004 Most communists will have to attend a picket line at some point in their working life. Few can have done so on the scale of Bill Freeman who, as one of the chief marshals of the year-long picketing, and Thursday and Saturday evening protests outside Murdoch’s Wapping plant during the News International dispute, sometimes found himself at the head of tens of thousands of protestors. Bill was one of three brothers all working in print in London. They were the third generation of a print union and communist family and their father, Bill “the burglar” Freeman, was a well-known character among the many in Fleet Street chapels. Bill the elder was, among other things, a minder for anti-fascist speakers in the 1930s London campaigns. Jim, George and Bill were all activists in the print union NATSOPA and were known for their solidarity with other workers as well as activities within print. All 64 | Red Lives

three were arrested on the Grunwick picket line in 1977. The youngest brother Bill was the most active. In 1972-3 as chair of the joint chapels he led the year-long “work-in” involving 150 printworkers in an epic battle to save their south London factory. Briant Colour Printing was highly unionised, with good terms and conditions. The company had been owned by the family of a prominent Tory MP, but it was sold early in 1972 to an asset stripper with the financial support of Robert Horne Ltd, one of the print industry’s largest paper suppliers. In June 1972, the closure of the company was announced. At a mass meeting, and inspired by the struggle of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in, the workforce decided unanimously to fight the closure. They threw out the liquidator and directors, declaring a work-in to save their jobs and factory, joining the battles being fought across Britain at the time for the right to work. The workers occupied and ran the factory for over a year, printing publicity materials for various other disputes, for trade unions and the labour movement – notably for the Pentonville Five and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. In July 1972, the first solidarity demonstration of around 3,000 people marched from the Briant factory in the Old Kent

s Briant Colour Printing Work-In committtee leading one of their marches through Fleet Street. Left to right: Bill Dunn (CPGB); Tom Hooper, Bill Sawyer, Bill Freeman, Chrissie Brazil (all BCP Work-In committee); Jimmy Airlie and another shop steward comrade (UCS occupation and BCP work-in committee); Brenda Horton, Norman Pennington (BCP Work-In committee). Red Lives | 65

Road to Clerkenwell Green for a rally, then joined the march to Pentonville to demand the release of the five gaoled dockers. During the dispute, the workers were faced with writs and injunctions, all of which were defied and burnt on demonstrations outside the law courts. The workers picketed the principal creditor Robert Hornes, with the support of many other trade unionists including dockers. This in turn led to the first deployment of the hated police Special Patrol Group. The trade union and labour movement gave tremendous moral, financial and physical solidarity throughout the dispute. A victory was secured when the factory reopened in July 1973 under new ownership. Unfortunately five months later the factory was suddenly bolted and barred and the workers lost their jobs permanently. Nevertheless, campaigns in the printing industry for the right to work and against redundancies saved many jobs, and paper supplier Robert Hornes became fully unionised. After the dispute Bill worked in Fleet Street, as a machine room casual with various newspapers and then, in accordance with seniority requirements of the casual system, made permanent at the Daily Telegraph and the Observer. Together with another NATSOPA member he devised a fairer system of work allocation for casuals which enabled the union to withstand the Times Newspapers lockout of 1978-79 by providing many of the sacked workers with some limited employment. With other left-wingers he helped expose the scandal of NATSOPA union funds having failed to be returned to union coffers after being squirrelled away in krugerrands to protect the union from sequestration. He campaigned actively for the right of reply in newspapers in the circumstances of other workers being traduced during industrial disputes, and to demand that the Observer admit women workers into the machine room to work. Due to his well-known expertise in the organisation of marches and demonstrations in the 1970s and 1980s, along with an impressive group of other comrades in London and the south-east, Bill was asked by the TUC to assist with the massive Peoples’ March for Jobs marches in the early 1980s and a number of other similar events. Bill foresaw that the attack on the miners would then be repeated on the printers. He was tireless in arguing the case for solidarity with the miners amongst Fleet Street workers. Bill was right. They did come for the printers next. During the heavily and viciously policed Stockport Messenger dispute Bill was wrongfully arrested, charged, found guilty and fined for assaulting a police officer during the picketing. Solidarity dictated that he never disclosed who actually carried out the deed! The strong bond between printworkers in Fleet Street and elsewhere was renewed in the great miners’ strike in 1984/5. Bill was tireless in working for solidarity with the miners organising and assisting many solidarity and fundraising events for miners and their families in all parts of the country. Acting for the London Machine Branch of SOGAT, Bill was heavily involved in the organisation of the Wapping dispute, both as an individual member and on behalf of SOGAT. His commitment and tactical skill in organising picketing as well as demonstrations meant that he was one of the union representatives named in court action by News International. He was the driving force behind the popular Wapping Post newspaper produced by strikers and supporters for the duration of the dispute, and 66 | Red Lives

was the lead organiser of the Printworkers’ March for Jobs. He was expelled from the Communist Party in the 1980s, along with many other comrades who had spent their working lives campaigning, organising and fighting for workers. He noted in his defiant appeal to Congress that such actions by a leadership devoid of class politics meant that along the British Road to Socialism they were only kerb crawling! Bill remained active and loyal to his class, becoming FOC (senior shop steward) of the machine room at the Daily Telegraph. However, a short time after the transfer from Fleet Street to Docklands in 1988 he was sacked along with 199 other production workers in a full-blooded attack on the workers and the union. After an interval of a year or so, Bill was appointed by SOGAT as a union organiser and official covering the south east of England, representing print and paper mill workers. He eventually represented the GPMU at national union level, leading negotiations with papermaking employers in particular. Accustomed to the heavier industry of national newspapers, he found papermaking a comparable and satisfying challenge. After his expulsion from the CPGB, Bill maintained links with the Communist Campaign Group and then joined Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party for a couple of years, finally re-joining comrades in the re-established Communist Party of Britain. Throughout his entire life Bill regarded himself as a communist whether he was actually in the Party or not. He had joined the CPGB during the Briant Colour Printing dispute, and together with George Jerrom sought to extend Printers’ Charter as the broad left grouping across all the print unions. In addition to campaigns in the printing industry, he was most closely associated with miners’ and dockworkers struggles. After retirement as a full-time official in 2001, he was involved briefly with the International Centre for Trade Union Rights and had a particular interest in the Palestinian struggle, having taken part in a SOGAT delegation to the West Bank in 1988. He was also able to indulge in his passion of renovating Citroen DS cars. He died in 2004, and his funeral was completely in keeping with his life, bringing together representatives of the rank and file of all the print unions and uniting so many activists. There cannot be many communists who are led on their last journey by a cortege headed up by a long-winding procession of vintage Citroen DS motors. He died in 2004, leaving his long-term partner Ann, his son Mark and five grandchildren.

Ruth and Eddie Frow 1922 – 2008 and 1906 – 1997 Eddie was born on 6 June 1906, the son of a tenant farmer of 18 acres, in Lincolnshire. He left school aged 14, and after a year at trade school commenced his working life as an apprentice in the drawing office of an engineering firm. Later he became a toolmaker. In 1924, aged 17 he joined the Communist Party, remaining a member until the day he died. He was 20 when he joined the General Strike in 1926. The Engineers Union had not been called out. It was a move of personal solidarity for which he lost his job. Eddie reckoned that over the following 20 years he lost 20 out of 21 jobs because of his union activity. Always a shop steward or convener, he served for 20 years on the National Red Lives | 67

Committee of the AEU, standing down in 1961 when he was elected as the full time Secretary for the Manchester District. He was 23 when the stock market crash of 1929 destroyed the economy, and 27 before he worked again. During those years he was an active member of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and chairman of the Salford branch. The scar on his nose was given to him by the police, in a temporary cell in Salford Town Hall. Eddie was one of the leaders of a march to the Town Hall. The police broke up the march and arrested the leaders. Eddie got a beating. They also gave him five months in prison. The scar stayed for life. Walter Greenwood, a council worker at the time, wrote the novel Love on the Dole (1933) in which the “Battle of Bexley Square” is a climactic event. Eddie was 47 when he met Ruth and began a relationship which lasted for over 40 years and produced, among other virtues, the WCML. Eddie died on 15 May 1997, aged 90. His lifelong commitment to the causes of human emancipation has a fine memorial in the continued development of the library he and Ruth founded. Ruth was born on 28th July 1922, left school in 1939 and spent the next four and a half years in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She joined the Communist Party in 1945 in Kent. Local miners advised her to join the CP in preference to the Labour Party. Ruth subsequently served in many positions of responsibility within the CP. When Ruth returned to London after the war, she became involved in the peace movement, serving as a member of the National Council of the British Peace Committee. She was Secretary of Manchester Peace Committee when Manchester CND was formed, and was elected as their first Vice-Chair. Ruth took an Emergency Training Scheme to become a teacher and became involved in union activity as a member of the National Union of Teachers. She represented Manchester Teachers’ Association on Manchester and Salford Trades Council. She was President of Altrincham NUT at the time when they went on strike for a day in the early 70s. She took early retirement in 1980. At the time she was the Deputy Head of one of Manchester’s largest comprehensive schools. Eddie and Ruth first met in 1953 at a Communist Party day school on labour history. They both shared a love of labour movement books and documents and realised how much they had in common. A couple of years later they started living together, and were married in 1961. By the late 1960s they had built up an enviable collection of works in their home in Stretford. Room after room was filling up with books and their home became known as the Working Class Movement Library. Donations of personal collections were added to the Library by labour activists far and wide. 68 | Red Lives

Eddie and Ruth wrote countless articles and essays on aspects of the labour movement, making great use of the Library as a source. There are the numerous books and pamphlets on the history of the Chartist movement, the Spanish Civil War, the growth of trade unionism, the co-operative movement, peace organisations and other political organisations from the Labour Party and the CPGB through to the ILP, SPGB, etc. By the 1980s their house was at bursting point and so the City of Salford Council agreed to house the magnificent library in a Victorian building called Jubilee House on Salford Crescent. The collection has been there ever since, and they had a flat in the building. When Eddie died, Ruth carried on undaunted working for the Library. Visitors were always greeted with a really warm, personal welcome; all felt the friendly hospitable environment she created. A month before her sudden death on 11 January 2008, she welcomed the news that the Library had won a £313,000 Heritage Lottery Grant.

GCT Giles 1891 – 1976 Granville Courtney Trelawny Giles was one of the most influential communists in Britain in the first half of the 20th Century. Born in 1891, he was educated at Eton where Harold Macmillan (later to be Prime Minister) was his fag. He then graduated from Kings College, Cambridge. Although he first came across socialist ideas while studying in Berlin in 1913, it was his experience as an army officer in WW1 that transformed his world outlook. He wrote: “Three years of war and the loss of many of my friends put me in hospital with a bad breakdown. I began to think and read”. After working in journalism and teaching abroad, in 1925 he visited the Soviet Union. He wrote: “… I got a glimpse of a new world where the people who did the real work of the world also ruled … I came back to my school work and to politics with a new enthusiasm and a new understanding”. He became active in the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and during the General Strike found himself working with Communist Party members: “I found in them a devotion to principle and a balanced outlook I had not found elsewhere. Here at last was a political party which was able to explain what was happening in the world and happening to me. Here was a party which not only had ideals but a scientific outlook. Red Lives | 69

Here was a party which offered loyal comradeship, a belief in mankind and a faith in the future”. He joined the CP in 1926 and in the same year was appointed head of Acton County School. After ten years of austerity, followed by the outbreak of WW2, education, along with much else, was in a state of chaos. Britain entered the war with a low level of education for the great mass of the people, who left school and all educational contact at the age of fourteen. They were catered for in elementary schools, half of which were churchowned. For a far smaller group there were local authority-run secondary schools that charged fees but also offered a proportion of free places and there were also ancient endowed grammar schools. The real elite however, were educated elsewhere – in the public school system. At the outbreak of war, Giles emerged as a key leader in the NUT and was selected to head the Hamilton House head office team that prepared the evacuation of young children and teachers from cities under threat of bombing. Operation ‘Pied Piper’ included the removal of three million children by 100,000 teachers and parents in two days over a weekend, without a single fatality. This biggest single movement of population in the history of Britain was organised at the centre by teachers, and the directing team was led by NUT leader G C T Giles, the first communist to lead the union. He was also a member of the Party central committee. The order to “evacuate forthwith” was given at 11.07am on 31 August. Teachers produced two labels, one each for child and their luggage. Within seven days a quarter of the population of Britain had changed address. In 1942, the NUT, along with other organisations, formed the Council for Education Advance (CEA). At the core of the CEA’s demands were the abolition or assimilation of public schools as a step towards the creation of a national system of education, secondary education for all over the age of 11, the abolition of fees, raising the school leaving age to 16, and abolition of state funding to church schools. Giles had been elected to the NUT executive in 1937 and as President in 1944 was at the heart of the campaigning and negotiations in what emerged as the 1944 Education Act as well as speaking at more than 200 meetings on both Bill and Act in a single year. He was also selected by the Education Minister to tour the staging grounds of troops preparing for D-Day where his speeches on a future for education won widespread endorsement. As a strong supporter of the Act and its potential, he wrote The New School Tie in support. He devoted a chapter on the secondary school of the future which argued that they should be comprehensive, non-selective and attended by all who lived in the neighbourhood. He warned that there would be “tremendous battles ahead” but argued: “on the whole, and in spite of certain weaknesses the Act is progressive and democratic … it is up to us”. Giles was admired by many who held quite different political views. Despite being described as: “a man of quite extraordinary charm, almost magnetic attraction and formidable persuasiveness”. As the cold war developed these qualities didn’t save him from being a victim of an anti-communist witch hunt along with many other comrades. He lost his seat on the NUT Executive in 1949 and didn’t win it back until 1952. His employer, Middlesex County Council, imposed a blanket ban on any new appointments of communists and fascists to headships. 70 | Red Lives

Giles was a communist through and through, for all of his life, but he certainly was not a yes man. In 1968 he is one of those recorded on the executive committee as voting against the intervention of Warsaw Pact countries in the internal affairs of Czechoslovakia. Giles enjoyed a long friendship with Annie and Tom Higdon, the teachers at the Burston Strike School, and sent his son Paul to the school as a pupil. He recognised that the solidarity of the trade union movement was essential for that school’s survival. The NUT in Giles’ day was a professional association with a narrow focus. Today the National Education Union, successor to the NUT, is a genuine trade union largely because of the pioneering, principled and brave leadership of Giles and his comrades. GCT Giles died in October 1976.

Ken Gill 1927 – 2009 Ken Gill found his politics young. A child of the 1930s depression, the youngest in a family living in a council house in Melksham, the Second World War saw him lose his RAF crew brother aged 21 when he was shot down over Germany. He discovered communism in his early teens via a Welsh miner lodger and the Red Army’s great battle against Nazism. He refused officer training on political grounds and became a draughtsman’s apprentice. Aged 17, he was a volunteer election agent for the Labour candidate in Melksham in 1945. At 21, he went to London to make his fortune and get involved in communist politics in the capital. In 1951 he joined a comrade on a trip to East Germany for the world peace congress, which saw them both arrested by US military police. He was successful as a young draftsman and salesman in a small engineering firm, but his political commitment saw him stand for union office in 1962 in the draughtsman’s union DATA (later TASS). He was thrust into the growing industrial militancy of the workforce fighting for better wages and conditions. His success as a negotiator and strike organiser winning victories for the members saw him elected as deputy general secretary in 1972. This was the era of Labour employment secretary Barbara Castle’s In Place of Strife, an attempt to limit union industrial action, which Ken opposed very publicly at the TUC, making his name as a strategic thinker on the left of the union movement. In 1974 he was elected general secretary of TASS, which at the time was amalgamated with the powerful engineering union, AUEW. He was elected as the only communist to the TUC general council, helping lead the broad left grouping within the TUC throughout the late 70s, when Labour attempted to reduce inflation through wage controls, and brought in IMF-backed austerity. Ken opposed both. Ken played a vocal role on women’s representation within the union movement, and also pushed for black representation within the TUC, when it was not popular or Red Lives | 71

accepted that women and ethnic minorities were massively under represented. During the 1984 miners’ strike Ken and his union not only supported the strike, but assisted the NUM leadership in various ways to avoid the seizure of its funds by the courts under the Thatcherite anti-union laws. Various meetings, involving the NUM’s advisers and officials, took place at Ken’s home in south London (which MI5 had bugged since the 1970s). Under his leadership, TASS supported the anti-apartheid struggle, paying the deposit for the Free Nelson Mandela concert in London in 1988 and hosting South African trade unionists. The union he led achieved a number of mergers to become a major general union of white-collar skilled workers, MSF (In later years it would join forces with Unite.) Ken remained a loyal supporter of the Soviet Union throughout his life, although his politics were never rigid and he was known for his hard-headed pragmatism. He visited the country and met the leadership, first under Brezhnev, then Gorbachev. In 1985, when the British CP shifted toward euro-communism, Ken was among the group expelled for supporting the Marxist line of the Morning Star. He became chair of the Morning Star’s management committee in 1984, helping steer the paper through the difficult years of the late 80s and 90s. When the USSR collapsed he did not abandon his politics. He helped set up the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in 1992, visiting Cuba and meeting Fidel Castro twice, and remained its chair until 2008, when he became ill with cancer. On his death aged 81, he was lauded throughout the trade union movement, and condolences were sent from South Africa and Cuba, at the highest level, for his great commitment to international solidarity and socialism.

Dave Goodman 1915 – 2001 Dave Goodman was born in Middlesbrough, on 25 February 1915, to Jewish parents who had emigrated from tsarist Russia. At age 13 or 14 he joined the Young Liberals, following his father’s politics. In his last year at school, he applied for teacher training, but it was a time of recession, and he could not get in. He went first into the family’s small trader business and then became a commercial traveller. With the rise of fascism in Germany, the Jewish community in Middlesbrough, as elsewhere, felt a kinship with the victims of Nazism, and Dave’s views began to change. Learning that some of his friends and contacts in the community had joined Middlesbrough YCL, Dave himself joined in February 1937, and his involvement rapidly grew – attending political education classes, reading literature, selling the YCL paper Challenge, leafleting factory gates, and agitating on unemployed issues and the grievances of council tenants. There were also regular dances and hiking or camping week-ends. One of the big campaigns was support for the Spanish Republican government. It was known that the British Battalion of the International Brigades had played a vital role at Jarama, though at terrible cost, and when the call came out for more recruits, Dave had no hesitation in volunteering. He was interviewed by Party district secretary George Short. Dave arrived in Spain on 23 January 1938. His training was cut short by the need to 72 | Red Lives

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reinforce the front line after the fascists took Teruel. After being wounded in the leg he returned, as commissar, to the fourth company of the British Battalion. It was a period of retreat and regrouping, with some action involving enemy forces, tanks and planes, and on one occasion having to wade across the River Ebro. On 31 March he was one of 140 British Brigaders captured in an ambush at Calceite, and he was imprisoned in the concentration camp of San Pedro de Cardena, describing it as “an education”: “It was grim. No windows, just bars. It was cold, even into late spring. There was a stone floor and no bedding. Sanitation was minimal. You’d get a very small loaf of bread once a day, otherwise only beans …. People made chess sets from bits of bread and we organised classes. We endeavoured to keep ourselves mentally, as well as physically, alive.” Dave’s last two weeks in Spain were spent in the San Sebastian prison, where brave Basque anti-fascist prisoners were held and executions were frequent. Dave returned to Middlesbrough in 1939, his political convictions greatly deepened and strengthened. He was banned from enlisting in the army and blacklisted from war work, but continued YCL activity, on one occasion being charged – with International Brigade comrade Dave Marshall – by the police for alleged obstruction while distributing literature outside the technical college. After the war he became Communist Party district secretary in Devon and Cornwall. In 1965, at the age of 50, Dave became a mature student, first at Fircroft College, and then at Hull University, where he graduated in economics in 1969. He then lectured in trade union studies at Cauldon College in Stoke-on-Trent, later becoming warden and tutor-organiser for the Workers’ Educational Association at the Wedgwood Memorial

s Dave Goodman next to Bill Alexander (back, left) with International Brigades Association Committee, 1996. Red Lives | 73

College in Barlaston, where he pioneered summer schools for North Staffordshire Miners. On retirement, Dave continued lecturing part-time and wrote up his early biography in From the Tees to the Ebro: My Road to Spain (Middlesbrough CPGB branch, 1987). He also published, in 1988, No Thanks to Lloyd George: the forgotten story – how the old age pension was won, with a foreword by Jack Jones, TGWU retired members’ president. He then set about campaigning locally for the restoration of the link between the state pension and earnings. In 1991 he established, and became chair of, the North Staffordshire Pensioners’ Convention and he served on the National Council of the Pensioners’ Convention throughout the 1990s. Round about the turn of the Millennium, Dave and some pensioner friends hijacked a bus in Stoke, furious at the way pensioners had been treated by the New Labour government. He died suddenly on 3 January 2001, having just completed a chapter, ‘Campaigning and the Pensioners’ Movement’, for the Open University collection Understanding Care, Welfare and Community: A Reader. From 1986, if not earlier, Dave was active in the International Brigade Association, becoming its president. In the Potteries Museum in Hanley, Stoke, there is a memorial to him in cold-pour bronze by Mike Jones, entitled Symbol of the International Brigade.

Angela Gradwell Tuckett 1906 – 1994 Angela Gradwell Tuckett was a remarkable woman. A complex character with a history of militancy and radical politics whose disparate experiences encompassed playing hockey for England in no less than 11 Hockey Internationals, writing for various left-wing publications, as well as writing books, plays, songs and poems, singing and playing concertina. All with the same unswerving passion she had felt when joining the Communist Party as a young woman. During her lifetime she met many of the great writers, intellectuals and politicians of the day and even qualified as a pilot. Always passionate about her beliefs and never afraid to speak out in support of those who were oppressed, to raise awareness of injustice or inequality. She was a peace campaigner, feminist and trades unionist. Born in 1906 to an affluent Bristol family, her father Richard Tuckett was a local solicitor who specialised in defending civil rights and her mother Edna Stacy came from a left-wing family of original thinkers, feminists and artists. Angela had two older siblings, a sister Joan with whom she co-wrote plays for Bristol’s Unity Players and a brother Coldstream. She was encouraged to think for herself and take an interest in the arts and politics. 74 | Red Lives

On leaving school she joined her father’s legal practice in 1922, the same year that the Law Society admitted women as solicitors, and qualified as the first female solicitor in Bristol in 1928. She joined the Communist Party on seeing the plight of the unemployed in Bristol and the Welsh Hunger Marches of the 1930s, taking food and copies of the Daily Worker to the marchers each day as they passed through the city. She became active organising meetings, acting as a driver, and becoming ‘legal observer’ at demonstrations, including facing baton charges by the police at two violent demonstrations in Old Market, Bristol in 1932. She excelled at hockey as a schoolgirl and played for England from 1931 – 1936. However, after an incident in Germany in 1935, in a stadium designed and being made ready for the Olympics the following year, she was never again selected to play for England. She refused to be part of the propaganda machinery validating the Nazi regime and was alone in refusing to give the Nazi salute. Her first husband John Pilley, who she married in 1933, was an academic at the University of Bristol. They travelled extensively in Europe, taking cash to the Greek patriots and supporting the Republicans in Spain. They lived for a short time in USA but divorced in 1941. He was a political theorist whereas she was forever the activist and campaigner. Angela moved to London after returning from USA and became Head of the Legal Department of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) in 1940, and joined the Daily Worker as its solicitor and legal advisor in 1942. She moved to Labour Monthly in 1948 writing numerous articles over 30 years, and was awarded Honorary Life Membership of National Union of Journalists in 1966. She would have remained in London had she not met and married Ike Gradwell, and moved to Swindon in 1962. They met on an official visit to Czechoslovakia in 1961. He was the love of her life and they remained together until his death in 1979. Angela’s political activities continued in Swindon. Standing as a Communist in the Wiltshire Council elections in 1967 she gained 7.4% of the poll, in a town then dominated by Labour and a county dominated by the Conservatives. Throughout her life she enjoyed listening to folk music, composing songs, singing and playing concertina, rarely missing Swindon Folk Singers’ Club on Friday evenings. Many remember Angela selling copies of The Morning Star or busking on the streets of Swindon. A distinctive figure playing her concertina to raise funds for the peace movement and in the mid-1980s for striking miners and their families. Angela died in August 1994 at the age of 88. Although ill health dominated her final years she remained active in the Communist Party, the peace movement and folk music until the end. Her legacy includes a treasury of books and publications that she wrote: The Scottish Carter published in 1967, The Blacksmiths’ History: What smithy workers gave trade unionism published in 1974, and The Scottish Trades Union Congress: The First 80 Years 1897-1977 published in1986 as well as collections of songs and verse and Ike Gradwell 1906-1979, Man of the People; a memoir published in 1980. Red Lives | 75

Horace Green 1907 – 1995 Horace was born on 10 March 1907 in a small pit village just outside Bradford. His father had a boot repair shop, and Horace attended the local Socialist Sunday School, which had a lasting effect on him. At age 14 he started work down the local pit, but after only one month was involved in the 1921 lock-out. In 1924 he went to work in his grandfather’s cobbling shop, later becoming a master boot repairer. He joined the shop workers’ union NUDAW, and through that also the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and its Guild of Youth, standing in local elections for the former and eventually becoming national secretary of the latter. It was in the Guild that he met Nora, whom he was to marry in the early 1930s. At this stage Horace did not see the Communist Party as progressing Marxism in Britain. But by 1935 he and Nora had left the ILP, due to its anti-Soviet attitude, and had moved to Hemsworth, where Horace became active in the local Labour Party and the trades council. Despite national Labour Party and TUC opposition, he supported the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and he became secretary of both the local Aid for Spain campaign and a large local Left Book Club branch. Deepening his knowledge of Marxism, and becoming a regular Daily Worker reader, Horace joined the CP in 1937, Nora probably around the same time. He soon became recognised as a leading Party activist in Yorkshire, including through local election contests. In 1943 he became the full-time district organiser, liaising with trade unions and working with their shop stewards, organisations and campaigns. Moving back to Bradford, he joined the Clerical and Administrative Workers’ Union (CAWU), and was elected a delegate to Bradford Trades Council, although he was removed from that in the late 1940s by the union’s Rule 13, which required communists to state their affiliation in internal elections, and banned them from being delegates to outside bodies. Nonetheless he continued to attend the Trades Council as a ‘visitor’. In 1951 Horace took up the role of North East Coast district secretary of the Party, moving to Newcastle with Nora and their daughter Ann. His Party wage was low, and sometimes non-existent, and he was only able to continue with Nora’s income as a bus conductress. He soon got to grips with the local political scene, developing excellent working relationships with local trade union full-time officials and rankand-file representatives, including several leading communists. He was ever-present during strikes and demonstrations. He attended Newcastle Trades Council, again as a ‘visitor’, and was often called upon there to add to a request for support from a strike committee. In 1973 he was awarded the Trades Council’s Tom Aisbitt Gold Medal, for “meritorious service to trades unionism and the labour movement”. In his own branch of CAWU – renamed APEX in 1972 – Horace earned great 76 | Red Lives

respect. He was to become branch secretary, Area Council delegate and treasurer, and in 1974 the first communist to be elected to the union’s Executive Committee, despite Rule 13, which was removed shortly afterwards. He was particularly helpful with the successful 1973 Coles Cranes, Sunderland, occupation, against redundancies and in defence of collective agreements – coordinating collections and advising on production of a local broadsheet. In the 1976-8 Grunwick strike he played a significant support role, both on the NEC and locally, attending the picket whenever in London on union business. Horace built up links with Labour MPs, and gained respect and trust from Labour Party activists in many campaigns and activities, including Marxist/Christian dialogues, and the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in the late 1960s. In 1968 he helped organise Newcastle’s first anti-racist march. Participation in Newcastle’s Immigrant Liaison Committee led to his involvement with the Community Relations Council, to which he got the Party to affiliate. In the late 1970s he persuaded the APEX Regional Executive actively to support the Anti-Nazi League. At age 65, Horace was obliged to step down from APEX’s NEC, and was awarded the union’s Gold Badge for exceptional service. He continued as Party district secretary for another 10 years. His term of office was exceptionally long, and was marred towards the end by the sharp divisions emerging in the Party, between the eurocommunists and those seeking to hold to a Marxist position, with Horace somewhat caught in the crossfire. He resigned in 1982, and within a few years tragically began to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. He died in the early part of 1995. As APEX regional official John Creaby wrote: “Everyone who knew Horace recognised and respected his honesty and forthright opinions.”

Henry Gunter 1920 – 2007 One of the Communist Party’s many unsung heroes was Birmingham’s Henry Gunter. Born in Portland, Jamaica in 1920, he studied to become an accountant at college there until he was tempted to leave for the Panama Canal Zone in 1940. The Americans who controlled the Canal Zone were recruiting Jamaicans and he joined many others who made the journey. In Panama he encountered the colour bar for the first time because the Americans enforced rigid racist Jim Crow laws in every territory they occupied. After a brief return to Jamaica he, with other Jamaican workers, travelled to the USA. He was sent to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and while there he joined the local union and began writing articles for the daily paper of the American CIO. In one article, he stressed the fact that very few Black workers were employed in skilled jobs and this led to his writing being published in Jamaica. Henry Gunter met members of the American Communist Party. He worked in the USA until the end of the war and became a staunch union activist, and this and his many articles attacking racism made him a target of the FBI, which refused him a visa back to that country after he returned to Jamaica at the end of the war. Back in Jamaica he came an activist in the Peoples National Party and worked Red Lives | 77

with one of their leaders, the Marxist Richard Hart. Job opportunities were few, so after he realised he was blocked from going back to the USA, he decided to emigrate to Britain. As he had friends in Birmingham, he made that city his home in 1950. As an experienced, militant worker he joined the Communist Party, where he was to play a very important role for many years. In Britain, although he was a trained accountant, Henry Gunter was sent to work in a factory. He lost that job when he challenged a shop steward who had expressed racist views to him. He found another job as a machine operator and tool cutter and became an active member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Eventually, he became the first Black delegate to the Birmingham Trades Council. In 1952, he put forward a resolution: “In view of the appalling conditions which immigrant workers have to live under in Birmingham, we ask that the TUC demand that the government provide accommodation for the workers”. This motion was adopted by the trades council. As well as being an active Communist, Henry Gunter helped form the Birmingham branch of Caribbean Labour Congress and often contributed articles for their paper Caribbean News. The unofficial colour bar in Britain during the 1950s was particularly strong in Birmingham and at the end of 1954, the local Communist Party asked him to write about that situation in the city. They published his report as a pamphlet called A Man’s A Man. This was a ground-breaking move by the Party and his pamphlet is a key anti racist text. Henry vividly exposed racism in employment, housing, in hotels, social activities and did not hesitate to take those trade union leaders who expressed racist views to task. Unfortunately the Communist Party didn’t work with other Caribbean or African Communists to produce similar pamphlets, until decades later. As well as his work in the Communist Party, Henry Gunter became a member of the Afro Caribbean Society in the city and very soon became its leader. He organised a march with the slogan “No Colour Bar to Housing and Jobs” and addressed many public meetings. He led this organisation to force a change in council policy to integrate the work force of the bus services, which had refused to employ Black workers. In 1958, when Paul Robeson regained his passport after years of international support and solidarity from a worldwide movement, which was led in Britain by the Communist Party, he made a tour of the country. Gunter met him in Birmingham and reminded the great man that they had met in his time in Milwaukee, when Robeson was performing at a rally for the American-Soviet Society. Later in life, although no longer a Party member, he continued writing and researching on anti racism and on the Black population of that city. He died on 23rd July 2007. Henry Gunter’s work as a Communist, trade unionist and Civil Rights leader need to be acknowledged. In particular, his pioneering mid 1950s pamphlet A Man’s A Man is a unique example of a Black Communist writing a pamphlet for his Party that had enduring influence, way beyond its ranks.

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Ida Hackett 1914 – 2012 Joe Clarke writes: “Ida Hackett was a miner’s daughter. She was hugely respected by the most courageous of the Notts miners. Ida was given honorary membership of the NUM for her work mobilising the Women’s Support Groups during the 1984/5 pit strike. Forthright and brave, she and her studious bricklayer husband Ernest, were the backbone of Mansfield Communist Party, and the East Midlands district. Ida cut her teeth in trade union struggles in a hosiery factory where she worked. She quickly became involved politically. Her comrade, Eric Whalley, joined the International Brigade and was killed in Spain. Ida was active in Aid for Spain, the unemployed struggles, and anti-fascist campaigns. Ida was a tribune of the community. She stood for council, getting strong votes, though never elected. Problems of housing, schooling, social care, pensions or health were always brought to Ida, rather than to councillors. Ida’s knowledge, experience and combativeness was legendary. Notts miners are disparaged for failing to commit to the ‘84/5 strike. But those who abandoned the NUM left behind a strong minority who braved police brutality, viciously hostile media, wholesale arrests, financial hardship and strife in family and community. Ida was in the thick of it. Women activists, many whose life experiences had hitherto been constrained within the pit village, Skegness (“Skeggy”), and Benidorm, became educated in struggle, campaigning and travel. Ida gained their trust and they valued her experience. She dispatched them to speak for funds and solidarity, everywhere, here and abroad. Notts pits villages were in police lockdown. So many pickets had been hauled through the courts and bound over to prevent legal picketing. Travel was denied to prevent outside help getting through. It was however possible to convene a national demonstration which was brought to Mansfield, so outsiders were allowed into the town, but not to picket. Ida, with Hilary Cave of the NUM, conspired to let demonstrators’ coaches arrive, but for the pickets to fail to return – Ida having found safe houses for them! Picketing continued. Ida combated the Cold War in all its manifestations. After decades of promoting the Daily Worker, she became a rep for Soviet Weekly, to ensure that the Cold War censorship could be challenged. Ida engaged with everyone, enjoying excellent relations with local MPs, councillors, officials, trade union activists in the Trades Council – which Ernest led. When Fred Westacott contested the Mansfield constituency for the Party, he was offered dingy office space – “all that is available” they claimed. Not so, said Ida, whose compendious knowledge of the town and with her sights set higher than theirs, saw splendid spacious town centre offices lying empty. At a moments notice she moved Red Lives | 79

heaven and earth, and got them for us. Ida’s main fault was that whatever she did, she did so successfully that no one could match her, so that even her vigorous supports for young people, was not the success we’d hoped for. A cold apparatchik? Never. She was immaculately dressed, quite blue rinse – but what a personality, what strength, what warmth, what compassion.”

JBS Haldane 1892 – 1964 The ghost of JBS Haldane, internationalist Marxist scientist, educator and pioneer of mathematical biology, would have strong opinions about Boris Johnson’s “scientific approach”, “flattening the curve” and “herd immunity”, in relation to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Unusually, Haldane won respect in multiple worlds. A member of the CPGB (officially, from 1942-1950) and its Executive Committee from 1944, in 1932 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific establishment, and assisted the government in both World Wars. Contributing to many intellectual fields, organisations and institutions, he was widely recognised for his exceptional intellect and breadth of knowledge. He wrote 23 books, some 400 scientific papers, and several thousand popular articles on human population genetics, evolution, mathematical biology, physiology, and the history and philosophy of science, amongst others. Haldane was never formally trained in science, despite being school captain at Eton, a reader at New College Oxford and Trinity College Cambridge, a Professor of Genetics and the Weldon Professor of Biometry at University College London. Instead, he was home schooled by his father, the eminent Oxford physiologist and radical liberal member of the House of Lords, John Scott Haldane. Haldane senior, engaged Haldane junior, in a comprehensive, but pre-regulation, programme of self-experimentation. Despite being ‘under-age’, it appears that Haldane junior did not consider these experiments (which involved risk of death, pain, and fear), to be child abuse, for he continued doing them throughout his life. These included going down mines, breathing methane and other poisonous gases, oxygen deprivation, drinking hydrochloric acid, being bled, experiments involving urine, extreme temperatures and atmospheric pressures. Eccentric and home-spun as they were, these experiments nonetheless sought to practically address burning social concerns. Lived experience of pushing human physiology to its limits, made it possible to identify where these limits lay. Such firsthand knowledge enabled understanding of industrial accidents, occupational illnesses, hazardous chemicals, and gas warfare. And, understanding enabled 80 | Red Lives

intervention – health and safety legislation, improved working conditions and practices, risk reduction, and compensation. Haldane was primarily motivated by understanding the two-way dialectical relationship between society and science, in which each shapes the other. An overriding concern was to understand (ever-changing) reality, and Haldane refused to view science as external to society, social relations and history. By the 1930s, Haldane considered himself a Marxist and historical materialist. He contributed to many organisations, primarily as a thinker, writer and educator. He chaired the Daily Worker’s editorial board from 1940-1950, and was an editor of Modern Quarterly, a journal closely associated with, but independent of, the CPGB. Importantly, Haldane thrived on criticism of his ideas, as exemplified by an extended intellectual polemic with the Christian theologian and Franco supporter, Arnold Lunn. Haldane was influenced by the then so-called Marxist ‘classics’ of dialectical materialism – Engels’ Dialectics of Nature (whose first English translation Haldane organised and wrote the preface to) and Anti-Dühring, Marx’s German Ideology, Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism, and part of Stalin’s History of the CPSU on dialectics. While these thinkers were greatly influenced by scientific developments happening around them, Haldane was actually “in the thick” of such developments. Haldane’s own major Marxist work, Dialectics of Evolution, was published in Science and Society in 1937. Haldane was driven by science as a (potentially) equalising and democratising force. Science demonstrated that all humans, regardless of race, ethnicity, skin colour or geographical location, were fundamentally alike. He explained how social and environmental factors, rather than so-called ‘innate qualities’, contribute to many inequalities. Haldane realised that science was a key terrain on which to fight the Nazis, given their reliance on ‘scientific-racism’. He also advocated “more democracy in the laboratories”, and “more democratic control of expenditure on research” as essential elements of socialism. Vital here was Haldane’s work as an educator and populariser of science, in Britain in the 1930s-1950s, and in post-independence India. He headed the Science Faculty at the Marx Memorial Library and Worker School (MML), where he spoke at and organised numerous conferences and symposia, lectures, evening classes and correspondence courses in the early 1940s. Topics included science and the war effort, anti-fascist struggle, Soviet science and technology, the politics of scientific racism, dialectical materialism and medicine, heredity, Marxism and science. This work brought him into collaboration with doctors at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and other Marxist scientists, historians of science, mathematicians, philosophers, historians and economists, such as J.D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, Joseph Needham, Maurice Cornforth, Robin Page Arnot, George Thomson, Donna Torr, and Maurice Dobb. A collection of 70 Daily Worker articles written by Haldane between 1938-1939 was published as a book, Science and Everyday Life in India, in 1945. This major contribution to worker education and popularising of science covers complex issues including diet, weather, astronomy, probability, evolution, air quality, poison gases, Red Lives | 81

industrial chemicals, medicine, disease, eugenics, air-raid shelters, gas masks, public health. His preface asserts that workers are not stupid and must never be treated as such. The articles reveal Haldane’s sardonic and morbid sense of humour. Haldane’s forays into population politics, including forced sterilisation to avoid ‘defective’ people reproducing, take the reader knee-deep into a panorama of wellintended but nonetheless hopelessly politically incorrect terminology from another era. However, at the time it was a discourse widely promoted on the left and by liberals in Britain, the USA and elsewhere. Notably, many of Haldane’s critiques of compulsory sterilisation were based on its limited practicality and inability to achieve its goals, rather than more fundamental ethical critique. In his favour, he warned that if implemented, forced sterilisation would cause many women to die and would adversely affect working class people. A product of the era in which he lived, Haldane’s political life was inevitably defined by the two world wars, anti-fascist struggle and the rise of the Soviet Union and socialist countries. In World War One, he was a bombing officer in France, a sniper in Mesopotamia, ran a bombing school in India, and advised the British government on gas masks. In the 1930s he participated in the Relief Committee for Victims of German Fascism, the international defence campaign around Georgi Dimitrov and others framed for the Reichstag Fire, and Spanish Aid Committees. He raised funds for two Jewish refugees to work with him at University College. As one of a small-number of openly communist members of government advisors during World War Two, he worked on developing bomb shelters and promoting gas masks. However, it was during the Spanish civil war that he participated in the anti-fascist frontline, advising Republican fighters in defence against gas attacks, and assisting Norman Bethune with blood transfusions. Bethune was a Canadian surgeon who later assisted Chinese revolutionaries in their struggle against Japan. Haldane covered the war for the Daily Worker, and also wrote one of his most important contributions on dialectics and evolution while there. Experience with three wars pushed Haldane towards the international peace movement, and the struggle for a rational, science-based world to emerge following World War Two. During the war, he attended landmark conferences on: Science and World Order, organised by the British Association for the Advancement of Science; The Planning of Science in War and Peace; and Science for Peace. These latter two, organised by the Association of Scientific Workers, contributed to paving the way for the post-war establishment of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, and the World Federation of Scientific Workers. Following the war, he attended the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw, Poland, 1948 and the International Medical Congress, Budapest, Hungary, 1948. A defining feature of the post-war world was the Soviet Union’s new power and prestige and the addition of socialist countries in Eastern Europe. Haldane’s relation with the Soviet Union was complex. In the 1920s he supported it, and in 1928 attended the Third Congress of Russian Physiologists, Biochemists and Pharmacologists in Moscow. During this trip he lectured in leading genetics institutes, and became close 82 | Red Lives

with the Soviet plant geneticist Vavilov. Impressed by the position of Soviet scientists, the role of science in the 5-year plans, and the popularisation of science through worker education, Haldane strove to inform workers in Britain about these achievements. He was highly respected by Soviet scientists. A recording of his voice introduced the 1940 Soviet film, Experiments in the Revival of Organisms. In 1942 he was elected as a Corresponding Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and he wrote articles for the Moscow publisher, Gosisdat. He proudly claimed: “I do not think it is a mere coincidence that my laboratory is probably the only place outside the Soviet Union where this [genetic] equilibrium and its disturbances are being studied”. However, the Soviet Union also presented Haldane with dilemmas. Firstly, in relation to his cautious support of the controversial 1928 Shakhty trials of engineers, which many saw as a political frame-up. More crucially, was Haldane’s Lysenko dilemma. Championed by Stalin for his contributions to agricultural use of plant genetics, Lysenko was widely accused both outside and inside the Soviet Union of falsifying data and of prioritising Marxist philosophy over scientific rigour. Haldane’s carefully ambiguous and nuanced praise and critique of Lysenko, led to accusations of ‘fencesitting’. Those who rejected Lysenko called Haldane an apologist, whilst those that accepted him called him overly critical. This brought Haldane tensions with Daily Worker, fellow communist scientist J.D. Bernal, and the Communist Party. One critical biographer notes that Haldane refused scholarly invitations to visit the Soviet Union in 1949 and 1951, implying this was due to fears for his safety over his position on Lysenko. By the late 1940s Haldane became more explicit in criticising the restrictions on Soviet scientists. Following the exiling of his close associate Vavilov, he left the Party in 1950. Thus, a lifetime of scientific scepticism made Haldane reject not only capitalist imperialist Britain, but also the Soviet Union and socialist countries. So, he moved to Non-Aligned India in 1957 and gained Indian citizenship. He explained this decision as a reaction to Britain’s military response to Nasser’s nationalising of the Suez Canal. Haldane worked at India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. He headed the Orissa State Genetics and Biometry Laboratory, shortly before dying. He educated many young Indian scientists, many of whom became pioneers in quantitative biological research, the genetics of rice, and human genetics in relation to uncle-niece/cousin marriages. Another important area was palaeontology. He predicted, accurately, that the first complete skeleton of a Jurassic mammal would be found in India. In the decade following Haldane’s death, India developed a very strong ‘people’s science movement’. Haldane was monitored closely by MI5 following his 1928 Soviet visit. After Haldane’s death, various sources claimed he was a Soviet spy, brought into anti-fascist activities by Comintern operative Otto Katz, with connections to the Red Orchestra resistance network, anti-fascist Ivor Montagu, and the anti-fascist spy, Anthony Blunt. It is beyond this short snippet to assess these claims, or indeed whether they matter… Red Lives | 83

George Halkett 1899 – 1949 George Main Halkett was born in Glasgow, and grew up in Alexandria. He served in the British Army during World War 1, spending the last nine months of that conflict as a prisoner of war in Germany. Like many soldiers returning to Britain after the war, George was inspired by the political promises of a “Land Fit For Heroes”, but disillusionment set in rapidly as the harsh realities of high unemployment, poor health care, lack of decent housing or educational opportunities for working class people remained as bad as ever. George became politically active in the 1920s, joining the Communist Party, where he became a close associate of Dan O’Hare, Hugh McIntyre, David McKim and several other exceptional local activists of that era. For over 25 years, George was a key member of the CP, and the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. He went on to become a District Councillor and County Councillor from 1932, retaining that position until 1946. During most of the 1930s, the Vale of Leven District Council had a communist majority, earning the area the nickname, “Little Moscow”. George was a shrewd organiser, and a driving force in numerous local strikes during the 1920s and 30s. He helped poor families to resist evictions, and led many marches and demonstrations in the area, in support of the rights of unemployed workers. There is a famous image of George assisting at a CP soup kitchen during the major BSD factory strike in Alexandria in 1931. George was widely respected and loved by local people, and a tireless campaigner for adequate welfare assistance for families affected by unemployment. During World War Two he was instrumental in providing accommodation, clothing and food for families whose homes had been destroyed in the Clydebank and Greenock blitzes. He served for several years as the Education Convener of Dunbarton County Council, and was passionate about education as a key means for working people to make progress in life. George’s formidable reputation as an activist resulted in him being blacklisted by local employers, and he found it almost impossible to gain paid work. He and his family suffered great hardship during the 1930s, and his health declined in the years following World War Two. He died aged just 49 in 1949. George’s legacy was not forgotten, however, and a street in Alexandria was named after him in the 1960s.

