December 30, 2004
A compendium of Communist biographies
A work in progress, this is a collection of obituaries and biographies of members of the British Communist Party, a selection of around 100 names from a file of a large number of cuttings and notes collected over twenty years and an increasing number of biographries submitted by readers. The relatively famous and the not so famous are included. Readers' suggestions of changes and