Kevin Halpin 1927 – 2017 Veteran industrial correspondent and Morning Star journalist Peter Lazenby recalls: “On the inside page of my signed copy of Kevin Halpin’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Militant are the handwritten words: ‘This book is not written about me, but about the working people who change history but never get a mention.’ I’m pretty sure he left very similar messages in many more copies of the book. I believe the words sum Kevin up to a tee. Never about self. Always about class. I had the privilege of meeting Kevin only two or three times, most recently at a Morning Star Christmas Party in London which he attended with Anita, though for years I knew of him by reputation through the labour and trade union movement. Born in Preston in Lancashire in January, 1927, he knew poverty and hardship as a youngster. His grandmother died in the workhouse. Such experiences commonly helped 84 | Red Lives

mould the future political lives of many grass-roots activists. By the time he was 13 he was a shop steward. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1950, and remained an active member of the CP until his death at the age of 90. His book Memoirs of a Militant gives an excellent record of his political and industrial activities and I will not try to condense them all into this short contribution, but will say that his political commitment to his class, and his absolute determination to fight for that class, left its mark in dozens of workplaces and several industries – and also on many young, up and coming trade unionists. An engineer, he worked – when he wasn’t ‘blacklisted’ – in the motor industry, ship repair industry and for London Transport. He was at the forefront of the struggle to defeat anti-union laws starting in the 1960s under a Labour Government and right through the years of the Tory attacks on workers’ rights in the 1980s and beyond. I asked others, who knew Kevin well, to give their thoughts and personal recollections. Carolyn Jones, director of the Institute for Employment Rights, recounts: ‘Modest though Kevin was, it is clear that he played a massive role, not only in supporting others in industrial struggles but also in encouraging younger people to get involved and commit to the cause. As the founder member of the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions (LCDTU), Kevin was on the front line of many disputes. As an example, he travelled to Liverpool on a number of occasions to work with and encourage those establishing the Building Workers Charter Group, which in turn provided the organising tool for the 1972 building workers strike, and subsequently the Defence Committee for the Shrewsbury 24 pickets, arrested and imprisoned by the State. ‘Nor did Kevin cling to organisational positions that he felt no longer served the movement. His decision to join forces and create the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom when LCDTU was no longer appealing to the labour movement reflected his foresight. ‘In terms of bringing on others, he understood the importance of succession planning and passed on the role of CPB Industrial Organiser to a woman with both feet in the labour movement.’ Kevin was never short of a joke or a quip, whatever struggle he was leading or was involved in. At his funeral Anita Wright of the National Assembly of Women said: ‘His first dispute with management was in 1940. Workers usually got the afternoon off on Shrove Tuesday, but the governor denied this for the apprentices so Kevin led a walk out and with his wicked sense of humour claimed it was ‘custard and practice.’ “Kevin spoke at meetings and rallies all over the country, including outside a special Red Lives | 85

conference of the TUC in Croydon. Kevin was on the megaphone (as usual) when a policeman came over to say that shopkeepers found it too noisy so Kevin put the megaphone down and just shouted. The policeman came back and said ‘please use the megaphone – it’s quieter!’ She said his commitment to the Daily Worker, forerunner of today’s Morning Star, was total – and almost delayed his wedding ceremony. ‘His ability to sell the Daily Worker is legendary,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he holds the record for selling the paper outside more union conferences than anyone else. He even sold it on the morning of his wedding to Anita Halpin in 1974 because no one else was available for the regular pitch at Acton Rails.” The sales session delayed Kevin from picking up the marriage licence. He made it with only minutes to spare. Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey said at Kevin’s funeral that despite being at: ‘...the heart of many of the greatest defeats suffered by the ruling class of this country,’ such as the campaign to kill the Industrial Relations Act of the 1970s, Kevin: ‘...was never satisfied with arguing over the division of the cake — he wanted control of the bakery.’ Anita Wright, like me, has a copy of Kevin’s book Memoirs of a Militant, which he presented to her. It too is inscribed, expressing the same sentiments quoted at the start of this tribute. Hers reads: ‘I’m pleased to make this contribution to the working people who make history but are rarely acknowledged.’

Finlay Hart 1901 – 1989 Finlay Hart was born in Clydebank in 1901. In 1915, Hart joined the Workers International Union at Beardmore’s, the Dalmuir shipyard. Two years later he became a member of the Socialist Labour Party, the bulk of which was to enter the formation process that led to the Communist Party. In 1922, Finlay Hart was one of the founders of the Clydebank Communist Party. From 1923 to 1926, he worked in Canada and was a member of the Communist Party there. Having returned to Britain he worked as a plumber, resuming his membership of the British Party and became a long-term elected Communist councillor for Clydebank until the 1960s, with the team of fellow Communist councillors, Arnold Henderson in the 5th ward and Jock Smith (Arnold died at the end of 1980; he was a long standing AEU activist, and a regular at the Radnor Park bowling club, albeit a strict teetotaller. The Club still has an Arnold Henderson trophy awarded every year in one of their competitions.) In 1932 Finlay Hart stood as a Communist candidate in Clydebank, Glasgow, 86 | Red Lives

Scotland with four other Communist party candidates – Robert Bird, Charles Hughes, James T Laird and George Hyslop. Their election address read: “We enter the election not with the cry of ‘Save the Rates’ but with the cry ‘Save the working Class’, who are being systematically robbed and swindled. We say quite frankly in opposition to moderate and Labour cries of Lower Rates that ‘We fight for higher rates and heavier taxes for the wealthy classes, We fight for lower rates for every working class area’.” Finlay was a leading figure in the Glasgow to London hunger march, and was elected as the first Communist councillor in Clydebank in 1935. As convenor of the Blythswood shipyard, Finlay Hart played a prominent role in the Boilermakers Society. He was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party from 1935 to 1943. He became a full time worker for the Party in 1949, retiring in 1963, having been Scottish secretary and national industrial organiser and a member of the executive and political committee. Hart was also a Communist county councillor for Dunbartonshire, chair of the Scottish Party, and stood for parliament on three occasions – West Dunbarton in 1950, and Springburn in 1954 and 1959. In recognition of his three decades as a Communist councillor in Clydebank, Hart was honoured with the ‘provost-ship’, equivalent to mayoralty, of the borough in his later years in recognition of his long service. Amongst his many pamphlets for the Communist Party were: The Communist Party and the trade unions (1958) and Shipbuilding – looking forward (1960). Finlay Hart died aged 88 in 1989.

Doris Hatt 1890 – 1969 A reflection by Liz Payne I didn’t know Doris Hatt. Neither, until recently, fifty years after her death had I ever heard the name of this talented communist painter. Then, Doris Hatt Revolutionary Artist arrived in March 2019. The first time I see the exhibition, it takes my breath away. Colour and movement everywhere. Life brimming over in every picture. Here fisherfolk work together, sorting out their catch on the quayside and there sits a woman mending a net, absorbed in her task – concentrating, hair falling over her face as she works. Beautiful. Rural and urban communities – people, buildings and objects sharply defined yet bound by floating islands of rich but subtle colour. Here is Still Life with Goldfish Bowl from 1935, the year she joined the Party. Nothing is still – as we know it never is. All things moving and changing. Then the exhibition’s treasure – a red flag pointing leftwards, waving in the breeze, flagpole planted on the hilltop, hammer and sickle detached, floating above the scene in the light of the rising sun. Red Lives | 87

A short film captures her story – Growing up well-to-do in Bath; finding her political feet in First World War London, an art student at Goldsmith’s College; discovering William Morris – exploring his writings on design, people’s history and socialism; seeing in front of her urban destitution and the casualties of the trenches returning from the fields of France. In 1917 she joins the Independent Labour Party, growing into the feminism and politics that are to shape her life and work. At ILP summer camp she meets the woman with whom she is to share her life, Margery Mack Smith. From 1929, Marjory comes to live with Doris in her bungalow in Clevedon, Somerset. They come to the Party together, drawn by its strong anti-fascism struggle. They attend the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union in nearby Bristol and are great supporters of the first workers’ state, travelling there in 1937 for the celebration of the life and works of Alexander Pushkin on the centenary of his death. Photographs and paintings testify to the deep impressions made by the living socialism of Moscow and Leningrad and the future it holds out. An aunt’s legacy in 1938 enables Doris to pull down her bungalow and replace it with the Art Deco/Bauhaus, Littlemead, built to her design, that still stands on Walton Road. She and Margery are more than comfortable there. For decades they host gatherings of all kinds at the house – lectures, art classes for children, meetings on topics of the day and fundraising garden parties – for neighbours, local comrades, and friends from the Bristol cultural scene. Speakers include Hewlett Johnson, the Red Dean of Canterbury; J.B.S. Haldane, biologist and physicist and Cecile Powell, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and many other luminaries from the worlds of science, arts, and politics. In the display case are speech notes, still usable I note; plans for painting classes and Doris’ election leaflet for Clevedon Urban District Council in 1946. Standing as Communist, she calls for social justice, housing for all, high quality education for working class children and equal representation for women and working-class people on the local authority. She is not elected but stands again in 1947. She is not returned on that occasion either but is not deterred. A last look at the art before I leave – the woodcuts, watercolours, pencil drawings, oil on canvases, oil on boards; new takes on favourite scenes; profound observation; vision without fear – I find myself saddened that history yet again almost succeeded in burying another woman whose life was so ahead of her time and who gave so much. I am happy that someone saw what she had to offer in a different age and brought it to us in this remarkable exhibition.

Margot Heinemann 1913 – 1992 Margot Heinemann was the second daughter of Max and Selma Heinemann, a nonorthodox Jewish merchant-banking family recently settled in London from Frankfurt. She was educated at South Hampstead High School, King Alfred School and Rodean, where she won a scholarship to read English at Newnham College. At Cambridge she achieved a Double First (Part I starred) and began post-graduate research into seventeenth-century theatre. 88 | Red Lives

Her life changed dramatically however, when the fifth national Hunger March passed through Cambridge in 1934. She threw herself into student politics and joined the University Socialist Society and the Communist Party. There she met and fell in love with the charismatic communist student leader, John Cornford. In the summer of 1935, they went to work for the Labour Research Department, Heinemann writing a report on the Distressed Areas. Soon afterwards she left Cambridge to teach in a Day Continuation School for girls at Cadbury’s in Bourneville. In 1936 she began working full-time for the Communist Party in London. Cornford, meanwhile, was in Spain. His letters to Heinemann from Spain included a poem dedicated to her, Heart of the Heartless World. After Cornford was killed at Lopera in December 1936, Heinemann published several poems about him in New Writing. In 1937 she joined the staff of the Labour Research Department. There she met Noreen Branson, with whom she later wrote Britain in the 1930s. She taught education courses run by the Communist Party and by the Miners’ Federation in Scotland and South Wales, where she established close friendships with communist leaders like Abe Moffat and Arthur Horner. In 1938 Heinemann was appointed editor of Labour Research. At the beginning of the Second World War she helped to establish an Industrial Health Committee with the Socialist Medical Association; the result was her LRD handbook, The Health of the War Worker. Two years later she gave up editing Labour Research in order to help the MFGB prepare its case for the Greene Inquiry into wages in the coal industry. One of the results was her Britain’s Coal published by the Left Book Club with an introduction by MFGB President Will Lawther. Wages Front followed, arguing for equal pay for women and for a minimum wage, and Coal Must Come First, surveying the coal industry since nationalisation. From 1949 to 1953 she worked in the Party’s propaganda department, writing leaflets, speakers’ notes, pamphlets (like The Tories and How to Beat Them) and speeches for Harry Pollitt. From 1949-51 she edited World News and Views. A report by her in World News and Views on the 1948 Margate TUC was used by the General Council to justify the anti-Communist witch-hunt inside the TUC. Her identification with the hardening Cold War orthodoxies of King Street may be seen in her contribution to the Caudwell debate in Modern Quarterly in 1951 and in her editing of the Party’s short-lived Zhdanovite literary magazine, Daylight. She stood as CP candidate for Lambeth and Vauxhall in the 1950 General Election, polling 503 votes, or 1.3% of the votes cast. Canvassing in the foggy streets of London brought on the bronchial illness which troubled her for the rest of her life. In 1949, Heinemann began living with the distinguished crystallographer and Red Lives | 89

Communist Party member, JD Bernal. In 1953 their daughter Jane was born. Heinemann gave up full-time Party work, although she continued to serve on the Party’s London District Committee and on the Party’s Publications Commission. She was on the editorial boards of Labour Monthly and Marxist Quarterly, and began working as a reader for Lawrence and Wishart. She wrote a novel, The Adventurers tracing the rise and fall of the Left in Britain from the high hopes of 1943 to the crisis of 1956. In 1959 Heinemann began teaching English at Camden School for Girls; in 1965 she started teaching at Goldsmith’s College. Returning to academic life after a gap of thirty years, Heinemann combined a passionate scholarship and a lively Marxist criticism in books like Experiments in English Teaching, Culture and Crisis in Britain in the 1930s and her most important work, Puritanism in the Theatre; Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts. In 1976 she was appointed Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge. In the 1970s Heinemann served on the Party’s Cultural Committee and its Theory and Ideology Committee. Her last book (edited with Willie Thompson) was History and the Imagination; Selected Writings of AL Morton. After 1991 she joined Democratic Left.

Michael Hicks 1937 – 2017 Michael Hicks was one of the stalwarts of the trade union movement, a leading comrade who was never afraid of standing up for his beliefs. Part of a Bermondsey print, transport and dock worker communist family he was born in 1937 and in 1953 joined the Young Communist League, and later the Communist Party. Patsy Hicks, Mike’s father, was active in the anti-fascist movement in the 1930’s and Patsy the younger was a well-known TGWU branch secretary. In 1964 Mike stood with Joe Bent as joint Communist Party candidates in Southwark, where they gained several thousand votes. From the 1960s onwards Mike took part in demos, protests and picket lines, urging support for workers in struggle and resistance to Labour and Tory government attacks on trade union rights. He can be seen and heard on film urging print workers in Fleet Street to come out in support of the five gaoled dockers; and again at the front of the celebrations at their release. He was a regular sight in Fleet Street selling and distributing copies of the Morning Star, until he took a serious hiding from someone with a score to settle. He was a member of the NUPBW later better known as SOGAT, and then the GPMU, eventually becoming a full-time London Central Branch official for the union in 1991. Mike was well-known in trade union circles when he was an FOC and activist at Bookwise 90 | Red Lives

in west London. Later in Menzies, the wholesale newspaper and magazine distributor, he became the convenor of all the London Menzies depots. He was a branch delegate to the SOGAT NEC, and regularly elected to attend TUC conferences. He was instrumental in helping to secure SOGAT resistance to Murdoch’s dismissal of 5,500 workers by wholesale workers refusal to distribute Murdoch News International titles. This historic decision by the union resulted in court sequestration of all SOGAT funds. While not one of the workers dismissed by Murdoch, nonetheless he came to symbolize printworker resistance as a consequence of his role in the demonstrations at Wapping in east London, including during some of the most violent police attacks on the crowd when he showed great bravery. Every Wednesday and Saturday night for a year, in the middle of the demos opposite the plant, he took on the role of keeping up a running commentary on the demonstrations and the activities of the police, and maintaining good spirits among the demonstrators and protestors. He became a key target of the police at Wapping and was gaoled for a year, with 8 months suspended, having been found guilty of the trumped-up charge of assaulting a police inspector and causing actual bodily harm. A “Free Mike Hicks” campaign ensued with slogans painted on walls all over London. He was moved around four prisons in three weeks as further punishment, ending up at the Isle of Wight high security prison. His appeal was rejected. Michael had been a Party loyalist, occupying various positions including chair of the London District and of the national Party. During the treacherous years of the 1980s he was among the great swathe of trade union comrades who were expelled, disenfranchised or just disconnected for their opposition to the class collaborationist approach being pursued by a eurocommunist faction. In 1984 he was expelled from the CPGB because, as chair of the London District Congress, he had ‘allowed Rule 3 (d) to be applied’ which had enabled that year’s congress to continue despite instructions from the Gordon McClennan, the General Secretary, to close it down. In the newly formed Communist Campaign Group he subsequently joined others expelled from the party for their opposition to ‘revisionism’. Eventually however through several versions of a communist group in waiting, an active caucus and then a re-launched Communist Party of Britain, in 1988 he served as its General Secretary until his replacement ten years later by Robert Griffiths. Mike and his second wife Mary Rosser parted company with these same comrades. It followed a series of increasingly acrimonious and divisive differences over policy and administration of the CPB and the Morning Star and which had led to an industrial dispute at the Morning Star. Mike left the Party and helped to form the Marxist Forum Group. He served as the trade union officer of the Marx Memorial Library from 2005 to 2010. He and Mary Rosser had moved out to Bournemouth and he joined the local Labour Party becoming local party chair, unsuccessfully standing to be a councillor for the Boscombe East Ward of Bournemouth in 2011. He was married twice, to Rosemary, with whom he had two children, and then to Mary Rosser who died in 2010. He collapsed and died whilst making a speech in 2017 Bournemouth at a Labour Party meeting. Red Lives | 91

Christopher Hill 1912 – 2003 Christopher Hill was born on 6th February 1912 in York. His parents were radical Methodists, and he admitted their outlook had a profound influence on him. He was a brilliant student at school and after sitting his entrance examination for Balliol College Oxford University, he was immediately offered a place there. However, instead of taking up this opportunity, he travelled to Germany in 1931 and whilst there, he witnessed the violent rise of the Nazis. He later said that this was another huge influence on his political thinking. Returning to Britain, he took up his place at Balliol College and his outstanding abilities got him a first class Bachelor of Arts Degree in modern history. His political ideas, especially after his time in Germany, led to him joining the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935, and the same year he travelled to the Soviet Union. He stayed there for almost a year, quickly becoming fluent in the Russian language and studying the Marxist works by Soviet historians on English history, especially of the 17th century. In 1936, on his return to Britain, Christopher Hill took a teaching post at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in Cardiff. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the same year, he decided to volunteer for the British Battalion of the International Brigades. His application was unsuccessful so he threw his energies into giving assistance to the Basque refugees who had come to South Wales. Throughout this period, he was researching the period of the English Revolution, and after discussions with the pioneering Marxist historian A L Morton, who was also a member of the Communist Party, Christopher Hill submitted his most influential early work, The English Revolution, for publication. The Communist Party’s publishing house, Lawrence and Wishart, duly made this available in 1940, and it has remained a classic work on that period ever since. He joined the army the same year, first serving in the South Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, and was later promoted to the rank of major in the Intelligence Corps. When the war ended, he continued his teaching career and was among the outstanding Communist historians – AL Morton, Rodney Hilton, E.P.Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Dona Torr, George Rude, John Saville, Dorothy Thompson, Maurice Dobb and others – who formed the Communist Party’s Historians Group. No other British political party or organisation had anything to match this extraordinary group of historians, and all went on to make incredible contributions to British Marxist history. In 1947, he wrote Lenin and the Russian Revolution and two years later, with another then Communist historian, Edmund Dell, wrote The Good Old Cause 16401660, a most important collection of historical documents relating to England in the 17th century. With the beginning of the cold war, prominent Communists in all areas 92 | Red Lives

of work were being watched by the security services, and Christopher Hill was no exception. MI5 and Special Branch were tapping his telephone and recording his calls. They also intercepted his private correspondence, and in an attempt to discover other Communists, monitored his contacts. In 1949, he applied to Keele University to be chair of history but was turned down because of his membership of the Party. Not fazed by this, he continued working and was prominent among those historians who created the journal Past and Present in 1952. The aim of the journal was to focus on social history. He continued writing articles, concentrating on the period of the English Civil War, especially the English Revolution. In 1956, when the Soviet Union intervened in Hungary, a number of his historian colleagues left the Communist Party, and the next year Christopher Hill, after 22 years membership, also left. He continued writing many very important books on 17th century England and remained a Marxist until his death. Christopher Hill’s historical skills, nurtured by the Communist Party and his colleagues, made an enormous contribution to historians, Marxist and non Marxist alike. Looking back, in an interview conducted in 1992 in International Socialism, he made these striking comments on his years in the Communist Historians group: “Anyone who was in it thinks it was the best academic and educational experience of their lives.” He goes on to say: “I was very sad when I left it and would have liked to have kept some sort of group like that going.” Towards the end of his life, he continued to lecture and it was a lucky person who might be able to gain entrance to his lectures on Cromwell and on the English Revolution, presented at Marx Library.

Beryl Huffinley 1926 – 2018 Beryl Huffinley was a CPGB member who became a leading figure in the labour, trade union and peace movements in Yorkshire, nationally and internationally. Beryl devoted her life to the causes of peace and union activism. She was a member of the Party until its demise in 1991, and was active during the decades when the party had a significant influence on the politics and policies of the labour and trades union movement in the UK. She worked with towering figures of the movement including Ken Gill, Kevin Halpin and Tony Benn. Beryl was a close associate and comrade of the late Bert Ramelson, who became Industrial Organiser of the CPGB. Together and with comrades, they staged weekly public orations on the steps of Leeds Town Hall. Under the occasional scrutiny of the establishment media, notably the Tory Yorkshire Post, she was dubbed ‘Red Beryl,’ which caused her no offence whatsoever. The positions she held in a lifetime of service to the movement are too numerous to mention, but they included presidency of the National Assembly of Women, chair of Labour Action for Peace and vice-president of the British Peace Assembly. She was a regular delegate to peace conferences in Eastern Europe at the height of the Cold War. She was active at Greenham Common women’s peace camp and, closer to her home in Yorkshire, with WoMenwith Hill peace camp, which targeted the United States’ information gathering base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Red Lives | 93

Her regional, national and international political activities were all equally intense. She was a leading figure in the British-Soviet Friendship Society, whose Leeds branch was held in high regard, staging annual events marking the anniversary of Russia’s October Revolution, and securing the prestigious Great Hall at the University of Leeds for celebrations. She was secretary of Leeds Trades Union Council at a time when its monthly meetings attracted more than 100 delegates representing tens of thousands of trade union members in the city. She was the first woman to be appointed Yorkshire regional secretary of the Trades Union Congress – in fact the first woman regional TUC secretary in Britain. At the time the West Riding of Yorkshire – now known as West Yorkshire – was a heartland for the male-dominated mining and steel industries. She faced and overcame the gender prejudice of that time. Ann Lee, a comrade from that period, said: “She thus became an inspiration for other women in the labour and trade union movement.” Ms Huffinley fulfilled her roles as Leeds TUC secretary and Yorkshire region TUC secretary working from an office in Leeds Trades Club at Savile Mount in Chapeltown in Leeds, where she greeted trade union delegations from Russia, South America, Africa and Asia. Under her direction, Leeds TUC and the Trades Club took a lead when political refugees from Chile began to arrive in Britain following the CIA-backed fascist coup in that country in 1973. The democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was bloodily overthrown by the military led by General Augusto Pinochet. Thousands of left political activists were murdered or disappeared. Negotiations between the UK and Chile secured the release of hundreds of political prisoners but only on condition that they left Chile and that other countries accepted them. In Leeds and other major centres in the UK, the labour and trade movement went into action to provide the refugees – communists, socialists and trade union activists – with homes and later jobs. In 1974 around 70 arrived in Leeds, where their first port of refuge was Leeds Trades Club. Condemned council properties were restored and renovated by trade union volunteers who included electricians, joiners and decorators. Fund-raising by trade unions helped furnish the homes. Forty-four years later Leeds is still home to a small Chilean community which began with the refugees – now with their grown-up children and grand-children. Beryl Huffinley and others, including Leeds University lecturer Barry Cooper, played a leading role in organising new lives for the political refugees as they arrived in Leeds possessing only their clothes and the occasional guitar. During the Cold War in the 1970s, at Beryl’s instigation, Leeds Trades Council infuriated the Leeds City Council establishment by “twinning” Leeds with the city of Vladimir in Russia. In the 1970s, when the fascist National Front was on the march, she was arrested for leading Leeds’ traditional May Day march because the Home Office had placed a blanket ban on all marches in the city to prevent a march by the fascists. Arrested alongside her was a comrade, Roy Rix, a former engineering union convenor who was steward of Leeds Trades Club. 94 | Red Lives

Beryl was known not to suffer fools gladly, and those who drew her ire were left in no doubt as to her strength of feeling. Beryl was married to Ron Huffinley, a train driver and activist in his union ASLEF. Such was the couple’s political commitment that they decided not to have children, choosing instead to devote their lives to the labour, trade union and peace movements. Beryl was a steadfast supporter of the Morning Star and its predecessor the Daily Worker. After her retirement she remained active, and Ann Lee recalls that even in her late 80s she regularly donated bric-a-brac and books to sell on the Morning Star stall at Yorkshire CND’s annual Peace Fair in Bradford. Beryl died in 2018 aged 92.

Margaret Hunter 1922 – 1986 Margaret Anderson, born on 11 November 1922, joined the Young Communist League at the age of 14 in 1937, and then the Communist Party in 1940. She was the factory convenor at Barr and Stroud during World War Two, a key optical engineering firm in Glasgow, which played a leading role in the development of rangefinders, for the Royal Navy. She became Margaret Hunter after she married former apprentice leader and fellow Communist, Jimmy Hunter, in 1946. Her work as secretary of the CPGB’s Knightswood branch brought her on to the prestigious Scottish Committee and then as full time worker, first for Glasgow City, and then as Scottish Organiser, the ‘number 2’ position. She sat on the National Commission that rewrote The British Road to Socialism, the Party’s programme, in 1956, authoring a new section on Socialism. In 1959, Margaret played a pivotal role in organising the Party’s celebrations to mark the bicentenary of Robert Burns’ birth. She herself stood for the Gorbals constituency in 1964, polling 5.6% and 4.1%. As Organiser, she authored the formal report to the executive on the Party’s intervention in the 1959 general election at Gorbals, in Glasgow, in which Peter Kerrigan had been the candidate. The Communist vote had dropped from 2,491 to 1,932 in 1955. Margaret Hunter reasoned that that the electorate dropped by one seventh, i.e., 8000, rendering the Communist proportion as roughly one seventh of the 1955 tally. An excellent vote in Cathcart at a first contest had been in a ward where the bulk of the Gorbals electors had been moved, leaving less to account for. Even though some 10, 000 had been canvassed, Margaret admitted it a to be a weaker canvass to 1955, with the absence of sustained public campaigning by the Party Branch, which had only recovered from difficulties. Red Lives | 95

In 1960, she was assigned to the Lancashire & Cheshire District to help out temporarily and, after five years as the Communist Party’s Scottish organiser, Margaret was appointed the National Women’s Organiser in 1963, at the age of 40. Her predecessor, Molly Keith, had been obliged to step down for personal reasons. Now a member of the Communist Party’s executive committee, Margaret was to particularly focus its work towards women’s rights and building the national Women’s Advisory Committee. Out of the blue, she became unwell while taking on a Party delegation to the German Democratic Republic. It seems that this may have been in the summer of 1968, certainly her apologies for non-attendance at the EC begin here. Although she he did not return to Scotland, she stood down from active political work and continued to live in London until her death on 21 February 1986 aged 63. Jim Whyte first met Margaret in the Spring of 1956 when she visited Aberdeen and subsequently got to know her well. He considered that she had few equals and it was a tragic loss to the Party that she died so relatively young. As he recalls: “Little did I know then that in a few months I would have the privilege of sharing an office with her for seven years in Scottish party offices, and what a learning experience that was. Margaret was outstanding as both an organiser and theoretician. As part of her remit she was required to liaise with the YCL. No comrade could have been more helpful, which included constructive criticism. Down the years Margaret was always drafted into Clydebank as the party fought to defend Arnold Henderson’s council seat. Her organisation and mobilisation of the local comrades was a sight to behold. Every last possible vote was squeezed out of the electorate, none was allowed to escape. Margaret was a powerful public speaker and the acid test was the factory gate audience. None could hold an audience better than Margaret, and that included Gallacher. She was ranked one of the best three factory gate speakers by the comrade who serviced the factory gate meetings with his loud speaking equipment. Margaret should have been Scottish secretary, but male chauvinism being what it was that was not on the agenda. I must finish with a bit of priceless humour. When Margaret left us to take up the post of National Women’s Organiser we had the usual non alcoholic farewell gathering of the full time workers. Margaret had us in stitches as she recounted her ‘honeymoon’. These were never lavish affairs for party comrades in those days. She and Jimmy stayed with party comrades in Fife, as I recall it. When Margaret and Jimmy got there a telegram awaited them: “To Margaret and Jimmy for whom the bells toll”. Bewildered they shrugged their shoulders. As it happened Margaret was unwell and there was barely a fond embrace. Their sleeping accommodation was a fold down settee, and as they prepared their departure and refolded the settee, they found attached to the springs a series of small bells, which had not been given the slightest opportunity to toll!”

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Charlie Hutchison 1918 – 1993 Charlie Hutchison was unique in more ways than one. He was a Black communist who spent ten years physically fighting fascism and racism from Cable Street, Franco’s fascists in Spain to Hitler’s Nazis in France, North Africa, Italy and Germany. Born in Oxfordshire on 10 May 1918, his father was from the Gold Coast (Ghana) and his mother a local woman. The couple had five children and Charlie’s father often travelled back to Africa and eventually did not return, leaving his wife in financial hardship as well as mental anguish. Concerned for her children, she asked for Charlie and one of his sisters to be taken temporarily into care and so they went to the National Children’s Home and Orphanage in Harpenden. He and his sister spent several years there until he was allowed to leave and joined his mother who now lived in Fulham. By 1935, working as a lorry driver and aware of his class and race, he joined the local YCL and was quickly elected chair of the branch. Alongside many other communists he went to Cable Street when Mosley’s black-shirted fascists attempted their provocative march through the Jewish East End of London and played his part in forcing them to turn away in retreat. Two months after this, in December 1936, the 18 year old Charlie Hutchison was among the early British volunteers to go to Spain to help defend the Spanish Republic from Franco’s fascists, supported by Mussolini and Hitler’s massive military aid. He gave his reason for going in these words: “I am half Black, I grew up in the National Children’s Home and Orphanage. Fascism meant hunger and war”. He has the distinction of being the only Black British Volunteer in the International Brigades in that momentous struggle for freedom and against the twin evils of fascism and racism. Despite his young age, he served for two years until the end of the war. He fought at the Battle of Lopera soon after his arrival, and was wounded during the fighting where the great British communist and poet John Cornford, lost his life. After recovering from his wounds, he refused to be repatriated and because of his youth, he was reassigned as an ambulance driver in the Republican Army. His superior officers described him as: ” A hard working and capable worker”, and his political views: “Good for his age, quite developed “. As time passed, and his mother wrote, pleading with him to come home, he did ask to go back on temporary leave of absence to deal with family affairs. Due to a bureaucratic slip up this did not happen, so he bravely continued to serve until December 1938. In the 1980s, Charlie Hutchison gave his reason why so many men and women came to Spain to aid the Republic in the International Brigades. He said: “The Brigades came out of the working class, they came out of the Battle of Cable Red Lives | 97

Street, they came out of the struggles on the side turnings, they weren't necessarily communists or socialists but they were anti fascist “. Charlie Hutchison hardly had time to resume his duties with the Communist Party in Fulham when the Second World War broke out. He joined the British army, went to France and was among those at Dunkirk in 1940 who were rescued by hundreds of small vessels and the Navy from the advancing Nazi forces. He then served in North Africa and through the long bloody campaign in Italy. In the last year of the war, he fought in France and into Germany. In April 1945, he was among those who liberated Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp. What he witnessed there was the ultimate symptom of racist fascist ideology, the very barbarism he had been fighting for ten years. He resumed life in Fulham and in 1947 married Patricia Holloway a fellow Communist. A life-long Ccommunist, Charlie Hutchison died in 1993 and was rightly honoured at an event in 2019 attended by many proud family members. His son John, speaking of his father, remembered growing up in a house full of books “by Marx, Steinbeck, Salinger and Hugo”. He also said: “...unusually for the 1950s and 1960s, he had friends from all over the world through the communist movement ” Charlie Hutchison, this unique Black communist, anti racist and anti fascist is well summed up in his son John’s words “My father believed in the family of man”.

George Allen Hutt 1901 – 1973 A life-long communist, a journalist and a prolific writer of books and pamphlets, George Allen Hutt was born in 1901. He began writing for Communist Party’s journals shortly after the 1926 General Strike and was already active in the party from 1924. He started at the Daily Worker as a journalist from its first issue in 1930, and was its chief sub-editor for many years. At one time, the paper and Hutt held more newspaper design awards than any other Fleet Street title. A highly regarded authority on typography and newspaper design, his books Outline of Newspaper Typography, NUJ 1952; Newspaper Design, OUP 1960; The Changing Newspaper, Gordon Fraser 1973; Fournier: The Compleat Typographer: Rowman & Littlefield 1972, were standard reading for journalism students and featured high on the curriculum; they were classics for youngsters starting out in the trade and went with them from job to job. His books on politics and trade unionism were widely read in the labour movement and included The Final Crisis, Gollanz, 1939; Crisis on Clydeside, Workers Bookshop 1934; The Post-War History of the British Working Class, Gollancz Left Book Club 1938; British Trade Unionism Lawrence and Wishart 98 | Red Lives

1975. Hutt established his reputation with the redesign of Reynold’s News. He was a consultant to the Guardian, the Daily Herald and Der Spiegel and also had connections with the Soviet news agency TASS. Of course he was an NUJ member, and was on the union’s national executive council for many years. He became editor of its paper, The Journalist, in 1948 and served a record-breaking 23 years in post. He survived the cold war days, when though his communism may have been divisive for many, the leadership always stood by him. He was the first Communist to be elected to serve as the union’s President for the 1967-1968 term. In March 1966, Hutt delivered the annual Marx Memorial lecture: ‘Karl Marx as a Journalist’, which appeared in the May 1966 issue of Marxism Today under the editorship of James Klugmann. Explaining why he had chosen the career of Marx as a journalist as his exclusive theme, he said that: “had it not been for Marx’s experiences in journalism it is doubtful whether today, 83 years after his death, we would be saluting his memory as that of a man of genius who established Socialism as a science, who founded modern Communism and under whose banner one-third of mankind has passed from capitalist to Socialist society”. The lecture detailed Marx’s experiences as a journalist and the battles against state censorship from his time at the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842 through to his 11 years (1851-1862) as the London correspondent of the New York Tribune. As a communist, Hutt sets his lecture within the historic context but he was a typographer and so he tells us that: “No. 1 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung proclaimed itself in bold display Fraktur type, only a couple of sizes smaller than the title-line, the “Organ of Democracy”. And he was also a consummate designer, so he adds; “Like its predecessor, the Neue Rheinische was a small format sheet of a size...permitting four 15-em or five 12-em columns; we would consider it a large tabloid, since it is almost exactly the half-size of a 26¼- inch cut off.…” An earlier article, again combined his politics with his knowledge of print media, in Marxism Today (March 1961), called ‘The Passchendaele of the Press’ explored increasing cross media ownership. Sub-titled ‘An Object Lesson in Monopoly Capitalism’, the impetus for the article, written first for the journal of the Moscow’s University’s Faculty of Journalism, was the Mirror group’s take over bid for Odhams, whose main business lay in magazines and periodicals. When, 20 years after Hutt, Anita Halpin became the second Communist and the third women in 90 years to be NUJ president, Hutt’s widow Avis wrote a charming note saying how, through the pages of the Journalist, she had followed Anita’s path in the union with interest. Allen Hutt’s son – a gynaecologist by trade – later doubled up as Hank Wangford, the spoof country and western singer, who presented the A-Z of Country Music documentary series on Channel 4. Hutt retired in 1966 and died in 1973.

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Wilf Jobling 1909 – 1937 Wilfred Jobling was born in the mining village of Chopwell, on 22 July 1909. He attended Socialist Sunday School, where he was taught by Harry Bolton, later chair of Blaydon Urban District Council, and very close to the Communist Party after its formation. Bolton helped build Chopwell’s reputation as a ‘Little Moscow’. Not surprisingly, Wilf became a coalminer himself, and must have been an activist during the 1926 General Strike and Lock-out, as he was blacklisted afterwards. It was during the Lock-out that he joined the Communist Party, and he soon became a local Party secretary, and an activist in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM). In 1930, he was sent, like others, to the Lenin School in Moscow. On his return, he became known as a very good speaker, and he ran classes on economics in Chopwell. In October 1932, the ruling Labour group on Durham County Council voted to cease cooperation with the hated Means Test. They knew this would mean Commissioners being brought in, but they were threatened with that anyway because their relief payments were too ‘generous’. The effect of the Commissioners was to reduce payments of 25% of claimants and to strike off 5% without appeal. The NUWM responded in January 1933, with a county-wide Hunger March to Durham, demanding recall of the Commissioners, abolition of the cuts, and free school meals and clothing for the children of the unemployed. A second march was held in April, and confrontations took place with the police outside the Commissioners’ offices. Wilf Jobling was one of 18 demonstrators who subsequently appeared in court, and one of seven sent to gaol. He was released in September 1933 to a big ‘welcome home’ social. 1934 saw the fifth National Hunger March. The North East contingent, some 120 strong, was under the leadership of Bob Elliot, later Communist councillor in Blyth, and Wilf Jobling. Lincolnshire marcher Walter Gregory described Wilf as follows: “Wilf was an extremely attractive personality. He was athletically built, with a powerful voice which was ideal for addressing open-air meetings, and a wonderfully persuasive magnetism. Tirelessly Wilf would walk up and down the length of the marching column of shabbily dressed and weary men, urging them on with words of encouragement and offering advice on how to treat weary and blistered feet.” In Cambridge the North East men were supported by the University Socialist Society. Margot Heinemann, a student at the time, and later a Communist Party member, remembered that: “...there was a meeting in the town in the evening which was addressed by the leader of the contingent, Wilf Jobling from the North East coast. I remember that as a landmark because for the first time it occurred to me that the working class could have a leading role, the central role, in politics, and that working-class leaders could have a central role. He was an unemployed miner, a very fine speaker ….” 100 | Red Lives

In April 1934, Wilf was part of a ‘Chopwell United Front Committee’ delegation, along with his sweetheart Maggie Airey, to the local Public Assistance Committee over the impact of benefit cuts. In May of that year he was a Communist candidate for Blaydon Council. In October 1936 he was part of the sixth and final Hunger March. On the Blaydon marchers’ return, council chair Harry Bolton held a civic reception, at which Wilf spoke, stating that it was now time for “the workers to build up a united front and abolish the present capitalist system, so that there would be no need for hunger marches.” In early October 1936, the NUWM National Committee had called for “support of the Spanish workers in fighting to defend a democratic republic”. Wilf had already in September been organising meetings on the issue in Blaydon. It is therefore not surprising that on his return, he – like other participants such as Bob Elliott – should have considered volunteering for the International Brigades. Wilf arrived in Spain on 27 January 1937, but died heroically at the Battle of Jarama on 27 February. Bob Elliott was killed at Villanueva de la Canada on July 6. Fellow-Brigader Frank Graham had the sad task of delivering Wilf’s last love-letter to Maggie Airey. After Wilf’s death, Harry Bolton paid a moving tribute to him at a Blaydon Council session. Wilf is also commemorated in Jack Lindsay’s Requiem Mass: for the Englishmen fallen in the International Brigade: Where is Wilf Jobling of Chopwell? Where is Tommy Dolan of Sunderland? Where is Jock Taddon of Dundee?

Len Johnson 1902 – 1974 Len Johnson was an important Black Communist and top professional boxer who was denied his chance of fighting for a middleweight championship because of the colour bar in British boxing. He was born in Manchester, where he spent much of his life, on 22n October 1902. His father Bill Johnson, from Sierra Leone, was a boxer and it was no surprise that young Len and his brothers followed him into the boxing ring. When he left school, he found work at Crossley Motors, a leading car manufacturer at the time. Following a meeting with a boxing promoter, he was offered work on one of the many boxing booths that toured Britain in the inter-war years. His father became his manager and so Len Johnson began his professional boxing career, fighting around the country and even travelling to Denmark and Belgium for competitions in the early 1920s. By 1925, his biggest opportunity came in a match with the reigning British champion in Manchester. After a 20 round fight, he beat his opponent and repeated the feat later that year. Red Lives | 101

Len Johnson should have now been given the chance to fight for the British championship but the colour bar, enforced by the boxing authorities in Britain, barred him. Despite challenges by Johnson and his father – who had fought in the trenches in the First World War – the racist reactionaries who ran the sport would not be moved. So, in 1926, he left for a tour of Australia where he was well received by boxing fans. Ironically, despite the extreme racism shown to the indigenous people of the country, Johnson’s race did not become an issue there and when he defeated the holder of the middleweight British Empire championship, he was hailed as the new Empire champion. On his return to Britain, the boxing authorities declared his victory in Australia null and void. Despite these setbacks, he continued fighting. He married fellow Mancunian Annie Forshaw. In 1928, he fought the European middleweight champion and won, but again the racists running boxing refused to recognise Johnson as European champion. After spending some time in the USA his years in the ring were beginning to show wear and tear and in 1933 he decide to retire. Instead of fighting, he concentrated on training young boxers and toured with them across Britain. His encounters with racism and his observation of the poverty of most people of his class in Britain, led him to radical politics. He was also aware that the Daily Worker had waged a ground-breaking campaign against the colour bar in boxing. These factors, in addition to the great popularity of the Soviet Union in the struggle against fascism during the Second World War, led to him joining the Communist Party by wars end. During the war, he had first worked in Civil Defence as part of the Heavy Rescue Squad and then as a physical training instructor. An active Communist, he wrote a boxing column for the Daily Worker and became a popular speaker in his native city. After he and Annie split up, he and his partner Maria Reid lived in Moss Side and he worked as a bus driver. In 1945 as a representative of the Communist Party, Len Johnson attended the important Pan African Congress in Manchester. In the 1940s, along with two Communist comrades, Wilf Charles and Sid Booth, he founded the New International Society in the city. This was a club that celebrated internationalism and fought racism. They participated in anti-colonial and anti-racist campaigns and when Paul Robeson visited Manchester in 1949, they featured him as the main speaker. Meeting Robeson was a reunion for Len Johnson, as he had met him in 1930 when the great man was in Britain and this was a highlight in his life. Len Johnson was a high profile Communist in his home city and was selected six times to stand as the Party’s candidate in local elections between 1947 and 1962. Unfortunately he was not successful. In 1954 health problems resulted in him going to the Soviet Union for an operation to remove a lung. When he returned home he resumed his political activities in the Communist Party. As the years passed in his retirement, he was rediscovered by the boxing world, being asked to write articles on his career for the boxing press. Len Johnson was a gifted boxer, an anti-fascist and anti-racist and remained a key member of the Communist Party until his death on 28th September 1974. The Manchester Evening News marked his passing with a headline that read; “Champ With No Title”. 102 | Red Lives

Bill Jones 1929 – 2010 Bill Jones was born and bred in Liverpool. His younger life was spent in Toxteth Street, overlooking the docks, where he lived with his two brothers and a sister. At the age of 16, Bill became a joiner apprentice and immediately joined the building workers’ union. In the 1960s he moved to Kirkby where he lived for the rest of his life with his wife and three kids. When UCATT was formed in 1971 following a merger of three existing construction unions, Bill helped establish the Kirkby branch and was Branch Chairman until he retired from work due to the onset of Parkinson’s disease. He also served on the General Council of UCATT and was Chair of UCATT’s North West Regional Council for 12 years. But it was Bill’s grass roots activity that earned him his legendary status. He served as a shop steward and convenor at major building sites across the North West. He was also the UCATT Convenor for 15 years at the Liverpool Direct Labour Organisation – at a time when Councils still employed in-house teams of workers to build and maintain a decent stock of council homes. Always closer to the rank and file than the union leadership, Bill was a founder member of the Building Worker’s Charter Group, established in Manchester in April 1970, and a member of its editorial board. The aim of the group was twofold. First, to build unionisation and direct action in a casualised industry increasingly blighted by “lump labour”. Second, to resist the productivity-flexibility agreements in vogue at the

s Bill Jones addressing a hillside meeting of building workers Red Lives | 103

time under Barbara Castle, which were signed by the union leadership to the infuriation of rank and file members. It was that Workers’ Charter movement, working closely with the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, that provided the basic organisation for the major building workers’ strike 2 years later. And it was that strike that led to 24 building workers being arrested and 6 charged with conspiracy, unlawful assembly and affray in what was described by Bert Ramelson, the Communist Party’s Industrial Organiser at the time, as a: “...politically motivated trial….probably the most serious in its implications for the labour movement this century”. Three of the six were subsequently found guilty and imprisoned – Des Warren, Ricky Tomlinson and John McKinsie Jones, commonly referred to as The Shrewsbury Three. During the 1972 strike, Bill headed the Merseyside strike committee, organising flying pickets and addressing many site meetings. He was subsequently intimately involved in the campaign to free the Shrewsbury pickets, regularly visiting the three men in jail and leaving behind a precious resource of prison letters – including a cartoon sketched by Ricky Tomlinson. His trade union and political activity on sites and in the wider labour movement did not go unnoticed. Recently released lists of blacklisted workers and their families, maintained and circulated by the Economic League (the forerunner of the Consultancy Association) listed Bill no less than 3 times together with the names, addresses and political affiliations of the rest of his family. But no amount of state surveillance would deter Bill from his dedicated and disciplined activities. He was a member of the Communist Party from an early age, inspired by another great Merseyside Communist building worker, Leo McGree. He was a founder member of an active Communist Party branch in Kirkby, played a key role on the Communist Party’s North West District Committee and took his communist politics into the wider local labour movement, chairing the Kirkby, Huyton and Preston Trades Council for many years Bill stood on more than one occasion as the Communist Party candidate in Kirkby. In 1975, at the age of 42, his election address outlined the need for affordable public housing, better social service provision for the elderly, more playgroups and nursery classes for the young and an integrated and affordable public transport system. Bill was also active in the decision to open (and help build) a Communist Party club, known as the Red Star Social Club. Although Bill preferred tea to a tipple, he regularly attended the Club and engaged in the political discussions with other comrades – including some who went on to participate in trips to South Africa to assist the ANC, as outlined in Ken Keable’s book, London Recruits. Bill actively supported the miners in their 1984-85 strike, recruiting the assistance of Ricky Tomlinson – by then a famous actor – to organise benefit concerts to raise money for the families of striking miners. Bill became the first UCATT member to receive a special membership scroll from his union and in 2007 his commitment to the working class was again recognised when he received the Robert Tressell Memorial Award at a ceremony in Liverpool. 104 | Red Lives

Claudia Jones 1915 – 1964 Claudia Jones was a Communist from her entry into the Communist Party of the USA in 1936 until deported to Britain in 1955, when she became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. She remained a Party member from that date until her premature death in 1964. This needs to be stated emphatically because individuals, organisations and even the British state that used her image for a postage stamp, either deny or obscure this fact. This unique and brilliant woman was born on 21 February 1915 in Trinidad, at that time a colony of the British Empire. At the age of eight, with her parents and her sisters, she moved to New York City and later wrote that they: “...suffered not only the impoverished lot of working class native families and its multi national populace but early learned the special scourge of indignity, stemming from Jim Crow national oppression.” Claudia Jones excelled at school but the early death of her mother, who endured arduous work as a machinist, was a blow. Her father brought up his daughters in their Harlem apartment, which was very damp, and this led to Claudia contracting tuberculosis at the age of 17. This resulted in the first of several long periods of hospitalisation that she suffered during her short life. Recognising the work of the Communist Party and particularly their defence of the Scottsboro Boys and opposition to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, she joined the Party in 1936, and became secretary of the Harlem YCL. The Harlem Young Communist League under her leadership became one of the most militant and cultured detachments of the American workers’ movement. She led boycotts of stores refusing to hire Black people and engaged Duke Ellington and Count Basie to play benefits for Ethiopia. At one point, the writer James Baldwin was a member. She soon began working at the Daily Worker newspaper. Her outstanding abilities gained her a sharp rise in the leadership and in particular she became an excellent editor and writer, as well as speaking at meetings all over the country. One of her greatest contributions to communist theory was her exposition of the triple oppression endured by Black working class women who suffered on the basis of class, gender and race. With the onslaught of the Cold War, the leaders of the Communist Party were imprisoned and Claudia Jones was, with others, moved up to a new leadership. In their turn, they suffered a kangaroo court trial in which she gave a brilliant response to the judge who sent her along with her comrades to prison. Suffering from heart failure she was hospitalised for three weeks at the end of the trial. In a short time she returned again to hospital following a coronary episode. The authorities still sent her back to serve her prison sentence. Following this, she was deported to Britain in 1955. The cruelty of the USA McCarthyist period is too quickly forgotten. Party Chairman, the Black Communist councillor from Harlem, went blind as a result of his time in prison and poor treatment there. The Communist Party sent Caribbean Communists Billy Strachan, Trevor Carter and Red Lives | 105

Winston Pinder to greet her on arrival and bring her to London. She immediately joined the Communist Party but was soon admitted to hospital due to the medical conditions she had suffered in addition to the poor prison conditions. Claudia became a member of the West Indian Committee and the International Committee on which she served until her death. Her Caribbean comrades admired her for what they saw as a superior understanding, particularly of the Caribbean people in Britain. Many have speculated on why her outstanding abilities were not utilised far more by the Communist Party. We cannot speculate, but she did not play a leadership role. Claudia Jones, although dogged by ill health, lack of funds and having to change accommodation several times, was a prodigious activist and worker, and now devoted much of her time to the Black community. In 1958 she started publishing the West Indian Gazette. It covered international events including youth festivals in the Socialist countries, anti-colonial struggles and domestic affairs. She became a well-loved figure in the cultural and political life of the Caribbean, African and Asian communities in the country, gaining great respect. Claudia was the inspiration for the Notting Hill Carnival, which started indoors at St Pancras Town Hall in 1959, in response to the recent Notting Hill riots. An outstanding writer, her last groundbreaking work The Caribbean Community in Britain, published in 1964 in the African American quarterly Freedomways, examines in particular the Tory government’s racist Commonwealth Immigration Act. She commends the Communist Party as the sole political party to completely oppose the act. She visited the Soviet Union in 1962 and 1963 being hospitalised again and in 1964 went to Japan and Peoples China. She died of heart failure on 25th December 1964. Claudia Jones was a remarkable and brilliant Black communist who despite serious health problems, devoted her entire life to the international Communist movement to establish a world without poverty, discrimination and racism.

David Ivon Jones 1883 – 1924 ‘The Delegate for Africa’, as David Ivon Jones was later to be known in revolutionary circles, was born near Aberystwyth in Cardiganshire, west Wales, in 1883. His roots were indeed radical ones. His family originally hailed from Y Mynydd Bach, a poor and mountainous farming area in the county. This community had been the centre of a lengthy guerilla struggle, ‘Rhyfel y Sais Bach’ (‘The War of the Little Englishman’) of squatters and small farmers against the enclosure of common land by an English landowner. And his great grandfather had led the progress of Methodism locally. Subsequently, David’s grandfather John Ivon Jones became a leading campaigner for Liberalism and radical causes in Aberystwyth. An antiquarian and literary figure, he passed on this 106 | Red Lives

radicalism and bardic name, Ivon, to his grandson. However, David Ivon’s parents died when he was young, leaving him to be raised by various relatives. In Lampeter and then Aberystwyth, the young David was soon working as a grocer in the family business. But he came under the influence of the former Unitarian minister George Eyre Evans and soon deserted his family’s austere Calvinistic Methodism for the radical Unitarian sect. With strong roots in Cardiganshire, it had recently opened a new chapel in Aberystwyth. David was publicly berated by Calvinistic Methodists in his shop and on the street for having joined the people of ‘Y Smotyn Du’ (The Black Spot), as the dangerous Unitarian presence in Cardiganshire was derisively known. As Gwyn A Williams, the Welsh Marxist historian and biographer of David Ivon Jones, explained: “In Aberystwyth at the time, the word “Unitarian” carried the same stigma as the word ‘Communist’ in later years”. Jones became the secretary and treasurer of Aberystwyth Unitarian Chapel, which developed into a particular hotbed of religious and political unorthodoxy. The chapel records show the congregation inviting striking miners to their services, collecting for the Penrhyn quarrymen locked out for three years and hosting Miss Von Pretzold of Prussia – the first woman to be ordained in Britain. According to Islwyn ap Nicholas in Heretics at Large – The Story of a Unitarian Chapel (1977): “Ivon appeared to be a Christian Humanist, unless this is a contradiction in terms. Indeed he was more of a humanist than anything else and he always stressed the social and economic teachings of Jesus”. Among David’s shop accounts book with its lists of payments for coal, rent, steak and vinola there are quotations from Plato and Kant as well as poetry and translations into Welsh, for example of Ebeneezer Elliot’s radical hymn, The People’s Anthem: WHEN wilt thou save the people? O God of mercy! when? Not kings and lords, but nations! Not thrones and crowns, but men! Pa bryd iacheir y bobl? O dywed Ior, pa bryd? Y bobl Arglwydd tirion, Nid gorseddfeingiau’r byd. Tuberculosis – the particular curse of his home county – was to cut short David Ivon’s residence in Cardiganshire. The chapel minutes note that in 1907 he ‘left to seek health in New Zealand’, following many in his family who had emigrated to the colonies. However, after a short time working as a rabbit farmer he was lured to the Orange Free State in South Africa to work in shops owned by two of his brothers. He arrived in South Africa in November 1910, after which his early admiration of the Boers for their ‘bravery’ in two wars against British imperialism quickly dissipated. He saw in them a gun-toting version of the same narrowness, bigotry and hypocrisy of the Calvinism he had witnessed back home. He also became increasingly aware of the position of the Black natives – even more so the women – as ‘slaves in everything but name’. In 1911, he had welcomed the formation of the South African Native National Congress (later Red Lives | 107

renamed the ANC) as part of the drive to ‘national self-consciousness’, but nonetheless joined the pro-segregation South African Labour Party (SALP). Still more of a liberal than a socialist, he moved closer to some of the social-democrats before the 1913 oreminers strike on the Witwatersrand changed his outlook profoundly. The ‘Randowners’, their government and British troops, crushed the white workers with brutal force as the province was plunged into a civil war which also included anti-Indian violence and looting. Jones had left his clerical job in a power station to join the struggle, helping the miners’ union as a book-keeper. The following January, martial law was declared in the main towns and cities to crush an attempted general strike. Repression of the unions, the SALP and various socialist groups further radicalised him as his organisational skills came to the fore in election campaigns. He was elected general secretary of the SALP in August 1914 as the party expanded rapidly in appeal and size. Devouring ILP and other left-wing and Marxist publications from George Evans and other Welsh friends and organisations across Britain, he abandoned all vestiges of religious belief and embraced socialism. Tensions within the SALP finally resulted in a major rupture over the First World War as Jones and a section of the party leadership stuck to the anti-war principles now being dumped by most parties of the Second (Socialist) International. He attacked pro-war Christians and journalists who perpetrated the ‘colossal swindle in terms of religion and honour’ which was leading British and German workers to butcher one another. He resigned as SALP general secretary and in September 1915 became the editor of a new paper, The International and secretary of the breakaway International Socialist League (ISL). He urged Karl Liebknecht to lead a new international body of anti-war socialist parties. His editorials explained the significance of the February and October revolutions in Russia. While still grappling with the race question and whether or for how long the more organised whites would play the leading role within an alliance of all workers, Jones played a major part in the formation of the country’s first all-Black trade union, namely, the short-lived Industrial Workers of Africa. Very much under his influence, the ISL published propaganda in the African languages, proposed working-class unity, challenged white racism and demanded equal status in industry and society for Black workers. In The International, he struck a ground-breaking note in support of Black Africans: “An Internationalism which does not concede the fullest rights which the Native working class is capable of claiming will be a sham. One of the justifications for our withdrawal from the Labour Party is that it gives us untrammelled freedom to deal, regardless of political fortunes, with the great and fascinating problem of the Native”. In 1919, he co-wrote with LH Greene a leaflet under the title: ‘The Bolsheviks are Coming!’ Addressed ‘to the workers of South Africa, Black as well as White’ in English, Sotho and Zulu, it declared: “While the Black worker is oppressed , the white worker cannot be free”. This was a fundamental break from the concept of the white working class – mostly racist in its aims and aspirations – as the vanguard of political change in South Africa. For producing this dangerous leaflet, the two authors were fined and sentenced to four months of imprisonment, though this was later quashed on appeal. In November 1920, David Ivon left South Africa for Europe. For the sake of his 108 | Red Lives

health, he spent time in Nice where he wrote a report in March 1921 for the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) Communism in South Africa. An outstanding survey of the complex economic, social, cultural and political conditions in the country, analysing its class and racial divisions, the report apparently had a major impact on Lenin and the Comintern. Jones also visited Wales briefly, but without the time to see many of his old friends. He had received an invitation to attend the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921 in Moscow as a delegate from South Africa, together with Sam Barlin. In the session of July 12, Jones proposed that the congress: “resolves to further the movement among the working masses of Africa ... and desires the Executive to take a direct initiative in promoting the awakening of the African Negroes as a necessary step to the world revolution”. It was agreed to refer the proposal to the Comintern executive committee (ECCI). In his speech, Jones quoted Marx on how veiled wage slavery in Europe was founded upon the open slavery of colonies in the New World. The Comintern had adopted a comprehensive policy on the colonial question, but along with the parties it had been weak in applying it. He described the position in South Africa as a replica of the world situation in miniature: a mass of native workers side by side with a white ‘labour aristocracy’ of skilled workers. It was proving very difficult to recruit militant workers to the Communist Party from the country’s very small labour aristocracy. But whereas the South African delegates at this Comintern congress were white, the “native working mass as a whole is going to be a brilliant example for communism”. He continued: “They are ripe for communism. They are absolutely propertyless. They are stripped of every vestige of property and caste prejudice. The African natives are a labouring race, still fresh from ancestral communal traditions. I will not say that the native workers are well organised, or have a general conception of communism or even of trade unionism, as yet. But they have made several attempts at liberation by way of industrial solidarity. They only need awakening. They know they are slaves, but lack the knowledge how to free themselves ... The solution of the problem, the whole world problem is being worked out in South Africa on the field of the working-class movement”. The congress agreed that he should represent South Africa as a consultative voice on the Comintern executive committee. Remaining in Moscow for health reasons, he missed the founding congress of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) at the end of July. Instead, he devoted his time learning Russian and became one of the first translators of Lenin’s works into English (technically David Ivon’s second language after Welsh). He also composed numerous articles for Russian, British and CPSA publications. For instance, in the Communist Party of Great Britain’s journal The Communist Review (February 1922), he wrote approvingly of Soviet support for the more radical and democratic elements among the poor peasants in their revolt against the bourgeois leadership and wealth of the Russian Orthodox Church. This was the way to win the Christian peasantry to the revolution. Forcing atheism upon them would fail, because “only the industrial proletariat and its fighting advance guard, the Communist Party, is able to carry science into all realms, and can thus dispense with supernatural idols”. In March 1924, David Ivon’s article urged revolutionaries to read and ponder the earliest works of Lenin, demonstrating his own expansive knowledge not only of Lenin’s writings Red Lives | 109

but also those of Plekhanov, Martov and other leading figures in the Russian movement. His skilled analysis explained Lenin’s early conception of the alliance needed between the industrial working class and the peasantry. But by now, David Ivon’s years of unstinting political toil had taken a heavy toll on his health and the Russian climate no doubt added to the burden. Although the Comintern despatched this highly-regarded revolutionary to Yalta for recuperation from another tuberculosis attack, he died in April 1924. He had, in effect, martyred himself in the cause of world socialism. In his ‘Political Testament’, written on his death-bed, Jones urged his comrades to: “carry out the great revolutionary mission imposed on colonies in general and South Africa in particular with revolutionary devotion and dignity, concentrating on shaking the foundations of world capitalism and British imperialism”. As he wrote to the CPSA general secretary WH ‘Bill’ Andrews: “We stand for Bolshevism, and in all minds Bolshevism stands for the Native worker”. He was buried in the Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow, alongside former South African Communist Party leaders Moses Kotane and JB Marks. A 20-strong deputation from the South African government and embassy visited the graves in 2015, shortly before the remains of Kotane and Marks were returned to South Africa at their families’ request. They also paid their respects at the headstone of David Ivon Jones. The ‘Delegate for Africa’ is now commemorated by a plaque on the Unitarian chapel in his native Aberystwyth. But it is in South Africa that his legacy is particularly treasured today by the SACP and the African National Congress.

Mick (born early 1890s) and Jock Kane (1907 – 1977) Two brothers: Mick (born in Connemara) and John (Jock) Kane ( born in Scotland), each were central to key points in mining history. Their Gaelic speaking father left Ireland to work in Scottish pits. Their mother joined him with five kids, and five more came along. Tam, Martin, Bridget, Mary and Mick were born in Ireland. Jock, Patrick and the others in Scotland. Tam, Martin and Mick were part of clandestine Irish Republican activities and later became founder members of the Communist Party. Tam was killed in the pit, Martin died of TB. A family imbued with radicalism, activism and the bitter experiences of poverty, evictions and victimisation – and solidarity. One would think they must be hard as nails. Quite the contrary. Confident in their convictions, highly intelligent and without personal ambition, they were warm, straight as dies, genuine and hugely approachable – and fearless. Mick was out in the 1921 lock-out, Jock remembers only the soup kitchens. Both 110 | Red Lives

active in the 5-month pit strike which followed the capitulation of the TUC in the 1926 general strike. Jock relates how essential it was to retain popular involvement and obtain supplies. Victimisation from jobs meant eviction from homes, so the families found refuge in the poor house until a Salvation Army lady, whose family had no connection with the pits or the colliery houses, provided a roof temporarily. Following that strike, the Kane brothers were denied employment. No jobs for the Kanes in Scotland, so Mick and John headed south, to pits in Yorkshire and later Derbyshire and Notts. Their families soon followed. It wasn’t just their militancy that the coal owners hated, it was their organisational abilities which they feared. Mick and John organised in the pits and the villages – pit villages full of company houses. The Party wrote local news-sheets – agitating, educating and organising and politicising. In Staveley, near Chesterfield, they were victimised and banned from all the owner’s pits. Mick, Jock, Patrick and Martin were on the dole, and the families evicted, so the women and kids ended up in the workhouse – where Mary rebelled against arbitrary rules! Jock went to the Lenin school in Moscow for a year or two. Mick worked organising in the National Unemployed Workers Movement. Jock became a Party organiser in Sheffield, working amongst miners, the unemployed, steel workers and engineers. After ‘26, most militant miners were blacklisted. The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) had suffered breakaway company unions in South Wales and Nottinghamshire. The Communist Party was organising to re-build the movement’s industrial strength. It saw the huge mining population, although spread over different coalfields and in isolated pit villages, as a key target where the company unions had to be defeated, if the MFGB was to be unified. At the Notts pit, Harworth, the MFGB branch president was Mick Kane and the Sheffield Party organiser was Jock. The fight-back was bitterest here. Most miners there had balloted massively for the MFGB, but had joined the Spencer union, a company union, just to get a job. When a local dispute arose, Mick Kane led the men out and exposed the uselessness of the Spencer outfit. The company, owned by a Hitler admirer, who was also chair of the Notts county council and as such, head of the Police Authority, sent masses of police to get the scabs into the pit. The six month strike, the victimisations, the vicious gaol sentences suffered by the strike leaders, especially the two years hard labour for Mick, is well recorded. But how the notoriously anti-worker trial judge was chosen, we’ll never know. Nevertheless the Spencer union was brought back into the MFGB. The uneasy unification suffered defeats, but the real outcome was that Notts was now part of the national union – a unity which endured for 47 years. Meanwhile, Jock had returned to mining, ending up in Armthorpe. When the pits were Red Lives | 111

nationalised, Jock accepted a personnel job, hoping to democratise the industry. Some hope! The old managers were retained, so Jock left his office job and went back down the pit, where he developed strong NUM branches in the Doncaster area NUM. The militancy of the Doncaster men and their 1955 strike led to the fiercest media attacks on Jock and his family, but it led to the defeat of the right wing in the Yorkshire coalfield. Jock won a seat on the NUM executive. Mining wages had been falling relative to manufacturing, and the scene was set for a fight back. Some men had cars by this time and flying pickets became the strategy. At Jock’s funeral, Arthur Scargill spoke of how Jock had initiated their use, in the 1972 national strike. That strike shook the government, who set up the Wilberforce Enquiry to investigate mining grievances. It found many such and recommended huge changes, which, with the strike still solid, the government accepted. The NUM however, didn’t! The NUM accepted all the recommendations, but Jock fought in the executive for more. Years of retreat had led to a build up of unresolved issues in the pits. Jock showed that the strike being solid and the Tories on the run, now was the time to force the government and the Coal Board to concede on these issues also. The right wing were appalled – they’d got all they’d asked for! Jock pointed out that the unresolved issues were only unresolved because the Coal Board had been strong and the NUM weak. Now was the hour, the men were strong and Ted Heath was desperate. Jock won a 13 to 11 vote in the EC to face up to Heath again – and got their case accepted. Jock and Betty, a union militant in her own right prior to motherhood, were at one with the Armthorpe community. When Jock achieved high office in either NCB or NUM, they rejected all perks and trimmings. They lived in the terraced Coal Board house till they died. Mick and Jock were true tribunes of the people.

Yvonne Kapp 1903 – 1999 Yvonne Helene Kapp – writer, researcher, political activist and biographer of Eleanor Marx, was born in south London on 17 April 1903 to Max and Clarisse Mayer. Her German-Jewish family were in business. Yvonne grew up bi-lingual, speaking both German and English, and enjoyed writing from early childhood. Her education included attending Queens College, Harley Street, where, according to her, no student was trained for work as it was not anticipated that any of them would do any. She also spent a brief period at school in Switzerland and further time ‘finishing’ in Paris. The atmosphere at home became increasingly tense as Yvonne kicked against parental traces, and aged 18, she severed ties with the family. From then on, contrary to the anticipated outcome of her upbringing, she worked to support herself. In 1922, at 19, she married the artist and musician Edmond Kapp and 112 | Red Lives

the couple had a daughter, Janna born in 1924. The relationship was not to last; they separated in 1930. In the half century between leaving home as a teenager and bringing out her work on Eleanor Marx, Yvonne had a remarkable and varied career. In the 1920s she lived largely on fees from freelance journalism. She wrote for London newspapers and was for a brief period literary editor of Paris Vogue. Her first book, Pastiche: A Music-Room Book, was published under the name Yvonne Cloud in 1926. She authored four novels, including Nobody Asked You (1932), Short Lease (1932), Mediterranean Blues (1933) and The Houses in Between (1939). These and other writings brought in some income to the by then single mother. After a visit to the Soviet Union and discussion with general secretary, Harry Pollitt, whom she met on her homeward journey, she joined the Communist Party in 1936. From then on, with her extended family in the Rhineland caught up in the horrors of Nazism, Yvonne dedicated herself to anti-fascism, working with Basque and Jewish refugees and going on to become assistant director to the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. This brought her into contact with Margaret Mynatt who had fled Germany in 1933 and was head of tribunals for the Czech Refugee Trust Fund. The two women were to spend their lives together until 1977 when Margaret died. Both were dismissed from their jobs by the Home Office in 1940 on suspicion of being communists. They went on to author British Policy and the Refugees 1933 to 1941 (1941), a damning critique of the government’s racist internment and deportation policies. The manuscript was turned down for publication at the time and did not become available until 1997. It remains, most regrettably, just as fresh and relevant today. After volunteering with the Labour Research Department, Yvonne found employment from 1941 to 1946 as a research officer with the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), working directly with its president Jack Tanner, as well as writing detailed reports on conditions in work sectors covered by the union – the “Production Enquiries”. As Jack’s speech writer, she demonstrated her capacity not only for amassing the requisite information but for astute observation of the man himself. She so accurately captured what he would have said and how he would have delivered it that, so Yvonne complained, he did not even bother to read the texts before he stood on the podium! Yvonne next took her investigative skills to the Medical Research Council where she worked from 1947 to 1953, doing field research in the docks and factories of the East End. In 1953 she moved to Lawrence and Wishart to put her exceptional linguistic ability to good use as an editor and translator. Here, while working on correspondence between Engels and Lafargue, she encountered Eleanor Marx. It was not until Yvonne was almost seventy that she published the first of her twovolume biography of Eleanor (1972 and 1976), the magnum opus for which she is most remembered. Eric Hobsbawm praised it as “one of the few unquestionable masterpieces of 20th century biography.” Throughout it testifies to Yvonne’s deep empathy with her subject and penetrating understanding of the interplay between the complex private and public spheres of Red Lives | 113

Eleanor’s existence. Yvonne’s genius was to bring alive for the first time, a woman who had made an exceptional but hitherto little-acknowledged, contribution to the developing struggle for socialism in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. In so doing Yvonne Kapp gifted us a work of art. Yvonne died on 22 June 1999. Her memoirs, Time will Tell, were published posthumously in 2003.

Solly Kaye 1913 – 2005 Solly Kaye, a lifelong communist and veteran of the 1936 Battle of Cable Street was a charismatic orator who, according to his friend and comrade Aubrey Morris: “held election meetings resembling old-fashioned revival meetings, though without reference to God”. The son of Lithuanian immigrants, he was only five years old (the youngest of four children) when his father died of Spanish flu. Born in 1913, he left school in London’s East End at 14 to start work as a woodcarver in a cabinet workshop. Solly was a political agitator and organiser, who attracted large gatherings in Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, but was equally at home in smaller, Friday lunchtime meetings on Tower Hill, where on a soapbox, he shared space with Methodist preacher Donald Soper. Despite their opposing views, they enjoyed a good-humoured rapport. He learned his oratorical skills on street corner pitches around Stepney, opposing the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Meetings were impromptu, passionate and occasionally dangerous – he was beaten up by fascists – but Solly learned how to counter heckling without physical force, to debate contentious issues with commitment, and the prime importance of humour, which he possessed in abundance (When he died in 2005, someone suggested his tombstone should say ‘have you heard the one about…’!). Like so many of his contemporaries, the rise of fascism drew him to the Communist Party in 1934. Solly explained: “Alone among the political parties, the Communists were on the streets, warning, explaining, educating and agitating about the dangers facing Britain and the world”, as Spain and the rise of Mussolini in Italy demonstrated. He played a major organising role in mobilising mass action to stop Mosley’s Blackshirts marching through the East End in 1936 in the Battle of Cable Street – showing that fascism could be beaten on the streets, and the power of direct political action. You can get a flavour of Solly and his strong views on Mosley from his appearance on the Frost Programme of 15 November 1967 at https://youtube/-pwtjOe1WqY Ever a campaigner, Solly backed the squatters demands to house the homeless and took up the cudgels against slum landlords after the war. Disguising himself to attend an auction of Eileen Mansions, a Whitechapel tenement, he announced that anyone who bought the property would experience trouble from him and the tenants. Potential purchasers departed, the property unsold. Local Franciscan, Neville Palmer, declared that: “It is not a sin to vote for Solly Kaye”. Solly was duly elected in 1960, as one of many Communists including Phil Piratin, Bertha Sokoloff and Max Levitas, onto Stepney Borough Council. He continued to be elected until 1975 (by now called Tower Hamlets) by which time he ruefully recalled he had “...got all his supporters successfully re-housed elsewhere”. 114 | Red Lives

The East End was shocked by the racist murder of an Asian fast food restaurant worker in 1970. With over 2,000 Asians now in the area, Solly roused a community meeting with typical drive and clarity: “The purveyors of racialism can be defeated by united action”, we must not “...leave it to the immigrant organisations to bear the brunt of the fight.” Back in 1957 Solly accompanied R Palme Dutt on a trip to Israel as fraternal delegates to the Israeli Communist Party Congress. His subsequent thoughts, based on articles in the Morning Star, were published in a pamphlet, Zionism – a false philosophy which adds to confusion (1971), ring true today. He said: “In the minds of millions, the words ‘Israel’, ‘Jewry’ and ‘Zionism’ are synonymous. And Zionist leaders want it that way….hence the confusion..but one can be a Jew without being a Zionist, a Zionist without being a Jew. One can be a Jew without being Israeli and an Israeli without being a Jew! Judaism is a religion, not a race. And Zionism isn’t a faith, or a religion. It is a political idea often reinforced by religious mysticism…..Jewish people are of many nationalities and in Israel a citizen’s nationality is Israeli – not Jewish.” Marrying north-eastern lass Margaret in 1946, and with a young family of Joanna, Johnny and Janet, it wasn’t easy as a Communist Party full-timer (which he had become) Red Lives | 115

to combine “being a working class leader and a good husband and father”, said Solly: “There were no classes teaching this subject! The political pressures were constant and relentless.” But his skills were used to the full; prolific pamphleteer, speech-writer, journalist, book critic and poet, “he could produce a jingle at the drop of a hat” according to Aubrey Morris. His copywriting skills flowered in the advertising industry, finally bringing in a living wage. Most satisfying, he said, was freelancing for the small agency called ‘Mountain and Molehill’ (named after the founders Ray Bernard, six foot three, and Ken Sprague, a shade over five foot) producing work for the trade union and labour movement. Overcoming initial reluctance they brought modern advertising and communications techniques into clothing workers’ and footwear unions as well as the Transport and General Workers Union with recruiting materials, posters, booklets and exhibitions. Late in his working life Solly re-trained as a woodwork teacher at secondary schools, from which he derived great satisfaction and success using his natural affinity with youngsters and his chiselling skills. Despite events in the Soviet Union, Solly retained his belief in socialism. He was against the dissolution of the British Communist Party, while recognising that in the changed circumstances of the late 20th century, there was no place for a highly centralised monolithic organisation. He continued to believe in the need for a campaigning party. Anybody who heard him fundraising at rallies big and small for the Daily Worker and Morning Star would attest to Solly’s wit and humanity. He had a rare quality – being able to raise both money and morale.

Bill and Gladys Keable 1903 – 1994 and 1909 – 1972 Writes son Ken, now a Communist Party district secretary: “Gladys Marion Main and William George Keable met in 1927 at a socialist summer school at Lancing, Sussex, organised by the Independent Labour Party. She was 17 and from a middle-class, Unitarian family in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex; he was 23 and from a very poor working-class family in Limehouse, London. Both already spoke the international language Esperanto, which must have drawn them together and was to play a very important part in their lives. He left the Labour Party (much to the disappointment of his local branch, where Clem Atlee was grooming him as a Labour candidate) to join the Communist Party in February 1928. She joined in 1929 and they married in 1930. Jointly they were so effective that comrades called them “The Keable Express”. 116 | Red Lives

Gladys was born in 1909 in London but moved to Leigh-on-Sea at age nine. Like many of her generation, she was outraged at Britain’s ruling class and political establishment for causing and permitting the carnage of the First World War. A selfportrait, drawn when she was 17, shows an angry young woman determined to change the world. She became a commercial artist and illustrator, an organiser, a strike leader, an editor and the international secretary of a world-wide organisation. She was children’s editor of the Daily Worker and Morning Star 1956-1970. Gladys learned Esperanto from her brother’s school friend H L Elvin. She absorbed the humanitarian and internationalist ideals that went with Esperanto as a common second language for all humankind and began corresponding with Esperantists abroad. At age 14 she became treasurer of her ILP branch, who later awarded her a scholarship to go to the summer school. After meeting Bill, she joined the local Plebs’ League and attended National Council of Labour Colleges classes to study economics and joined the Southend Branch of the CPGB in 1929. She took a three-year course at Southend Art School and, at the end of 1928, began to earn a living as a free-lance artist under the name Marion Main, drawing for magazines and newspapers, including advertising work. Because she was travelling to London weekly to sell her drawings, and hence could meet the leadership, pay subs etc, she was made organiser of her CP branch. She worked with John Mahon, George Allison and George Renshaw at the Minority Movement and produced drawings for MM leaflets. When the Daily Worker first appeared (1st January, 1930) she contributed a daily children’s cartoon, “Micky Mongrel – the Class-conscious Cur” which continued for about two years. On getting married, they moved to Tottenham and then Shoreditch. To ensure that she should have an independent political development, they decided that she should work in the Young Communist League. She helped to form the Tottenham Workers’ Sports Association, wrote and drew leaflets and sent in a scathing criticism of the Young Worker to its editor, Alex Massie. She was promptly co-opted onto the London District Committee and National Bureau of the YCL. She became National Organiser of the Young Pioneers, a children’s organisation run by the YCL. She set up about 10 groups and helped to organise some school strikes. One of these was in Glasgow and she was ordered to go there to help. Because Bill was ill and needed her, she refused to go and was dismissed from the YCL leadership. Gladys taught Esperanto, set up classes and ran a lesson column in the Young Worker. She became London Organiser and later National Organiser of La Brita Laborista Esperanto-Asocio (British Labour Esperanto Association – BLEA). Her job was mainly to establish branches in working class areas where members were taught the language well enough to translate workers’ letters and to organise correspondence between local workers’ groups, trade union branches etc with similar groups abroad – mainly with the USSR. This work was called Proleta Esperanto-Korespondado (Proletarian Esperanto Correspondence). In 1932, in Berlin, BLEA helped to launch the new, pro-Soviet organisation IPE – Internacio de Proleta Esperantistaro, the International of Proletarian Esperantists, with about 14,000 affiliated members in 14 countries including China, Japan, the USSR and USA. Bill and Gladys played leading roles, Gladys becoming International Secretary Red Lives | 117

1937-39. By agreement with the CPGB, she closed IPE in 1939 to prevent it becoming an anti-Soviet organisation. Bill was editor of the BLEA’s monthly magazine Ruĝa Esperantisto. They did their Esperanto work under the guidance of Emile Burns on behalf of the CPGB leadership. By special request of the German CP, Gladys and Bill were relieved of other Party work to play a leading part in the Esperanto movement. All this came to a halt after, in 1937, the Soviet government suddenly closed down the Union of Soviet Esperantists, apparently because its members had so many international contacts (it banned the stamp collectors’ organisation at the same time) and had leading Esperantists jailed or executed as spies. This development only became apparent slowly, over subsequent years. They had their first child, Robin, in 1940 but were bombed out after six months. Gladys moved back to her mother’s place at Leigh-on-Sea, where she entered into local Party work. With two other Party women, she started a Housewives’ Club and from it launched a Letter of Greetings to the Women of Moscow. It ended with such enormous support that a Town Meeting was held from which she and the Chair, a local guildswoman, were elected to present the letter to Madame Maisky (wife of the Soviet ambassador) in London. The Committee embraced local Conservative women, Salvation Army, Labour Party, Co-op Guilds, Sisterhoods etc. Out of this committee and simultaneous work done on the Trades Council, they eventually formed a local Aid Russia Aid China Committee. After being re-housed by the council in 1947, the couple led a rent strike on their council estate in Stoke Newington, London. Moving to Debden, Essex in 1950 to raise their family (I came in 1945 and my brother Stan in 1946), they led a school strike in 1953 which caused a new school to be built on their council estate ahead of schedule, with school buses provided in the meantime. Gladys became children’s editor of the Daily Worker in 1956 (the Morning Star from 1966), producing a daily children’s item until 1970. As editor, she sourced progressive material, even learning Italian so that she could translate a graphic serial lifted from the Italian Communist paper L’Unità because it dealt with the “Wild West” but with Native American children as the protagonists. In Debden, Gladys became organiser of the Peace Council and formed an International Women’s Day group which sent delegates to the National Assembly of Women. Bill joined the CPGB when the debate about launching the Daily Worker, and its purpose and character, was in full swing. He became one of the Party’s best public speakers, speaking at street corners, training speakers and travelling all over Britain in support of Party campaigns. He wrote a Party pamphlet on public speaking. He began working full-time for the Party in 1935/6, working for the Daily Worker as cashier, advertising manager and other posts and, from 1939-41, as London and Southern Counties Organiser of the Daily Worker Readers’ Leagues. Called up in 1941, he did his national service in the National Fire Service until being invalided out as a result of a road accident that occurred on the way to a fire. On recovering, he worked in a factory making aircraft parts, where he became a leading trade unionist. The Daily Worker was owned (on behalf of the CPGB) by the Keable Press Ltd and so, in February 1946, it was Bill who, as director, sold it to the new, broad-based, readers’ co-op, the People’s Press Printing Society (its current owner) for a shilling, at a big rally in the Albert Hall. 118 | Red Lives

In 1936, the couple took part in the anti-fascist Battle of Cable Street. To build support, Gladys chalked the “Stop Mosley” message on pavements and Bill spoke on street corners. Refugees from Nazi Germany stayed at their flat on an escape route. Bill would take them to Jewish comrades in the East End who would take them in. One “refugee” aroused suspicion because, despite claiming to be left-wing, he didn’t know any revolutionary songs. Deciding that he was a spy, Gladys locked him out. Bill left the Daily Worker in 1945 as a result of a disagreement over a staffing matter and had great difficulty finding work. When he got a job, a man from MI5 would visit his employer and get him sacked. Eventually he became a self-employed salesman. Gladys continued her commercial art work, including children’s comics. She died of cancer in 1972. Both continued to be active in the Esperanto movement up till their deaths. Bill was devastated when Gladys died but he lived on until 1994, aged 90. He travelled to Bulgaria and elsewhere, where the Esperanto movement welcomed him as an honoured veteran. As with Gladys, the struggle for socialism was never far from his mind. I am lucky to have had such inspiring parents.”

Dorothy Kuya 1932 – 2013 One of the Communist Party’s most important Black members from the 1940s to the 1980s was Dorothy Kuya. She was born in April 1932 in Liverpool, her mother a Liverpudlian and her father from Sierra Leone. He disappeared and when her mother married a Nigerian, young Dorothy took his surname and regarded him as her father. She and her family lived in Liverpool 8, which was virtually a ghetto, with mainly Black and mixed-race families living in one of the oldest Black communities in Britain. The inhabitants suffered the worst housing and unemployment. In an interview she remembered: “You'd be hard pressed to find a Black face in Liverpool city centre only twenty minutes away by foot”. However, the people of Liverpool 8 were a close-knit community with social clubs that reflected the culture and nationalities in the area. Young Dorothy Kuya was aware of the class divide and the poverty in the city and the racism and discrimination and so, whilst still a teenager, she joined the Young Communist League. A most confident person even at that early age in the 1940s, she addressed Communist street meetings and regularly sold the Daily Worker. One of her proudest moments was when she met and presented the great African American Paul Robeson, with a bouquet of flowers during his tour of Britain in 1949. Despite the onset of the Cold War with its anti Communism, she continued to be an active member of the Party. On a personal level she trained first to be a nurse and then a teacher. In Red Lives | 119

the latter role, she excelled, showing her talents as a gifted communicator, with the sharpest of minds. Dorothy moved to London, joined her local Party and began teaching in a north London school. Whilst teaching there, she and another Communist teacher, Bridget Harris, set up a pioneering organisation – Teachers Against Racism – that was particularly active in the 1970s. Her co-worker and friend for many years, Jean Tate, relates that another very influential person in Dorothy’s life was another Communist Ken Forge, who after having lived for a while in Nigeria in the 1930s, was repulsed by the racism there and on return to Britain, joined the Party as a confirmed anti-racist. He worked with Dorothy Kuya and became the first person in the country to set up a Black Studies course in a south London comprehensive school. Alongside her Communist activities, teaching and working with groups on racism, she became involved with a most important journal Dragons Teeth, which had been started by a radical Indian woman Bandana Ahmed. Many teachers will remember in those years realising the value of the journal, which investigated and exposed racism in children’s books and suggested alternatives. In connection with this, she set up a Racism Awareness Unit with funding from the Greater London Council. They had a headquarters in London but when the Thatcher government abolished the GLC that was lost. As a Communist woman, Dorothy Kuya was a member of the National Assembly of Women (NAW) and ensured anti racism was on the forefront for the members. She eventually became general secretary of the organisation. The NAW was affiliated to the International Federation of Women and she met many women from the socialist countries, as well as progressive women from the capitalist world. Her friend and comrade Jean Tate describes how a dynamic African American woman, Vinnie Burrows, who visited Britain, became a particular friend of Dorothy. By the 1980s, Dorothy was deeply involved in anti-racist activities, and at the beginning of that decade spoke at a GLC conference on racism. She also participated in a Communist conference on racism and the police in 1981. Her contribution and those of others were published as a Communist Party pamphlet later that year, Black and Blue – Racism and the Police. By now she had become Head of Race Equality for Haringey Council and worked closely with Bernie Grant MP. From the late 1980s, she devoted much of her energies to working within the Black community and continued to fight racism. She returned to Liverpool where she had bought a house in Liverpool 8. She worked tirelessly opposing racism and urged the setting up of a slavery museum in the city, as much of Liverpool’s wealth had been as a result of the slave trade. She was overjoyed when the Slavery Museum opened. It is a tribute to her vision and determination. Dorothy’s community work was not over and the next struggle was over the attempts of the Tory government to demolish ten streets in Liverpool 8 under the guise of “redevelopment”. Dorothy Kuya led the resistance refusing attempts to buy her out and insisted on staying put. Despite the people’s resistance many homes were demolished. On the cultural and community front she, with others in Liverpool 8, started “African Presence” as a centre celebrating the area’s rich cultural past and its connection with 120 | Red Lives

the long established African and Caribbean communities. Dorothy Kuya died on 23rd December 2013. Her whole life was devoted to people’s struggles. In the fight against racism and discrimination she was always a leader. For 40 years she was an active member of the Communist Party who contributed much to the understanding of race and class. A pioneer in many ways, she deserves a prominent place in the history of the Communist Party.

Abe Lazarus 1911 – 1967 Abe Lazarus was a Communist Party organiser in Oxford. Born in 1911, he was known for leading a series of successful campaigns in the city between 1934 and 1938 – a landmark strike at the Pressed Steel works, the Florence Park rent strike, anti-fascist mobilisations, protests against the Cutteslowe Walls, and the Oxford Bus strike. Lazarus was already recognised as an effective activist after he had been involved in a strike at the Firestone Tyre Factory in his native Brentford. Because of this he was given the pseudonym, ‘Firestone Bill’. He was summoned to Oxford on 17th July 1934 by the Oxford Communist Party to help grow a strike at the Pressed Steel plant in Cowley. The strike had begun as a spontaneous walkout four days earlier when workers on the night shift were not paid their full wages. A strike committee was quickly formed with Lazarus as its chair, and it gained the full backing of Oxford & District Trades Council, as well as the Oxford Labour Party. Ernest Bevin, secretary of the TGWU, communicated privately with the factory managers and advised them to capitulate. The number of strikers grew to almost 1,000 workers, and after just over two weeks the TGWU was recognised by management, workers secured a fixed wage, and the strike was won. Lazarus was present during this period, speaking at mass meetings in the town centre. Olive Gibbs (later Lord Mayor of Oxford) recounted how his voice: “...could be heard, without the aid of a microphone, from one end of St Giles to the other”. From the Pressed Steel strike, Lazarus moved on to organise on the newly-built Florence Park estate. Many of the Cowley workers were living on the estate, and Lazarus himself moved in there too. The houses were built as cheaply and quickly as possible, on land which was marshy and boggy. New tenants were disappointed by their damp, ramshackle homes, and they complained to the owner-developer, a man called Fred Moss. He refused to carry out repairs, which prompted Lazarus to bring together a tenants’ association and call for a rent strike. The rent strike was eventually defeated, yet the houses were later renovated after the estate was sold to a new owner, and the tenants’ association is still active today. In a similar dispute, Lazarus led the protests against the Cutteslowe Walls – two large walls which had been built in 1934 to cut off middle-class housing from council houses. The walls ran right across Wolsey and Aldritch roads, totally separating Cutteslowe. The Oxford Communist Party organised a march on the walls which would have culminated with the walls being pulled down by the community, however police intercepted the march and defended the walls, so no demolition was possible. The city council made numerous attempts to remove the walls, and they were finally cleared in March 1959. Remains of the wall are on display in Oxford Town Hall, and there is a mural Red Lives | 121

commemorating the campaign near Cutteslowe Community Centre. Central to the success of the party in Oxford was its ability to organically connect struggles across the city. The strike at Pressed Steel was a precursor to the campaign in Florence Park, as many of the tenants worked at the factory. Arthur Exell noted how Lazarus mobilised students to break up fascist meetings at Oxford Town Hall, and all these activities brought radical students in contact with the Trades Council and the Labour Party. Common work between Communists and Labour activists resulted in the formation of a Popular Front to fight the 1938 Oxford by-election. And in city council elections, Lazarus ran as a candidate on a joint Labour-Communist ticket. Lazarus suffered from rheumatism as a child, which affected his education, and because of his illness he was kept home during the Second World War. In 1947 he turned down nomination to the party EC, citing health reasons. His marriage to Mabel Browning broke down in the 1940s, and he started an affair with Inez Hill, the former wife of Christopher Hill. Because of his notoriety in Oxford he had attracted the attention of the police, who searched his house, opened his letters, and watched his movements. This is evident from the extensive records held in his police file. Lazarus saw the surveillance as a form of harassment, and it put him under a lot of stress. A combination of overwork, illness, and personal issues, forced him to gradually withdraw from Party activity. He stepped down from his role as Midlands District Secretary. His final assignment was to report on the 4th World Festival of Youth and Students in Bucharest, in July 1953. After this he spent the rest of his life working as a librarian at the Bernal Peace Library, and he died in 1967. As a testament to Lazarus’ great contribution to the labour movement in Oxford, the Unite office in Cowley, and the city Labour Party office, is today named ‘Abe Lazarus House'.

Norman Le Brocq 1922 – 1996 Throughout Europe in the early 1940s, wherever the Nazis occupied, the subject population exhibited the same responses: collaboration, resistance or indifference. The Channel Islands showed the same features as elsewhere. Norman Le Brocq was 18 years old when the German forces came to Jersey on 1 July 1940. Like many others most at risk, the members of the Communist Party well known to the authorities had managed to escape beforehand leaving just 3 young members behind: Norman Le Brocq, Les Huelin and Stella Perkins. Their clandestine cell remained remarkably free of infiltration until the end of the war although it had expanded to 18 by that time, including Rosalie Le Riche, whom Norman later married. Armed initially only with a Gestetner duplicator, the cell managed to circulate news 122 | Red Lives

about the war under the noses of the German and collaborationist authorities as well as chalking slogans calling for resistance. Their most decisive action was the arson of the hotel used as an officer training school by the Germans, leading to a loss of nine lives. The Communist policy of forming a United Front with patriotic elements, led to the creation of the Jersey Democratic Movement, initially with only seven members. Those who had chosen to keep their heads down cannot have failed to be aware of the deportations of British born residents to prison camps on the continent, from which many did not return. The eagerness of the authorities to collaborate in the identification of Jewish residents on the islands led to their deportation and death in nearly every case. Most evident of all that the official line of correct behaviour of the occupation regime was superficial at best, was the arrival on the islands of slave labourers used in the construction of the Atlantic Wall, built to resist the Second Front demanded by the Soviet Union. On the mainland, the Communist Party led the campaign for this front to be opened at the earliest opportunity. Reactionary forces in all parts of Britain resisted this. Thanks to the existence of two native Russian speakers in the resistance group, it was possible for them to produce material informing the slave workers of the victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, that had a decisive effect in maintaining morale in eventual victory. The inhumane treatment of the Soviet and Spanish Republican POWs produced many acts of humanitarian support from the local population, even up to hiding escaped prisoners at the risk of severe punishment. The most famous example was that of Louise Gould who died in Ravensbruck, although her brother Harold somehow survived the brutality of Belsen. They had been denounced to the authorities by neighbours, who were not unique by any means in providing information that led to the imprisonment of around 4,000 people for breaking the occupation regulations, including one shot for the crime of keeping a pigeon. The effectiveness of the Resistance culminated by 1945 in making contact with anti-fascist Germans, most notable Paul Malbach whose father had been murdered in Dachau. Plans were even made for a mutiny in May 1945 as the German garrison was desperately short of food and defeat was seen to be inevitable. The death of Hitler as the Soviet and Polish forces entered Berlin made the uprising unnecessary as it risked the lives of too many of the civilian population. The Liberation of the Channel Islands, unlike the rest of Europe, did not result in the punishment of collaborators or the honouring of the Resistance. The old order simply carried on ruling in the same old way, and people like Norman Le Brocq became an embarrassment as a guilty conscience of the misdeeds of so many. Norman continued to advocate for the improvement in the lives of the common people and the extension of democratic rights in the government of the islands. He was instrumental in expanding the membership of the Channel Islands Co-operative Society, and was eventually successful in being elected to becoming a States Deputy in 1966, being re-elected in 1972 and 1978, until his retirement in 1987. During the years of silence about the history of the Occupation, Norman’s role was certainly not forgotten by the USSR or by those Spanish Republicans who had Red Lives | 123

remained on the Islands at the end of the war. In 1960 Norman and Francis le Sueur of the Jersey Communist party had invited the crew of the Soviet timber ship Jarensk to visit the site of the graves of over 100 Soviet PoWs at Westmount, near St Helier. The sailors donated funds for a memorial to be erected with the words ‘Your motherland will never forget you’. From that time onwards a ceremony was held at the site that grew to include the Spanish Republicans, whose leader Francisco Font acted as Master of Ceremonies until his death in 1981, when the role was taken over by Norman and later by Stella Perkins as survivors of the Resistance. The history of the Nazi Occupation of the Channel Islands is still a matter of controversy, as the recent programme on Adolf Island showed how the excavation of suspected mass graves in the prison camp on Alderney, Lager Sylt, was being prevented by the authorities. In 1966, Norman and nineteen other resisters were honoured by the Soviet Union with the presentation of gold watches. He is now at last commemorated on his native Jersey by the naming of a Fisheries Protection Vessel performing a role that was close to his heart. It was notable on the other hand that the leaders of the collaboration authorities were honoured by the post war British government by the award of a knighthood and an OBE for their role during those five years.

Lou Lewis 1939 – 2010 Lou Lewis was a bricklayer who was one of the leaders of the 13-month strike at the Barbican in London, which resulted in him being blacklisted. He went on to revive the Building Workers Charter, an unofficial rank and file movement and newspaper of members of all building unions, which paved the way for the national strike of 1972. He was the convenor of all the unions at the Barbican in September 1966, when a work to rule was introduced in a dispute over a bonus. The disputes procedure ruled in favour of the workers, but the employers sacked three activists. This led to a walkout of the whole site, supported by the unions (except the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers). The unions nationally eventually agreed to a return to work for all except the members of the joint shop stewards committee – which the workers refused to accept. The employers sacked the entire workforce and attempted to bring in strike breakers, leading to violent confrontations between police and pickets. An offer to re-employ all but the six members of the works committee including Lou was approved by the unions. Shamefully they published an advert stating it was disgraceful that: “A few individuals who represent nobody but themselves should try to stop 200 to 300 workers from being on a site which offers the opportunity of substantial earnings.” But the strike ended in November 1967 with the works committee blacklisted. In 1971 Lou’s union, the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Operative Workers, merged with the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers, into what became UCATT (the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians). 124 | Red Lives

Lou, and fellow Communist Pete Kavanagh (of the TGWU), relaunched the Building Workers’ Charter, and by 1972 it was selling 15,000 copies of the newspaper, and attracting nearly a thousand delegates to conferences. They agitated for a claim for £30 for a 35-hour week, and an end to bogus self-employment (known as the “lump”), which was used to undermine organised labour. UCATT supported this and called a national strike in 1972. Lou and Pete were also active in organising flying pickets, including to Shrewsbury, which led to the infamous miscarriage of justice in lengthy jail sentences for Des Warren, Ricky Tomlinson and others. A 25 per cent pay increase was accepted by the unions (without consulting the membership), but nothing was agreed against the lump or blacklisting. Afterwards Lou became UCATT regional secretary for London, and a member of the Communist Party Executive Committee. He retired in 2003 and died in 2010 at the age of 71. Pete Kavanagh had showed many imaginative ways to publicise disputes. These included occupying a crane in central London, and leafleting guests at a breakfast in a Russell Square hotel, owned by a neighbouring one where the workers were on strike.

Jack Lindsay 1900 – 1990 Jack Lindsay was born in Melbourne, Australia. The eldest son of the artist Norman Lindsay and his first wife Katie Parkinson, Lindsay was heir to one of Australia’s most distinguished artistic dynasties. His father, two of his uncles, an aunt and one of his brothers were painters; his brother Philip was a novelist; other members of the family included the cartoonist Will Dyson and the novelist Joan Lindsay. Lindsay did not attend school regularly until the age of twelve, when he won a scholarship to Brisbane Grammar School. From there he won another scholarship to the University of Queensland, where he took a First in Latin and Greek. In 1926 he moved to London. He established the Fanfrolico Press and The London Aphrodite, with the intention of outraging literary London. He championed DH Lawrence, and was a familiar figure in 1920s Fitzrovia. When the Fanfrolico Press folded in 1929, Lindsay could not afford to return to Australia. He spent the next sixty-one years in England. Living in the West Country in very considerable poverty, he began writing historical novels, including a trilogy set in ancient Rome. By 1936, a growing awareness of the European political situation and extensive readings of Marxist classics brought Lindsay to communism. He wrote several Mass Declamations, including Who Are the English? and On Guard for Spain, performed all Red Lives | 125

over Britain to raise money for the Spanish Republic. He also turned to writing about the English radical tradition. His books over the next few prolific years included a trilogy of novels about English history – 1649, Lost Birthright and Men of Forty-Eight – a study of John Bunyan (attacked by F R Leavis, but praised by Christopher Hill) and (with Edgell Rickword) the influential anthology A Handbook of Freedom. He eventually joined the Communist Party sometime in 1940-1. Called up in 1941, Lindsay joined the Signals, but in 1943 was transferred to the War Office, where he wrote play-scripts, film-treatments and living-newspapers for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs Theatre Unit. After the War he lived with the Unity Theatre actress Ann Davies (star of the 1938 hit Babes in the Wood) and National Organiser of the British Drama League. Lindsay and Krishna Menon established Meridian Books. Close friends included the poets Randall Swingler, Edgell Rickword, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell. Lindsay was now a senior figure in the cultural life of the CP. He was a member of the Party’s National Cultural Committee, and attended the 1948 Wroclaw Peace Congress and the 1949 Paris Congress, where he met leading European Communist writers like Aragon, Eluard, Tzara, Brecht, Lukacs and Ernst Fischer. He was involved in the work of the Committee for Democracy in Greece. Many of his books were published in the Socialist countries, to which he travelled extensively. In 1949 he and Ann attended the Pushkin celebrations in the Soviet Union, recorded in A World Ahead. At the same time, however, Lindsay found himself increasingly in conflict with King Street’s cultural apparatus – over his Marxism and Contemporary Science, the direction of the magazine Arena (which he launched in 1949 with Swingler), and the Key Poets series. Meanwhile, his nine-volume Novels of the British Way series charting the decline of the hopes of 1945 were denounced in the TLS. His historical study Byzantium into Europe was used by the TLS as the pretext to call for the expulsion of CP members from British universities. Anne died in 1954. In the late 1950s Lindsay began living with a Dutch potter, Meta Waterdrinker. He turned to writing autobiography and biography, and a remarkable series of popular but scholarly studies in art-history. For many years he contributed weekly book reviews for the Morning Star. One of the ‘British Way’ novels, the comedy All on the Never-Never was filmed in 1962 as Live Now – Pay Later. Among Lindsay’s last books were a major collection of critical essays, Decay and Renewal, the massive Collected Poems, and The Crisis in Marxism in which he reconsidered the political tradition to which he had given so many years of his life. Penguin published his three autobiographies in a single volume. In 1968 Lindsay became the first English writer to receive the Znak Pocheta for his translations of Russian poetry. In 1981 the Australian Government awarded him the Order of Australia. Jack Lindsay remained in the Party until his death.

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Danny Lyons (Dates unknown) Danny Lyons often stood alongside fellow London docker Jack Dash when addressing mass meetings calling for unofficial strikes in the 1960s. They made a good partnership. Jack had a rousing rhetoric which proved very persuasive. Danny complemented this by calmly quoting facts about company profits, bosses’ pay and their other interests, from the Financial Times, Lloyds List (the shipping paper) and other sources such as the Labour Research Department. These were rarely reported in the “popular” papers such as The Sun or Daily Mail, which preferred to keep their readers, including dockers, ignorant of them. So Danny performed a valuable task in informing his workmates, and it often strengthened the justice of their strike action. As a young reporter at the time, the writer of this piece found his facts very useful in writing the story. Communists were barred by the Transport & General Workers’ Union (now part of Unite) from being shop stewards or any other office for many years, until Jack Jones was elected general secretary. That was one of the reasons that the dockers had formed a Liaison Committee to organise action directly from the rank and file. Danny had been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s executive committee from 1966, but when the dockers elected shop stewards in 1968 after de-casualisation, he was elected to union office and the ban dropped. In the same year the dockers notoriously came out on strike for one day in defence of Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration “rivers of blood” speech. Danny spoke out against this but was heckled and disregarded. Ironically at another meeting on the issue at Tilbury, the leaders, denying racism, quoted from the Daily Sketch that it was merely a matter of overpopulation. This was the same Daily Sketch which not long before had been torn to pieces by the same leader for its “bosses’ lies” about their pay strike. The following year Danny stood for election as a councillor for Tower Hamlets, and only failed by 72 votes from winning a seat. After his death a special “Danny Lyons Memorial Award” was set up by members of the Transport & General Workers’ Union. It was awarded annually to rank and file workers who had bravely stood up for justice, even if it meant getting sacked or blacklisted. The award consisted of a clenched fist, sculpted by Mick Jones, the son of Jack.

Dr Alan Mackinnon 1946 – 2015 Alan joined the Communist Party while a medical student at Glasgow University becoming a member of the university’s student branch. On graduating in 1971 he transferred to his local branch, Glasgow Kelvin, where he was an active participant in branch activities and seller of the Morning Star. In 1973, with the aim of being able to assist Frelimo in Mozambique, he went to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania with a post at a government organisation called the Dar es Salaam Group Red Lives | 127

Occupational Health Service. He didn’t achieve his primary aim, but through reading, meetings and direct experience, he expanded his knowledge of the challenges facing post-colonial countries. He returned to Britain a year later, more committed than ever to the necessity of a national health service. He was to work as a GP in the NHS in Glasgow for almost forty years. He was elected to the Party’s Glasgow Committee in 1975. Guided by his partner Karin, he contributed his developing talents as a propagandist and graphic artist to the work of the Party’s Propaganda Committee and Poster Group. As a medical practitioner he gave invaluable assistance to the community of Chilean refugees settling in the West of Scotland. Later, in 1976-77, he contributed his knowledge of the NHS to the local fight-back against cuts to the health service and welfare state and was active in the Clydeside Action Committees and in producing their journal Clyde Action. In the early 1980s he was among those comrades who rallied to the Morning Star when it came under attack from Party right-wingers. After the mass expulsions of 1985 he became an officer of the Communist Campaign Group in Scotland and in 1988 was elected a member of the British-level Executive Committee of the re-established Communist Party of Britain and was a key member of its Scottish leadership. For the following quarter century virtually every Scottish party publication was designed and often written by Alan Mackinnon. Within the CPB’s broader campaigning he was a member of the Scottish Committee of 100 against the Poll Tax, was secretary of the Scottish Campaign against the Maastricht Treaty in 1990, and in 1991 was instrumental in organising the visit to Scotland of two leading women physicians from socialist Afghanistan to rally support against the US-led invasion. In 1990-91 he took a leading part in organising Scottish opposition to the Gulf War. It was in 1989 that he first became Chair of Scottish CND, serving for two terms till 1992, and was again chair between 2001 and 2011. In that period he organised a mass movement of opposition to the US-British attack on Iraq. He established the Scottish Coalition for Justice not War shortly after the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 with the objective of uniting opposition across parties and religious groups. In the aftermath of the war, he sought to build a united movement of opposition to the renewal of the Trident nuclear missile system. He established a commission of enquiry, jointly sponsored by Scottish CND and the Scottish Trades Union Congress, to analyse the consequences of Trident cancellation for employment in Scotland. When published in 2007 it conclusively demonstrated that the loss of jobs in Scotland would be minimal, that alternative employment could be found and that the resources saved could be far better spent on redeveloping the NHS. At British level Alan served on the executive of CND and led the work of the Communist Party’s peace advisory. He developed the party’s theoretical analysis of the rise of the new imperialism of the 2000s writing for Communist Review and was author, among other works, of The Scramble for Africa in 2014. At the turn of the century he was a central figure in creating Scotland’s Red Paper collective. This brought together leading experts from across the Left to keep alive the radical perspectives of a People’s Parliament for Scotland – contributing to both the 2005 and 2014 editions of the Red Paper. 128 | Red Lives

His last medical mission was in 2011 after taking a further qualification in tropical medicine. He worked with Medecins Sans Frontiers in Sierra Leone, a country still suffering the effects of colonialism. He was deeply affected by the poverty and the lack of health services. He continued campaigning for nuclear disarmament, and hosting meetings for his friend and fellow anti-nuclear campaigner, Jeremy Corbyn, until shortly before his death.

Tom Mann 1856 – 1941 It was said of Tom Mann that he was the youngest person ever to attain the age of 82! There can be no other life devoted to the labour movement that packs in so many significant milestones. Most biographies of Mann end in 1923, when he was 67. This is, in good measure, because his own biography finishes at this point. It conveniently excuses some scholars from recording his life and achievements as probably the best known name in the Communist Party. Mann became a foundation member and stayed the rest of his days, during which he was involved in work that was so dangerous, it required him to be armed, not with one, but sometimes two revolvers! Tom Mann was born in 1856 in Foleshill, Warwickshire, just outside Coventry. His mother died when he was two and he left school at nine to work in the fields, then in

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coal mining aged ten to 14, when a colliery fire resulted in him being ‘bonded’ to a toolmaking firm in Birmingham, where he worked a 60-hour, six day week. His was a near medieval start to working life. He dragged: “...mullock overburden from coal mine ventilating shafts, in steel boxes made like sledges (without wheels), 30 inches long, 18 inches wide, and 18 inches deep … these were pulled on ‘all fours’ with a chain attached to a belt around his waist and thighs. A candle on the box lit his way.” He was but ten years old. Mann left the pits to become a highly skilled engineer, but took with him an unyielding hatred of the capitalist system. The rest of his life was spent at the pioneering edge of the new ideas which forged our modern labour movement, passing from temperance and the Christian church movement, to new unionism, social democracy, then syndicalism, to communism. In each shift of political gear, he was an agitator, organiser and above all, educator. Harry Pollitt, who knew him better than any other, characterised Mann as: “The only leader of his generation who never stayed satisfied with things as they were, or went after positions of security, wealth and power.” Mann found time to refuse a post in Gladstone’s last cabinet. It was Mann who embedded the struggle for an 8-hour day into the DNA of the British and Australian labour movements. He joined the socialist movement when it had barely 500 members in all of Britain, joining the Social Democratic Federation, the first Marxist party. He, along with lifelong friend and brilliant organiser, and sometime Liberal, Lord Ben Tillett, led the Great Dock Strike of 1889. Mann became President of the Dockers’ union and later founder of the militant Workers’ Union. Mann championed New Unionism, which entirely re shaped Britain’s unions, and then he did the same thing again before 1914 with his campaigns for unity, amalgamation and industrial syndicalism. As such he is the inspiration behind the great amalgamation of rail unions, which led to the formation of the ‘all-grades’, National Union of Railwaymen. Mann represented the working class at the pivotal Royal Commission on Labour (1891). He helped to found the Eight Hour League. He became the secretary of the Independent Labour Party from 1894 to 1897 and a parliamentary candidate in 1895, 1896 and 1897. He was a founder delegate of the Second International and first President and organiser of the International Transport Workers Federation, the first true industrial international of workers. Mann then toured New Zealand and Australia where he is considered a father of the labour movement, leading the armed miners of Broken Hill out on strike. He returned via organising drives in South Africa and in France, where he absorbed the politics of revolutionary syndicalism. On his return to Britain, he was called to Merseyside (1911) to lead the Central Strike Committee of dockers, seafarers and transport workers. At one point nothing moved on Merseyside without the ‘say-so’ of the strike committee. The police used vicious and thuggish tactics, attacking one giant meeting at which Mann spoke, injuring as many as 350 people in baton charges. The army was deployed and 3000 soldiers were used to do what the police could not, resulting in firing on unarmed crowds and murder. Then Home Secretary Churchill, sent the HMS Antrim up the Mersey to intimidate strikers. The press referred to Mann as the dictator of Merseyside, when in fact he was merely an 130 | Red Lives

elected leader of workers. They would clash again, as Mann drove the ‘Hands off Russia’ movement in the face of Churchill’s attempt to crush the Russian Revolution. Mann was hauled before the Manchester assizes, and on 9 May 1912 was sentenced to six months in prison for publishing a letter in The Syndicalist, “Don’t Shoot!”, which he had read to a demonstration in February of that year in Pendleton. The call was to soldiers to not shoot or raise their weapons if ordered to do so by their officers, during action allied to a labour dispute. In 1913, Mann visited the USA, a place to which he had at one time wanted to emigrate. There he toured far and wide, becoming close personal friends with the legendary syndicalist, later communist leader, William Z Foster and the miners leader Big Bill Haywood. Mann was later able to use his influence to get Haywood, facing trumped up charges, which could have led to the death penalty, out of the country. Haywood came first to Britain, then to the safety of the Soviet Union. Mann was an opponent of the imperialist war and member of the British Socialist Party. In 1920 he became the first elected general secretary of his own union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. His introduction to a pamphlet on ‘Americanism’, written by union educator W T Colyer, shows a real appreciation of the changes within capitalism, which Lenin characterised in his 1916 work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In the heat of the struggles that followed the first world war, including the great engineering lock-out, it was but a short step for Mann to join the Communist Party. His note to the founding Communist Unity Convention held 31 July 1920, in the Cannon Street Hotel, states: “I desire therefore to express my sincere hope that real success will attend the efforts of those who assemble, and that we may as a result have a thorough-going Communist Party, equal to carrying on the educational and propagandist work needed to develop and focus opinion, and ere long enable us to reach the communist ideal.” He first attended a Comintern congress in 1921, where he met Lenin and heard Trotsky and Zinoviev speak. He was to return to the USSR many times and never lost his admiration for its achievements. In 1922, he answered the call of the miners of South Africa, then launching an insurrectionary general strike, which resulted in some of its best known leaders being hung. Mann was an internationalist to his very core, having spent his life organising dock, seafarer and transport workers. By its nature this industry looks out across the seas and continents, as well as inwards. It was natural for Mann to answer the call of the Red International of Labour Unions and he became a key organiser, along with Earl Browder, future general secretary of the CPUSA, of unions in China, Australia, Philippines and Malaya. Records describe Mann at the head of armed demonstrations of sailors and dock workers in Hong Kong and Wuhan. Wherever he went the labour movement evolved, was revived and where it was already established, became electrified. In his seventies, he barely escaped the massacre of workers and communists in Shanghai, setting out on an arduous journey by foot, boat and along narrow mountain paths, to a safe port. The return to Britain did not get any easier as it required going back via Moscow, avoiding Chinese warlords in the North, pirates and the Japanese imperial navy. Red Lives | 131

In 1932, aged 76, he was arrested and imprisoned in London during a National Hunger March. He served in the National Unemployed Workers Movement as President. Later that year, in October, he went to Belfast, helping to bring together religious communities in a struggle against the Means Test. He was again sent to prison, this time for sedition. A serious charge. The judge said to him on sentencing: “Someone your age should know better.” Mann responded: “Sir, the longer I live and the more I see here and around the world, I know my course is right.” In 1933 he became the first president of the newly formed Marx Memorial Library and Worker’s School. In 1934 he was arrested and put on trial in Cardiff along with Harry Pollitt, again for sedition. Fortunately in this case both were acquitted. Later in the year he was deported from Canada. He was last tried for sedition alongside Harry Pollitt in 1934 at 78 years old. He served prison sentences in London, Hamburg and Melbourne, which led to a famous free speech fight, and later was put on trial for his support of the workers of Ireland and was expelled from France and Germany. It is said that Pollitt directly intervened, pulling rank, to stop Mann from volunteering from joining the International Brigades. The first British contingent was called the Tom Mann Centuria. He was a regular attender of Young Communist League education centres and summer camps. Mann was a deep thinker, self-schooled and cultured, personally brave and always positive. His essay in the Labour Monthly, “From Syndicalism to Communism”, was a turning point in the thinking of the labour movement between the wars, and he went on to chair the Minority Movement during the general strike in 1926. Amongst his closest friends and acquaintances were the likes of William Morris, Big Jim Larkin, Keir Hardie, Ben Tillett, Eleanor Marx, Big Bill Haywood and James Connolly. In later years as a presidium member of the Red International of Labour Unions, he toured famine-hit Soviet Russia in the personal entourage of Kalinin, also a metal worker, then President of the newly formed Soviet Union. During the long trip, Mann got the Russian sailors to teach him their language. When he died on 13 March 1941, Harry Pollitt revealed that Mann had served, at least until 1938, as a member of the central committee of the Communist Party – a fact not generally known, because during this period, the names of the leadership were not published. Red flags were hung at half-mast over many town halls, public and Labour buildings in Australia. In Britain, Harry Pollitt rushed to Leeds to be at Mann’s bedside and arrived in time to say farewell and thanks, for a life lived to the full, well-lived and one of devotion to the cause of the international workers’ movement. The last words should go to the man himself: “Trade unionism is of no value unless the members of the unions are clear as to their objective – the overthrow of the capitalist system – and are prepared to use the unions for that purpose. Political action is of no value unless all political effort is used definitely and avowedly for the same end, the abolition of the profit-making system. As far back as 1886, I took an active part in celebrating the Commune of 1871, and have continued to participate in the anniversary celebration down to the present time. I gladly accepted the name of communist from the date of my first reading of The Communist Manifesto, and have ever since been favourable to communist ideals and principles.” 132 | Red Lives

Elsie Marshall 1915 – 2008 Elsie Cox was born on the 12 August 1915, the youngest of five children in a staunch socialist family. She only knew her father from 1918 when he returned from active service, and he died from pneumonia in 1921. Elsie remembered attending meetings of the Co-op and the Labour Church with her mother as a very small child. Her eldest brother, Arthur, was active in the National Unemployed Workers Movement and, along with her sister Bessie, was a founder of the Young Communist League. Elsie had rheumatic fever at the age of eight, which left her with a permanent heart condition. She was obliged to spend lengthy periods recuperating in bed, where she passed the time reading, mainly 19th century novels and poetry. At twelve years of age, she took up the piano, eventually qualifying as a piano teacher passing the LLCM examinations as an external student. She joined the Communist Party in 1936, and was active in work associated with the Spanish Civil War and later, the Birmingham tenants’ strike of 1939. That year she married Martin Marshall, then a GWR railwayman. Their marriage in Yardley Wood church was packed inside and out with rent strikers. Elsie wrote a song about it in the 1960s. The couple stepped up to form a workers’ choir, when Dr Colin Bradsworth called for volunteers at a Daily Worker social. Bradsworth introduced them to the songs he had heard during the Spanish Civil War, but before long the range of the group was vast. The piano was played by veteran Party member, Jock Leishman. The first song rehearsed was the “United Front Song”. The choir first met in the Old Contemptibles pub in the city centre (then known as The Albion) and its first known concert was given to a Tenants Association audience in the Co-op hall, in the Birmingham suburb of Yardley Wood. The name of the choir was later adopted as tribute to the work of Dr Bradsworth, recalling his fond membership of Clarion Cycling. Birmingham Clarion Singers then performed in air raid shelters, factory canteens, on bomb sites and in New Street’s Big Top – a circus and fairground set up on a bomb site as part of the ‘Holidays At Home’ scheme. Elsie and Martin Marshall gave joint performances as Figaro and Susanna, Papageno and Papagena, MacHeath and Polly, Master and Mistress Ford, which were highly acclaimed and much in demand. The couple went on to have two children and, through them, five grandchildren. At the end of world war two, they were invited to join a professional opera company but declined, preferring to stay with Clarion. They were to devote the rest of their lives to this progressive choir, which acquired a high regard for the outstanding musical quality of their amateur productions and continues to this day. In addition to her amateur, but highly talented, role as a singer, actress, choreographer, vocal tutor and conductor, in 1966 Elsie became a music teacher at Red Lives | 133

Wyndcliffe Junior School, an expression of her dedication to disadvantaged children. After retirement from Wyndcliffe she again taught piano and singing to a large number of children and young people, many from local CP and labour movement families, increasing her already large circle of friends in the process, and only calling a halt in her mid eighties when she moved to a small apartment. Martin Marshall died in 1984, at the beginning of the debacle that was to befall the Communist Party over the next few years. He had been distinctly suspicious of some of those who aided the destruction. Elsie remained loyal to both the re-founded Communist Party and the Morning Star. Elsie herself died at the age of 92 years on 22 March 2008.

Terry Marsland 1931 – 2011 Terry was born into a large family of Irish Liverpudlians, one of ten children. She married into a communist family and was much influenced by her mother-in-law, Marion Marsland, an early stalwart of the National Assembly of Women, which Terry became a life-long member of, and its President in 1992. Terry worked as an official for the Goldsmiths’ and the Bank Employees’ Unions, becoming a national official of the Tobacco Workers’ Union in 1973 and later its Deputy General Secretary. A forceful and compelling public speaker, she addressed CND rallies and spoke at Greenham Common’s Women’s Peace Camp, taking her daughters with her. A passionate champion for women’s rights, she moved the first pro-abortion resolution at the TUC in 1975 and was a member of the TUC Women’s Committee from 1977 until her retirement in 1993. When the Tobacco Workers’ Union merged with TASS in 1986, Terry took over the leading role in the women’s structure and helped develop an effective and democratic force in the 1988 creation of the new union MSF. Terry’s commitment to fighting for women’s rightful place in the Trade Union movement went far beyond her own union. She convened regular meetings of left women activists from many trade unions in order to fight for progressive policies at the TUC. This group of left women took a lead in organising support for progressive women to be elected to the General Council. When Ken Cameron, General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, began a root and branch examination of the union’s equality policy he sought advice from Terry. Terry spoke at the first FBU women only weekend at Wortley Hall. She was inspirational. She showed what women, united, could achieve in their trade union, their workplace and in their personal lives and relationships. Besides her many trade union commitments, Terry was always a champion of the Morning Star. She was an elected member of the Paper’s Management Committee in the early 1980s. Terry was a Communist Party member for most of her adult life and as such made important contributions to the work of the Party, particularly in helping to develop policies and cadres among women activists in the trade union movement. Mick Costello, the Party’s National Industrial Organiser in the late 1970s and early 1980s, 134 | Red Lives

paid the following tribute: “Terry Marsland was in the tradition of communists who never lost sight of the importance of winning socialist advance if the gains won in the daily struggles of the working class, its unions and the democratic movement were to be secured." Terry served on the Equal Opportunities Commission, the ACAS Council and the Women’s National Commission. After her retirement she became involved in local politics. She was the independent Chair of the Warrington Borough Council Standards Committee, a member of the Cheshire Fire Authority and a non executive director of the Cheshire and Merseyside Strategic Health Authority. Anita Halpin, CP trade union co-ordinator and former chair of the TUC Women’s Committee says: “Terry Marsland will be remembered as one of all too few senior women trade unionists. As a full-timer she remained a working class champion, never becoming a bureaucrat. As all true socialists Terry was an internationalist, and will remain a role model in the true sense of the words, for all sisters.” Fittingly her last public speaking engagement was at the Merseyside Women’s’ Movement celebration of the Centenary of International Women’s Day.

Ewan MacColl 1915 – 1989 There are not many lives more deeply dyed in red than that of Ewan MacColl, nor lives so deeply, single-mindedly and successfully committed to erasing the line between art and politics. He was born in Salford in January 1915, the son of two politically committed Scots. His mother was a socialist activist and his father was a blacklisted foundry worker, a militant trade unionist and Communist. The family moved to to England to escape victimisation and unemployment. From his earliest days in soot-choked Salford he heard the stories, songs and poetry of working-class lament, protest and resistance. His first foray into cultural activity after leaving school at 14 was the theatre. With other unemployed members of the Clarion Players he formed an agit-prop street theatre group, the ‘Red Megaphones’, which performed political sketches and songs on marches and demonstrations. MacColl joined the Young Communist League, and was responsible for publicising the YCL-organised mass trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932. MI5 duly opened a file on him – at 17 years old! – after local police reported on his ‘extreme communist views’. For many years MacColl, together with his first wife Joan Littlewood, led the Theatre Union, a touring theatre company which performed plays dealing with social issues. He also started to develop an interest in folk music, believing that music could be more effective than drama in spurring people to political action. He was particularly interested in the popular music of working people and excluded social Red Lives | 135

groups like the Roma, and in the 1950s switched his attention to folk music. Not the dominant strand, the nostalgic and reactionary focus on a romanticised rural England, but an authentic, subversive folk music with politically committed urban and industrial themes. In the late 1950s MacColl met the singer Peggy Seeger, blacklisted by the CIA, and half-sister to Pete Seeger. Together, the couple wrote and performed a huge number of songs, as well as a radical new cultural format – the radio ballad. These programmes combined interviews gathered documentary-style from working people, interlaced with songs based on key passages from the interviews. They were broadcast by the BBC for several years. MacColl was capable of writing songs of tenderness, great beauty and lyricism – for example, Joy of Living and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. That song, written in 1957 soon after he and Peggy had begun their relationship, has been covered by an astonishing 100-plus artists since Roberta Flack produced her memorable version in 1982. However, the songs that he will be most remembered for expressed an abrasive, angry – but always compassionate – politics. For example, My Old Man, which evokes a memory of walking behind his father during the Depression after he had lost his job as a foundry worker because of his union activity. Ewan always believed that his father was broken by the experience, and the song is a superb blend of empathic love and bitter social criticism. It is a song that will strike a chord today with all the working-class communities in the Midlands, the North and Scotland who have been thrown on the scrapheap. The message in the last verse is as relevant today as it ever was, to migrant workers picking vegetables on zero-hours contracts, shelf stackers in Amazon or Sports Direct distribution centres, delivery drivers, care workers, cleaners, and call-centre workers: My old man he is dead and gone Now I am your old man And my advice to you, my son Is to fight back while you can Watch out for the man with the silicon chip Hold on to your job with a good firm grip 'Cause if you don't you'll have had your chips The same as my old man. The working people he sang about – miners, foundry men, herring trawlermen, mill workers and travelling people – have now largely disappeared from Britain’s social structure, and so the songs are sometimes heard as irrelevant, nostalgic evocations of a ‘poor-but-happy’ past. But in these current times of growing class divisions and inequality, and a reserve army of poorly paid, precarious workers, the documentary-like immediacy and realism of his songs, and the deep concern and compassion that inform them, make them as relevant and inspiring as they ever were. As his son Calum once observed, all his father’s songs were love songs – either to a person, or a particular trade, or to the working class.

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Alex McCulloch 1910 – 1991 Born Alexander Murray McCulloch on 19 November 1910, like his father and brother, both named Walter, Alex was a Glasgow carpenter. He and his brother both came south looking for work, joining the Birmingham Communist Party in about 1935. Both brothers were highly active in the 1939 council house tenants’ rent strike, which was led by Jessie Eden – who eventually became Alex’s sister-in-law. He was first married to Nancy, with whom he had three children before being widowed and remarrying in 1961 to Noreen Lowe, a teacher active in the Communist Party. She was first a delegate to the CP’s national congress in 1944, when she was secretary to the very big and lively Aston branch. She was also a key member of the first Midlands district women’s committee. An Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers (later to become part of UCATT – today Unite) shop steward and delegate to the union’s conference, Alex twice won an election for a full-time officer’s position but found his victory snatched away from him on technicalities arising from actions of the union’s right-wing. Alex was a member of Birmingham trades council (BTUC) from 1938, later a member of its executive. He was also a delegated member of Birmingham city council’s education committee from 1954. Considerable controversy arose in 1960 out of this practice of allowing local trades councils to be observers at local authority education committees, when the Labour group on the city council decided to ask for another delegate to be picked. BTUC tersely told the Labour group leader why “this communist had been unanimously picked”. If it isn’t obvious, almost the last thing Alex did in 1977, before stepping down as education committee co-optee after retirement, was to publicly challenge the authoritarian stance of the council in harvesting information about every one of the school children under its care. A staunch co-operator, he served for a long time as an elected member on the board of directors of the Birmingham co-operative society, later the Greater Midlands co-op. In later life he became clerk of works for Sandwell Borough Council, and performed the same function for the Party during the course of the building of its new premises, the Key Books and later also the Star Club in Essex Street, Birmingham. Alex served on the midlands Party district committee and its secretariat for 12 years, and was a regular municipal candidate for the Party. He stood as a local election candidate for the city council in Weoley ward. This area was close to the Longbridge car plant, and Alex’s and Noreen’s Northfield Communist Party branch were quick to extend to Derek Robinson an invitation to join their branch from the factory branch after his victimisation. Sadly, Alex died in July 1991, but his widow, Noreen, continued indefatigably as a member of the branch as best she could with failing health for another couple of decades, including a spell as treasurer. Red Lives | 137

Berit McFadden 1956 -1997 Communist Party northern district secretary Martin Levy got to know Berit in early 1986, on moving to Newcastle. By then she was already a significant figure in the local labour movement. Wherever a struggle – home or abroad – demanded solidarity, Berit was there, starting with the campaign against the West German ban on communists in public service, the Berufsverbot, in 1978, and including the epic miners’ strike of 1984/5. She was deeply involved in the Tyne & Wear Anti-Fascist Association, and in its campaign against racism in football. Through her union, the NUT, Berit became a delegate to Newcastle TUC, a member of its Executive and a dedicated Editorial Board member of Rostrum, the paper of the Tyne & Wear County Association of Trades Union Councils. Berit had married Alec McFadden in 1979, and together they made a formidable activist partnership. However, she was not simply an extension of Alec – she made a considerable contribution in her own right. This was no mean achievement for a young Jewish girl from Germany, in Tyneside with all its male chauvinist and xenophobic prejudices. Her talents were justly recognised by Newcastle TUC when she was elected vice-president in 1988 and president in 1989, a post which she regretfully had to relinquish on moving to Merseyside. But she continued trade union activities, and on moving to further education became a member of the Executive Committee of lecturers’ union NATFHE in the Wirral. Berit was a lifelong communist. This was the guiding vision to her life – she had a clear understanding of Marxist-Leninist principles and put them into practice on a daily basis. She was dedicated to enabling working people, through struggle, to liberate themselves from the drudge of capitalism, to build socialism and to transform themselves in the process. She saw the need for a political party, based in the workingclass movement, to provide the necessary perspective and thereby to give leadership in the struggle. She was a solid supporter of the Morning Star as a daily vehicle championing working-class and progressive causes, and Alec and Berit’s blue and orange tent became a focal point for Star sales at Tyneside May Day demonstrations in the 1980s. Martin Levy recalls: “At the time I arrived in Newcastle, Berit was the Newcastle West/Central branch secretary of the CPGB and a District Committee member. At that time the Communist Party was shifting to the right. Already several members of the branch had been suspended from office in the wake of district secretary Brian Topping’s expulsion, and the leadership was engaging in a bad-list and witch-hunt against Morning Star supporters. When in 1988 it became clear that all chance of retaining a Marxist perspective had been lost, a number of comrades – Berit and Alec included – took steps to re-establish the Party as the CPB on the basis of its original rules and programme. Berit became the Tyneside Branch secretary and Northern District 138 | Red Lives

secretary of the CPB, although – characteristically – she later relinquished the latter post because she felt she could make a much better contribution in the branch. She remained, however, District chair until the move to Merseyside. Subsequently she took on leading roles there, and in November 1991 was elected to the Party Executive Committee, where her contributions were always highly regarded. She resigned from the EC in March 1993 following the birth of her first daughter Alexis. “Berit was far from being a one-track political automaton. She lived her life to the full. There were stories of ‘Cuba Libre’ drinking sessions at the end of Berufsverbot campaign meetings, and of revolutionary songs on the train to London during the epic miners’ strike – and incidentally, I understand that the house was mortgaged to finance that train. She certainly was the life and soul of any party: her singing voice was of tremendous vigour, and parties at the McFaddens’ house were memorable social occasions.” Berit died on 18 April 1997, aged 41, from a rare form of lung cancer. This was six weeks after diagnosis and 11 weeks after the birth of her second daughter Sasha. It was a tragedy, not only to her nearest and dearest, but to the Party and labour movement that a comrade so vibrant and full of potential should die so young. She gave all her strength to the liberation of humanity.

Leo McGree 1900 – 1967 Leo was born in Seacombe in 1900 and started work at the age of 14. He died in Liverpool in 1967 barely one year after his retirement. It’s no exaggeration that Leo was a titan of the 20th Century labour movement on Merseyside. Jim Arnison summed it up in the title of his political biography of Leo – ‘What a man, what a fighter’ – a small booklet that captured Leo’s life of struggle for the working class, in particular, building workers. Leo was involved in all of the major struggles of the 1920s through to the 1960s. Fighting for workers’ rights in the building industry and on Liverpool docks. Mobilising against Mosley and his fascist movement. Raising aid for Spain and for the families of local International Brigades volunteers. In the 1930s and 1940s, wholesalers refused to distribute the Daily Worker and Leo was one of those comrades who met the London train at 4.30am every day, organising distribution throughout Merseyside. Leo was an outspoken opponent of sectarianism when it was rife in Liverpool – famously saying: “...you fools, you fight each other every 17 March and 12 July but forget about your empty bellies the rest of the year”. Leo was an active and loyal CP member throughout his life. He first stood as a candidate in 1928 in Edge Hill. In November 1945 he stood in the Liverpool city Red Lives | 139

council elections in North Scotland ward and obtained 981 votes – 37% – despite an hysterical campaign against him by the Catholic Church. In the 1950 general election he stood in Huyton and obtained 387 votes, losing to a future Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Leo was a larger than life character – at the TUC Congress in 1949 he moved reference back of the obituaries section of the General Council report – because it included the NUR leader J H Thomas, who played a treacherous role in the 1926 General Strike! In 1957 he went to the Congress rostrum in support of the Soviet intervention in Hungary and received a hostile response from the hall. Leo made great personal sacrifice for his political beliefs and actions. In 1934, along with other comrades, he was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment for his involvement in the National Unemployed Workers Movement following riots in Birkenhead – even though he wasn’t present. The late Frank Deegan, a Communist docker and International Brigader – wrote in his biography ‘There’s no other way’ about various scrapes involving Leo when he was selling The Mersey Docker on the Dock Road. On one occasion, Leo was thrown into the canal by a group of stooges, and on another he was attacked by a notorious ship’s boss and exboxer ‘Slogger Davies’ after Leo had challenged his bullying methods in the Port. In 1952 at the height of the Cold War, Leo was removed from office in the Associated Society of Woodworkers following a witch hunt by the Daily Express and Tories in parliament, who claimed that Leo was spreading a strike throughout the ship repair industry. Leo overturned the ban in the courts. As a young man Leo served on the CPGB’s central committee – from 1925 to 1935 – a momentous era in the class struggle in Britain. At Leo’s funeral at Anfield Crematorium the address was given by John Gollan, General Secretary of the Communist Party. The Merseyside Communist Party went on to name its office in Shaw Street as ‘Leo McGree’ House. In 2017, 50 years after Leo’s death, Merseyside Communists organised the unveiling of a commemorative portrait and plaque dedicated to Leo which hangs in the UNITE Regional Office at Jack Jones House.

Gwen Miller 1925 – 2002 Gwen was born on 30 May1925 at 26 Amwell Street, Finsbury, London to Walter Henry and Lily Elizabeth King. Her father was an engineer and her mother a skilled seamstress. Her father’s relatively large family (by today’s standards) lived close by in Barnsbury St, Islington, under the watchful eye of her grandmother Henrietta. So Gwen’s early life was fairly traditional, her parents being skilled working class, albeit of limited means. She was always proud of her working class “cockney” background, being actually born within the sound of 140 | Red Lives

Bow Bells. She quickly learnt the value of hard work and the importance of money in putting food on the table and a roof over your head. This was reinforced during the depression of the thirties, when like many others her father was unemployed for several months. He finally found employment in a large engineering firm in Tottenham. During this period her parents lived in rented accommodation but then finally were able to buy their own house at Dovehouse Gardens, Chingford. Here Gwen lived her teenage years, which included becoming seriously ill with scarlet fever and being kept in an isolation hospital for several weeks. Like many of her generation she left school at 14 years of age, and in 1939 became a junior secretary to a company in the city of London. She also became active in her local church and became a Sunday school teacher. It was whilst involved in the church she first became interested in politics. Her church held a debate on Christianity versus communism, and Gwen thought that it was most unfair that a non-communist priest was chosen to put the case for communism. She was complaining about this injustice to a friend on the bus when a total stranger sitting behind her leant forward to say he was a communist and would be willing to speak in the debate. Not unsurprisingly her church refused the offer, but Gwen did take up his invite to attend a Communist Party meeting. It was through this, that Gwen met and made friends with, what for her was a completely different group of people. It changed her life for ever. Not only were they from the radical left, but they were drawn from a wider cross section of society than she previously had been exposed to. They included actors, artists, intellectuals, people with a university education as well as representatives of organised labour. They were exciting times and Gwen became involved not only politically but also culturally. She became involved in amateur dramatics including the early days of Unity Theatre and she joined the Communist Party in 1942 aged 17, much to the annoyance of her father who remained a Tory voter all of his life. Her political education rapidly developed through active campaigning and attending evening classes and residential courses organised by the Party. One of those she met at that time was to become her first husband, Derek Miller. They married on the 18 December 1948 in Epping, and Bevis, her son, was born two years later. Initially, due to her husband’s work commitments they lived alternatively in rented accommodation in Stratford on Avon and then with either his or her parents in Chingford. Derek then became employed in London and they bought their own home in Epping in 1952. Family commitments did not prevent Gwen from political activity. She became an elected member of Essex district committee of the Communist Party in 1952 and became active in her local cooperative movement being elected to the district committee of the London Cooperative Society in 1955. Gwen later became an active member (minute secretary) of the 1960 committee, which went on to gain control of the London Coop for the left. At this time she also became involved in the British Peace Council and subsequently the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, being part of the first Aldermaston march in 1958. She also became well known in Epping through her work for the local school, raising funds to build a swimming pool. These issues of peace, cooperation and community remained with her for all of her life. Through her involvement in the Coop, Gwen met David Ainley the secretary of the Daily Worker, subsequently re-named the Morning Star. It was therefore not surprising Red Lives | 141

that such a young, dynamic, committed organiser and communist was recruited to work for the paper. Initially to support Barbara Niven on the fund, and then in 1961 to become its national fund and events organiser. This involved writing the daily “fund appeal” in the paper, organising a national three day international bazaar in London and the paper’s annual concert in the London Festival Hall on the south bank. She also travelled throughout country promoting the work of Party branches in supporting the paper, through local fundraising and bazaars. She also was known on occasion to speak at factory gate meetings about the paper and its appeal fund Sadly this period also saw the difficult breakdown of her marriage to Derek, which for a period affected her health. Her divorce being finalised in1969. Her son Bevis had now left to go to university, so Gwen sold the house in Epping and moved back to central London, to a flat in Anson Rd, Tufnell Park to be nearer her work. Her work for the paper had two unplanned consequences for Gwen. Firstly through organising the International Bazaar and the Festival Hall concert, she had direct contact with the London embassies of the socialist countries, who when asked would support her work, with goods for the bazaar and artistes for the concert. Secondly Reg September, who was the European representative of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, approached her to seek her help with fundraising for the ANC in London. Reg possibly got more than he bargained for. They were married at Islington register office on the 19 April 1975, and Gwen became immersed in the liberation politics of Southern Africa. She was particularly proud to have Dr Yussuf Dadoo, the Chairman of the banned South African Communist Party, as one of the witnesses to the marriage. For Gwen the marriage meant a radical review of her political activities, whilst retaining membership of Communist Party of Great Britain, she felt it was no longer appropriate to have such a high profile role. She therefore with sadness resigned from her work at the paper. However her contacts with the socialist embassies proved useful and she took on the job of Executive Secretary of the British Bulgarian Friendship Society. This work involved her travelling to Bulgaria and promoting cultural, educational and trade union links between Britain and Bulgaria. Gwen’s commitment to the Anti-Apartheid struggle now involved her assisting with the supply of money for Legal Aid for anti-apartheid activists facing trial in South Africa and their families if they were imprisoned. This was via the International Defence and Aid Fund, banned in South Africa. It was very successful in sending millions of pounds, over the years, and the Apartheid government was never able to infiltrate its system. She also became involved in supporting the work of the ANC exile community in London. These new roles meant that even her solidarity work with the socialist countries had to be dropped, and in 1976 she left the British Bulgarian Friendship Society to become a secretary to Gasters, a firm of London Solicitors. However in 1979, events in South Africa required that Reg move to Lusaka, Zambia to take on a new role for the ANC. Naturally Gwen went with him and subsequently joined the ANC. Life in Zambia at this time was not easy, with the ANC community being fearful of attacks, particularly by agents of the South African Defence Forces. All had to become 142 | Red Lives

very security conscious and on occasion sleep in the bush rather than in their homes. Friends and colleagues had to operate on a need to know basis, often vanishing for periods, since they were waging the underground struggle to liberate South Africa. Whilst living in this clandestine world, Gwen made a family home for her and Reg, as well as a haven of normality for many of their friends. She became well known for importing Boots the Chemist beer kits from the UK and providing hospitality of a good meal and a drink. She made many friends among the senior ANC leadership at this time, including becoming the scrabble partner of Alfred Nzo, its General Secretary. Not being one to sit at idly at home Gwen also got herself a job working as the Administrative Secretary of a UN Food and Agriculture Organization project. This involved a daily long drive by Landrover to outside of Lusaka, which played havoc with her neck. But in 1984 the ANC asked her to work for the Treasury department of the ANC, supporting the work of the South African Congress of Trade Unions and fundraising for the education and training of the young people who fled South Africa after the Soweto uprising. In 1986 both Reg and Gwen then returned to England and again set up home in London, this time at Clissold Court near Highbury. However Reg had increasingly to spend large times abroad. So Gwen again got herself a new job. This time as the administrator of the Islington Suffolk project which organised rural holidays for disadvantaged children and young persons from Islington. The work involved running the office, liaising with parents and the local youth service, fundraising and occasionally going camping with the youngsters in Suffolk. By 1989 however, sadly Reg and Gwen had drifted apart, so she decided to move from London to Bristol to be nearer her family in the West Country. Upon arrival in Hotwells Bristol, she returned to her early political roots by getting a temporary job as secretary to the local UNISON Education officer, rejoining the Communist Party and becoming active in supporting the Morning Star. The latter through bazaar work and being secretary to the South West District Morning Star Trade Union support committee. In 1990 Gwen formally retired, but few would have noticed it. In the next 12 years she worked ceaselessly as a volunteer in a variety of Bristol organisations, including becoming a Director of the Hope Centre (the Hotwells and Cliftonwood Community Association); an Advice and Information Officer for Age Concern, a member of the Bristol Old Peoples Forum, Baby Milk Action and Bristol CND. In 2002 Gwen finally decided she take it a bit easier and move again, this time to Wells so that she could be even closer to her family. But even then she continued to be active, working as a volunteer first for the Citizens Advice Bureau and then the Wells museum. She also became an active member of the U3A, enjoying visits to gardens, the theatre and playing bridge. Her local group, Mid Somerset CND, organised a public meeting in Glastonbury with Bruce Kent being the speaker. From her sick bed she was offering “advice” and was hoping to get out of hospital to attend. Sadly she died on 13 March, the day before the meeting. Gwen was a one off; she truly devoted her life to the betterment of the human condition. Red Lives | 143

Melita Norwood 1912 – 2005 Melita Norwood is the only member of the South East London branch of the Communist Party to have a full-length feature film made about her life and work and to be awarded the order of the Red Banner by the Soviet Union. The daughter of a Latvian father, Peter Alexander Sirnis (Latvian: Pēteris Aleksandrs Zirnis), and a British mother, Gertrude Stedman Sirnis, she was born and grew up in Bournemouth. In the necessarily opaque world of Comintern espionage against fascism and in the defence of peace and socialism, Melita Norwood was a real heroine. She worked for forty years in the administration of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association which, in the immediate pre-war years and as the Cold War developed, was an important resource in developing nuclear weapons. A longtime member of the Communist Party, which she joined in the mid-thirties from the Independent Labour Party, she was an enthusiastic supporter of the Daily Worker and the Morning Star and an active co-operator. Her job at the Research Association enabled her to copy and photograph a mass of documents and material which she passed through her handlers – which included the legendary German agent Red Sonya – to enable the Soviet Union to develop its own nuclear weapons and thus break the British and US monopoly. Her work was of inestimable value in three critical periods. Firstly, in the immediate pre-war period when sections of the British ruling class were keen to turn Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union and were highly obstructive to Soviet proposals for an anti-aggression pact with France and Britain to safeguard Czechoslovak sovereignty. Secondly, in the early stages of the Second World War when the British ruling class was divided over whether the USSR and colonial liberation was a bigger threat to the British Empire or whether an aspiring imperialist Nazi Germany was; and third, in the post-war period when powerful elements in Britain and the USA wanted to utilise what appeared as a US monopoly of nuclear weapons to halt the advance of socialism and colonial liberation. An utterly principled communist when, after her retirement, she went in 1979 to Moscow to receive the Order of the Red Banner she refused the pension that went with it saying she already had enough to live on. Christopher Andrew, the MI5 functionary and official historian of the British secret police, argues that: “She was, on present evidence, both the most important British female agent in KGB history and the longest-serving of all Soviet spies in Britain.” According to the notes of Vasilly Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who British intelligence exfiltrated in 1992, which Andrew quotes, Melita Norwood was assessed by Soviet intelligence throughout her decades-long career as a ‘committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to be the utmost assistance.' After leaving the Research Association Melita Norwood continued as an active cooperator, took part in peace activities, sold the Morning Star and took a lively interest in the 144 | Red Lives

Communist Party’s work and kept abreast of its publications. Her own description of her motives revealed a principled thinker. “In general, I do not agree with spying against one’s country”, she said: “I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service. I thought perhaps what I had access to might be useful in helping Russia to keep abreast of Britain, America and Germany.” When, as she reached advanced years and decided to live away from London, she was awarded life membership of the Party in recognition of the great respect she had earned as a consistent fighter in defence of peace and socialism.

Dan O’Hare 1887 – 1956 The Vale of Leven History Project describes that: “In spite of being the most northerly estate and nearest to the rest of Bonhill, the O’Hare housing estate wasn’t built until the early 1970s. It is named after one of the outstanding Vale personalities of the 20th century – Dan O’Hare. Dan was born in the Canon Row, Bonhill in 1887, the son of a couple from County Armagh, and was a man of many parts: a tool-maker who was blacklisted for his trade union and political activities (he was a communist); fruiterer who had a barrow and then a shop in Main Street Alexandria; flautist (definitely not of the concert hall variety) who led his own Dan O’Hare’s Flute Band which took to the streets as the occasion demanded; an outstanding public speaker, raconteur and wit. He was a charismatic figure, of whom few had a bad word. He was a Communist councillor for the Braehead Ward of Bonhill, firstly on the old Bonhill Parish Council from 1922 onwards, and from 1925 on Dunbarton County as well. He was at the forefront of the struggles on behalf of the underdog for the whole of his political life, and the causes he embraced included increased poor relief, better housing, improved public health and improved working conditions. There were more than enough of these issues to keep him busy for nearly 30 years. Ill-health forced Dan to stand down from the Council in 1949, by which time he was wheelchair-bound. He lived on for another seven years, dying in 1956 aged 69 at home in Tontine, Renton where he had been looked after by his wife Effie (who had originally been a nurse) for a number of years. Given his contribution to the improvements in the Vale, particularly housing, it was appropriate that not just a street but a whole Estate was named after him. Like all of the other council-built estates on the hillside, it has no street names, each house being numbered and called O'Hare. Dan would have found the appropriate words for this arrangement. George Halkett’s daughter, the late Mary Drain recalled: “Although Dan’s family originated from Northern Ireland, his flute band was nothing to do with marching bands of the “Orange” variety! A tin whistle band really, they would lead the processions and marches which were taking place constantly as part of the CP’s activity in the area. The marches were very well disciplined – no fighting or vandalism – and the police on several occasions congratulated George Halkett for keeping the men in order.” Like George, Dan had been a prisoner of war during the First World War, as was Hugh McIntyre, another of the prominent local Communist activists/councillors. A joke went Red Lives | 145

round at the time that the Vale soldiers surrendered too easily! Clearly that can be rebuffed with the fact that dozens of Vale men were killed in action, and many others lived out their lives with terrible disabilities or health problems after the conflict. The shared experience of war was a major feature of the political radicalism in the Vale between the wars. Dan O’Hare was a brilliant orator, and addressed large gatherings both locally and further afield (Glasgow, Clydebank, Paisley etc). He also had a mischievous sense of humour, and exercised it whenever there was an opportunity to ridicule his political adversaries in the council chambers. He and George were sociable men too, and political meetings at their homes, would invariably end with a refreshment or several. The 1930s was a period of desperate poverty and social instability. Known communists and left wingers were victimised by employers and police in various ways, blacklisting being the most blatant. The men always aware of the threat posed by far-right movements. While British fascism did not gain any serious traction in central Scotland, the risk of invasion in the early years of World War Two was real. George and Dan, and others, each kept a handgun at home with a view to the day when they might be faced with hard choices.

Wilf Page 1913 – 2001 Wilf Page was born into abject poverty, observed imperialism as an RAF aerial photographer in India, and eventually became an international agricultural workers’ union leader. In between he was a professional dancer, boxer, bus driver, lorry driver, beach photographer and more. Born the son of a rag and bone man near Norwich in 1913 he had to share a bed with his grandfather, who died there when Wilf was 14. They could not afford a funeral so took the coffin on their horse and cart and lowered it into the grave with the horses reigns. While picking potatoes as a youth in Jersey he also got a job “dancing with elderly dowagers” as an escort in a dance hall. He joined the RAF at the age of 19, through lack of other well paid employment, and was posted to India. When one of his comrades, Dan Cohen, was attacked and racially abused by four others, Wilf stepped in and used his fists to good account (he was an accomplished middleweight boxer). Cohen was a communist who introduced Wilf to Marxist theory. Appalled at the poverty and mistreatment of the Indian people, Wilf wrote to his local Norfolk parson about it, only to get a reply that: “...the rulers of our great empire are already doing much to raise the well being of the natives.”. This completed his disillusion with the church, although later he became involved in the Christian-Marxist dialogue. 146 | Red Lives

He was finally demobbed in 1945. While living with his wife, Christina, and two children in an old railway carriage in a field, he got involved with local politics, and was elected as a Labour councillor for Edgefield in 1947. But he left the party in 1949 over the sending of troops to Korea, Malaya, and Burma, and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, and continued to be re-elected to the council until 1974. He frequently fought to prevent evictions from tied cottages of sacked farmworkers, often using imaginative tactics. One example was of a worker who lost his job after injuring his back when falling off a hay cart. Wilf recalled a discussion with a group of village parsons about similarities between Christianity and Marxism, so he got in touch with the Bishop of Norwich for support. He sent an industrial chaplain to the cottage just as an old lady was praying to God to prevent her furniture being thrown out into the torrential rain. The chaplain got on to the council and the family was rehoused. As a farm worker himself Wilf became a branch secretary of the agricultural workers’ union, and started each meeting by reading aloud from a chapter from the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. But for many years he was barred from union schools because of his membership of the CPGB. Indeed he was the unpaid East Anglia District secretary of the party from 1960 to 1968. In 1967 he was elected to its National Executive Committee for six years but was frustrated by the experience. He did however remain a member until the party disbanded in 1991. He found more satisfaction when elected on to the union’s national executive committee in 1969 and stayed on it (and that of the TGWU when it merged) until 1986. He became president of the European Federation of Agricultural Workers’ Unions in 1979. His imaginative tactics were also shown when, during 1971 national pay talks, he organised a stinking dead chicken to be thrown into the room and the shouting of: “Our wages smell like this does.” Wilf became the editor of Country Standard in 1974. When he was selling it with his grandson at the Glastonbury pop festival in 1995, just short of his 83rd birthday, trudging through mud with his walking stick, he became known as “the oldest hippy in town.” He was arrested in 1985 for cutting the fence around Sculthorpe air base, where American cruise missiles were based. When fined £60 for “criminal damage” he said this was a ridiculous charge compared to the mass destruction that was being planned within the fence. In later years he became a pensioners’ activist and helped restart the annual Burston Strike School rally, before dying in 2001.

Bert Papworth 1899 – 1980 Writes past Unite national secretary, Chris Kaufman: “Nobody was more relieved than me, when Bert Papworth picked up the phone back in 1973. I was books editor of the Labour Monthly and he, the celebrated London busworkers’ leader. I had just received a book called Cloth Cap and which included a slim chapter on Communists who had served on the TUC General Council. It described him as ‘the late Bert Papworth’. ‘Maybe they said that because I got to the meetings late’ ventured Papworth, known far and wide as Pappy. ‘They can’t call you dead when you aren’t’. I protested, referred it to the Party lawyer Red Lives | 147

Bill Sedley, and forgot all about it. A year later, a delighted Bert and his ever-loving wife Betty, invited me round for a victory-over-the-rulingclass toast. The author had been ordered to publish an apology in the Times and Morning Star and provide Pappy with a nice little nest egg in damages. Truly Bert had packed enough into an eventful life to have lived twice. Born in 1899 into a Catholic family in South London, Bert became the first CP member on the Transport and General Workers Union executive committee (1935) and a similar trailblazer on the TUC general council (1944). Working part-time from the age of eight, he joined a union at 16, leading a strike at Morgan Crucible during World War One as a teen-aged branch chairman. Working at Woolwich Arsenal he was involved in two strikes. Following a brief spell in the army, Bert joined the Labour Party and the National Association of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers (later the British Legion). In 1927 he got regular work as a bus conductor with the London General Omnibus Company in Putney, becoming Transport and General Workers Union branch secretary. His reputation for organising and speaking won him the trust of colleagues across London and his affectionate handle ‘Pappy’, as everyone knew him. When the LGOC announced pay cuts and 400 redundancies in 1932, TGWU leaders, fearing the use of non-unionised labour, reluctantly agreed, but a significant minority of busworkers strongly opposed the agreement. Pappy, along with Bill Jones, Bill Payne and Frank Snelling, founded the Busmen’s Rank and File Movement, meeting at bus garages across London and publishing Busmen’s Punch. Many leading figures of the movement were in the Communist Party which Bert subsequently joined. He had found himself, in his words: ‘in conflict with the state in all its brutal callousness’, as sackings and strikes were the regular experience of trade unionists, and one time returning ex-servicemen faced police charges as they demonstrated for fair treatment from the country they had defended. Sectional struggles for small gains were not enough, wrote Bert (Daily Worker 23 October 1945): ‘society itself must be changed before the working man could really get justice’. Bert overturned the union leadership at the T&G biennial conference in the early 30s, when he championed the need for a ‘United Front’ against the rising menace of fascism. His growing power base in the union led to his election to become the first Communist on the General Executive Council in 1935. He visited Spain in 1937, Barcelona, Alicante, Valencia and Madrid, speaking up for the Republicans in the Civil War (where that trade union colossus, and later T&G General Secretary, Jack Jones fought), when back in the UK. He was active in opposition to the British Union of Fascists. Prominent in the famous ‘Coronation Strike’ of 1937, Pappy had actively pursued the Rank and File Movement’s campaign for a seven hour working day and improved employment conditions. When management refused to negotiate, a London wide bus 148 | Red Lives

walk-out lasted from 30 April-28 May 1937 (including George VI Coronation shenanigans). The strike failed, undermined by depression conditions and the tacit collaboration of T&G General Secretary, Ernie Bevin, with management – keen to defang the power of the London busworkers and its Communist leadership. Bert and other Communist activists were expelled by Bevin and debarred from holding office in the T&G. With anger simmering a breakaway union was formed, but he remained loyal to the T&G. Bevin let them back in on condition that they fought the breakaway union – which they did successfully. His commitment to anti-fascist work continued as an organiser of the mass counterdemonstration of a Mosley Hyde Park Rally in September 1939 (Betty, whom he later married, had participated in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936). 100,000 anti-fascists, faced 2,500 Mosleyites protected by 6,000 police. During the war, Bert gave total support to the war effort and the need to increase productivity. He told fellow busworkers: ‘Our Russian comrades are working worse schedules than ours in the tanks on the battlefield in the East. They are fighting our battle.’ Back in the T&G he was elected to the TUC General Council as the first selfproclaimed Communist to be elected to that body (Bill Jones joined him shortly afterwards) Writing in the Daily Worker, 20 October, 1944, Walter Holmes said: ‘His busmen comrades call him ‘Pappy’ but he is anything but what that might imply …the TUC General Council certainly won’t find the first Communist member, A F Papworth a sleeping partner.’”

William Paul 1884 – 1958 Best known as Bill Paul in his later life – though commonly known as Willie from the time of his birth in Glasgow in 1884 – he was a committed socialist and revolutionary who joined the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), a forerunner of the Communist Party, and became not only one of its main theorists and educators, but also a leading activist and organiser. Bill moved south to Derby in 1911, where as a market stall holder he regularly travelled across the Midlands and North of England – trading not just in fabric and clothing from his stall, but supplying SLP members and other workers with radical pamphlets and papers, and organising study groups and workers’ networks. His political and social science education classes in Derby in the years up to and after the Russian Revolution were hugely attended and earned him great respect, even amongst many who never personally took part! ‘Independent working-class education’ was always a priority for him, and Bill is remembered to this day in the Derby area through the “William Paul Society” which organises such discussion and education sessions on a regular basis. As the British ruling class mobilised for war, Bill Paul agitated and organised against it – working closely in this dangerous activity with fellow Derby SLP member Alice Wheeldon and others, becoming friends with Arthur McManus, a regular visitor to Derby on shop stewards movement business, who was to later become the first Chair of the Communist Party. Discussions and debates were lively and animated as the comrades struggled with the Red Lives | 149

development of the revolutionary movement in Britain and abroad. The Socialist Labour Press in Glasgow published a collection of Bill Paul’s openings to his workers’ education sessions as The State – Its Origins and Functions, in 1917 (https://archive.org/details/stateitsoriginfu00paul/page/4/mode/2up) – pipping to the post by a couple of months Lenin’s State and Revolution, not then translated or published in Britain, but reaching the same conclusions – that the State is not fundamentally a provider or a mediator, but a weapon by which the dominant ruling class oppresses others. Bill, with Tom Bell, was appointed joint editor of the SLP’s newspaper The Socialist, and was their candidate for parliament in 1918 for SLP, securing 13% of the vote in a one to one fight with the official Labour candidate. Alice Wheeldon sadly died in late 1919, just before the Communist Party was formed. Sentenced to 10 years penal servitude on a fabricated attempted murder charge as a result of her anti-war work, Alice was released after two years as a result of her health being broken by harsh conditions and her repeated hunger strikes. Her death hit Bill Paul and the other comrades hard – but the result was increased determination and commitment. With the victory of workers in Russia in the 1917 October Revolution, the clear and urgent need for a united Communist Party to bring together various Marxist groupings had become even more clear and urgent. When this was rejected by the majority of the SLP, Bill and his comrades played a central role in bringing together those in the SLP who saw the need, becoming founder members of the Communist Unity Group. This in turn came together, with others in the revolutionary working class movement, to form the Communist Party of Great Britain at the Communist Unity Convention in 1920. A big debate at that time was the relation between the Communist Party and the Labour Party. Bill Paul argued against CP affiliation to the Labour Party, as did Willie Gallacher and Sylvia Pankhurst – the majority view being that the CP should take its rightful affiliated place in ‘the mass party of the working class’ – while maintaining its own clear policies and organisation. Bill was always clear that for him this was a question not of “principle” but of tactics. The newly formed CPGB applied for affiliation … which the Labour Party promptly rejected! In his December 1920 book Lenin on Communist Tactics in Britain, reporting his “long and interesting interview with Lenin”, Bill writes: “Lenin clearly realises the value of revolutionary parliamentary action, but he also understands its limitations as a constructive power in the creation of a Workers Industrial Republic. To Lenin the test of the real revolutionary communist is to know when to use a given weapon and when to discard it. Talking on the labour party, Lenin said he was very glad to learn that it had refused to accept the affiliation application of the Communist Party. It was a good move to have applied for affiliation, because the refusal of the Labour Party to accept communists in its ranks showed the masses exactly where the Labour Party stood” – a position with which Bill was very much in agreement. The following year in 1921, Bill was given the job of editor of the CPGB’s Communist Review, symbolising the Party’s commitment to independent working-class education, his first and enduring priority, and reinforcing his reputation in the movement generally. So much so that when, in 1923 and 1924 general elections he was CPGB candidate in Manchester – one of his old market trader/working class organiser stamping grounds – 150 | Red Lives

his candidacies were supported by the local Labour Party. He later became the editor of the late 1920s broad-left Sunday Worker, published by the National Left-Wing Movement and inspired by party policy, and attracting 100,000 readers and helping to lead to the massive step forward of the establishment of the Daily Worker in 1930. Taking some time out of national leadership to focus on his new marriage and daughter, he turned back to local Derby activity in the 1930s and l940s, focusing again on Marxist education and developing mass support for the Soviet Union. He was a very high-profile figure locally, campaigning for political and practical aid for the Soviet Union in the war against fascism, and in the Derby Peace Council in the l950s. He died in 1958. The banner of the Derby Branch of the Communist Party carries a quote from Bill Paul: “By any and every means possible we must organise the power of workers.”

Photo: PJ Arkell

Mike Pentelow 1946 – 2020 Editor’s note: Mike Pentelow used his amazing knowledge to write a number of the contributions to this book. Who could have thought that he would not live to read it? It was the unanimous view of the editorial team that Mike’s own biography should be included in the volume he was so looking forward to. The breadth of tributes paid to Mike Pentelow when he died in April 2020 bore eloquent testimony to the influence of this lifelong Communist. In over 50 years as a journalist and author, predominantly in the labour movement, he promoted and reported on the biggest and smallest industrial battles. As a community activist he used his vast knowledge of local history and personal warmth to engage generations in joint activity, compensating in part for the break-up of traditional working class communities. Born in Sheffield in 1946, Mike and family moved to Staines when he was very young, then onto Elstree where his passion for Watford football club took root. His parents were Joan and Jack; his father worked as an accountant at Smith’s Industries, clocks and watches manufacturer. Mike shunned an academic route on leaving secondary school in Hampstead, preferring to train as a journalist. His first job was with the Thurrock Gazette in Essex, where he tapped into a rich seam of stories from the local docks, striking up invaluable links with union activists involved in the battles over containerisation. By now a member of the Communist Party, he landed a job on the Morning Star sports desk. Mike took time out to complete a degree at the Wells Street faculty of the Polytechnic of Central London where he was a popular figure whose views were often sought out. On qualification, he was surprised to be appointed to the industrial desk on his return to the Star, succeeding Mick Costello. In 1983 Mike moved to the Transport and General Workers Union, signed up by the Red Lives | 151

T&G Record editor. There followed a productive 25 year relationship in the union’s Publications and Campaigns Department with colleagues and friends including Phil Katz, Sue Rubner, Derek Kotz and Chris Kaufman. He turned out a huge range of award-winning periodicals and leaflets to stimulate the T&G’s wide diversity of membership, and recruitment drives under general secretaries Moss Evans, Ron Todd and Bill Morris. Mike’s unassuming nature sometimes blinded people to his sheer professionalism. In writing, design and layout, liaison with printers or hitting tight deadlines, he was totally reliable. He could tease a story out of anybody, head slightly inclined as he jotted gems into his ever-present notebook – often finding the convivial setting of a pub encouraging an extra dimension to a tale. He maintained a healthy scepticism towards the great and the good, whether political or union luminaries, whom he thought “too up themselves or just plain right wing” as one of his admirers observed. Mike fitted equally well with industrial correspondents, union activists and leaders like Rodney Bickerstaffe, Mick McGahey and Ken Cameron. Mike went on to edit the Landworker (for T&G agricultural and allied industry workers) in the late 1990s, obtaining legendary status with the membership. On retirement he was instrumental in reviving the CP’s Country Standard (established in 1935); became editor of his local community newspaper the Fitzrovia News; ran the Stand By Me Club Bulletin (as Joint World President of the club which collected over 300 versions of the song made famous by Ben E King) and was involved in countless other enterprises. As a local historian, Mike led many walks around London, including the famous ‘Karl Marx Pub Crawl’ paying homage to the master of historical materialism in the many watering holes he had frequented on his way home from a hard day’s work at the British Museum. Well-known in the area, Mike had stood as Communist Party candidate in the early 1970s’ local elections in South Marylebone. Despite his ear-catching campaign song ‘We keep the rent low with Michael Pentelow’ (to the tune of Avanti Popolo) regrettably the voters did not turn out in sufficient numbers. He also built a reputation as a prolific author. His book, A Pub Crawl through History, the Ultimate Boozer’s Who’s Who, describing pubs named after commoners (not kings, queens or dukes) is a valuable and readable reference book – yes he liked a pint. Photographer Peter Arkell was co-author again for Freedom Pass London which described walking tours to the edge of Ken Livingstone’s travel pass underground lines. Norfolk Red, a biography of farmworkers’ leader Wilf Page, a leading architect of CP post-war agricultural strategy, showed Mike’s deep interest in rural trade unionism. In his element at Tolpuddle, Burston, Joseph Arch and other countryside festivals, Mike showed you could socialise for socialism. His lavishly-produced book Characters of Fitzrovia with a cavalcade of notables from Dylan Thomas to celebrated murderers who coloured the area’s history, said much about his ability to research and write engagingly. Any updated edition of the book would certainly include a chapter on Mike himself. 152 | Red Lives

Mike Perkins 1940 – 1987 Mike Perkins was born on 9 April 1940 in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire. He was very proud of his northern working class roots. Mike was a long-standing member of the Communist Party. He was a civil service trade unionist, a leader in the wider trade union movement, a true internationalist and antiapartheid campaigner. He was elected to his union branch committee in Inverness in 1961. He served first the Customs and Excise officers’ union and then the Society of Civil and Public Servants, which it joined with. He was sometime President and also Vice-President of the Society of Civil and Public Servants (SCPS) which is now part of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). One of his many legacies is that he was one of the people that not only helped the Customs and Excise Federation, but also the larger SCPS, to develop further from a staff association to a proper trade union. He was also totally committed to a single civil service union. He had a tireless commitment and energy. He was never too busy to travel far and wide to talk with members. He didn’t just want to address members but very much wanted to hear their concerns and views. During his time as a leader he was involved from the beginning with the trade union dispute at GCHQ, travelling overnight as soon as news broke about the trade union ban so he and the union leaders were there for members at 7 am on the picket line. He was proud of, and genuinely humbled by, union members in GCHQ. He was an inspirational leader of the left in the union and had an impressive ability to persuade those around him to give more and fight harder than they would otherwise have done. He refused to be negative and pessimistic. In face of defeat his response was simply to redouble efforts.

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Beyond the Civil Service Trade Union movement Mike gained an enviable reputation. He was asked to share platforms with many of the leading trade union and political speakers at major rallies. He was closely involved with several disputes such as the Miners’ Strike and Wapping. He was an active supporter of the Morning Star. Mike was active in the work of Trades Councils and was TUC appointee governor at South Bank Polytechnic. In 1987 he was elected Chair of South East Region TUC (SERTUC) representing millions of workers, which was a role in which he hoped to achieve so much for the trade union movement. Unfortunately, his death that year meant he only had a few months in this role. After his death South East TUC had a Mike Perkins Memorial Award for Young Trade Unionists. Mike was an internationalist and believed trade unionism reached out above national divides. He worked to help the people of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile and people involved in liberation struggles throughout the world. He had close trade union links across the world in Chile, Portugal, Cyprus, France, Spain, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Czechoslavakia, Greece, the GDR, Lithuania and the Soviet Union. He was a member of the International Trade Union Committee for Peace and Disarmament striving for world peace. His inspiration to be a lifelong fighter against racism came from hearing Trevor Huddleston speak at his secondary school. This had a lasting impact on him. He was privileged to sit on the National Council of the Anti-Apartheid Movement alongside Ken Gill and Abdul Minty, both who were speakers at Mike’s Memorial service. Abdul thanked Mike for the key role he played in ensuring that the anti-apartheid movement was put on the agenda of other unions. It was fitting that in memory of a life long fighter against racism Mike’s union funded a two-year scholarship for a South African trade unionist with Northern College. Mike died after a heart attack in June 1987, at only 47 years of age

Ted Poole 1925 – 2018 Writes Rosie MacGregor: “I first met Ted, or to give him his full name Edward John Frederick Poole, in the late 1960s. He was most welcoming to all, no matter what their background. His charm, twinkling eye, and the warmth of his personality were such that he made an instant connection with all who knew him. As an activist and campaigner Ted fought inequality and prejudice with tenacity. A true man of the people.” Ted was born in Kentish Town, London in May 1925. After the death of his father, a merchant seaman, Ted, his brother and their mother moved to Swindon where she remarried. Apart from time serving in the RAF as an aircraft fitter during the second world war, it remained his home for the rest of his life. After leaving school Ted worked first at Garrard Engineering and 154 | Red Lives

Manufacturing Company of Swindon who produced record turntables, then Short Brothers at South Marston. He was called up in 1943 and served in the RAF. When he was demobbed in 1947 he returned to work in South Marston but by then the factory had been bought by Vickers Armstrong. After leaving Vickers he worked as a technician at Swindon College until his retirement. Always strong in the union, he was an active member of the AEU (Amalgamated Engineering Union now part of Unite) and Swindon Trades Union Council. He married Ivy (Barr) in 1952 and joined the Communist Party in 1956. Ivy, already a committed socialist, joined a little later. They were a devoted couple sharing a common interest in radical left-wing politics and music. Ted was for many years Chair of the Swindon branch of the Communist Party and was well respected within the party, the town and beyond for his unswerving beliefs, commitment and loyalty to the cause, as well as his kindness, compassion and respect for ordinary working people. It was this empathy for, and understanding of humanity that resulted in his active support for the peace movement and internationalism. This included membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Thamesdown Racial Equality Council, the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Swindon Miners’ Support Group, actively raising funds for miners and their families during the Miners’ Strike. Ted and Ivy regularly attended rallies and demonstrations in support of the many causes for which they campaigned, as well as the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival. Ted was a distributor of the Morning Star and sold copies wherever the opportunity arose. Politics and music were almost always a feature of any conversation with Ted. Together he and Ivy founded the Swindon Folk Singers’ Club in January 1960, in the early days of the folk revival. They were both fine singers, not just of the traditional folk songs of these islands but jazz, music hall and the popular songs of their youth. Their interpretation of The Sheik of Araby was as surprising as it was entertaining. The club showcased many of the finest traditional and socially aware singers in the folk world and encouraged local talent. It is one of the longest running folk clubs in the UK which they ran until 2004. They continued to attend on an almost weekly basis thereafter until Ted’s death, and the club is still running today. They never missed Sidmouth Folk Festival or the Bampton Traditional Morris dance celebrations at Whitsuntide, and Ted was on the committee that established the first National Folk Festival at Keele University in the mid-1960s. Ted understood the deep-rooted connection between folk music and politics; the need to maintain our own culture, but equally as a vehicle to fight injustice, class division and fascism. Guests at the Swindon Folk Singers’ Club who stayed with Ted were encouraged to help him distribute and sell the Morning Star the following Saturday morning! He always said that it was his intention to live to be 100 so that he could have the satisfaction of sending the telegram/birthday card back to the Queen. Sadly that didn’t happen as he died at Swindon’s Great Western Hospital a few months short of his 93rd birthday, in March 2018. The funeral service at Kingsdown Crematorium was so packed to capacity that many mourners were unable to gain access. The wake, featuring many tributes to his memory, held fittingly in The Legends’ Lounge at Swindon Football Club immediately afterwards, was equally full. Donations to his memory were appropriately divided between the British Heart Foundation and the Morning Star. Red Lives | 155

Laurence Platt 1950 – 2019 Laurence Platt was born in Melton Mowbray in 1950. The Midlands community played a big part in shaping him. His internationalism and hatred of racism was heartfelt and his commitment to understanding and sharing the vibrant history of the working class was in no way ‘academic’. Both were ingrained in him – the essence of the man. For many who knew him it was his love of English working class music and tradition that would open the door for them to his politics. In the 1960s he was involved in the ‘folk music revival’. Indeed, he said it had never been away! He was a quality musician, singing with distinctive style, and an impressive mastery of the concertina, performing throughout his adult life locally in the Midlands and at folk festivals around the country – or just in mates’ living rooms and back yards. He played an important part in the influential Nottingham Traditional Music Club. Characteristically, he took on an organising role as an area coordinator for the English Folk Dance and Song Society, and was active in the Musicians’ Union. Laurence’s commitment to working class history and tradition saw him dancing with the Dolphin Morris Men and other local sides, and back in 1969 him being a founder member of the “Owd Oss” Mummers performing the traditional morality plays of the people derived from the Old Horse Play tradition found in north Notts and south Yorkshire. The history and experience of working people the world over developed in him a burning commitment to justice and equality, a hatred of capitalism and imperialism, a recognition of the necessity and power of revolutionary socialism – and at the age of 23 he joined the Communist Party from which he never deviated or sought an easier path. He joined the Party’s Race Relations Committee reflecting his passionate opposition to all forms of racism – and was also in the late 70s the Trade Union Liaison Officer of Nottingham Community Relations Council. Laurence was an activist and secretary of a large branch of the Transport & General Workers Union, and played a key role through UNITE’s United Left, in developing a fighting, organising union. UNITE’s strong class conscious position today owes a lot to Laurence – and of course many of his comrades. He was tireless in also fighting successfully to change the face of UNITE so that it mobilised its Black and ethnic minority and its women members. Laurence was a real advocate of the unions being a progressive force for the community as well as for their members. In the 80s he played a big role in his Trades Union Council, and was Chair of “Jobs for Radford”, as the working class came under the Thatcher cosh, and the destruction of industries and jobs as a method of undermining class solidarity and action. Radford is a Nottingham inner-city area where its industries were largely based – Raleigh Bicycles, Player’s cigarettes and Manlove & Alliott engineering. A great many workers’ struggles were shaped by his militancy. 156 | Red Lives

Laurence’s patience and dry humour – very biting when required - were also known to all, as was his running joke of always managing to avoid buying a drink! Laurence never deviated from his Communist path throughout his life. But the revisionist leadership of the CPGB certainly did deviate and in 1991, having lost all confidence in working class politics, it dissolved the Party after a fierce internal battle. As far a Laurence was concerned, he never left the Party, it left him – after his being heavily involved in the fight to maintain Marxism-Leninism in the CPGB. Laurence had 17 years without a political Party – though not without working class struggle. And just for good measure and in addition to his existing roles, Laurence took up and became a skilled archaeologist reflecting both his love and commitment to people’s history, and his desire to “get his hands dirty” – in both the real and metaphorical sense. He took part in many digs in the Midlands, had papers published, and led many public meetings, discussions and education sessions and events. Dr Howard Jones, Director of Trent & Peak Archaeology in which Laurence played an important role, spoke at Laurence’s memorial meeting of: “Laurence’s Time in the Trenches”. As an archaeologist and working class fighter, he would have appreciated the pun. After those 17 years Laurence decided to join the Communist Party of Britain established in 1988 by Communists establishing continuity from CPGB foundation in 1920 to this centenary year of 2020. At one of his first meetings of the CPB he opened his remarks with: “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted …”. More recently he has been Chair of the CPB Midlands District and stood for the 2009 EU elections as East Midlands candidate for “NO2EU – Yes To Workers Rights” in which he was active for the CPB. He wrote extensively, including a memorable CPB pamphlet on the Tory anti-union laws and many features for the Morning Star on manufacturing policy. And it was the Morning Star that lay at the heart of Laurence’s life. He regularly called people together for the Nottingham Morning Star Readers and Supporters Group, using the paper to “educate, agitate and organise” and to raise sales and funds. His impassioned closing speeches to “rally round the paper” are not to be forgotten! When Laurence died in 2019, he had dozens of copies of the Morning Star spread around the room which he was reading and having read to him – along with many messages from his friends and comrades. His memorial, full of music, history and politics was a celebration of a life lived in the cause of the working class.

Annie Powell 1906 – 1986 When Annie Powell died in August 1986, at the age of 79, the news was even thought worth reporting by the New York Times. The death of the former Mayor of the Borough of Rhondda appeared to signify the end of the era. She was born into a Welsh-speaking home in Ystrad, in the heart of the South Wales coalfield. Young Annie Thomas went from Bodringallt Primary School to Pentre Grammar School, whose motto echoed the battle-cry of Owain Glyndwr in the fight for Welsh freedom, ‘Hoga dy fwyell’ (‘Sharpen your battle-axe’). But it was only when a student teacher in 1926, at Glamorgan Training College in Barry that she began taking an interest in politics. Red Lives | 157

Annie began her teaching career in Trealaw, just down the valley from her home. As a volunteer raising money to buy food and clothes for the unemployed and their families, she was shocked by what she saw, recalling: “The poverty of the people and of the children was something that hit me really hard”. She joined the Labour Party and became active in the National Union of Teachers. In September 1936, she married Trevor Evan Powell, a warm-hearted, popular man who shared her leftwing views. In the course of the Great Depression her disappointment with the Labour Party grew: “They didn’t discuss theory, in the sense that the Communists discussed theory, and neither did they organise events and put themselves at the disposal of the people in the same way as the Communists did. And it was because the Communists were doing something, I think, that attracted me in the first instance to know more about them”. She was swept up in the huge CP-led campaign throughout the Rhondda valleys to build the Popular Front against fascism and war. She eventually joined the CP in 1938, and later commented: “It was a decision taken after I’d done a terrific amount of reading and given an awful lot of thought to it”. During the Second World War, she carried out full-time work for the Party with Dora Cox, encouraging women to join the armed forces or enter essential wartime production industries. This meant campaigning for employers and local authorities to make provision for childcare. In March 1946, Annie contested the Gelli ward in the Glamorgan County Council elections, polling one-third of the votes against the victorious Labour candidate and an Independent. Throughout this period, Labour and Communist were the only parties with the capacity to fight seats in the Rhondda valleys. Trevor and Annie Powell contested the 1950 borough council elections, attracting press attention as the husband and wife team standing in the neigbouring wards of Penygraig and Ystrad. In the 1955 General Election she was the CP’s candidate in Rhondda East. It was a Labour landslide, but Annie had increased the Communist vote by 50 per cent, finished ahead of the Tory and made a big impact on the electors. Two months later, she narrowly beat the Labour and Independent candidates in a Penygraig ward by-election to win the Party’s first seat on Rhondda borough council for six years. All the while, ‘Mrs Powell’ was still teaching, moving on to Trefforest Central School where former pupils remembered her as effective, strict but fair. Her most trusted charges were sent to the shops to buy her favourite Capstan Full Strength cigarettes. Annie and her large and enthusiastic team threw everything into their 1959 General Election campaign. One of only five women candidates in Wales yet again, she took part in a loudspeaker pit-head debate with Labour candidate G Elfed Davies and a Tory at Maerdy colliery. Although excluded from television and radio coverage, she was given space in the Western Mail to propose Soviet-style rapid industrial expansion, accusing the Tory government of siding with the oil monopolies in their ‘cut-throat war’ against the coal 158 | Red Lives

industry. She argued that higher wages and East-West trade would boost economic growth. In the midst of the Cold War, Annie won 4,580 votes – little more than previously, but enough to to finish ahead of the Tories and Plaid Cymru. Re-elected to the EC, she represented Britain’s Communists at the international meeting of 81 parties in Moscow in 1960. She later told of how she had charmed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a reception by singing the Welsh national anthem, Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (‘Ancient Land of My Fathers’) to him, in her mother-tongue, naturally. In great demand as a speaker, Annie’s engagements included a BBC Home Service radio debate on the student grants system and a public meeting in Abertillery on the CP’s programme The British Road to Socialism. After a spell as deputy mayor of the Rhondda, her Labour colleagues elevated Annie to the mayorship in May 1979. It was a rare departure from the tribal politics of the south Wales valleys for Labour councillors to bestow such an honour on a non-member. On assuming office, she told the BBC – in Welsh, of course – that her chief ambition was to instil ‘new faith’ in the people of the Rhondda that their communities would live. They were not dying, even though mass unemployment had returned. Annie Powell stood down from the council in 1983 and laid down the red flag three years later. Husband Trevor lived on at 12 Railway View, Llwynypia, for another 20 years to reach his century. He was a much-loved regular in the Ynyscynon Hotel and the Llwynypia Workingmen's Club to the end.

Jim Prendergast 1914 – 1974 Born in January 1914, Jimmy Prendergast joined the Irish Worker’s Group, a precursor to the Communist Party of Ireland, in 1932 and studied at the Lenin International School in Moscow in 1934, after which he joined the British Communist Party while working in London. Jim volunteered to join the International Brigades fighting against fascism in Spain, arriving there on 12 December 1936. Almost immediately he was thrust into military action in Lopera in Cordoba, when the XIV International Brigade, which had no training, telecommunications, air or artillery support, was devastated by fascist machine gun fire, mortars and artillery. Soon elected a Political Delegate of the Irish Section at Las Rozas, then made an officer, he remained in this position until he was wounded at Jarama on 12 February 1937. On 16 June 1939, former Lieutenant Jim Prendergast, of the Irish company in the British Battalion in Spain, wrote about the campaign to release the legendary Major Frank Ryan (1902-44) in the Daily Worker. The leader of the Irish in Spain, March 1938, Ryan was captured by Fascists. His unusual detention, long after the release of other international prisoners, became clearer the following year, when German Red Lives | 159

military intelligence tried using Ryan to strengthen links with the IRA. In 1938, Jim Prendergast was one of those who founded the Connolly Association (initially ‘club’), a British based body of Irish migrants supporting a 32-county republic in Ireland. The CA launched a newspaper, Irish Freedom, first published in January 1939, with Jim Prendergast as editor (It was renamed the Irish Democrat in 1945). Whilst totally committed to a United Ireland, the CA was also opposed to a sectarian military war designed to achieve that. Not that the police understood the distinction. They lost a court case after charging Jim Prendergast with obstructing the highway at Marble Arch while selling Irish Freedom. The magistrate said he: “...had a strong feeling that the defendant was arrested because he was selling a paper that was regarded as political” and dismissing the case, said it: “...should never have been brought before the court.” During the three and a half hours Prendergast was detained, Special Branch officers raided Prendergast’s flat. During the Second World War he was a volunteer in a group of men, all former International Brigaders, under the leadership of Professor Haldane, who were engaged in developing under water suits for the armed forces. Jim later served in the Royal Air Force during World War Two, as a rear gunner. Following the war, he became active amongst the resident Irish community in London. Having commenced working on the railways, he became a guard at Marylebone. He became a leading figure in the National Union of Railwaymen, the NUR (today the RMT), and was soon elected to be an NUR Branch Secretary and then to the Executive Committee of the NUR. In 1966, he effectively ended the colour bar in employment at London railway stations, which had been in place for 12 years, after a member was rejected for a higher paying job. Mr Xavier, an experienced guard, had received a letter telling him that he had been rejected for a job at Euston due to a ban on ‘coloured men’ being employed as guards and porters there (At St Pancras it was just limited to guards and supervisory grades that porters could be promoted to). Guards at Euston were getting from £10 to £15 a week more than those elsewhere. After Jimmy’s intervention, not only was Xavier offered the job, British Railways agreed that no ban would apply any more. Jim died 31st May,1974, following a fall down the steps outside his home in St. Johns Wood Terrace. His remains were cremated in Golders Green Crematorium, and were taken some weeks later to Mount Jerome, Dublin by his son Christopher, and placed in the same grave as his cousin, Bill Gannon, with whom he had been an early activist in the Communist Party of Ireland, having given his burial oration.

Erik Rechnitz 1915 – 2001 Chris Kaufman writes: “Long time Communist and leading member of the Transport and General Workers Union, Erik Rechnitz had an unorthodox way of organising his fellow Smithfield Market workers into the union. He challenged an opponent of the move, that if he won a wrestling match between the two of them, then the T&G would win recognition at work. This always seemed a bit of T&G folklore hokum to me so, as editor of the T&G Record, I asked him for proof. Within 24 hours Erik had come back with a printed programme of the famous bout. 160 | Red Lives

Born February 1915 in Highbury, north London, Eric was the son of Jewish immigrants from Austro-Hungary, who arrived in England just before World War One. He went to school in Stoke Newington, and was found collecting for workers on General Strike aged 11. With the closure of the factory where he was working as a trained metallurgist, he entered the industry which would be his life – as an ‘offal boy’ in the meat market at Smithfield in 1930. Two years later he joined the T&G, and after a spell in the Independent Labour Party, joined the CPGB in 1932, and later the CPB, being committed throughout his life. He volunteered for the International Brigade in Spain, but was barred as the family’s sole breadwinner. Erik honed his wrestling skills as an amateur light-heavyweight, making the Olympic trials. As a professional in the late ‘40s/early ‘50s, he bestrode the ring as the ‘Battling Hungarian’. No wonder he threw down that gauntlet in Smithfield! He served in the South Wales Borderers and later the Parachute Regiment, training as a driver and mechanic, in Europe and the Far East. Returning to Smithfield, Eric became a ‘puller-back’ and then a driver. Under the right wing T&G leader Arthur Deakin (1946-55), like all Communists, he was barred from official office. But this did not prevent Erik being hugely influential at Smithfield (where he played a prominent part in a nine week strike involving thousands of workers in 1958) and the wider union. He was at the centre of the 1972 battle for the release of the jailed Pentonville Five dockers; chairman of the largest (London and South East) regional T&G Road Transport Commercial group committee, which he represented nationally on the union’s powerful executive council from 1968. President of the Hackney trades council and chairman of the CP transport advisory group for many years, Erik was presented with the T&G’s highest award, the gold medal, by General Secretary Ron Todd in the1980s. Ron commented: “If there is a heaven, and St Peter is at the gate, he would have a major problem if he tried to deny admission to Erik. Passionate in the cut and thrust of debate”, said the genial Ron: “stubbornness and irascibility hung around him, as did clouds of smoke from the pipe clenched between his teeth.” Receiving the gold medal, Erik bit it. Checking the gold content. That metallurgy training finally bore fruit. His joust with St Peter was in 2001 at the age of 86.

Irene Rickman 1931 – 2015 Just weeks after the birth of Irene Hickie in May 1931, south Birmingham was hit by a tornado, causing severe damage to properties in its path. This force of nature could have seemed a portentous sign to her parents, given the indomitable spirit of their daughter in the years to come! Although in poor health, Irene’s mother was supportive, and made sure her large family had opportunities to develop their talents. In the aftermath of World War II, and following her evacuation to the Welsh countryside, Irene was enrolled for singing lessons. At the age of 15 she joined the fledgling socialist choir Birmingham Clarion Singers; and as a headstrong, forthright teenager, was drawn to the fight against fascism and the belief in a better world. This Red Lives | 161

political firestorm led her to join the Young Communist League. Irene very quickly became a leading light in the soprano section of the choir, taking on challenging roles under the tutelage of fellow comrades. This brought her into a world of cultural and political activism, rubbing shoulders with luminaries such as Paul Robeson, Alan Bush, Charles Parker and Pete Seeger, as well as left-wing academic George Thomson. This was a world away from her life as a young typing clerk, performing Ballad for Americans at Birmingham Town Hall for Paul Robeson in 1949 and playing Anne Page in Sir John in Love (and meeting composer Ralph Vaughan Williams during rehearsals). Irene met her life partner Alan Rickman at a Communist Party event, and they married in 1952, the day after her 21st birthday. Alan regularly took Irene to her singing lessons at the house of her friend Elsie Marshall, on his motorbike. It wasn’t long before Elsie had persuaded Alan to take singing lessons himself, and to join the tenor section. In 1952 the choir took its message of peace and socialism to audiences in Romania, and in 1957 to Czechoslovakia, funding these cultural exchanges by taking their progressive music to local venues and public houses. The people of Birmingham were treated to the works of Mozart and Vaughan Williams, sung by ordinary working people from the factories and offices in the city. Irene continued to play a pivotal role in Birmingham Clarion Singers, taking on many roles over several decades of performances, and ensuring her clerical training was fully employed in the role of choir secretary. “As she matured,” present Choir Director, Jane Scott, explains: “her voice became deeper and richer, and as an adult she ended up with a beautiful alto voice. In the 1970s, she retrained as a nursery nurse, finding a welcome setting for her warmth and generosity of spirit. She took great pleasure in her extensive circle of family and friends and could always be found at the heart of social events, enjoying a sing-along or a quiet joke and observation.” Irene and Alan had another child, Mark, and their family life was full of shared interests, including camping, protection of wildlife, a love of the British countryside and, of course, politics and singing. In 1984 Mark died suddenly and tragically at the age of 19, and Irene demonstrated her unconquerable spirit as the family courageously came to terms with the loss. Current Birmingham Plus CPB branch secretary, Andy Chaffer comments: “Irene was branch secretary for Birmingham Communists from the early 1990s ... So staunch was her commitment to Communist Unity, which some were lukewarm about, that I recall her in the middle of heart problems refusing to leave a Congress committee meeting until things were sorted!” 162 | Red Lives

Alan died in April 2015 and, as Jane Scott recalls: “With the loss of her elder sister, Audrey, Irene became uncharacteristically melancholy and world-weary. In her usual decisive manner, she decided it was time to bow out, from a life lived to the full, leaving a legacy of music and political activism to inspire the next generation, dying at the age of 84.”

Derek Robinson 1927 – 2017 Born in 1927, Derek Robinson started work at the age of 14 at the Longbridge car plant in Northfield, Birmingham, which was dominated by the Communist Party. He became a shop steward, and much later followed Dick Etheridge, as plant convenor at the end of 1973. Derek stood in Northfield as a Communist candidate in four General Elections from 1966. Graham Stevenson writes: “I worked closely with Derek as his Press and Media Officer in the two elections of 1974. I was only 23 and it was a hugely invigorating experience. My abiding memory is of the calm and kindly approach I received from a man so much more vital to the movement than me and one many years my senior. Of my daily press releases, he said; ‘Write what you like, son. I trust you.’ Later in my union career, he always provided sound advice.” The main spokesperson for the British Leyland (BL) combine committee of some forty plants, he found himself pitched against a new boss, Sir Michael Edwardes, in 1977. Within a matter of 15 months over 18,000 jobs had gone and 50,000 less vehicles were produced. Another 25,000 job losses and 13 factories closing were envisaged. Astonishingly, Derek was sacked in November 1979 for a combine pamphlet advocating fighting this by drawing on the experience of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. MI5 had sent Edwardes the minutes of a meeting of Communists, discussing the plan. The T&G called for an official strike but Derek’s union, the AUEW, was in the grip of a hostile right-wing leadership. A huge national protest demonstration was convened in only two working days. But the AUEW set up a delaying Committee of Enquiry. Media ‘hate’ stories built to a scale never seen before. In such an atmosphere of sell-out, the workforce simply gave up. This was the first major defeat for the movement after Thatcher’s 1979 victory. If you could sack ‘Red Robbo’, you could sack anyone. George Hickman, TGWU convenor of the gigantic Sandwell Direct Works Department, was one of the first significant rank-and-file unionists to be next victimised, just 16 months after Derek: “Derek was one of the most principled trades unionists and staunch friends you could possibly meet. He was always there for me, whether fighting my own dismissal, assisting me in a new role as head of an Unemployed Workers Centre, or in my work building the T&G Broad Left. When he was still convenor, the T&G 783 branch had brought all of the transport section of the local authority out on strike for an increase in wages and to Red Lives | 163

be recognised as professional drivers. We won that. Then we rewrote the procedure agreement and formed a combine committee based on a model supplied to me by Derek. We got called the ‘Terrible Twins’ back in the day by the press. Quite frankly, we took that as a compliment.” During the 1980s, BL was brought to a feeble state, Longbridge finally closing in 2005 when 6,000 lost their jobs. Derek was to the fore in supporting the campaign to keep the plant going. Having initially hated the nickname, he told MPs in 2000 that he finally regarded the ‘Red Robbo’ tag as a badge of honour: “I can sleep sound at night because I never betrayed the workers I was elected to represent” he said. Derek worked as Midlands Circulation rep for the Morning Star and then as a tutor in trade union studies. His first marriage, very young, to Betty produced a daughter, Steff, who he was immensely proud of and who doted on him, caring for him until his death. Fellow Communist, Phyllis Davis, herself a towering figure amongst the Longbridge women stewards, was a long time partner, being hugely supportive during his sacking. Sadly she died in 1993, although Derek’s late marriage to Pat was also a comfort. His Party branch secretary, Andy Chaffer, recalls him as a: “...proud and well-read Communist and a keen observer of how Party work in the West Midlands fared in his later years. Expelled from the CPGB as a member of the PPPS Management Committee, Derek was a key voice in the re-founding process as chair from 1984 of the Communist Campaign Group and by 1988 of the re-established Communist Party. He remained a staunch member of our branch and a solid mentor to many of us heavily involved in the trade union movement.”

Alec ‘Spike’ Robson 1895 – 1979 Alec Robson was born on 18 March 1895 into a coal mining family in South Shields. At age 11 he started work at the Cambois pit near Blyth, participating in 1910 in the national miners’ strike for an 8-hour day. At age 16 he joined a boxing booth, travelling country fairs and boxing for a living. He probably got called ‘Spike’ because of a South Shields professional boxer of the same name. In 1912 Spike joined a tramp ship as a cabin boy, sailing first to Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, where he saw political prisoners chained together. On the next leg, he learned from an old sailor about the Battleship Potemkin, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists and the Mutiny on the Nore. Arriving in New York, he boxed around the United States, but on the outbreak of World War One returned to Britain and joined the Army. He was wounded twice, and awarded the Distinguished Conduct and Military Medals. Demobbed in 1919, Spike married his sweetheart Evelyn and then signed as a stoker 164 | Red Lives

on the SS Tzarita, carrying 700 British troops for Murmansk and Archangelsk. Fraternising with Red Guards in Murmansk, he learned about the class struggle, and on return to Liverpool joined the ‘Hands Off Russia’ movement. During the winter of 1920-1921, unemployed in London, he came across a protest march which led to his joining the Communist Party and becoming active in the seamen’s section of the Minority Movement (MM), and in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM). In 1926, the National Union of Seamen (NUS) was expelled from the TUC for opposing the General Strike. The union was largely a management stooge at the time, and the MM sought to form a new Union of Seamen and get it affiliated to the International Seamen and Harbour Workers (ISH). That failed, but in 1932 Spike was elected onto the ISH executive committee, and in 1933 he was active in the campaign to free imprisoned German Communist leader Ernst Thälmann. Spike was a fighter, not only for the rights and freedoms of British workers and their families, but against the oppression of working people of all races, creeds and lands. In July 1931, he defended, against an angry crowd of 500+ white sailors, the right of local Arab seamen, who were union members, to join the crew of a South Shields ship. The next month he led an MM occupation of the local NUS office to demand the transfer of an official who had been blocking members in arrears from getting work. In 1932 he addressed mass meetings and demonstrations against the Means Test and the Public Assistance Committee. After the police charged one demonstration he was arrested and gaoled for four months. In 1933, during the Japanese war on China, Spike was arrested again and fined, this time over the SS Stanleyville, which was at Blyth harbour to take scrap iron to Japan. He spoke at migrant seamen’s boarding lodges, getting the ship blacked so that it only sailed after a long delay. He was arrested and gaoled in North Shields in July 1934 when he “appeared to collide” with a fascist speaker; and then the following year he was arrested in Cape Town, and deported, for organising a petition and protests against the SS Julius Caesar, which was loading material for the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. In early 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Spike was shipped on the SS Linaria in Boston, USA, when the crew learned that they were to deliver nitrates to Seville, the fascists’ headquarters. Suspecting that the cargo was to be used for explosives, Spike led the crew in holding a sit-down strike for three weeks. They were deported and charged at Liverpool under the Merchant Shipping Acts. They were fined for “impeding the navigation of a ship”, but this was overturned on appeal. Blacklisted until the outbreak of World War Two, Spike then joined the Royal Navy as a petty officer. His activities included landing in Yugoslavia with supplies for the partisans, and teaching them to throw and detonate hand grenades. After the war, Spike went back into the Merchant Navy, and in 1947 became the first Communist to be elected onto the NUS executive. Under the impact of Spike and other left-wingers, the union had changed, and the living conditions on board ships were transformed from the squalor that seamen had to endure before the war. He continued his union activities till retirement, and died in November 1979. Red Lives | 165

Bill Ronksley 1924 – 2018 Bill Ronksley was a train driver, trade unionist, Communist and international peace campaigner who died at the age of 94 on 6 November 2018. Bill became active in the trade union movement as a teenager in his home county, Yorkshire. In 1939 he became a train driver, and later went on the become President of train drivers’ union Aslef. A long-time member of the Communist Party, he was involved in peace delegations to the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe, and was held in great respect there. After his death, stories about him from friends and comrades flooded in to the Morning Star, painting a picture of an activist with passionate beliefs, committed to working tirelessly in support of his principles. They also depict a man always prepared to help others, with wise counsel, steadfast support – and action. Mick Appleyard, who met Bill in 1974 during the miners’ strike of that year, was a miner at Sharlston colliery in West Yorkshire during the 1984-5 strike against pit closures. He said: “There was a railway line going into Eggborough power station to deliver coal. Bill told me ‘if you put a banner over that bridge, there won’t be a train goes in there.’ And there wasn’t, throughout the strike. No coal was moved by rail.” One of the most famous stories about Bill was how, in 1950, he went to Sheffield railway station to meet Pablo Picasso, who was due to speak at a peace forum in Sheffield. Later Picasso drew doves of peace on bits of paper and gave them away as souvenirs. Of course they became collectors’ items of some financial value. “Maybe I should have asked for one,” Bill said later. There was also another story about the Picasso visit. Bill was with a small delegation who met Picasso at Sheffield railway station. When he arrived they greeted him and gave him a bunch of flowers. Bill then had to ask Picasso to give them the flowers back because another delegate was due to arrive and they’d only got one bunch. After retirement Bill became secretary of Sheffield Trades Union Council. Current secretary Martin Mayer said: “Bill spent his entire life in the trade union movement and held lay office throughout his life till his death. His knowledge and experience of working class history both here in Britain and internationally was immense. He was of course a life-long member of the Communist Party but was never dogmatic or forceful in his views when discussing politics with others. A quietly-spoken man he shunned the limelight and was personally very modest. “One of his proudest moments was during the 1984/85 Miners Strike when his union Aslef won the support of its members to refuse to move coal during the entire strike – one of the reasons why Thatcher had to get trucks to move coal to the coking plant at Orgreave, thus paving the way for the battle over which we are still fighting for justice today. He encouraged young people to get involved in the trade union movement and, in 166 | Red Lives

recognition of this, the Yorkshire and Humber Regional TUC launched the Bill Ronksley Award for Young Trade Unionist of the Year. He earned the huge respect of all who knew him both here in Sheffield and internationally and will be sadly missed.” Tosh McDonald, former President of Aslef, and now a Labour Councillor in Doncaster in South Yorkshire, said: “Bill, who I met when I joined the railway, was the full-time officer in District 4. He took me under his wing and for that I will always be grateful. He was a giant of Aslef and did so much for this trade union.” Rob Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party, said: “Bill Ronksley was one of the finest of many fine trade union leaders produced by the Communist Party. Hugely knowledgeable, deeply political, straight-talking and fair-minded, he was a tower of strength for Britain’s railway workers and the whole trade union movement in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. “More of a doer than those who mostly just talk about it, he knew all about organising and winning strikes and securing solidarity for other workers in dispute. I know what he would be saying now, in the words of Joe Hill, ‘don’t mourn – organise.’” Labour’s Shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon said: “I’m so sad that my inspiring friend and comrade Bill Ronksley has passed away at the age of 94. “He was truly one of the most wonderful human beings I ever had the pleasure and privilege to know. He was a selfless force for good and devoted his whole life and all its energy to the fight for a better world for the working class, here and internationally. “Even in his 90s, the extent of his internationalism, anti-imperialism and anti-racism made him ahead of his – and our – time. He is irreplaceable. We can all learn something from Bill’s example.” Friend and comrade Leslie Warsop said: “My fondest memories are of Bill and I when travelling together on the early morning bus to Sheffield in the 1960s. Bill would be travelling to London to Aslef headquarters, as Bill was the president of the union at this time. We would discuss current international politics and I was amazed at his knowledge.” Barbara Warsop said: “I recall a story of Bill being present at a protest when Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists came to Sheffield in the 1930s. Bill must have been a teenager. Also I think he went to the Donbass Region of the Ukraine to help coordinate solidarity from the miners there during the 84-85 strike.” Mick Rix, former Aslef general secretary and now national organiser with the GMB, said: “I first met Bill in the mid-70s. I went to the Morning Star Peoples Press Rally in Sheffield. Our family had also undertaken the programme to take in Chilean refugees after the fascist coup there. Bill was the driving force in Aslef in ensuring effective respite was given. “As Aslef district organiser his weekend political schools were legendary. He had a way of ensuring peace and internationalism was at the forefront of what we did. Years later, I was fortunate to visit a number of countries and it was not that surprising how many people asked after him in different countries. Myself and Bob Crow as young men were sent to East Germany with a delegation from Aslef/NUR. Myself and Bob were let through checkpoint Charlie in seconds, the others took a good while longer to get through. We knew why we got through without our passports being checked. On Red Lives | 167

the other side immediately we were asked how Bill was, and they implored me and Bob to pass on our best regards. “Bill was modest, he hated flattery, he didn’t like fuss. Like many good activists of his generation, it was all about collectivism not individualism. He mentored me, and many others in our movement. “I often reflect, how lucky was Picasso to have met Ronko, and in his beloved Sheffield too.”

Rosa Rosen 1930 – 1983 Finances, and the conduct of those finances, are essential to a Party organisation, without them they would not be able to fulfil their function. Those individuals involved in running the finances are key to the life of the organisation, and to the work carried out. These individuals are often overlooked, but without them the organisation would not be able to operate. Especially in a Communist Party whose function is changing a system, and therefore needs punctilious conduct of business. Rosa Rosen is a case of a Communist functionary who committed her life to the efficient running of the party. Rosa was born in Hackney in 1930, the middle child of six children. Their mother, Rebecca Silverstein, had come to Britain from the Ukraine at the age of two, and was part of a revolutionary family, being taught by Fyodor Rothstein in the local Socialist Sunday School. Their father, Aaron or Harry Rosen, arrested as a revolutionary, had escaped from the Tsarist police, and had made it to the United States. During the First World War he joined the American army, came to London where he met Rebecca Silverstein, and never left. After the Russian Revolution both were considered stateless, and they were classed as enemy aliens. Rosa and her siblings grew up in a home where Communism was at the centre of the family, and the Soviet Union was an important part of their lives. As a stateless citizen, their father ‘haunted’ Communist meetings and the Soviet embassy, and all of the children were to a greater or lesser extent involved in the Communist movement. All joined the YCL, and Rosa became the local YCL secretary. Her revolutionary ideals, developed as she knitted for the Red Army during the Second World War, matured as she organised a march of her fellow evacuees in St Mawes, Cornwall in support of one who had been forced to stay out in the garden of the big house he was billeted on, and coalesced as she attended Second Front meetings in Trafalgar Square with her father. In 1946 her father died, and so did her ambition of becoming a Maths teacher, as she left school in order to work to support the family. Starting off in a commercial firm she then went to work for the Hackney Communist Party, and then soon after that joined the London District Communist Party. There she stayed, first as a secretary, and then moving on and using her maths skills to become the bookkeeper, a role she continued to her death. She was well-known at Party events, usually on the door taking the entrance fees, or arranging the donation boxes or counting the money behind the scenes at all of the big 168 | Red Lives

CPGB occasions. She organised the floats at the local bazaars and jumble sales. She didn’t like, need, or feel it was her strength, to be at the centre of attention. As she saw it, her role in the Party was to support others, to make sure that there was as much money as possible to support its activities, and to keep it safe from creditors. She reluctantly sat on the platform at the London District Congresses to answer questions about the accounts, and left it as soon as she could. And then made sure the collecting box was out on show as people left. She worked with comrades from the Malayan National Liberation Army, and supported AKEL in her free time. When Johnny Mahon retired as London District Secretary, and began his biography of Harry Pollitt, Rosa typed the first drafts, discussing the work over cups of tea in a café. She was good with children and they loved her – she was a good teacher. However, she never regretted the loss of the profession she had wanted. She was satisfied with her role in the Communist Party, making sure that the London District organisation continued to function. The Party was central to her life. To her fingertips she was committed to its ideals, to revolution and to the working class, remaining so until her early death at the age of 53. At her funeral, one of the branch secretaries came with his monthly quota. She would have liked that, and then she would have wanted to know where the donation bucket was.

Benny Rothman 1911 – 2002 The late Benny Rothman was born in the poor working class North Manchester district of Cheetham Hill to Jewish immigrant parents. He won a scholarship, but family circumstances – poverty and the premature death of his father – forced him to leave school and work as an apprentice in the motor trade. Benny made up for the premature end of school education by avid reading and study and became interested in socialist ideas, bringing him to the attention of members of the Communist Party, including workmates. He was invited to a meeting of the Young Communist League, which he joined and became an enthusiastic activist. A committed Communist from then on, in 1937 he married fellow Party member Lily Crabtree. They had two children and were together as companions and comrades until 2001 when Lily died. Benny’s arrest, shortly after joining the Young Communist League, for chalking support for the Daily Worker on a pavement, and his phenomenal paper selling abilities, as well as demonstrating his commitment, also brought him to the attention of his employers, and almost certainly played a part in him subsequently being picked for redundancy. His role as a working class militant and Communist included decades of organising in Red Lives | 169

the engineering industry, and was met both with the respect of colleagues and more victimisation by employers (including sacking from MetroVic in 1951 followed by reinstatement after a strike by his workmates), recruitment to the Party and workplace sales of the Daily Worker and then the Morning Star. His lifetime of committed work was recognised by the Amalgamated Engineering Union in 1990. He was heavily involved in the struggle against fascism in the 1930s, as Moseley’s Blackshirts attempted to build in the towns of the industrial North West, and on one occasion was thrown from the balcony at a Blackshirt rally after coming to the aid of a woman comrade who was heckling Mosley. Committed to support for the Republican cause in Spain, he was disappointed to be turned down when he volunteered as an ambulance driver. During World War Two, unable to enlist due to his reserved occupation, he joined the Home Guard. Benny became a determined activist in the peace movement following the War and the development of the Cold War, and like many Communists became a keen and active member of CND. But it was his enthusiasm for the outdoors which led to his key involvement in the struggle for which he is famous, the fight for the right of access to the countryside, and specifically in the Peak District, situated between the industrial cities of Lancashire (including Manchester and Salford) and Yorkshire. Young workers, wanting to spend their free time away from the grime of the cities found the otherwise open spaces of the peaks were closed to them because the landowners generally denied permission to enter, and this abuse of property ownership by the wealthy was an abomination to Benny and his comrades. The YCL, with Benny in a leading position, played the crucial role in the establishment of the British Workers’ Sports Federation who led the famous mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1931. This saw Benny and others arrested, following battles with gamekeepers employed by the landlords, to keep out the “great unwashed”. The Communist affiliations and Jewish heritage of Benny and most of his codefendants did not go unnoticed either by the magistrates or the local newspapers which reported on the events. The events of Easter 1932 and the decades of follow-up work carried out by Benny and others played a huge role in inspiring the increasingly successful campaign for the right to roam, and Benny and his comrades are recognised for their role far beyond the ranks of the Communist Party. He was awarded life membership of the Ramblers Association in 1996. There’s even a locomotive engine with the plate inscribed: “Benny Rothman, the Manchester Rambler”. Benny continued to fight for the right to roam for the rest of his life, and against the despoliation of the countryside. He appeared in a Channel 4 programme dealing with the question of land ownership, and was involved in campaigns such as the one to defend Twyford Down in Hampshire An annual walk is held on the anniversary of the Kinder Trespass to raise money for the Morning Star newspaper, although sadly, it was not able to be held during the CP’s centenary year, due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Communists and our friends and allies, have kept the memory alive. 170 | Red Lives

Andrew Rothstein 1898 – 1994 Andrew Rothstein was born in 1898 in Islington, London, the son of Theodore Rothstein, a Russian political refugee. His father was a comrade of Lenin, organised Lenin’s stay in London in 1902-1903 and arranged for the editing and printing of Iskra at the Social Democratic Federation’s Twentieth Century Press, in what is now Marx House. Theodore later arranged, on behalf of Lenin, the holding of two Congresses for the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party in London. Theodore also played, from 1895 onwards, a leading role within the Social Democratic Federation (later the British Socialist Party). He fought for a principled anti-imperialist position, argued for the party to work within the trade union movement and the Labour Party, to which the SDF/BSP affiliated, and opposed the opportunism of its leader Henry Hyndman. In 1916, Theodore was instrumental in the victory of those in the British Socialist Party who opposed the First World War as an imperialist war and later, after 1918, in preparing the way for a united Communist Party in Britain. This background was of determining significance for Andrew Rothstein. After attending Owen’s School in Islington, he won a History scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford and was then called up for military service. In December 1918, as a twenty year old lance corporal, he led one of the first British army mutinies when his unit was called on to embark for active service in Russia – mutinies which compelled the government to order the fast demobilisation of the army. Andrew then returned to Oxford to complete his degree but was banned from further academic progress by the intervention of the Foreign Office. In summer 1920, Theodore Rothstein was recalled to Moscow for consultations, but then banned by the British government from returning to Britain (he was shortly after made Soviet ambassador to Persia/Iran). That summer therefore, Andrew Rothstein had to take over most of the roles previously fulfilled by his father – specifically in servicing the Hands Off Russia Committee, handling press work for the Soviet legation in London and playing a significant part in preparing for the first Unity conference of the Communist Party in August 1920. He was described by MI5 as the key link between the Labour Party Left under George Lansbury and the Soviet delegation in London. It was also Andrew Rothstein who wrote the lead article, under the pseudonym of C.M.Roebuck, in the second issue of the new party’s weekly paper, The Communist. Through the 1920s, Rothstein was employed as a press officer in London for ROSTA, the Soviet press agency, and subsequently handled press work for the Soviet mission and for TASS. He was instrumental, through his contacts in the trade union movement and the Labour Party, in establishing the Anglo Russian Trade Union Committee with backing by the TUC General Council – a development that caused the British government great concern as appearing to indicate that the British Labour movement was turning towards Bolshevism. This committee played a significant role in mobilising Red Lives | 171

international solidarity in the period running up to the General Strike. In January 1928, as a member of the Communist Party’s executive he drafted, along with J R Campbell, the ‘majority’ resolution that opposed the line being pushed by Bukharin in the Communist International. This called for parties to adopt a new ‘class against class’ approach which involved breaking off all links with the Labour Party and the formal trade union movement. Rothstein argued that this would breach the position taken by the Communist Party in 1920 in light of Lenin’s arguments in Left-wing Communism, as well as denying the wider experience of the Party over subsequent years. Though temporarily successful, the line advocated by Rothstein and Campbell was defeated later in 1928 – with relatively disastrous consequences for the Party’s size and influence until reversed in the early 1930s. Rothstein continued his work as press representative for the Soviet mission in London, and in 1929 moved to Moscow to become deputy head of the Anglo-American section of the Red International of Labour Unions. He subsequently joined the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations under Litvinov in Geneva, and later in the 1930s resumed his work as Soviet press representative in London – becoming, between 1943 and 1950, President of the Foreign Press Association. In 1945 he became Lecturer in Slavonic and East European Studies at London University – until dismissed in 1950 at the height of the Cold War. He continued his work for the Soviet and Czech press until retirement in 1966 when he became Chair and later President of Marx Memorial Library. His last major political intervention was in 1985 when he wrote, jointly with Robin Page Arnot, an article for the CPUSA’s Political Quarterly entitled the ‘British Communist Party and Euro-Communism’ denouncing the liquidationist trend then dominating the party. 1n 1988 he was presented with card No 1 in the re-established Communist Party of Britain, and continued as active party member, contributing to Communist Review, until his death in 1994. As well as his many translations, Rothstein was a prolific author in his own right. His most important and influential book was his magisterial History of the USSR published by Penguin in 1950. He also wrote British Foreign Policy and its Critics, originally lectures delivered in Moscow; When Britain Invaded Soviet Russia about Britain’s war on the new Soviet republic between 1918 and 1920; Marlborough and Peter the Great about the origins of Britain’s foreign policy as a capitalist state and The Munich Conspiracy exposing Britain’s deals with Hitler in 1938.

Avtar Sadiq 1941 – 2018 Avtar Singh Sadiq was born on 13 April 1941 in the small village of Chak, now in Pakistan, and following the partition of 1947, which is stained with inhumanity and the blood of so many of innocent people on both sides of this divide, his parents managed to reach their original home of Kahlon, a small village in East Punjab. His mother died when he was only 11. His father was a poor peasant and married again to support the family, as was the requirement to sustain life. His stepmother did not treat him so well, but he never blamed her or his stepbrothers for it. He remained very close to his stepbrothers and sisters. The painful 172 | Red Lives

experiences of childhood had a deep impact on his personality which gave him a sense of humanity and kindness. He was one of the most recognisable faces of the Indian Marxists in the UK. He shared the visible signature identity of his lifelong political inspiration, the veteran leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Harkishan Singh Surjeet. He maintained his long hair and wore a turban with pride. Avtar Singh “Khomal” was his pen-name to start with, but he later changed it to Avtar Sadiq as suggested by a renowned Punjabi writer Gurbax Singh Preetlari — meaning in Arabic and Urdu “truthful friend” — to personify his dedication to a secular, democratic and socialist ideology. Comrade Sadiq, as he was fondly called, graduated from DAV College in Hoshiarpur in 1961, and completed postgraduate teacher training from a college in Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar in Punjab. After a short stint as a teacher, Sadiq, like many of his generation coming from the poorer sections of peasantry, left the spartan comforts of life in Punjab in search of a brighter economic future in England. He arrived in Leicester in 1964, making it his home until he took his last breath on January 28 2018. According to his son Arvinder Singh Kandola: “Dad always said in life you should strive to struggle to improve yourself and serve others, and also that life is beautiful. It’s given to you once and should be lived with enjoyment and no regrets.” The first words following Avtar Sadiq’s demise by his lifelong partner Gurdarshan Kaur were: “Let there be no tears. Let us remember how he was always smiling and happy, never giving in to pain.” Avtar Sadiq faced the harsh reality of racial discrimination and economic austerity of life in Leicester, as he started to build a new life as a factory worker with Dunlop and other plastic manufacturers. From his association with like-minded people like Dharam Singh and Harkewal Singh Kewal, he joined the local unit of the Indian Workers Association (IWA) GB in 1965. Sadiq was elected as secretary of the local writers’ unit in 1966. His keen interest in poetry and literature was soon recognised and Sadiq was elected as the cultural secretary of the Leicester unit. Sadiq saw these as the formative years of the political life that was to follow. He was given the responsibility to form the Progressive Writers’ Association in 1968. Years later, Sadiq recalled this association with pride, stating: “It’s because of IWA (GB) that my voice reached out to the people and as a result I received recognition as a writer and freelance journalist.” The IWA in turn recognised the talents of the gifted Sadiq, said his lifelong comrade Mohinder Farma: “Sadiq was instrumental in setting up youth groups, teaching folk dance, mentoring budding poets and writers, encouraging and inspiring communist activists. He was a remarkable role model for his peers and the next generation in impeccable socialist behaviour.” Red Lives | 173

For Hardev Dosanjh one of the veteran founder members of the IWA GB: “Sadiq’s poetry symbolised the struggles of the working class for freedom, a world free of exploitation, with social and economic equality and a yearning for the alternative to neoliberalism ... socialism.” “His going is such a great loss to the Association of Indian Communists (AIC), the IWA, his community and the progressive movement in Leicester and the whole country. I can't believe that never again will we hear Avtar patiently and cogently guiding us on the right path to combat imperialism,” says veteran Communist Party of Britain comrade David Grove of Lincolnshire. Avtar Sadiq was elected as the national general secretary of IWA GB at its Golden Jubilee in 1988 and then as national president from 1993 to 2004. His quest for a secular democratic society was recognised at an international gathering of eminent Punjabi academics at a conference in Punjab during what was to be his last visit to his native homeland in November 2017. Sadiq became quite ill at the conference but was not deterred and delivered his address before returning to England. Upon returning to Leicester his health further deteriorated, yet in his normal manner he remained focused on championing the struggle against the rising menace of Hindutva fascism led by the paramilitary RSS and was planning a series of events for the summer. “We will carry forward Avtar Sadiq’s legacy with renewed vigour and commitment,” said Joginder and Rajinder Bains from Derby. Sadiq was influenced by the progressive movement and the writings of Marx and Lenin which attracted him to communist ideology. He joined the AIC when it formed in 1967. He was elected to the AIC executive committee in 1970, its secretariat and eventually as its secretary in 1995. He held this highest post of the AIC until 2012, when he passed on the responsibilities due to failing health. During this period, on at least seven occasions, he is known to have attended the national congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). As the party’s general secretary Sitaram Yechury said: “The CPI (M) deeply regrets the passing away of a dedicated communist. Comrade Avtar Singh Sadiq served the party through the Association of Indian Communists in Great Britain and the Indian Workers’ Association and immensely contributed to the consolidation of these organisations. Comrade Avtar will be sorely missed and will always remain among the ranks of dedicated communists working to establish an exploitation-free society.” Sadiq became a familiar figure on working-class platforms. He, along with the support of his comrades in Leicester, regularly organised creative events to raise funds for the Morning Star as well as solidarity funds for the national liberation struggles in Palestine, Vietnam and South Africa, supporting the defence of the revolution in Cuba and the toiling masses of India. Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths said: “Avtar was a lifelong activist and communist campaigner both in his local community and with the Indian Workers Association. He was recognised as a leader, nationally and internationally, and was one of the best-known and longest-serving cadres of the Association of Indian Communists here in Britain. He would be everywhere and you knew that his contributions were well thought-through and well carried out. He was a 174 | Red Lives

warm figure who was known to so many communists in Britain and his energy will be sadly missed.” Avtar Sadiq had an insatiable appetite for study and self-development. He quit fulltime employment in 1977 to study youth and community work at Leicester University and went on to study for a master’s degree in sociology from Warwick University. He used his newly acquired skills and knowledge to advance his career as an employment officer and became a senior executive officer at the time of his retirement in 2001 with the Race Equality Council in Nottingham and Leicester. “Sadiq’s academic background and powerful intellect, infused with the antiimperialist ideology of the working class resonated through his writings and speeches. Equally comfortable in Punjabi and English, Sadiq would manipulate social and economic information and provide simple examples to explain the complexities of dialectical materialism,” recalls IWA GB national president Dyal Bagri. By the time of his death, Avtar Sadiq had published four books on poetry, three story books and a travelogue of his visit to Cuba. He also has a couple more pending publication. “Avtar Sadiq was a brilliant student, exemplary teacher and the epitome of revolutionary leadership,” remembers Harsev Singh, secretary of the Association of Indian Communists GB.

Shapurji Saklatvala 1874 – 1936 Shapurji Saklatvala, Sak to those who knew him, was briefly the Labour MP and then the Communist MP for Battersea North in South west London in the 1920s. He was a remarkable individual. Born into the wealthiest family in India, he came to Britain in 1905. Originally for a short stay but upon meeting his future wife, who was English, he made Britain his home. Already a supporter of the Indian National Congress, upon his arrival he gradually became influenced by socialist writers and speakers and joined both the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation. After the outbreak of the First World War he became an increasingly active member of the ILP. His involvement brought him to national prominence. Influenced by the Russian Revolution he moved to the left. In 1921 he was adopted as the Labour candidate for Battersea. There were no bans on Communist Party members being members of the Labour Party. Sak had joined the CPGB soon after the ILP’s refusal to affiliate to the Communist International in March 1921. At the 1922 General Election he was elected as the Labour MP for Battersea North. Defeated at another election the same year he was re-elected at a third election in 1924. This time he was returned as a Communist MP although backed by the left leaning local Labour Party and trades council. There were still no bans on CP members Red Lives | 175

being members of the Labour Party. This did not come into force until 1925. He remained Battersea’s MP until defeated by a Labour candidate at the 1929 election. By this time Communists could no longer be members of the Labour Party. Unlike many Labour MPs, Sak involved himself in the extra parliamentary struggle. Arrested in 1926 during the General Strike, on his release he addressed mass meetings all over the country. He was a fantastic orator and one of the CP’s leading and popular speakers. While an MP, he visited India in 1927 and met with Gandhi. Both men agreed over India’s freedom from British rule but disagreed how this was to be achieved. While there, Sak met many Indian communists and laid the basis for the cotton workers strike in Meerut, which lead to the famous Meerut Conspiracy Trial. Through his political life Sak was active in India’s liberation movement. Through organisation like the Workers Welfare League of India, which raised awareness amongst British workers about India’s plight, through to the Indian National Congress, of which he was a London member. He wrote pamphlets about India, contributed to Commissions on India’s welfare and was regarded by some in the right wing media as India’s MP in parliament. He was knowledgable on India, and had it not been for his commitment to the Communist Party, his secretary during his time in parliament believes that he could have become Labour’s spokesperson for the colonies. High office indeed. Sak’s life does blow rather a hole in the argument of many commentators of CPGB history. They all argue, with some honourable exceptions, that British Communists were dictated to by Moscow through the Communist International. This is particularly so with the adoption of the ‘Class against Class’ policy from 1929-35. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sak was advocating such a policy from 1925 onwards. His experiences of Labour in power and its lack of support for the labour movement, and India, led him to write a letter to the Party’s executive committee three years before ‘Class against Class’, urging them to change the Party’s policy in exactly the direction advocated by later ‘Class against Class’ strategists. After his election defeat in 1929 Sak stood as Communist candidate again in Battersea, but also in Shettleston in Glasgow at a by-election. He spoke at a whole number of meetings in support of the party’s new daily paper, the Daily Worker, launched in 1930. In 1934 he visited the Soviet Union and was very impressed with the Union’s eastern republics which were Muslim. He spoke at meetings about the progress they had made under Soviet rule on his return. It was on his visit that he suffered a heart attack. He survived another two years and died in January 1936. General secretary Harry Pollitt, led the oration at Sak’s cremation in Golders Green Crematorium. Apart from his political life Sak was a devoted family man. He met his English wife in Derbyshire soon after his arrival here. They married and had five children. Living most of their life near Parliament Hill Fields in London. As Harry Pollitt said at his funeral: “He will live again in work to come”.

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Alf Salisbury 1909 – 2000 Not many British Communists receive a letter of special commendation from the Ambassador of Mongolia, but this is exactly what happened to Communist Alf Salisbury, when in his 80s. Alf never held paid office in a union, and he was notoriously reluctant to talk about himself. Liane Groves, national officer of Unite, was able to record his life in a series of interviews and writes here. Alf’s family hailed from Riga in Latvia, and his parents had to escape from a Czarist pogrom. In 1902 they arrived with their ten children to London’s bustling east end, centre of the Russian and Baltic Jewish communities. Five years later, in 1909, Alf was born in Stepney, which he would often refer to as: “the cradle of trade unionism and socialism.” When he was 14 he left school, and after a period of unemployment went to sea and joined the National Union of Seamen. This was a company union led by Havelock Wilson. Alf recalled that fellow workers referred to Havelock as Have-the-lot! At the age of 19, he jumped ship in New York and spent the next three years travelling and working all over America. Here he became a follower of the IWW, known as the ‘Wobblies’, a syndicalist mass union movement. In 1929 Alf returned to Britain to ‘work the ships’. Trouble was never far away and in 1929, he was arrested in Guatemala for spying. In that same year, he joined the Communist Party and he

was to stay in it for the rest of his days. He said: “No matter how weak the Communist Party seemed to be, it was essential to make it grow as the main force for socialism.” In 1933 Alf was one of the small number of comrades made directly accountable to then general secretary Harry Pollitt, and became a clandestine courier supporting German communists. The danger of this role cannot be overestimated. He recalled regularly getting a postcard, which triggered a rendezvous with Pollitt in a pub near Party headquarters in King Street, where a big wad of German currency would be handed over. Alf then had to take it, when his ship docked in various German ports, and make contact with KPD members, often themselves on the run. One time this led to a vicious fight between British sailors and Nazi Brownshirts and Alf’s subsequent arrest was only resolved with the intervention of the British embassy. By the mid 1930s Alf was finding it hard to get work, being blacklisted from the merchant navy. He joined the National Unemployed Workers Movement, and was a very active community organiser, taking part in the Battle of Cable Street. For Alf, this struggle was ‘just a short step’ to joining the International Brigades, which he did in 1937. Alf recalled the losses and in particular that of a woman fighter who he “could have married”. Returning after 16 months, he became secretary of the influential Stepney branch of the NUWM, working alongside Maude Brown, who mobilised women workers. At this time the NUWM was in decline as a mass movement and so its leaders resorted to better focused action, involving fewer people, but more radical in intent. Alf was one of those who chained himself to railings of the Settles Street Labour Exchange, went to the Ritz to order tea and then refused to pay, and even lay down in Oxford Circus to block the flow of traffic. His bravery throughout his life flowed from a hatred of poverty and the capitalist system, which had made life so hard for his family. Alf was part of a group that joined New Year’s Eve celebrations, when the NUWM marched on Downing Street with a coffin. He was brutally beaten by police and bound over at Bow magistrates court the next day. The NUWM and Communists in the London markets of Spitalfields and Covent Garden called for a sympathy march outside the court. Perhaps as a continuation of the revelry of the night before, so many turned out that the streets were blocked. Alf was bound over, which was a very light sentence and linked to the demonstration outside. His only concern was that the police would not return the coffin. When the Phoney War gave way, Alf was called up but mysteriously ‘failed the medical’ – a common ruse to exclude Communists. Instead he went to Carlisle and became a CP organiser in Maryport. Here he became a shop steward in a munitions factory. He then went to Leicester and became a party activist. Alf liked to stay on the move alright! At the war’s end he returned to London to work in textile factories and became well-known figure in the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers, but was repeatedly sacked – one time for leading a strike (he was also involved in squatting and rent strikes at the time) and blowing a raspberry at the employer as he crossed Alf’s picket line. Tragedy later struck when Alf joined the famous Savoy workers strike in 1949. Alf 178 | Red Lives

made the news again as he threw himself under a truck as it sought to break the picket, narrowly avoiding serious injury. But a woman striker later died of a heart attack on the picket line, which was a matter of ongoing regret to him as he was picket captain at the time. In the mid 50s he reinvented himself as a rail worker, first at South Tottenham, then at Kings Cross stations. In 1963 he left rail and worked variously in a furniture factory and then a chemical factory. A born organiser, he became a shop steward in both. In the mid 60s he went on to work for the London Co-op and joined USDAW, which he remained a member of for a further 30 years, being a very well known figure selling the Morning Star at meetings of the West End One branch. Alf was a founder member of Waltham Forest CND (1970) and the Greater London Pensioners & Trade Union Action Group. He represented pensioners at the South East Region TUC and was for many years an active delegate to the Cities of London and Westminster Trades Councils. Naturally his constituency MP had to be the adversarial kind, and Alf ended up with the repulsive Norman Tebbit. The two regularly clashed at surgery meetings and in correspondence, which occasionally got into the local newspapers. Throughout his life, Alf lost count of the number of times he was arrested, but his biographer and friend Liane Groves reckons on over thirty, once serving a three-month sentence. In his final years, and to those who knew him, and apparently for no clear reason, Alf decided that it was racist for newscasters to call children with Down’s Syndrome, ‘Mongols’. So for an entire year, he set about picketing the BBC news offices in the morning, and the then ITN offices round the corner, in the afternoon. His home-made signs of protest began to draw so much attention that both organisations began to review the use of the term ‘Mongol’ in the context of children with Down’s Syndrome. Alf would not just picket, he would stop people and talk to them, ask them to take sides and he energetically lobbied the Press Council (which found in his favour). Both the BBC and ITN now refer to children with Down’s Syndrome as having.…Down’s Syndrome, because of the personal stand of this Communist. Characteristically Alf went on to picket newspapers including the Mirror and the Mail, then in Fleet Street, till the same end was achieved. Alf later received a special commendation from the Ambassador of Mongolia and was given a spell at a health spa in that country, as a sign of thanks and respect for his anti-racist stand. In his final years, with political struggle to the fore, Alf was first expelled from his CPGB branch which had fallen into the hands of reformists. He was proud to be a founding member of the Communist Party of Britain of which he remained a member until his death. It was shortly before his passing that he was interviewed by Liane Groves, then a young worker student and activist in USDAW. In the interview he said: “I’ve got marvellous faith in humanity, more than I’ve ever had in my life. I think there’s far more good people in this world, even though some of them won’t show themselves, than there are bad.” Red Lives | 179

Vishnu Sharma 1921 – 1992 Vishnu Sharma was born in the village of Khatkar Kalan in the Punjab. It was the home of the great liberation movement hero, Bhagat Singh who was hanged by the British in 1923 when Vishnu was only 10. This event proved to be an important influence on his life. His family was poor, in a village of predominantly landless workers. He became secretary of the Congress movement in the village, and there were many ‘toadies’ of the British Raj who couldn’t tolerate his activities. He was arrested at the age of 15, and imprisoned for 15 months. It was during this time that he met a communist, Harbans Singh Karnana, who convinced him of the need to face up to the question of who was responsible for the poverty – he spoke of the Soviet Union and how illiteracy and poverty were being tackled there. During the 1930s, a broad based movement called the Kirti Party worked actively in the organisation of peasant and textile workers. Working full time for the Kirti Party and the Peasants Association, Vishnu was plunged into anti-war activities and under-cover work amongst textile workers following the arrest of the President of the Textile Workers Union. Here he got his first lessons in trades unionism. In 1942 he was arrested and imprisoned for 8 months under ‘Defence of India’ rules, using the time to study ferociously. When asked where he graduated, he would reply: “Jullundur Prison University”. The Kirti Party dissolved, becoming a part of the Communist Party of India, with Vishnu becoming active in its local leadership. After independence in 1947, Nehru’s government persecuted communists and Vishnu started working underground, growing his hair and becoming a ‘Sikh’, using aliases, in order to continue his work amongst textile and government workers in Delhi. Financial difficulties within the family forced his move to Britain in 1957, where he immediately made contact with the Communist Party in West Middlesex. One of the principal employers in the area was Woolfe’s rubber factory, noted for its appalling working conditions. Vishnu got a job in the factory, and found his experience organising unions whilst operating underground stood him in good stead. The Southall Indian Workers Association was established in 1957, and Vishnu was elected General Secretary between 1961-2 and 1966-8, and then President. Vishnu was sacked from his job at the factory, the foreman saying he spent too much time in the toilets! He told him that one day he would be forced to negotiate around a table with representatives of the union. From outside the factory, Vishnu, with others, managed to enrol some 400 members into the TGWU – more than half the Indians working there. The Union brought pressure to bear and the management gave in. Vishnu had the satisfaction of seeing his foreman again and rubbing in the victory. Vishnu could always count on support from all sections of the Indian community in his political work and within the Indian Workers Association. He said: “My experience 180 | Red Lives

is that if you work hard, give service and take a principled political stand, these barriers are finished.” In 1971 he stood as a Communist council candidate in Northcote ward, Southall and received around 500 votes. Three years later this increased to 1553, just 23 votes short of defeating the incumbent Labour councillor who had held the seat for 23 years. In 1979, the National Front had been allowed to organise their meeting in the Town Hall, prompting huge anger. The Indian Workers Association coordinated a massive demonstration to present a petition demanding that the fascists be refused access to the Hall. After the death of Blair Peach, some 15,000 people marched in the streets of Southall to commemorate him. Vishnu was elected to the Executive Committee of the CP in 1971, and throughout the subsequent period was a major figure in the Southall community, and a leading figure in anti-racist politics nationally. He said: “Well, I am an immigrant, and a worker. Nobody needs to teach me what poverty is. It was but natural to be a Communist. Marxism is the strongest philosophy in the world, and it has changed the face of the earth. I am a humble soldier of the Communist Party.”

George 1900 – 1994 and Phyllis Short 1903 – 1979

George and Phyllis Short were dedicated working class warriors, making a partnership which gave a lifetime of service to the labour movement and the Communist Party. Born into coal mining families in County Durham – George in 1900 in High Spen, and Phyllis (as Margaret Phyllis Waugh) in 1903 in Brandon Colliery – they met in Chopwell, where their families had moved by 1911. George left school at 14 and went straight down the pit. His first job was as a gatekeeper, requiring him to spend long periods alone in the dark. He played an active role during the strikes and lockouts in 1921 and 1926, in the latter case being Red Lives | 181

responsible for the Chopwell strike committee’s printing press. He later recalled that, always on the move: “You slept where you were.” During the First World War, Phyllis campaigned for the introduction of food rationing, which did not happen until January 1918. In 1920, she and George were married. By the time of the 1926 general strike she was the mother of two children – Doris and Billy – chair of the Chopwell Cooperative Women’s Guild and an ardent campaigner for birth control clinics. A third child, young George, was born in the 1930s. During the general strike Phyllis took part in picketing along with other women: “When we heard that certain persons were black legging at the pit we used to go up to the pit head,” she said; “We used to wait on them coming out and then we used to chase them home.” George was a delegate to the Labour Representation Committee before he and Phyllis joined the Communist Party during the 1926 lockout. After the lockout, George was blacklisted, and never worked in the pits again. With a young family to support, he moved to Teesside, where he set about organising the then non-union ICI plant at Billingham. Elected to the Party’s central committee in 1929, George was sent to the Lenin School in Moscow in 1930 for two years, then returned to Teesside to take up the (initially unpaid) position of District Secretary of the Communist Party, a post he held for some 30 years. He became one of the key local organisers of the National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM) and in this capacity led Hunger Marches from the NorthEast – and Marxist classes in a Stockton-on-Tees churchyard, to tackle what George called “dole death”, losing hope, belief and eventually the will to live. During this time Phyllis campaigned for dried milk and orange juice to be distributed at baby clinics, and herself took part in the 1932 Women’s Hunger March, organised separately from the men’s marches to avoid allegations of sexual liaisons. Public meetings were held en route, gaining mass support from working class women and men, and this was where Phyllis first did public speaking. Often there was local support, but otherwise the marchers were obliged to sleep in workhouses, and in London they were subjected to arrest and police violence. By 1933, 45% of the workforce of Stockton-on-Tees was unemployed. At that time Phyllis and George had about 28 shillings a week to live on, of which twelve went on rent, while food would have cost about 13 shillings a week. Phyllis got a “little job” cleaning floors at the fever hospital for £1 a week, but the Means Test stopped 9 shillings a week from George’s dole money. Their daughter Doris passed the 11-plus, but they had to beg for the grammar school clothes. In Stockton, NUWM activity developed into a battle for free speech, over the refusal by the police to allow the organisation to hold public meetings at Stockton Market Cross. The NUWM challenged the ban, and as a result both George and Phyllis were arrested for disturbing the peace. George was sentenced to three months in Durham Prison, but the struggle ultimately resulted in the ban being overturned. The NUWM, under George’s leadership, also waged a struggle for the ‘children’s shilling’. At that time the allowance paid to unemployed parents was two shillings per child, but Stockton paid three shillings per child. As a result of a vigorous campaign of public meetings and demonstrations, George was able to secure agreement that 182 | Red Lives

Middlesbrough would pay the same rate as Stockton. George was also particularly active in the fight against fascism. When Mosley’s blackshirts tried to march through Stockton, and to hold rallies in Middlesbrough, George and the Communist Party organised to stop them. Then, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, a campaign was developed to stop the war. The Japanese ship, the Haruna Maru, docked in Middlesbrough to load scrap, but as a result of efforts led by George, the dockers refused to load the boat. In 1936, fascism attacked the Spanish Republic, and an appeal went out for volunteers to defend democracy and join the International Brigades. George wished to go himself but was under Party instruction to stay, while given the task of recruiting volunteers from Teesside. He admitted subsequently that this was one of the most difficult tasks he had undertaken. The night before each volunteer left, George and Phyllis would entertain them to “a cup of tea and a bite”, and then George would say to them: “If you don’t want to go – no hard feelings. You’re going there; you may not come back.” George recalled that not one withdrew. Many of those recruited were his personal friends and some never returned. “We lost the flower of the Party,” he said, with some emotion. The development of the atom bomb after World War Two brought a new dimension to the struggle for world peace. Despite the hostility of the Cold War period, George organised demonstrations, often of handfuls of people with Ban the Bomb placards. It was the dedication and foresight of people like George, in keeping the issue alive, which ultimately led to the development of mass organisations like CND, and trade unions adopting positions opposed to weapons of mass destruction. George was for many years treasurer of his branch of the Clerical and Administrative Workers’ Union, now part of GMB, but due to proscriptions, could not be elected delegate to Stockton and District Trades Council. After retiring early from Communist Party full-time work, due to ill-health, George was sent to the Soviet Union for medical treatment and recuperation. On his return, he worked as a lollipop man and, from about 1970, set about building the Teesside Pensioners’ Association where, he admitted, he began fully to appreciate what a broad, united campaign really meant in practice. One of his greatest achievements was initiating the struggle for the free concessionary pass won by the Teesside pensioners, the first in Britain. After many years as secretary of the Association, he became its Honorary President. George and Phyllis remained stalwart members of the Stockton branch of the Party. If there was ever any ‘Moscow gold’, they certainly never saw it. Getting dues and guarantors from Party members on Teesside, to help pay George’s wages, was always a struggle. But despite all the poverty and suffering caused by life-long struggle, George and Phyllis always retained the love and respect of their family. In retirement they were ultimately able to move into sheltered accommodation in sight of the beautiful Eston hills outside Middlesbrough. Sadly, Phyllis, who had survived bowel cancer in her middle years, died in 1979. George lived on until 1994, joining the CPB shortly after re-establishment of the Party. To the end, and despite failing health and eyesight, he maintained an acute and active interest in political developments, never swerving in his principles. Red Lives | 183

Thora Silverthorne 1910 – 1999 Thora Silverthorne was born in the South Wales mining town of Abertillery on the 25 November 1910, daughter of George Silverthorne – a miner at the Vivian & Six Bells collieries – and Sarah Boyt of Bargoed. Her early years were spent at 170 Alma Street, Abertillery. She secured a scholarship to Natyglo County School (Hafod), and attended the local Blaenau Gwent Baptist church run by Pastor Rev Ivor Evans. Thora recalled that “everyone in Abertillery talked politics ”, and in this cauldron it is of little surprise she followed her father (who was active in the South Wales Mines Federation and a founding member of the Abertillery Communist Party) as a Young Communist Leaguer at 16. Soon Thora was chairing meetings with prominent speakers including Arthur Horner, the miners leader. With her mother’s early death in August 1927 and as one of seven, she was forced to leave Abertillery for England. She worked initially as a nanny for Reading’s newly elected Labour MP Somerville Hastings, but continued her Party activities including selling the Daily Worker to the local railwaymen. Thora then followed her sister Olive as a nurse in March 1931 at the John Radcliffe Infirmary and qualified as a registered nurse in 1934, earning the nickname “Red Silverthorne”. While nursing at Oxford, Thora became heavily involved in Communist Party activities in the city, developing a long friendship with historian Christopher Hill, whom she met

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through the October Club. Thora also took time to tend to the health needs of the hunger marchers who passed through Oxford on their way to London, “helping herself to bandages and dressings on the wards”. She recalled that the marchers’ feet were often “in a particularly bad state”. In 1935 Thora secured a Sister’s post at Hammersmith hospital and worked closely with Dr Charles Wortham Brook and his wife Iris, a nurse, both of whom were heavily involved in the Socialist Medical Association – the organisation credited with developing and campaigning for the National Health Service. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Thora volunteered to nurse in the Medical Unit pictured left. She and three others became the first nurses assigned to aid the Republican cause on 23 August 1936. Once in Spain, on the Aragon front, such was Thora’s highly skilled theatre nursing skills that she was “elected” Matron at Granen hospital, caring for many anti-fascist German soldiers in the Thalmann Centuria. Tragically, British International Brigadier Michael Livesey died in her arms – a memory she never forgot. During the Huesca offensive, Thora and her team were working 20 hours a day and treated 700 patients in five days. She returned from Spain in September 1937. Thora’s involvement as sub editor of Nursing Illustrated led her to establish a progressive union – the Association of Nurses – in direct competition with the reactionary Royal College of Nursing (RCN). The RCN and hospital managers routinely attacked Thora, claiming she was amongst other things not “a registered nurse” or “paid by Moscow”. With the help of other progressive nurses such as Nancy Blackburn (Zinkin), the Association grew in size and achieved significant media coverage, running a particularly high profile campaign to highlight the poor pay and conditions of nurses. The Association soon amalgamated with NUPE, whose general secretary Bryn Roberts was also a native of Abertillery. After the Second World War, as Assistant Secretary of the Socialist Medical Association, Thora met Prime Minister Clem Attlee and other Ministers to discuss the establishment of the NHS in 1948. She was chosen to welcome Picasso on his visit to London. Later in life she remarried, to Nares Craig (a relative of Lord Canarvon) – a leading progressive architect who went on to meet Chile’s President Allende to plan cheap affordable housing, before the latter’s untimely death in the CIA-backed Chilean coup. Thora swapped her role at the Socialist Medical Association for a post as one of the few trade union officials in the Civil Service Clerical Association, returning to Wales in 1970. After her death, Special Branch files on Thora’s many activities came to light, illustrating that from her time in Spain Thora was not only under surveillance but her telephone tapped and post intercepted. She retired to Llanfyllin, Powys, in mid-Wales for 25 years where Clive Jenkins and Frank Cousins were regular visitors, before returning to London to be close to her daughter Lucy Craig (Haringey Labour Councillor) a few years before her death on 17 January, 1999. At the service at Marylebone cemetery on the 25th January, the Valley of Jarama, The Internationale, and Cwm Rhondda were sung, and a recording played of Paul Robeson’s rendering in English of the Welsh national anthem Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (‘Land of My Fathers’). Red Lives | 185

Bertha Sokoloff 1920 – 2018 Writes daughter Sally Sokoloff in March 2020: “Growing up in a closely knit Jewish family in the East End of London, poverty and fatherlessness shaped the radical spirit of my mother Bertha Sokoloff”. Bertha, who died in 2018 aged 98, had vivid memories of the of the anti-fascist demonstrations and the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. Family history held that her apolitical sister Faye, got arrested as a bystander, whereas Bertha, chalking slogans and running errands, and already a member of the Young Communist League, was not. Bertha was born in Whitechapel, third of four children of Rachel and Jacob Markovitch, immigrants from Romania. Jacob was injured in army training during the first world war. He began a relationship with one of his nurses and later abandoned his family. Rachel struggled to bring up her children with help from Jewish charities. From Robert Montefiore elementary school, Bertha gained a scholarship to Central Foundation School for girls in Spitalfields. She left unwillingly at 16, and became a secretary at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, then for Victor Gollancz publishers, and at Stepney borough council. She married Stan Sokoloff, a fellow Young Communist, in 1940. They counted themselves lucky that he survived four years’ second world war service in Africa and she weathered the London blitz. During the war, Bertha proved an able branch secretary for the Stepney Communist Party at a time of growth. In 1943 she took up war work in a factory where the management noticed that she was clumsy on machines but good at maths and at inspiring others – they made her productivity officer. Bertha was the agent for Phil Piratin who was elected to parliament as the UK’s second ever Communist MP in 1945 (he had Willie Gallagher for company in the Commons), and she was elected as a Stepney councillor that year. She was one of 10 CP councillors including Max Levitas, Tubby Rosen, Solly Kaye and Tom Rampling – and Phil Piratin swept to power, described in Piratin’s book Our Flag Stays Red. All the Communist candidates were elected. Had they stood in all the seats, rather than left some for Labour – they would have swept the board! In 1949, Bertha and Stan, with two young daughters, me and my sister Ruth, moved from a condemned East End flat to council housing in south London. Mum could be obstinate when it came to principles. She displeased the local Party when she resigned her council seat in 1950, triggering a by-election which the CP lost. Living 10 miles away from the East End with a toddler and a new baby meant she struggled to represent her ward constituents. But she continued to build a branch at St Paul’s Cray in Kent, mourned the death of Stalin in 1953 (I remember our living room full of people all crying) and joined in the CND and anti-Cold War marches. Stan left the Party in the early 1950s. Bertha left in 1957 after the annual conference in which she denounced the Soviet invasion of Hungary. 186 | Red Lives

Chris Kaufman remembers all the kids being sent out to play in the garden when the grown-ups’ political discussions became heated (but comradely!) in the kitchen. However, through community-building in St Paul’s Cray, campaigning for a nursery at Woolwich college, volunteering as a housing adviser in Bromley after retirement, or protesting in 2013 against the closure of Pocklington House (a home for the blind in Northwood where she lived), Bertha was an effective and respected activist all her life. After teaching in infants’ schools, Bertha graduated in sociology in 1971 at the same London University ceremony as her younger daughter. She loved teaching mature students at Woolwich College in the 1970s, and after retirement enjoyed spending time with her 5 grandchildren. An atheist but culturally Jewish, in old age she contributed to the social life of Bromley Reform Synagogue. Never happy with historians’ interpretations of East End communism, she wove her own experience into a book about the dedicated community worker Edith Ramsey (Edith and Stepney, 60 Years of Education, Politics and Social Change. 1987). Bertha’s communism sprang from her great desire for equality based on her experience of poverty and class struggle. Stan, a marvellous head teacher, died in 2005. Bertha’s gift for friendship lasted to the end of her long life.

Graham Stevenson 1950 – 2020 Graham was born in the mining village of Kerseley, near Coventry on 28 October 1950, the younger of two children. His mother had been a textile worker. His father, Ernest, was an engineer and a lifelong trade unionist, becoming AEU convener at Smiths Industries Coventry plant. Graham won a place at the King Henry VIII school in Coventry and took his left politics into a strongly conservative, middle class institution. Graham strengthened his arguments by reading Labour Research which his father brought home from his convener’s office and also the Daily Worker which he bought out of his lunch money. He was soon enthused by accounts of James Klugmann’s Christian Marxist dialogue and aged 15 was already running into trouble with right-wing teachers. His 1965 Christmas present was, as requested, Bukharin’s ABC of Communism, the following year it was Joan Robinson’s Economic Philosophy. By then he had joined and revived the previously moribund Coventry YCL. By 1970 he was Secretary of the Coventry Trades Council Youth Committee, by 1971 a member of the Coventry Communist Party City Committee and 1972 of the Midlands District Committee – at the same time as holding national positions in the YCL. In 1973, as building workers began to mobilise for strike action around the Building Workers Charter, he joined UCATT and, along with fellow Communist and building trade activist Pete Carter, sought to unionise local building sites. A clash Red Lives | 187

with the management on one site, and an attempt at an occupation, led to the famous Rotunda legal case. Graham and his colleagues were arrested months after the event and charged with ‘conspiracy to trespass’ with potentially unlimited penalties. Their trial preceded that of the Shrewsbury Five but on this occasion – with a sympathetic Birmingham jury led by a local union convener – the accused were found not guilty. The Shrewsbury trial was shifted to Chester. By this time Graham had moved from Coventry to Birmingham and was working closely with the Birmingham Communist Party City Secretary Frank Watters, previously an NUM activist legendary for his work in the Yorkshire coalfield. Together they redeveloped the Party’s premises into a social club, pioneering Reggae. which soon became a home for many in the local black community including Bill Morris, future general secretary of the TGWU. In this work Graham worked closely with Frank’s daughter, Lesley, who he married in 1979. By then Graham was employed at the BSA factory in Birmingham becoming a TGWU steward and actively involving himself in the work of the union in the West Midlands. In 1980 he applied for the post of District Organiser for the TGWU in Derby and began his career as a full-time trade union officer. In Derby he re-unionised bus services and took the union into wider community activity – particularly leading the way in re-establishing CND and building a mass movement among local youth against unemployment. In 1982 he was organiser for the Midlands March for Jobs in 1982. In 1983-84 ensured that transport drivers gave full support to the miners. It was in this period also that Graham emerged as an integral figure in drawing together the TGWU Left at national level. In 1988 he moved on to become National Secretary for Passenger Services. Martin Mayer, subsequently United Left convener, recalls: “Graham grasped the magnitude of the threat posed to members’ wages and conditions by Tory bus deregulation and possessed the strategic understanding needed to counter it. He reorganised the membership into national groups matching the new privately owned bus companies and took on the companies in areas where they were most exposed – transforming union morale and membership density.” In 1999 Graham became TGWU National Secretary for the whole of Transport. In this capacity he also played a leading role in the European Transport Workers Federation and later the International Federation – having helped to create the European Federation after the collapse of the previous federation. He ensured a progressive Left leadership in the International Federation and as President of the European Federation Graham developed it as a militant organisation coordinating actions across the continent to defend members’ interests – most notably the strikes across Europe’s docks in January 2003 which forced the abandonment of the EU Commission’s Directive seeking to introduce privatisation. These were also the years in which Graham played a central role in consolidating the broad left in the TGWU, helping to ensure that the union maintained its opposition to the worst excesses of New Labour and personally clinching its vote to oppose the Iraq war in 2003. The same year he unsuccessfully challenged Jack Dromey in the ballot for Deputy General Secretary on an anti-New Labour ticket, the first Communist to stand for the leadership of the TGWU since the lifting of the bans 188 | Red Lives

and proscriptions in 1969. In 2007-2008 he played a key part in creating a United Left during the difficult negotiations that eventually saw the TGWU merge with Amicus to form Unite. He drew up the Aims and Objectives of the new United Left within Unite which enabled it to carry forward the socialist traditions of Frank Cousins, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon. Graham played a similar role in the Communist Party during the difficult years of the 1980s where he worked for unity among trade unionists opposed to eurocommunism. He was for many years a member of the Executive and Political Committee of the Communist Party of Britain and became its fourth trade union organiser following Kevin Halpin, Caroline Jones and Anita Halpin. His son Ben became the Party’s National Secretary and his daughter Joanne a General Secretary of the YCL. After his retirement from Unite in 2010 Graham turned his energies towards the Midlands District of the Communist Party where he was District Secretary until his death and stood as Mayoral candidate for the West Midlands receiving just under 6,000 votes. He served as Treasurer for Marx Memorial Library from 2013 to 2019 and during his final years was helping to redevelop the trade union base of Liberation as deputy to Maggie Bowden. He also found the time to develop his passion for the history of the working class movement – adding to his monumental work of Communist biography, writing his daily column for the Morning Star and redeveloping the Communist Party History Group and its periodical Our History.

Bob Stewart 1877 – 1971 One of the founders and key leaders of the British Communist Party, Bob Stewart was born on 16 February 1877 in the Howe of Strathmore in Angus, to William, a farm foreman and Georgina, a hand-loom weaver. The family moved to Dundee when Stewart was two years old and he remained closely associated with the city thereafter. His father supported twelve children on a carter’s wage, Bob Stewart being tenth out of the brood. He attended school only between the ages of seven and thirteen. For a time he worked in various capacities in jute mills, before becoming apprenticed to a carpenter at the age of twelve. He joined the Amalgamated Association of Carpenters and Joiners on becoming a journeyman, was employed at Gourlay’s shipyard and was elected to the union’s yard management committee. He was a shop steward by 1900 in the shipyards of Dundee, representing many members including those building the Antarctic research ship RRS Discovery. Following a downturn in work and subsequent unemployment, he went to South Africa to work for a short while, becoming a delegate on, and campaigning with Cape Town Trades Council, but also having some depressing Red Lives | 189

encounters with the racism of his fellow countrymen. Work became harder to find and he ended up having to sell some of his tools before returning to Scotland, where he quickly found work as a full-time organiser for the Scottish Prohibition Party (SPP), a unique force combining alcohol temperance and working class politics. He was elected for this Party to Dundee Town Council in 1908 where he joined future prohibition MP, Edwin Scrymgeour. At his first Council meeting he and Scrymgeour were ejected from the chamber for ‘offending against decorum’ for calling another Councillor a liar. Between 1909 and 1910 he became disillusioned with the Party’s direction and participated in a socialist split against religiosity in the SPP, to form the avowedly socialist Prohibition and Reform Party, for which he became a fulltime organiser in 1911. In 1912, the celebrated Scottish Marxist John McLean, described Stewart as the “finest propagandist in Scotland”. In 1915, he was appointed Dundee and Forfar organiser for the Scottish Horse and Motormen’s Union (this union was to merge with the T&G in the 1970s). In 1916, he was an organiser of the No Conscription Fellowship and became a national figure in the conscientious objector movement, a role reflected in the size and activism of that movement in his home city of Dundee. Despite his occupation he was himself gaoled in December 1916, and then conscripted into the army from 1917-1919. But he spent most of the time in jail, perhaps setting some kind of record for the number of times he faced a court martial – four in all! His first brought him 112 days in Wormwood Scrubs for a protest over infested blankets. Then he got six months (reduced from a year on appeal) for leading a protest against corrupt cuts in rations. He was in Carlton jail, for ‘refusing to go on parade’, in a row arising from his declaration that he would not use his gun on Germans, when he heard of the news of the February 1917 revolution in Tsarist Russia. His fourth court martial was also for refusing to bear arms – although his laxity with taking weekends away from jail to see his family was thrown at him – and he was not released until April 1919. He wrote My Prison Rhymes during his various incarcerations, and it became an immediate best seller! He launched himself into work for the now renamed Socialist Prohibition Fellowship (SPF) but within a year, he was liaising closely with Tom Bell and Arthur MacManus on the issue of revolutionary socialist unity. A large majority of the Socialist Prohibition Party, as Stewart’s party was now called, voted to join a single British Communist Party. Bob Stewart was a delegate from the SPP to the April 1920 discussions between various groups on the founding of a British Communist Party. He was at the Nottingham Communist Unity national conference in August, where he was in favour of parliamentary participation for the new party. He was highly placed in the election for six members of the first Executive Committee of the Communist Party that, in addition to the Chair and Secretary, would form the new leadership. Stewart also attended the 1921 conference in Leeds that finally resolved outstanding unity issues. In 1921, he became the first Scottish Organiser of the Communist Party and found himself yet again in jail – three months in Cardiff, for sedition arising out of Mayday speeches made at Aberdare and Mountain Ash in Wales earlier in the year. It was a time of severe repression; there were already 68 Party members in jail. That August, 190 | Red Lives

Stewart contested the first ever parliament election for the Communist Party; a byelection in Caerphilly constituency. John McLean came down from Glasgow to campaign for him and he polled 10.26% of the vote, a creditable performance given the immaturity of local Party organisation, the repression felt everywhere and the fact that the Party had only decided to contest the seat a few weeks before. His eventual return to Dundee was met by a large and enthusiastic crowd which was on the receiving end of a brutal police attack, mirroring subsequent violence by the authorities meted out to Dundee’s working class in 1931 and 1935. In 1922 Stewart and Harry Pollitt were despatched to help Willie Gallacher’s Parliamentary Election campaign in Dundee. Having been Scrymgeour’s agent in 1908 when Churchill was first elected, Stewart would now see him triumph and Churchill famously defeated. E D Morel took the second Dundee seat for Labour, meaning that the top two candidates in the city’s first post war poll had been active conscientious objectors. Gallacher came sixth with almost 6,000 votes but in the following year’s general election took the Party’s vote to over 10,000. In February 1923 Stewart played a leading role in what was probably the greatest workers’ gathering in Dundee’s history. The Jute barons had locked out their 30,000 workers in an attempt to break trade union organisation. Joined by thousands of the city’s unemployed, it is estimated that 50,000 rallied in Albert Square. Stewart was elected to lead a deputation to the nearby parish council offices to demand relief. After a foolhardy initial refusal, the parish authorities backed down, but the lock-out lasted for another eight weeks. In early 1923, Stewart partially moved to Moscow to work at Comintern headquarters where he met all the key Soviet leaders including Lenin, and represented the British CP at Lenin’s funeral. He was used all over Europe, given that his British passport enabled him to travel at will. In 1924, he was sent to Ireland to assist in the creation of a communist party there and he kept this role up for at least the rest of the decade, often staying with Jim Larkin and his sister Delia in Dublin. As the British representative on Comintern, he attracted extensive British security force attention and some of the files are now available in the National Archives. A bundle covering 1927-31 includes correspondence relating to Stewart’s contacts with Norwegian and Chinese communists in 1927. The file chiefly concerns correspondence with Norwegian officials and British representatives in Norway about Stewart’s visit, and his objective in addressing Norwegian union meetings. There are also reports from an informant in Ireland concerning Stewart’s continued activities to organise the party there, including from August 1929 and into 1930 on contacts between the IRA and the CPGB. There are also numerous surveillance reports and records of Stewart’s overseas visits. But he maintained links all this time with his base in Dundee. In 1924 he was the Party’s candidate in the ‘Zinoviev’ general election, polling 8,340 votes. Following the October 1925 arrest of the 12 leaders of the Party, when Stewart was working in Liverpool, he found himself the Acting General Secretary of the Party as the sole major member of the leadership at liberty. The security force files includes Red Lives | 191

correspondence between Stewart, as Acting General Secretary, and Zinoviev relating to propaganda work in the UK, the colonies and the empire and covert funding. He stood again in Dundee in 1929, but his vote was squeezed to a little over six thousand in the clamour to get a Labour government elected. In the 1931 general election, he was to boost this to 10,262 votes. But again found himself in jail, for three months, for protesting at police heavy-handedness of the crowds waiting to greet his arrival for the campaign in Dundee. The security forces collated a file on Stewart’s prosecution and kept a copy of his election address for the October election. In Ireland again in 1930, he chaired a meeting to establish a Preparatory Committee for a Workers’ Revolutionary Party, as the latest attempt to develop communist unity. Earlier attempts to involve Jim Larkin had not borne fruit, but still hadn’t been dismissed out of hand. Some sources hint at CPGB leadership attitudes being unhelpful to developing a communist party in Ireland. Toward the end of the 1930s, Stewart had reached retirement age but he continued to play a significant background role in the Communist Party, especially as a sort of elder father figure, smoothing over personality clashes and resolving personal problems, formally leaving the executive of the Party in 1936. He was known as a shrewd but friendly and humorous man and was universally liked and admired within the Party, as well as being lionised within his home town for at least a couple of decades after his death, and perhaps still is amongst ‘those in the know’. No doubt, this unique, unifying role, which is supposed to have included being Moscow’s pacifier on troubled waters within the British party, made him still an interesting figure for the spooks to watch, for their files for the period 1941 to 1951 give a detailed history sheet of Stewart’s continually observed activities. There are many detailed reports of intercepted phone conversations, including one of December 1943 where Stewart apparently talks disparagingly of a Soviet intelligence contact with which he was familiar, saying: “The things I’ve done for that b.! But I might have been caught quite easy because I carried the stuff … bloody lucky we were…” Whatever all that may mean! Bob Stewart was married for a very long part of his life to Margaret, who died before him, on 14 March 1950. Overshadowed by her famous husband, she was herself a foundation member of the Communist Party. Of her welcoming to the incessant visitors to her house, whether in Dundee or in London, it was said that: “Her hospitality was unbounded and her friendship was treasured by all those who were privileged to know her.” He was on Party business in China, meeting Mao, in 1955 and was famously photographed on the platform of a Party public meeting in Britain during the socalled Yangtze Incident, defending himself with a chair from an unseen assailant. He remained a member of the Party to his dying day, in his 90s. The Communist Party’s headquarters in London once boasted a fine bronze bust of Bob Stewart. His autobiography, Breaking the Fetters, was published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1967 and barely covered his more outstanding exploits. 192 | Red Lives

Jimmy Stone 1923 – 1994 Jimmy Stone, as a young man, was active in the Printers Anti-Fascist Movement in the 1930’s, and one of the most active members of the London Machine Branch of NATSOPA. Returning to the printing industry and Fleet Street after 1946, eventually he became Imperial FOC (convenor) of all the NATSOPA chapels at the Daily Mirror for more than 20 years. During his time as FOC at the Mirror, Jim also campaigned for a diverse newspaper industry. This included raising a huge sum to produce a newspaper called The Challenger, printed by Reynolds News, with a circulation of 100,000. Jim never stopped fighting for his union even after retirement, and was a regular participant at demonstrations and picketing at Wapping. He died in 1994, aged 71. However, Jim’s part in the protest campaign to secure demobilisation at the end of World War Two was the single most momentous struggle in his unswerving commitment to the working class. At the end of the war in 1945, Jim was serving in the RAF in India at the Cawnpore Airbase. The war in Europe was over, and Japan had surrendered at Tokyo Bay. Millions of Allied servicemen and women eagerly awaited their return home. Thousands had served abroad for up to six years away from their families. Things would be different from the pre-war years of unemployment and exploitation. That’s how many saw the future, a new era, to return home to help build the post-war world they had talked of, and voted for, in the snap election of June 1945. But demobilisation was very slow. Inferior food, re-introduced spit and polish and pointless parades, caused great frustration, reaching boiling point in a series of mass meetings and demonstrations that first occurred at the big RAF Maintenance Unit at Karachi early in 1946. Demands were formulated and conveyed to the authorities, and a petition sent to the government. Long-range teleprinters and aircrews carried news of the “insurrection” across the Indian sub-continent. Mass stoppages and protests took place at RAF stations in India, Malaya, Sri Lanka (at the time Ceylon), Egypt and Palestine. “Disaffection” spread to sections of the army, and to the colonial forces. In February the Royal Indian Navy mutinied, seizing ships in Bombay and Karachi harbours. The Attlee Government and reactionary military leaders were shaken to the core, and careful plans were laid, despite promises of no victimisation. The full weight of military discipline fell first on Air-craftsman Norris Cymbalist, radar operator at Selatur, Singapore, who was sentenced to 10 years penal servitude. Arthur Attwood, electrician, was put in solitary confinement and then transferred to a Bombay gaol to face a prolonged court martial. When he arrived he discovered Jimmy Stone and his mate Mick Noble already there following their arrest in Cawnpore. Messages of support, telegrams and letters, and cash from scores of airmen towards defence costs poured into the gaol. The ETU, AEU, Tobacco Workers and the Furniture Workers pledged their support. A big meeting at the London Memorial Hall called for their release. Trades Councils added their weight. Ministers were bombarded with the same demands by MPs Driberg, Jennings, Piratin and Gallacher and by the “forces MP” DN Pritt. Jim’s wife Tilly also spoke at protest meetings. Faced with their growing tide of support, the brass hats retreated. Although Arthur Red Lives | 193

was declared guilty at his court martial, the Air Council did not confirm the findings. This was soon followed by an announcement in the House of Commons that the charges against Jim Stone and Mick Noble were being dropped, and they were freed. On returning home they all helped in the efforts of the Forces Personnel Defence Committee to free Norris Cymbalist, who was released from his undeserved imprisonment after 22 months. “Such were the eventful days when some 50,000 took action, in the biggest demonstration in the RAF’s history. As one of the finest most committed members, SOGAT can be justly proud of Corporal Jim Stone, who at RAF Cawnpore, 1946, by his leadership in the demobilisation campaign, served our Movement with distinction.” This short biography of Jimmy Stone includes much of the material written by his comrade and fellow campaigner Arthur Attwood and published in longer form in the New Worker.

Billy Strachan 1921 – 1998 Billy Strachan’s life was extraordinary in it’s scope. Born in the British colony of Jamaica on 16 April 1921, he grew up in a relatively privileged home in a mainly white area of Kingston. In 1938, mass strikes broke out in Jamaica due to appalling living and working conditions for the mass of the Jamaican people. The British government sent the Royal Navy and used troops and police to brutally put down the strikers but also they sent British politicians to investigate the situation. At a meeting in Kingston addressed by Stafford Cripps, the Peoples National Party, led by Norman Manley and a young Richard Hart, was formed and Billy Strachan witnessed this. A year later World War Two broke out and Jamaicans were called upon to support the ‘motherland’, Britain. Having just started work in the Civil Service, Billy Strachan made a life changing decision to join the Royal Air Force and being told he would have to pay his own way to Britain, he sold his bicycle and saxophone to pay for the voyage. Aged just 18, he was sent to an RAF base in Blackpool to train. He became first a wireless operator, then a gunner and finally a pilot in Bomber Command. He rose from the ranks to become a Flight Lieutenant, an outstanding achievement for a Black person in Britain at that time. He flew an amazing 33 missions. Amazing, when you consider the average life of a bomber crew was six missions. He ended the war as a RAF liaison officer investigating racial incidents on RAF bases. During the war he had married Joyce Smith and in 1946, the couple with their three sons, travelled to Jamaica where he resumed his civil service job. Billy Strachan made contact with David Lewis, a British Communist in Jamaica, who seeing his 194 | Red Lives

leadership skills, advised him to return to Britain and help form the London branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress. This organisation had been formed at war’s end by Caribbean trade unionists, socialists, communists and left wing nationalists dedicated to workers rights, self organisation, universal suffrage, federation and a long-term goal of a socialist Caribbean. Returning to London in 1947, he immediately joined the Communist Party and became an active member, selling the Daily Worker and addressing street meetings regularly every week in his locality. Soon, as more West Indians arrived in London, the most radical joined the Communist Party and saw him as their leader, as one of them, Cleston Taylor, related in an interview. Billy Strachan was seen as “...the leader of Caribbean Communists in the country” and he went on to say: “Billy and the Caribbean Labour Congress gave me my real political education”. Another Caribbean Communist, Trevor Carter, lived with the Strachan family for a period introducing him to Cheddi Jagan, Palme Dutt and Kay Beauchamp as well as the drama of Brecht, Unity Theatre and the communist musicians, A L Lloyd, Alan Bush and Ewan McColl. Billy Strachan became an important member of the party’s West Indian Committee and the International Committee. He helped form the London Branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress, becoming secretary, serving in that post from 1948 until 1956. During the Cold War, reactionary West Indian leaders in the Caribbean persecuted their radical members and ordered the London branch to disband. They refused and in 1952, he and his comrades started to publish Caribbean News, an anti colonial, socialist, monthly newspaper, with support for trade unions and nation liberation struggles. Billy Strachan and fellow Jamaican Communist, Ferdinand Smith, under the auspices of the World Federation of Trade Unions, began a tour of the British West Indies and despite being banned from countries they successfully made speeches to huge rallies of workers in their homeland Jamaica. So successful in fact that a calypso “The Ferdie and Billy Calypso” told of the tour, which was written by Jamaican Marxist Richard Hart. Back in Britain, he self-studied for the law and eventually he was called to the Bar in 1959. As he rose to become Chief Clerk of Courts, he could not be an open communist. So, the leadership agreed he no longer hold a party card but in every other way he supported the Communist Party until his death, reading the Morning Star to the end. He was a founder member of Movement for Colonial Freedom and was a mentor for many. Always a close friend of Cheddi and Janet Jagan, it was on a visit to Guyana in 1996 that he began to feel unwell. On return to London doctors diagnosed motor neurone disease and his second wife Mary cared for him until his death on 26 April 1998. Billy Strachan was a true Communist dedicating his adult life to a better world for all, one without exploitation, poverty and racism. At a memorial meeting soon after his death, Janet Jagan, President of Guyana, sent this message: “Billy was my friend, my comrade, my mentor for most of my adult life. He was a genuine Caribbean man always in the forefront of labour and political challenges of our region I will miss him very much. Life without Billy is not the same”. Red Lives | 195

Jean Styles 1927 – 2012 Born in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, on 19 October 1927, Jean was the second child of a mother who was active in the newly formed Labour Party and a founder of the north-east women’s section. Jean was always a rebel. Evacuated to Norfolk to work on a farm during the WWII, she was unhappy at being used as a housemaid and organised opposition. This proved difficult, so she packed her bags, stormed out, and tried to walk back to Grimsby. The police delivered her home, because she said she would run away again or set the farm on fire if returned. She joined the YCL and became an activist. Her mother’s disapproval led to her moving to London, where she met her future husband, Maurice, on an anti-fascist demo. Jean had four children, yet she remained active in the trade union movement, in tenants’ campaigns and, particularly, in the CP, where she often acted as agent for Solly Kaye in London County Council elections. Jean stood herself, unsuccessfully, for the Greater London Council. She worked for the London CP, and organised solidarity action for the striking Grunwick women. Jean also took male CP members to task over issues such as the right to have an abortion. Her husband, a lapsed Catholic, had this argument with her only once! She became the first National Women’s organiser of the CPGB and worked at King Street alongside, among others, Gordon McLennan, Bert Ramelson, Betty Reid and James Klugman. In this role she led a post-war delegation to Vietnam. Executive Committee member Denis Ellwand said her alliance in the King Street office with Betty Ellwand, Betty Reid and Gwen Bell often gave male comrades cause to rethink their views on women. As Chair of the Stockwell Park Estate Tenants’ Association and also the Lambeth Tenants’ Federation she gave evidence to the Scarman enquiry. She got funding for the Stockwell Park Estate Youth and Community Centre – managed by the tenants. The youth club she organised was described by a senior ILEA inspector as the most effective in South London. Together with Kath Pottinger, a former Labour councillor in Greenwich and close friend, she organised a girls’ section, with classes on contraception, education and work. After ‘retiring’, Jean volunteered at the Southwark Unison office, where her eldest son was the Education Convener. Maurice died in 1991, ending their plans to explore more of the world. Jean continued to express radical ideas about the role of women until her death in 2012, aged 84. She regretted that equal pay remained an issue more than 35 years after the Act was passed.

s Communist Party National Women’s Organiser Jean Styles (second from right) at a women’s rights demonstration possibly 1975. 196 | Red Lives

Maurice Styles 1923 – 1991 Born 9 June 1923 in Wandsworth, London, to an Irish Catholic mother and a London-born father, a stage carpenter at The Coliseum theatre. He started work as an apprentice engineer. He later became a postman, and discovered he had a knack for public speaking. World war Two took him to Oakdale Colliery, Wales, as a Bevin Boy, where he obtained the hard industrial edge to his burgeoning negotiating skills. In the late 1960s, reactionary forces inside Union of Post Office Workers (UPW) expelled him, and three other comrades, in an attempt to remove prominent socialists. Their reinstatement at High Court (Maurice was described by the presiding judge as having statesman-like conduct and demeanour) proved a significant victory for progressives. Maurice subsequently became UPW Assistant General Secretary during Tom Jackson’s leadership. In 1971, the postal workers went on national strike, and he was described as “The Man Behind the Man Behind the strike” on the front page of the Sun newspaper. Maurice was also Chair of the Lambeth Community Relations Council. He was Vice-Chair of the Lambeth Police Consultative Committee and was a strong critic of the Met Police in the aftermath of the Brixton riots. He became Chair of the National Council for Community Relations Councils, leading to the Home Office asking him to conduct a fact-finding tour of the Caribbean. During the tour he arranged support for striking Trinidadian postmen, was a house guest of Cheddi Jagan (PPP Guyana, later the country’s president), and stayed with Raul Castro (to become president) in Cuba. The Home Office were aghast – they told him the Caribbean did not include Cuba! At home, he was targeted by the NF and BNP for his anti-fascist and anti-racist work. Maurice admitted his greatest strength in both his political and industrial work was the full support of his wife, Jean. Jean and Maurice’s four children all became trade unionists, and their eldest daughter, Ruth, is on the Communist Party’s executive committee.

Randall Swingler 1909 – 1967 Randall Swingler was a prolific playwright, novelist, librettist, critic, editor and lyric poet. A unique and unflinching witness to his times, from the romantic communism of the early 1930s to the grim defeats of the Cold War. His father was an Anglican vicar. One grandfather was an iron-master, railway-builder, coal-owner and Deputy Lieutenant of Derbyshire. His uncle and godfather was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson. Swingler was educated at home until he was ten, when he went to prep school, followed by Winchester Red Lives | 197

and New College, Oxford, where he earned a reputation as a runner, flautist and poet. In 1931 he met the concert pianist Geraldine Peppin, for whom he wrote Poems. They married in 1933 and moved to the Cotswolds. Like many of his generation, Swingler believed that the political and economic crises of the 1930s required revolutionary solutions, a conviction expressed in the poems of Reconstruction, and the widely acclaimed Difficult Morning. In 1935 the Swinglers joined the Communist Party. With his Jean Gabin-like good looks and unworldly charm, Swingler was the best-known young writer then active in the CP. He edited Left Review and published Nancy Cunard’s Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. He wrote a new version of Peer Gynt for the Group Theatre (where he was assistant editor of the Group Theatre Magazine) and several plays for Unity Theatre, including the Mass Declamation Spain and the Munich-play Crisis. He wrote Peace and Prosperity for the London Choral Union, a new version of Handel’s Belshazzar for the London Co-op Choirs and the chorale finale of Alan Bush’s Piano Concerto. In 1938 he launched his own radical paperback publishing company, Fore Publications, selling half a million books in twelve months. He was active in the Workers Music Association and in the Left Book Club, for whom he and Bush edited the Left Song Book. Swingler and Bush also organised the 1939 Festival of Music and the People, which included an Albert Hall pageant written by Swingler and starring Paul Robeson, as well as the premier of Britten’s Ballad of Heroes, for which Swingler and Auden wrote the libretto. He published two well-received novels, No Escape and To Town. In 1939 he was made literary editor of the Daily Worker. During the first months of the War, Swingler worked as a staff reporter for the Daily Worker, writing anti-government Blitz journalism until the paper was banned in 1941. He took over Poetry and the People, re-launched it as Our Time, and turned the magazine Seven into a forum for new writing from the Forces. Called up at the end of 1941, he trained as a wireless operator before being posted overseas with the 56th Divisional Signals. Swingler took part in the Salerno landings in September 1943, and was in almost continuous action for the next twenty months. He was made a Corporal at Anzio, and for his part in the battle of Lake Commachio was awarded the Military Medal for bravery. Swingler returned to London in 1946 to edit Our Time with Edgell Rickword. He broadcast regularly for the BBC, taught adult education classes for the University of London, and collected his war-poems in The Years of Anger. But in Cold War London Swingler found himself attacked from both sides. His adult education classes were investigated and closed. He was black-listed at the BBC, where MI5 prevented him obtaining a staff job. Inside the Communist Party he was attacked for liberal sympathies and forced to resign from Our Time. Its successors Arena and Circus both proved short-lived, too literary for the Communist Party and too political for the book-trade. When, in 1950, Fore published a series of poetry books, including Swingler’s The God in the Cave, they were ignored by literary London and denounced as ‘bohemian’ by the Party. Visits to Czechoslovakia in 1953 and Romania in 1954 did nothing to persuade Swingler that Communism was not in crisis, and he resigned from the Party in early 1956. The following year he helped found the New Reasoner. 198 | Red Lives

Swingler spent the last decade of his life in the village of Pebmarsh in Essex. He wrote a never-published book about the Lidice massacre, and several libretti for the composers Bernard Stevens and Alan Rawsthorne. By 1965, writer’s block, political despair, financial worries, heavy drinking and medication for a serious heartcondition combined to cause a breakdown. He died of a heart-attack in 1967, outside the York Minster in Soho.

Cleston Taylor 1926 – 2010 The outstanding trade unionist and communist, Cleston Taylor was born on 1 October 1926 in Lluidas Vale Jamaica. His father was a small farmer, and his mother a housewife and he lived with them and his six siblings in an area dominated by owners of sugar plantations and sugar factories, who ran the schools, worked with the church and generally controlled much of life there. During the Second World War he went to the USA to find employment. Still in his late teens, he travelled around that country and recalled in an interview that he made contact with Black Communists in Toledo Ohio where he had many discussions and learnt about the class struggle and the fight against racism which was in the forefront of the American Communist Party’s agenda. They also talked about Africa and colonialism. So Cleston Taylor returned to Jamaica meeting British communist David Lewis and Richard Hart, leading member of the socialist Peoples National Party (PNP). Back in Lluidas Vale, Marxist classes were set up and he soon became a leading figure in the left wing TUC, the trade union branch of that party. In 1950 he led his members in a struggle with rival union the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU), that was the union arm of the reactionary Jamaica Labour Party. The TUC was demanding that the sugar workers be allowed to join the union of their choice and this struggle became intense when the government backing the BITU sent soldiers, colonial police and the riot squad to the area to intimidate the workers. He was charged with leading a riotous crowd, which would have led to a prison sentence of thirty years. After many months, he was found not guilty but was blacklisted by major employers and this in addition to the expulsion of Hart and other leftists from the PNP led him to migrate to Britain. He arrived in London on a cold Thursday morning in March 1952 and the following Monday joined the Communist Party. He remembered a number of other Caribbean Communists being in his Kilburn branch where he soon settled in attending meetings and selling the Daily Worker. Simultaneously he joined Caribbean Labour Congress (London branch) that was led by fellow Jamaican Communist Billy Strachan and he soon became a member of the Party’s West Indian Committee. Always an active trade unionist, he joined the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers. He was elected shop steward on his first job, a great achievement as the only Black worker on that site. Wherever he worked after that, Cleston Taylor – a known Communist – was elected shop steward on construction sites, always gaining huge majorities in the vote. He worked in the early stages at the Barbican for over a year where, known to his mates as Chris, he again was elected steward. He always Red Lives | 199

ensured safe, good working conditions were made available, as well as leading his members on disputes with recalcitrant employers. Unfortunately this eventually resulted in him being blacklisted from the construction industry. To return to his time in the Communist Party, he had some difficulties on the West Indian Committee with leading communist Jack Woddis. Cleston Taylor and some of his fellow Caribbean communists felt the leadership was not always heeding their views. So, in 1964, after he had gone to Jamaica to report on the situation there, he gave reports to the West Indian Committee. The numbers of progressives in Jamaica were small and suffered under a reactionary Jamaican government in alliance with the British state which would not have tolerated a Communist Party there and they were asking the British Party for some financial and print support to publish a paper. According to Cleston Taylor, the majority of the leadership could, or would, not understand why a Communist Party could not be formed and insisted this must happen before greater help could be sent. After three such meetings, he felt distraught and with a heavy heart, finally left the Communist Party. With Richard Hart and others he formed Caribbean Labour Solidarity. He valued his years as a Communist, and never spoke against the Party publicly. He recalled a meeting many years after he left when another Caribbean ex-Communist made personal attacks on veteran Monty Goldman. He rebuked the speaker and reminded the audience of the sterling work Goldman had done over many years and then spoke about the Party’s great achievements fighting fascism, anti-semitism and racism over decades. When asked if he ever encountered racism from rank and file Communists, he emphatically said he had not. Cleston Taylor died in 2010 and his valuable contribution as a Caribbean Communist in the 1950s and 1960s cannot be underestimated.

Katharine Thomson 1906 – 2006 Katharine Stewart was born in Cambridge in 1906 to Jessie Crum, a first class graduate of Newnham College. Her father, Hugh Stewart, was ordained, but his day job was as Trinity College’s authority on Blaise Pascal. There were five siblings living at Girton Gate, Cambridge, opposite Girton College. Three of them, Katharine, Frida (Knight) and Margaret, were to become Communists. The family hosted a steady stream of musicologists. In 1927 they were visited by Zoltán Kodály, the Hungarian, who had been heavily involved in collecting folk songs and was developing a methodical approach to music education that was only able to be adopted under a socialist regime after the war. Two years later, Arthur Honegger, a Swiss composer, paid a visit. He had written the music for the epic 1927 silent film, Napoléon, and was later in the French resistance. 200 | Red Lives

The Austrian, Alban Berg, visited in 1931, having studied with a Jewish composer – the Nazis placed him on a list of ‘degenerates’. Katharine’s political outlook would be fixed in Germany, when as a student of piano at Leipzig Conservatoire she saw the fascist jackboots on the streets in 1933-4. In October 1934 she married George Thomson, a devoted partnership lasting until his death in 1987. George had been appointed Professor in Greek at Birmingham University in 1936 – both he and Katharine were active CP members from then. Their elder daughter, Elisabeth (Lis) was born in 1936, and Margaret (Meg) in 1939, after which Katharine suffered depression. In March 1940, she attended a rehearsal of the newly formed Birmingham Orpheus Choral Society, having heard via the Communist Party of its foundation by International Brigade veteran Colin Bradsworth. She was later to recall arriving in some trepidation with the expectation of meeting a choir of about fifty singers, only to find “a handful of nice people gathered round the piano”. She took on the role of conductor and the choir, renamed Birmingham Clarion Singers, grew. Besides the contemporary anti-fascist and labour movement repertoire, Katharine introduced opera and established mainstream composers. So there were performances of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro on the back of a lorry parked on a bombed site in Birmingham’s Balsall Heath; Bach’s Peasant Cantata on a green space in a Yardley Wood Council estate; and Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in The Big Top (again on a bombed site) in New Street. In the Festival of Britain, Clarion performed Sir John in Love, a Vaughan Williams opera. Although he had expressed doubts as to the feasibility of this, Katharine’s gentle but persistent persuasion won through as usual. Jane Scott, today’s musical director of the Birmingham Clarion Singers, recalls: “With others Katharine helped form our choir in 1940 and was its conductor for over twenty years, later its accompanist and musical advisor. It would become an invigorating, anti-fascist force in the war, expressing the songs of struggle of the labour movement and the international workers’ movements, whilst also inspiring its audiences with music drawn from the classical repertoire. That it continues today is as much a memorial for Katharine as anything else could be.” As Katharine’s daughter, Margaret Alexiou, recalls of George Thompson, he: “...was a rebel and maverick, Katharine a lover of compromise … [they] were never in dispute on the issue of the CP programme, the British Road to Socialism … [it] was a subject of some discussion, he cared about it deeply … Katharine was not very interested, and got on with Clarion Singers. George was equally engaged with on-theground issues, whether in Ireland, Greece or Birmingham. It would be wrong to suggest a rift, rather many fruitful debates, which I still remember from childhood and adolescent years, for example, Katharine saying to George after a discussion, ‘You may have won in words, but I don’t feel beaten’”. Katharine wrote articles for the Party’s Music Group bulletin, Music & Life, in the 1950s and encouraged Luke Kelly and Ian Campbell in folk song revival. In 1977, Katherine was the author of The Masonic Thread in Mozart which identifies the composer with rationalism. Red Lives | 201

Mary Pearson, later President of Birmingham trades council recalled how in the 1970s she and Katharine bonded, being for several years the only two women members. Katharine celebrated her 100th birthday on 29 June 29 2006 but died shortly afterwards.

Vic Turner 1927 – 2012 Vic Turner was the country’s ‘most wanted man’ by the Tories’ National Industrial Relations Court in 1972. Four of his fellow London dockers had already been arrested for picketing container depots. Private detectives hired by the court had identified them and Vic as the ringleaders to be prosecuted. For some reason the police had not located Vic. But he was not in hiding and turned up outside Pentonville Prison to demonstrate against the jailings and demanded to be arrested as well. He thus became famous as one of the Pentonville Five, who despite an order from the court, had continued to picket in defence of dock jobs that had been transferred to depots outside the docks. Solidarity strikes from workers all over the country spread like wildfire, and the TUC was on the verge of calling the first general strike since 1926. The

s Vic Turner hoised aloft by cheering workers as thousands laid siege to Pentonville Prison where the five docker’s leaders were incarcerated. Faced with mass strikes on the docks, in the markets, print industry, factories and construction sites the Tory government sent the Official Solicitor to release the men. 202 | Red Lives

government backed down and had to revive the ancient position of the Official Solicitor to order the release of the prisoners, who refused to agree to stop picketing. As they were carried shoulder high from the prison gates, they jokingly complained about the roundthe-clock chanting by supporters for their release – because it had kept them awake! Born the son of a docker in London’s east end in 1927, Vic was taken to meetings as a child by his mother to learn about socialism. After following his father into the docks, he joined the Communist Party, and became a prominent member of the unofficial docks liaison committee alongside the legendary Jack Dash, which organised mass meetings to resist attacks on their terms and conditions. Later, when the docks were de-casualised and the TGWU set up shop stewards in the docks and lifted its ban on Communists, Vic was elected as a steward for the Royal Group of docks. As well as fighting for dock jobs, in 1972 Vic also organised support for the “work in” by shipyard workers on the Upper Clyde in Scotland, which successfully prevented closure of their yard, and for coal miners in their successful national strike for a pay rise. When the Royal Docks finally closed, he became a dustman for Newham Council, and later was elected as a Labour Party councillor in 1984, and subsequently became the Mayor. His popularity as a ceaseless defender of working class interests at all levels, led to him being awarded the TUC’s gold badge for outstanding work for the trade union movement. Later he became a leading organiser of the Danny Lyons Memorial Award, and took delight in arranging the annual presentation in East End pubs used by the dockers over the years. He died in 2012, and his wake was a huge and glorious affair.

Ruth Wallis 1919 – 2013 Ruth Violet Wallis, née Kisch, was born on 21 January 1919 into a Jewish family in London, and was one of those comrades who are referred to as ‘stalwart’ – giving decades of support to the Communist Party and the labour and progressive movement, holding firm to principles and keeping on fighting. She met her future husband Peter during her first term at Cambridge University in 1937. He was a year ahead of her, and she later wrote that: “He had already had his views changed by the ferment in the student political movement, so he soon got to work on me, challenging many of the ideas that I had grown up with.” It was, she said, a time of great upsurge in anti-fascist activity – at first supporting the Spanish people against the Franco rebellion, then in trying to prevent Czechoslovakia being dismembered, and finally campaigning for an agreement with the Soviet Union to stop Hitler. The movement was led by a large Socialist Club, which had a contingent of communists, including Peter. Red Lives | 203

This started Ruth’s own Party membership in 1938, and her Marxist education – an issue on which she remained very keen throughout her life. She also developed a strong sense of the international dimensions of the class struggle, and the importance of the fight for peace and – with Peter’s encouragement – for women’s equality. In later years she was active in the British-Soviet Friendship Society, the National Assembly of Women, and in CND, where activists outside the Party paid tribute to her work. Ruth and Peter were married in 1939 and had five children, but they also brought up Ruth’s four nephews and nieces for a time, after they were orphaned. Peter worked during the war on developing radar, and afterwards became a mathematics teacher, and then head teacher at different schools. In 1958, wanting to spend more time on research, he moved into teacher training at Newcastle University. Ruth supported his research and became a co-author to several major publications of his – on Newton and Newtonia, 18th century medics, and a partial list of 18th century mathematicians. Ruth was an active member of five CPGB branches altogether, in Newcastle: Heaton & Benton; Newcastle East; Longbenton & Gosforth; Newcastle; and Newcastle West/Central. We know this because we have the minutes books from the first three, mostly written in her own hand. They are a meticulous description of branch and branch committee activities, in which she was fully active – election work, Daily Worker/Morning Star sales and bazaars, political discussions. At times she also held the position of dues organiser and literature secretary. Ruth was a delegate to the 37th CPGB Congress in 1981, at which time the influence of revisionism, which she strongly opposed, was already being felt. After the 38th Congress, in 1983, Northern District secretary Brian Topping was expelled from the Party for being part of a minority on the Congress Elections Preparation Committee which had produced an alternative Recommended List. Then in turn Ruth and four other branch committee members were banned from holding any Party office, over a branch decision to remove EC member and acting district secretary Joe Keith from the chair, at a meeting to hear a report on the expulsions. When the Party was re-established as the CPB in 1988, Ruth remained in the CPGB, partly to continue the fight to get her ban lifted. However, not long after Peter’s death in 1992, she joined the CPB, and shortly became Newcastle & Gateshead branch minutes secretary and, later, District auditor. She participated in many other ways, including helping at Morning Star bazaars and the May Day stall, and delivering election leaflets well into her 80s – remarking that the exercise was good for her. Books were very important to Ruth. She was a supporter of the Marx Memorial Library, and many of her political books went there when she left Newcastle. She was also an avid reader of the local press – providing clippings for the Party to build policy and write letters, but also writing letters to Newcastle’s The Journal herself, and indeed winning prizes for them. Her clarity of thought and ability to make connections always shone through. At age 93, finding it difficult to manage by herself, Ruth moved to Cambridge to stay with her niece. As with the rest of her life, she made sure all her affairs were sorted to avoid being a burden on her family. She died just 16 months later on 3 June 2013. Her funeral was officiated by Unitarian, Rev Andrew Brown, then Chair of Cambridge Communist Party. 204 | Red Lives

Bert Ward 1922 – 2016 Bert Ward was a working-class intellectual and Communist Party activist who played a key role in changing Labour Party attitudes to Ireland. He was born in 1922 in Middlesbrough. His father was a riveter’s helper, his mother a hospital ward-maid. Leaving school at the age of 15 without any qualifications, he joined the Royal Navy, serving as a gunner on north Atlantic convoys. After the War he worked in the shipyards, on the railways and then as a rigger at ICI. In 1948 Bert joined the Communist Party, an event which, he said: “...introduced me to books, to serious reading and study”. He was secretary of the Middlesbrough CP branch, stood for election to Middlesbrough Council, and led the squatters occupying an empty army camp on the edge of the town. In 1957 he won a scholarship to Ruskin College, and then a State Mature Student scholarship to the LSE. He worked as full-time National Organiser for British Council for Peace in Vietnam, before being appointed as a lecturer in Local Government Studies at Catford College of Commerce. Elected secretary of his NATFHE branch, he was also secretary of the Sydenham Branch of the Communist Party, and a member of the Communist Party London district. In 1974, following a visit to Belfast with the London district, he joined the Party’s Irish Advisory Committee, editing (and often writing) the committee’s monthly Information Bulletin. In 1985 Bert moved back to Middlesbrough, with his second wife Ruth. In retirement he taught politics courses in adult-education, published an autobiography, several books of poems and short-stories, and a wonderful three volume fiction memoir, Dear Bob. For several years he and Ruth taught Scottish country dancing on the Party’s annual summer school in East Germany. After 1991, Bert joined the Labour Party, where he was instrumental in the election of Ray Mallon as Mayor of Middlesbrough. Every week, before standing for election, Mallon used to visit Bert for a weekly tutorial on the workings of local government. Bert also remained involved with Irish politics as national secretary of the crossparty peace group New Consensus, later New Dialogue. Convinced of the need to include the Unionists in any future settlement, Bert patiently educated MPs and the media about the complexities of Northern Ireland, on one occasion providing a platform for David Trimble at a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference. Above all, through his close friendship with local MP Mo Mowlam, it can be argued that Bert Ward’s thinking about Ireland made a long-term contribution to the Irish Peace Process.

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Harry Watson 1907 – 2000 Harry Watson was a Thames lighterman during years of intense struggle against exploitation, in which time he progressed from organising unofficial action to becoming president of the union. He remained down to earth and connected with the grass roots throughout this time. Born in Poplar in 1907 he was apprenticed as a lighterman at the age of 15. Lightermen were widely considered the most skilled of all the marine workers on the Thames, as it was they who were responsible for steering barges, boats and ships through the tides and sandbanks that could be found throughout its 215 mile length. 1922 was the year the Amalgamated Society of Watermen and Lightermen had been one of the founder unions which formed the Transport & General Workers’ Union. Two years later they broke away from the TGWU after wage cuts had been negotiated, and formed a new union with stevedores and dockers which was banned from the TUC. Then in 1927 a breakaway from this, the Watermen, Lightermen, Tugmen and Bargemen Union (WLTBU) was formed, and still excluded from the TUC. It was not admitted into the TUC until 1957, and in the meantime was excluded from the national docks and waterways negotiating machinery. Harry and some others set up an unofficial rank and file organisation in 1932 because, as he explained, the excluded trade union had little muscle power to negotiate better working conditions, especially at this time of high unemployment and a restrictive Trade Disputes Act. In a Greenwich pub called the Cricketers, they drew up a charter to put to a mass meeting, and then a plan to fight for it without recourse to the official movement, direct to individual employers on the river. They called the mass meeting at Tower Hill and put the programme to the workers who voted overwhelmingly for it. “Hours in those days were unlimited,” he recalled: “Once you went to work the employer could keep you at it for as long as he wanted.” So they fought for a limit to prevent more than one overnight being worked in succession. Another battle was to ensure that the men got a lunch hour at a time when they were often forced to work through it and get paid eight hours for nine hours’ work. He joined the Communist Party in 1941, in its port of London branch which included dockers and seamen. Hence he was named by Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, during the 1966 seamen’s strike, as one of the: “...tightly knit group of politically motivated men”, supposedly exercising outside communist influence to bring down the government. After becoming a full-time London organiser for the WLBTU by 1950, he stood in the general election of that year as the Communist Party candidate for Poplar, with disappointing results. He was more successful in 1959 in getting elected as the president of the WLBTU. In 1971 the union merged at long last with the TGWU, and Harry retired at the age of 64. In Southend, where he had lived for 40 years, he enjoyed his retirement, adopting an almost hippy demeanour, belying his age, with a healthy lack of respect for petty authority, until dying in his 90s. 206 | Red Lives

Frank Watters 1920 – 2002 Frank Watters was born in 1920 Lanarkshire to Kate and Paddy, a miner victimised after the 1926 General Strike. The family lived in deprivation though the siblings shared similar views; one brother would become a local Communist councillor. Frank became an underground miner in 1937 and had serious accidents underground, leaving him with deformed feet and only a stump of one finger – forever poking vacantly in the air to hammer home a point! In February 1953 he began work for the CP, being quickly transferred to Yorkshire miners, where he played a decisive role in changing the nature of the NUM, employing a talent for detailed organisational work and local electoral work. Armthorpe near Doncaster began electing Communist councillors in straight fights with official Labour. Frank was close to major figures such as Mick McGahey, Vice-President of the NUM, and Arthur Scargill. A generation of leaders were in his debt – a score or more in the NUM, a dozen senior officials in the T&G, several in Unison, the FBU, ISTC and others. In 1957, Frank married fellow communist, Freda Hartley. To make ends meet, he even took up a market stall. Their daughter, Lesley, recalls: “My mother was cultured and well read, admired by many for her humanitarian instincts. But living on the Party wage with a family was hard, so an offer of a guaranteed income from the Midlands Communist Party was greatly attractive. Thus, Dad became firstly the Birmingham and then the Midland district secretary of the Party. After a short while, we were able to join him. One of his outstanding initiatives was the promotion of the Communist Party’s Star Social Club, which was a base for very many political campaigns, strikes and trade union demonstrations and brought diverse communities together.” The Club became renowned for the vital role it played in the battle of Saltley Gate, during the 1972 national miners’ strike. Without Frank it might have never happened. He invited Arthur Scargill to bring flying pickets from Yorkshire to demonstrate outside the massive coke stockpile. Scores were put up on the floor of the Star Club and hundreds put miners up in their own homes. Tens of thousands of factory, office, and building workers poured out of work to demonstrate solidarity, causing the authorities to close the coke depot. Within weeks, the miners had won their strike. The Star Club ran a weekly folk music club involving many famous names. Twice a week, a Reggae Disco took over, with hundreds of young black people looking for entry. It was the focus of the massive campaign to free Angela Davies. Jamaican jazz musician, Andy Hamilton, became a friend. Group after groups of workers in struggle found Frank by their side and over two decades he was rewarded with constant invitations to attend union conferences. He campaigned for the Fire Brigade Union during their national strike in 1977 and the steel workers in 1980. Frank became a regional circulation representative for the Red Lives | 207

Morning Star in 1979 and helped both ambulance workers and then P&O seafarers. In 1987, Frank was made an Honorary Member of the NUM, a rare honour shared with Nelson Mandela. Frank was an inspiration to many in and out of the CP up and down the country, mainly for his zeal, attention to detail and intense focus. Like all humans he had his foibles, larger than life like himself! In 1977, Freda had been cut off in her prime by cancer at the age of 52. A dozen years later, his second marriage to Esta Meltser, a teacher from the Soviet Union, saw Yorkshire regional TV run a five-minute piece. Frank died in 2002, his most durable achievement being to publish his memoirs, Being Frank, in 1992 selling no less than 5,000 copies. It was Arthur Scargill who wrote correctly in it of Frank’s astonishing contribution to working class history.

Sam Watts 1925 – 2014 “They don’t realise that strength they’ve got, do they? They don’t realise that power they’ve got – the working class can change the whole history, as quick as that, they just don’t realise, they haven’t grasped it” said veteran Communist Sam Watts in his stand out contribution to Ken Loach’s 2013 film The Spirit of ‘45. Sam was a formidable and lifelong Communist Party member in his native Merseyside. Born in February 1925 in Liverpool’s Great Homer Street area, he lived through the direst poverty as a child, which he described eloquently when interviewed for Ken Loach’s 2013 film, The Spirit of 45: “I was the third of eight children, living in the worst slums in Europe, sleeping five in a bed. The house was full of vermin — bed bugs, cockroaches, fleas, rats. There was nothing we could do. We couldn’t get rid of them”. Three siblings died in childhood, two at the same time, prompting Sam’s memory of his family travelling to the cemetery in a one-horse carriage bearing two coffins on their knees before burial in a pauper’s grave. His mother’s task was not eased by the removal in 1933 of her husband, who had worked in a timber yard, to what was then called the lunatic asylum at Rainhill. He suffered from post-traumatic stress brought on by experiences in the first world war trenches that were further aggravated by his brother William’s execution for supposed cowardice. Sam’s father remained in Rainhill without speaking until he died in 1943. In reality, William was suffering from shell-shock and exposure to gas, as were many of the 306 British soldiers shot by firing squad in that conflict. Sam campaigned for years for these men to be pardoned, and was delighted in 2006 when this was belatedly agreed. He had proudly but provocatively waited in line on Armistice Day to incur the wrath of the British Legion by laying a wreath of white poppies at the war memorial in memory of the uncle he had never known. Sam joined the Royal Navy in 1943, but, after being demobbed, he returned to the same slum conditions before going to London to seek work. Eventually, he found work at a Lyons Corner House where he cleaned the place in the morning before donning a brown suit, peaked cap and white gloves in the afternoon to 208 | Red Lives

welcome customers. “Every night I joined the long queue to get a bed in the Salvation Army hostel, as I had no money for proper rent,” he said. Returning to Liverpool, he survived on dead-end jobs and then benefited from the post-war economic upturn to find work as a rigger on Liverpool docks and become a shop steward. Although he had never been a great reader, he was given The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by a workmate on the docks. “It opened my eyes to many things, to life and how we were being conned,” he said. “I was invited by leading Mersey docks shop steward Alec ‘Bunny’ McKechnie to attend a Communist Party rally at St Georges Hall in Liverpool. “It was addressed by general secretary Harry Pollitt and I joined the Party at that meeting. I became a regular reader and seller of the Daily Worker from then onwards.” From that day until his death at the end of 2014, Sam spent over 60 years as a Communist Party activist. His activities included being lifted, literally, by police when he protested against Margaret Thatcher’s visit to the Eldonian housing estate in Liverpool’s Docklands in 1989. He was also for decades the Party’s Morning Star organiser, collecting a quire every morning before cycling around Liverpool’s trade union offices to sell them their daily paper. He was in no doubt that the real problem was a clapped-out economic system. “The capitalist system is finished. It just doesn’t work any more. You can’t make it work. The only answer is socialism to get the country back on its feet.”

s Sam Watts being removed by police during a protest against Margaret Thatcher, Liverpool, 1989. Red Lives | 209

Wolf Wayne 1923 – 2011 Wolf was born into an East End Jewish working class family, of parents from Czarist Poland. His father would take him to the Synagogue on Saturdays. He left school at fourteen, and later lied about his age to get into the army. He fought in North Africa, Sicily, and then Italy. He would later recount how the sergeant-major’s neck would be bristling as the men marched along singing The Red Flag! In Italy, he and his fellow soldiers made contact with the partisans. Through quick wittedness, he was able to save the lives of a number of them. He was honoured in later years when he made a return visit to the village where the action took place. Wolf’s platoon was sent forward to take a small village. However, reinforcements never arrived and the Germans retook the village. Wolf was captured and sent to Stalag 7, in Bavaria. He later recounted how an officer at the camp had asked him when had he last heard from his family in London? Wolf said two weeks ago. The officer said “Impossible—our Field Marshal Göring has obliterated London”. Returning from the war, Wolf told how he and his comrades couldn’t believe that Mosleyites were organising and holding meetings again in London. He helped found the 43 Group of Jewish ex-servicemen who took the fight to the fascists, breaking up their meetings. On one occasion of attacking the lorry-platform of an outdoor fascist recruitment meeting in Romford, they were pelted with razor-studded potatoes by the fascists. In 1950, the 43 Group’s activities were dying down. Len Rolnick, seconded by Wolf Wayne, both of the group’s executive committee, proposed to merge the Group with the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen. The merger was one-sided, in the event. After the war, Wolf worked full-time for the CP, organising across North London plants such as Kodak, Handley Page, De Havilland and Dupel. During this work he met the former major who had been unable to bring reinforcements to Wolf’s platoon. The major was also in the CP! He studied history at the University of Sussex (1972-5). His BA dissertation was The Spitalfields Silk Weavers: Their Place in the London Radical Movement and the Decline of the Community1820-59. While at Sussex, he mentored a new generation of Communists in the University’s 30-strong branch of the CPGB, advising on every aspect of political campaigning, right down to the proper speed at which to sing The Internationale! On Tuesday 5 June, 1973, Professor Samuel P. Huntington, a Vietnam War strategist for the US military, was successfully prevented from speaking at the university. Wolf had relayed to the Party branch the Sussex district secretary’s endorsement of the planned action: “You can see what he [Huntington] is!” Shades of the 43 Group! Huntington later authored the notorious book, Clash of civilizations? Wolf completed a Master’s degree in history at Birkbeck aged 56. His dissertation was The Radical Movement in Clerkenwell and Spitalfields, 1820-1850. He became an adult education lecturer and was a long-standing member of the Socialist History Society. When the CPGB dissolved itself, Wolf became a founder member of the Green Socialist Network, forerunner of the Alliance for Green Socialism, and a leading member of the AGS. 210 | Red Lives

He shared a life-long marriage with Beryl whom he met in the Party. She became a prominent London trade unionist and peace campaigner. Wolf considered himself a life-long Communist. He remained politically active well into his eighties, dying of a stroke in April 2011, aged 88. In 2013 Beryl created the Wolf Wayne Research Fund for Graduate Students in the History Department, Birkbeck, University of London, to support students’ research, particularly on non-British topics.

Fred Westacott 1916 – 2001 Fred Westacott could have been a philosopher, a scientist, an engineer, or a poet. He did none of those things, he became a political organiser for the Communist Party. Fred was a working class intellectual who never lost his roots, who became what he was by using every job, every experience, to expand and deepen his understanding. He drew on the wealth of experience he’d gained as an engineering shop steward, a founder of the South Wales Shop Stewards movement. His politics continued into his army service. Among his many contributions was to advance Marxist analyses, to develop policies based on the deepest study. His profound historical sense was a great asset. Those who know the difficulties of uniting the mining industry unions, because of varying geological conditions, will recognise the achievement of Fred Westacott. Fred was Coalfields organiser of the party for many years in the East Midlands. The Notts miners are much maligned, but we measure not the extent of their defeat, but rather the extra-ordinary military measures the State used to defeat them. The mainstay of NUM loyalism was the broad left within the coalfield which was patiently built up under Fred’s leadership, and but for the untimely death of Fred’s comrade Joe Whelan, the outcome may well have been very different. Many campaigns bear the hallmark of Fred’s work, winning people to new ideas, and giving them confidence to pursue them. When May Day became a bank holiday, Fred galvanised Chesterfield TUC, with his comrade Bas Barker, to seize the opportunity to transform May Day into a day of working class culture. It became a festival of political ideas, solidarity and action. Qualities which have survived for 40 years. We remember the difficulties placed in the way of Tony Benn’s attempt to win adoption as Chesterfield MP. On Fred’s initiative, a demand built up from engineers, miners and Labour activists to win through, and defeat the Labour Party machine which was hell-bent on “anyone but Benn”. Fred’s introduction to Marxism, the Manifesto, is never debated for what is in it, but is always condemned for the caricature created by those fearful of its revolutionary content. Likewise, Socialism is never assessed for what it is, but always for the malicious caricature its enemies slander it to be. No caricature of Socialism is complete without a caricature of Communists and others who work for Socialism. We are all apparently soul-less apparatchiks, spies, or dupes of evil empires, or whatever. Tony Benn, Chesterfield’ s MP had the distinction of being declared insane – by the Sun! Fred Westacott was the living embodiment of all that those caricatures were not. He was the living embodiment of all that those caricatures are intended to obscure. And Red Lives | 211

while he fought to preserve the core of Marxist belief, that the motive force of history was class struggle, he showed immense intellectual courage in being prepared to reappraise the history of the movement. But for Fred, never the luxury of armchair criticism. His was the appraisal of comrades, in solidarity, fighting here, against the enemies of Socialism everywhere. Fred was a deeply cultured man, a great reader. He was an engineering craftsman, a toolmaker, the highest grade of the AEU, the union he served for over 50 years. Manual skills were not just a job for Fred, he was a creator. After an exhausting day of travelling, meeting, organising, arguing, Fred could be found relaxing, far into the night, making a detailed doll’s house for a grand child – or someone else’s grandchild. He had great artistic skills, which like everything else, was pressed into the service of the movement – high quality leaflets and displays, imaginative photographic presentations. Nothing tawdry was acceptable to Fred – except his pullover! Fred was a great communicator, universally trusted and liked. Many of us have been grateful for Fred’s support or guidance at critical points in our lives. He was no sectarian, enjoying mutually supportive relations with Bert Wynn, Peter Heathfield, Tony Benn and many others. He clearly recognised that political reformism was a subjugation to Imperialism. His life challenged that, with his class-based understanding of how to fight for Socialism. Fred had no personal ambition. His forte was to build fruitful long term collaborations. With comrades like Bas Barker and Ida Hackett, and most especially with Kath Westacott, his intellectual bedrock, wife, and comrade, throughout their lifetime of struggle.

Sybil White 1908 – 1995 “Shop at the Coop!” Sybil’s daughter, Pat Jay recalls: “At sixteen, my mum, Sybil White, joined the Littlehampton Labour Party Women’s Section and the Co-op Women’s Guild, then the Labour Movement’s major organisation for women. Another world of new ideas, meetings and discussion opened up, especially within her lively circle that also went to dances, lectures and outings – sometimes on motor bikes! In 1930, at 22, she married George William Percival White – Percy. His mum and aunts were also Guildswomen. Moving to London, she worked as a shorthand typist, joined the Co-operative Women’s Guild, and both joined the Communist Party. Then, unusually for “ordinary people”, they bought their own house in Hounslow. She campaigned to open up the Second Front. Mum spoke and collected for the International Brigade, and both were part of the 30s anti-fascist protests, clinging to lamp posts to avoid being swept over during ‘The 212 | Red Lives

Battle of Cable Street’ and disgusted by demonstrators throwing marbles under the mounted police’s horses. Elected In 1937 to the London Co-operative Society (LCS) Political Committee, she also worked at the CP’s Head Office. Their daughter Jen was born in 1939, bringing great delight, to Sybil’s own mum particularly. Sybil having campaigned for free Family Planning Clinics to provide contraception, Nan said: ‘Oh, I thought you never would!’ Mum’s war years were busy. She took over Dad’s Co-op Insurance Company ‘book’, while he worked in the aircraft factory, and had a second daughter, Pat, me! If the siren sounded, she’d put me in the bike basket and pedal off to collect Jen from school. Elected to the LCS Management Committee in 1942, she lost her seat in 1949 – a ripple of the Cold War power struggle between superpowers USA and USSR? Never giving up, she contested every LCS election for 11 years. Dad said proudly, she showed such ‘remarkable guts’. Then the 1960 Campaign Committee was formed – a broad alliance of Co-op members, employees, Labour, Communist Party and non-party members sharing progressive policies including determination to make LCS staff conditions the best in retail. Alongside MacCullum, Harrison, and Ainley, she at last regained a Management Committee/Board of Directors, seat. The LCS was gradually improved. Mum was instrumental in improved workplace conditions, including Equal Pay; the five, not six day working week for Coop shop assistants, (one of the things of which she was proudest), and chairs behind counters for shop assistants, also promoting wider humanitarian causes like the boycott of South African goods in LCS stores during Apartheid. Involved also in delegations abroad to observe differing Co-operative organisations, the height of her political career was in 1974, becoming Vice-Chairman of the LCS Board of the largest Cooperative Society in Britain. Retiring in 1975, she said at her retirement dinner: ‘No one has the monopoly of good ideas’. This had always been her mantra. Listen, discuss, work together, organise. Even in their Heathfield retirement, they both supported the Labour candidates. Remarkable in so many ways, she had working class parents, campaigned as a woman about policies not personality or party allegiance, and spoke out, from postwar removal of US airbases to CND. Appalled and distressed when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary she said: ‘Individual countries must find their own roads to socialism’. Equally, she never pressured me to join the CP, although she was very pleased when my sister did. She did join us both to the Coop though, but stopped me going with friends to church Sunday School, despite my pleas. Her passion for politics and making conditions better for everyone was lifelong. She reminded us it wasn’t just her, but all who worked together for the same end. People listened to her and took to her. And she had a great sense of humour. Dad said: ‘She always laughs at my jokes!’ At the end, she believed that workers organising through Cooperatives of various sorts was the future – that cooperation was the way to a better society – for all. Throughout, she was a great family woman. Grandmother to five, she could always be called on for child care. She kept up wider family ties and always recognised Red Lives | 213

Percy’s role in her career: ‘I couldn’t have done it without him.’ And she made great Christmas cakes and chocolate mousse! She saw herself as ‘ordinary’, but clearly, she was an ‘extraordinary’, ordinary woman. Her story belongs not just to us, her family, but within the world-wide legacy of women who made change happen. All their stories should be heard!” This piece would never have been written without reference to the 1993 preface to Sybil White: interviews and collected papers, by Ben Jay, her grandson, the preliminary to his thesis Two Handshakes from Lenin; or the help of her great granddaughters, Anushka and Mili, of whom she would have been so proud, and to whom I am most grateful. Pat Jay June 2020

Joan Wills 1933 – 2014 Writes daughter, Tanya: “Joan Wills went to work at the age of 14. Her father’s chronic ill health meant little money was available to the family. As a result, only the son was sent to grammar school. Aged 16, Mum was devastated by the sudden loss of her adored mother. Aged 21, on 26 June 1954, she married a Communist. Mum joined the Party aged 22. Joan’s political views were not embraced by some members of her family. Her strength and bravery was present very early. Despite the impact of loss, she followed her humanitarian path while facing further separation as a result of that politics. Mum abandoned the family Catholicism for atheism, and married in a register office. The only one of five siblings not to marry in church, her father did not attend the wedding, and did not recognise the marriage. In 1950s and at the height of the Cold War, Joan worked at CP central office. She travelled from Benfleet by bus. She was often aware of the presence of a man near the bus stop, and, uncomfortably, felt that she was the focus of his attention. One morning he approached her and said: ‘we know all about you, and where where you go’. Later in the 1950s Joan got a job in a local shirt factory. she became a convener of the Tailor and Garment Workers Union, and led a strike for more pay. In the 1970s Joan was actively involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement. Like many women, she was met with further criticism and derision about ‘women’s libbers’ from both society and wider kin, but as ever she continued, injured but undeterred. By this time, she had a whole body of female comrades in her life, her new, true kinship group. Their common bond of shared humanity, and devotion to the cause of liberation and justice for all, lasted from their young womanhood until they died. Joan was a progressive thinker in the truest sense. Her politics influenced her decision-making, and practice, and she did not adhere to dogma. Mum challenged the lack of suffrage in ‘socialist countries’, and similarly challenged some attitudes and activities in the Communist Party. 214 | Red Lives

Her contribution to ‘the cause’ was huge, an active campaigner, but also a fundraiser. Morning Star fetes became a regular event in our garden, and were opened by docker’s leader Jack Dash. There were stalls, games, bunting, and potent beer that mum brewed in big, plastic dustbins. The garden thronged with comrades and neighbours. Also, there were frequent Morning Star jumble sales, our little bungalow forever full of ‘stuff’ that was being collected for the next one. As a result of a local comrades’ grandchild being diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, Joan started a branch of the charity, also with a function in the garden. The charity grew to become a big concern, with support from Richard Attenborough and Warren Mitchell. In the late 1960s, the USSR sent delegates to England to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. Two delegates were sent to Benfleet, and Joan organised the event, and the family hosted Marina, the translator. The ‘Russians’ were met with great fanfare by the Tory councillors, who’d muscled in and arranged a Sedan as transport for the guests. Mum and Dad ensured they led the procession in their white van decorated with red flags, and emblazoned with ‘Hands off Vietnam’. Mum’s policy at home was that ‘everyone was welcome and what we had we shared’ (this generosity did not extend to the robed and gold chained Tory councillors who wanted access to our home during the Russian visit). However, the policy was evident following a late evening phone call from the local police. Four children, aged from 6 to 12, had been left at the station, and had named Joan and George as people who might look after them. There was previously little involvement with this family, even though the father was a Party member, so the shock of the call was profound. The children arrived that night. Our small, two bedroomed, one bathroom bungalow housed the four of us, (besides other people’s jumble sale items, and tons of literature and campaign paraphernalia). Suddenly, it housed eight. Mum dealt with everything, nursing the troubled and unwell children, and battling with social security for support, despite having a nine and seven year old of her own at this time. The children, who came for a week, left nearly a year later. Joan was an environmentalist, who espoused natural medicine, and food production without chemicals. She was an organic grower since the 1970s and loved her allotment. She was a Friend of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, and Chair of South East Essex Organic Association. The Socialist Medical Association contributed to knowledge in the household, and she stopped smoking in he 1950s following their early advice re cancer. Fortunately, she also refused the Thalidomide drug.  The political work never ceased throughout Joan’s life. From being part of the campaign which delivered the first letter to US Airbase Wetherfield to inform them that their nuclear weapons were not welcome in England, to more latterly, Stop the War and save the NHS actions. A favourite activity, was the Burston School Strike Festival. Joan was a star turn at this popular gathering where she ran the Morning Star book stall for years, until poor health prevented her attendance. Joan would make jam from her own home grown fruit, and sell it at the festival. All money went to the Morning Star Fighting Fund.” Red Lives | 215

Tom Wintringham 1898 – 1949 There can be few communists who led such an adventurous life as Tom Wintringham, who died aged only 51 years old. Wintringham was born in Grimsby at the turn of a tumultuous century. Aged 17 he secured a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford University to study history, but with the outbreak of war joined the Royal Flying Corps. At the war’s end he became politicised after participating in a ‘refusal to leave barracks’ mutiny. Intrigued and influenced by the Russian Revolution he ventured to Moscow in 1920 and returned a determined revolutionary. It is not clear if he completed his law studies as he became quickly involved in revolutionary politics, joining the communist party in 1923. Two years later, Wintringham, by now assistant editor of the CP newspaper, Worker’s Weekly was one of twelve party leaders arrested for ‘seditious libel’ and ‘incitement to mutiny’. This was a pre-emptive strike against the revolutionary leadership preparing for a general strike, which took place in May 1926. A police raid on the Party offices he used, also managed to ‘arrest’ busts of Lenin and Zinoviev! Wintringham had written an Appeal, which read: “Soldiers, sailors, airmen, definitely let it be known that neither in the class war nor the military war will you turn your guns on your fellow workers, but use your arms on the side of your own class. Turn your weapons on your oppressors!”. It was this which landed him in the dock. Wintringham was found guilty. Facing the judge and wearing a red rose, extraordinarily, he was offered the choice of leaving the Communist Party or facing six months in prison. His resolve never wavered. As they entered Brixton prison, the twelve leaders signed a ‘warning to workers’. The class war was about to be stepped up. The next ten years were a series of dogged struggles to build the party. Wintringham was in turn editor of The Worker newspaper of the National Minority Movement, then progressed from assistant editor of Workers Weekly, closed as a result of one of many libel actions, and became editor of its successor, Worker’s Life. A supporter of the ‘class against class’ policy, Wintringham began to write on military affairs, especially in Labour Monthly where he worked closely with Palme Dutt. On its launch, he became a business and technical editor of the Daily Worker and was one of those who worked, literally, by candle light, to get the first issue out on 1 January 1930. It is too easily forgotten that during this period, police would actually stand next to the presses as the Daily Worker was being printed to impose their censure. His knowledge of the law and his proletarian approach to business, which often meant writing IOU’s for paper and ink to enable printing to take place, was essential to the running of the paper. It was a risky role to take on as other DW business managers were imprisoned on a regular basis. 216 | Red Lives

In 1934 he became editor of a Party sponsored Left Review, a literary journal that attracted a broad spectrum of writers including W H Auden and Stephen Spender and the poet Cecil Day Lewis. But it was in military affairs that Wintringham made his mark. And there were no shortage of subjects to write on, from the Japanese attempt to conquer China, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and of course, the fascist uprising and intervention in Spain. He also turned his skill to analysing British history, writing on Cromwell and the Civil War, the war of intervention against revolutionary France and the tactics of the Chartists. Wintringham was respected as an innovative military thinker and was a powerful voice against trench warfare, seeing greater potential in mechanised war and partisan guerrilla warfare. Ironically years later, the likes of Orde Wingate used guerrilla war to drive the Italians out of Abyssinia. Wintringham asserted that guerrilla warfare came ‘naturally’ to the working class because it relied on a combination of discipline and initiative. And the successful armies – he drew heavily on the experience of Cromwell’s New Model Army – fought best when motivated by the values of freedom and democracy, rather than crude top-down orders. He authored twelve books, some of real historical interest, with others of continuing relevance. He was the first historian to integrate English military history (Armies of Freemen – Routledge 1940’ and Mutiny – Mutinies from Spartacus to Invergordon – Stanley Nott, London 1936) with Marxism, The Coming World War – Wishart 1935. This brought him into contact with a broad range of very senior military and political figures. Wintringham did not just write about war, he fought too, leaving for Spain in August 1936. He was tasked by Pollitt to play the role of Communist Party representative in Barcelona and it was during this time that he and others conceived of a British Battalion as part of an International Brigade. The first fruits of this work were the Tom Mann Centuria. He became Battalion commander for a short while on the eve of its first battle at Jarama. Wintringham had by this time become a controversial character in the Party leadership. Criticised at home and in Spain for his personal relationships with women activists. He took one such to view a battle front without permission, and used her as a courier for messages to the party leadership in London, even though she was not a communist or a trained courier. During his time recovering from a wound (he would be wounded twice) and illness, Wintringham became tutor at the International Brigades officers’ training school in Pozzorubio, near Albacete and it was here that he developed lectures on the history and practice of warfare that he was to later use at the officer school for the Home Guard in Britain. His writing henceforth focused on the need to reform the army so that it was democratic and ideologically committed. Wintringham repeatedly argued for trade unionised factory workers to be armed. On his return to Britain, Wintringham took to journalism, warning of the danger of war and the experience of Spain. But his association with an American woman journalist who had failed to convince the Party of her political loyalty (she had been denied membership by both the British and US Communist Parties) led to an agonising expulsion from the party, he had done so much to build. Red Lives | 217

Despite his expulsion, he continued to campaign very much along communist lines, even engaging local Party branches to actively support a ‘dig or die’ campaign around the time of imminent fascist invasion of Czechoslovakia. In this, ex-soldiers, unemployed and communists began to dig deep trenches in north London squares and parks, aimed to withstand bombing. This direct action was one of a number of campaigns that forced the government to establish the ARP. He was able to develop a mass following for his ideas of a ‘democratic army’, with weekly columns in the Picture Post and the Daily Mirror, in Tribune and the New Statesman and broadcast on the BBC. When on 14 May 1940 Eden, then secretary of state for war, called for volunteers to form Local Defence forces, a quarter million signed up immediately. The LDF became the Home Guard and its officer training was set in Osterley Park in west London. Osterley was privately financed and there began a long struggle with the military command, which wanted to wrest control of it from what were essentially Communist Party or pro-communist trainers, including the remarkable Yank Levy and Basque miners who taught how to handle dynamite. In the spring of 1941, the college was finally closed and Wintringham dismissed, but not before he had joined Lord Beaverbrook to purchase and import 18,000 machine guns from the USA. At this time, the Communist Party opposed the war as an imperialist war. In his social and historical writing, Wintringham drew heavily on Communist Party policy, but on the character of the war, he attacked the Party. In a series of political twists, he formed Common Wealth, a political party aimed at challenging the government, despite the fact that, after June 1941, it fought alongside the Soviet Union he admired. Many of the leaders of Common Wealth came from landed aristocratic liberal backgrounds and middle class intellectuals and it failed to gain significant support. On his death the Communist Party recognised Wintringham as one of its own, but an errant member who could have achieved so much more if he had not let his complex personal life overshadow his extraordinary political achievements.

s Tom Wintringham – one of twelve Communist Party leaders arrested for ‘seditious libel’ and ‘incitement to mutiny’. In this picture Tom stands to the back of the group without a hat. 218 | Red Lives

Ivy Woods 1914 – 2005 Ivy Oliver was born in Holborn, London in 1914, living above the shop where her father was a grocer. In the mid 1920s, after stopping a bailiff removing Freemason’s regalia from a tenant’s flat, he lost his trade from all the surrounding hotels when he refused to join them. They moved to Bristol in 1926, where she lived for the rest of her life. She worked in the Bristol Central Library, where she met her future husband, Stephen Woods (who was already in the Party), married in August 1939, and had three children. She joined the Party in 1940, when its opposition to imperialist war made it a target of political and state attacks, though during this period membership grew significantly. At a time when members were encouraged to spend at least half their time on work outside the Party, she joined the Sea Mills Coop Guild, and soon became secretary. The President of the Bristol Cooperative Society was a Communist Jack Webb, and he got Ivy involved in structures in the coop. By 1946 she was attending Society meetings. She was elected to the Cooperative Society Party (Political Committee) in 1947, and immediately faced hostility as a member of the CP. This was the time of bans and proscriptions. She got defeated in 1951. She was on the Political Committee for a total of 8 years, standing 24 times! Ivy was finally elected to the Management Committee in 1964 at the 14th attempt. Other than a break of a year after a defeat in 1975 for one year, she had continuous service. She did not slacken that year, as she took on adult literacy work. It was the time of “On the Move”, and she got huge satisfaction helping Caribbean women to learn to read.

s Delegation to the Soviet Union, June 1963. Ivy Woods stands 10th from the left. The group includes Valentina Tereshkova and Yuri Gagarin Red Lives | 219

At the same time as all this coop activity, she took on positions in the CP. Ivy was a strong supporter of the Daily Worker/Morning Star. In the war she sold regularly at the dock gates, and was still selling at a pitch in Shirehampton, Bristol in 1988 on a Saturday morning. She was a regular bazaar supporter – her speciality was coconut ice, vanilla, pink and chocolate. She was a member of the West of England district of the CP for 30 years, 12 years in the chair, and nine years as district treasurer. She went on the Communist Party’s women’s delegation to the Soviet Union in 1963, led by Gladys Easton, the first to visit Siberia (Irkurtz and Novosibirsk) and Leningrad and returned early to Moscow to meet, at a party restaurant, Valentina Tereshkova, who had just returned from space, along with Yuri Gagarin and Valery Bykovsky. When she returned Ivy gave at least 50 report-back meetings. Several of these will have been to Coop Guilds. She was giving talks to Women’s Guilds by 1950. There are notes on the topics of ‘Economics of Cooperation’, which started with the background to the Rochdale Pioneers, and the eight principles. She gave a number of talks on women in the period from 1953-5 ‘Women through the Ages’, a history of women. A series of talks in 1956-7 on ‘New prospects for women’, dealing with women’s current position. There were about 28 Women’s Guilds in the 50s in the Bristol area, and in any one lecture year, which ran from October to May, she was doing about 20 talks or more, to a dozen guilds, with two or three topics on the go each year. Ivy was also very active in the peace movement, and a lot of her talks were on peace: the immorality of war; the vested interests of the arms industry; against the H bomb tests in 1957; discussions on Unilateral Disarmament, and Aldermaston marches. In 1968 she spoke to a rally in Bristol against the war in Vietnam in the following terms: “A real love of peace is something active. It is not passive. It is good, but of little practical value at this time, just to want peace, if you are not prepared to do something about it. As a woman and a co-operator of our city of Bristol, I am speaking to the people of Bristol. We women want peace and we women mean to have it.”

Jane Wyatt 1879 – 1969 Jane Wyatt, a school teacher, started her political life as a suffragette in Leicester. She joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in about 1908. She said one of the reasons was the unfair discrimination against women teachers. Not only were they getting less money, but were debarred from headships of any schools except infant and poorer Church junior schools. She took part in a wide variety of protests, including burning down Leicester railway station, but insisted the aim was never to injure people, only property. On one occasion, when Ramsay MacDonald was addressing a big meeting in Leicester from which suffragettes were barred, she borrowed a nurse’s uniform from a friend, and, disguised, made her way to the balcony. When MacDonald, who had promised the suffragettes help and then broken it, got up to speak she got up too and started heckling him: “Ramsay MacDonald, you have betrayed your trust!”. She threw down hundreds of leaflets which she had hidden under her nurse’s cloak. 220 | Red Lives

On marches she was regularly pelted with eggs and tomatoes by the crowd. She had a beating by a policeman with a truncheon more than once. As well as her women’s suffrage activities, she campaigned as a young teacher to raise the salaries of teachers and especially the principle of annual increments, of which women colleagues were deprived. She was at times chair and secretary of the Leicester branch of the National Union of Women Teachers, and a teacher representative on Leicester Education Committee. She joined the Communist Party in 1936, after hearing Harry Pollitt and Palme Dutt speak at Leicester Guild Hall.” When I heard them speak”, she said “I knew that disillusion of following work with the Labour Party, the Communist Party was just what I what I wanted” She was on Leicester City Committee, and amongst her responsibilities was early morning collection and distribution from the railway station of the Daily Worker, whilst it was banned by the distribution wholesalers. Jane moved from Leicester to Bristol in 1940, after her home was severely bombed. She joined the Russia Today Society, and became the Secretary. She was assistant secretary in the war-time Bristol Aid to Russia Council. During her time with Bristol Unity Players she was assistant producer, treasurer and secretary. When she was a mere 79 years old, Jane went with Dora Russell’s Peace Caravan across Europe in 1958. This was an all-women venture into Eastern Europe at the height of the Cold War, to break through the barrier of the cold war, protesting against nuclear weapons and campaigning for peace and freedom of the peoples of the whole world. She was the oldest participant! She was well into her 80s when she went on the last day leg of an Aldermaston march in London. She was walking at the side of the road, by the kerb, next to Jimmy Reid (Upper Clyde Shipbuilders). He asked her whether she would like to exchange places with him, to walk on the flat. “No, not at all” she answered, “the camber of the kerb is making the walking much easier.”

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Glossary Acas – Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service. AEU – Amalgamated Engineering Union until 2001. The workers in these industries are now represented by Unite AKEL – Founded in 1926 as the Communist Party of Cyprus, the The Progressive Party of Working People ANC – African National Congress ASLEF – Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen. AUEW – Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers 1971 – 1984. The workers in these industries are now represented by Unite BNP – British National Party, fascist political party BUF – British Union of Fascists – party led by Oswald Mosley CIO – Congress of Industrial Organisations. A federation of unions in the US & Canada from 1935 to 1955 CND – Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament COMINTERN – Communist International. International federation of communist and workers parties founded in 1919 and disbanded in 1943 COSA – Colliery Officials and Staffs Area, representing colliery workers not involved in manual labour within the NUM CPGB – Communist Party of Great Britain. The antecedent of the Communist Party of Britain CPUSA – Communist Party of the United States of America EETPU – Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications & Plumbing Union. Formed in 1994, the workers in these industries are now represented by Unite ETU – Electrical Trades Union. Merged in 1968 to form part of EETPU FBU – Fire Brigades Union FOC/MOC – Father/Mother of Chapel – a lay official usually in the print and paper industries GPMU – Graphical, Paper and Media Union until 2005. The workers in these industries are now represented by Unite ILP – Independent Labour Party ISTC – Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, now part of the union ‘Community’ IWW – Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). An international union founded in Chicago in 1905. KPD – Kommunistische Partei Deutchlands (Communist Party of Germany). A major political party between 1918 and April 1946 when it merged with the SPD to form the Socialist Unity Party. In the postwar period it was banned in West Germany in 1956. LLCM – Licentiate of the London College of Music LSE – London School of Economics MFGB – Miners Federation of Great Britain. Became the NUM in 1945 NATFHE – National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education NATSOPA – National Society of Operative Printers and Assistants. In 1966 merged with NUPBW to form the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT) 222 | Red Lives

NF – National Front, fascist political party NMM – National Minority Movement – a Communist Party supported movement of left wing forces in British unions, established in 1924, lasted until 1929 NUDAW – National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers. Superseded by USDAW in 1947 NUM – National Union of Mineworkers NUPBW – National Union of Printing, Bookbinding and Paper Workers. In 1966 merged with NATSOPA to form SOGAT NUPE – National Union of Public Employees. In 1993, merged with two other public sector unions, NALGO and COHSE, to form UNISON NUR – National Union of Railwaymen NUWM – National Unemployed Workers Movement. Established in 1921 by the Communist Party PROFINTERN – Red International of Labour Unions – trade union affiliate of the COMINTERN. RILU was founded in 1921 and disbanded in 1937 TASS – Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section. Founded in 1913 as the Association of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsmen. The workers in these industries are now represented by Unite TGWU, T&G – Transport and General Workers Union until 2007. The workers in these industries are now represented by Unite TUC – Trades Union Congress Thalmann Centuria – A battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War SACP – South African Communist Party SOE – Special Operations Executive. Formed in 1940 to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance, initially in occupied Europe SOGAT – Society of Graphical and Allied Trades STUC – Scottish Trades Union Congress SWMF – South Wales Miners Federation SWP – Socialist Workers Party U3A – University of the Third Age UCATT – Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians. In 2017 merged with Unite UN – United Nations UNISON – Public Service Union WCML – Working Class Movement Library WFTU – World Federation of Trade Unions. Founded October 1945

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Hackney Council leader John Kotz was no town-hall bureaucrat. His politics were drawn from a deep well of class consciousness, strengthened by a firm internationalism, militant anti-racism and anti-fascism and an enduring loyalty to the Labour Party. £9.95 (+£2 p&p) 132 pp illustrated.

This pioneering new biography tells the story of Phil Piratin, key figure in the Battle of Cable Street, Communist MP for Stepney Mile End in the postwar General Election that swept Labour to office on a radical manifesto. £14.95 (+£1.50 p&p), 256pp illustrated

Bob Cooney (1907-1984) was a prominent anti-fascist and communist in Aberdeen who joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. Published for the first time, Proud Journey is his memoir of those turbulent times £5 (+£2 p&p), 124 pages.

The definitive biography of the Irish revolutionary leader, leader of the Citizen Army and the 1916 Easter Rising and murdered by the British Army. By C Desmond Greaves edited by Anthony Coughlan and published in partnership with the Connolly Association £11.50 €10 (plus £2 €2.5 p+p)

Miner’s MP, militant socialist and supporter of the Soviet Union Stephen Owen Davies was one of the 20th century’s great rebels. Robert Griffiths suthoritative biography tells the story of his life and times. 360 page 20 illustrations £19.50 + £2.80 p+p €21 + €4.50 p+p

Mercia MacDermott’s Lone red poppy, is the first substantial and authoritative account in English of the life of Dimiter Blagoev, worker’s leader, founder of the first marxist circle in prerevolutionary Russia and of the Bulgarian Communist Party. £14.95 (+£1.50 p&p), 252 pages 32 illustrations

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Beyond the Blockade Education in Cuba

Edited by Gawain Little & Malcolm Richards with Aretha Green & Phil Yeeles

manifesto

First published for the 50th anniversary of the Great October Socilaist Revolution, this book documents the immediate and lasting effects on Britain of the events in revolutionary Russia. Bulk orders over 20 copies post free £8 (plus £1.50 p&p)

Latest from John Foster When, close to a century ago, the labour movement in Britain prepared to take industrial action in defence of the young Soviet Union, the ruling class was terrified, as were the labour leaders.. £4 (plus £1.50 p&p)

Cuba’s education system as seenfirst hand by dozens of British teachers in a series of study tours to the socialist island. £7.50+£1.50 p&p £5+£1.50 p&p concession price for NEU members (Quote membership number)

Spain’s “Left” Critics by Daily Worker editor JR Campbell and George Orwell and Spain by Bill Alexander, who was commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigade gives a unique insight into the Spanish Civil War and the fight against fascism. £4 per copy plus £2 p+p Bulk orders over 20 copies post free

Marx’s Das Kapital and capitalism today by Communist Party general secretary Robert Griffiths sets the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx in today’s reality and the insights these provide for understanding contemporary capitalism in crisis. 90pp Illustrated £10 €11 (plus £2 €2.5 p&p)

By Andrew Murray this book sets the Ukraine crisis in its global and local context, and draws the lessons needed for the anti-war movement as great power conflict returns to Europe and threatens a new cold war or worse. 138 pp illustrated £11.95 (+£1.50 p&p)

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manifesto

CPB

Red LivesMary Davis Communists should go back to Russia! Right? This compendium of biographies demonstrates that revolutionaries are internationalists, but ‘Made in Britain.’ Read here the story of a communist who has a locomotive named after him and another who has a Fisheries Protection Vessel bearing his name for services to the community. Find out about nurse No: 75812, described by the Daily Express as the “25 year old matron behind the Morata front”, who went on to work with Attlee to create the NHS. Find out about a woman communist international hockey star who became a pilot, a communist train driver who had to run home ‘to put his teeth in’ when told he was meeting Picasso. Discover a daring-do champion rally-cross motorbike rider, who died volunteering for Liberty in Spain. There’s even a story about a union official, sent on a fact-finding tour of the Caribbean by the British government who ended up staying with Raul Castro and a Scotsman who had an entire estate named after him where every house bears his surname. There are men and women, young and veteran, black and white, those who

pioneered LGBT political campaigning, a miner who formed the first ‘flying pickets’. Some worked clandestinely against apartheid in South Africa, others defied Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands. Read of a district council that had a communist majority throughout the 1930s! Or a musician who has 29 ‘albums’ on Spotify and another who had an MI5 file opened on him, aged 17! There’s the tale of a scientist who saved tens of thousands of lives and a communist decorated for organising the evacuation of children from bomb threatened cities. You can read about a Welsh woman mayoress in Red Rhondda and a miners’ leader who is buried under the Scottish parliament out of respect for his support for a workers’ parliament in Edinburgh. Yes, communism is British as well as Russian, Chinese or Cuban. In every country throughout the world, it is home spun and you can read here the contribution of a thousand acts of selfless devotion to a cause which starts and ends with the elevation of working people and their liberation from the shackles of capitalism.

Manifesto Press acknowledges the support of the Communist Party Heritage Programme in publishing this book.

ISBN 978-1-907464-44-7 www.manifestopress.org.uk £9.99 www.communistparty.or.uk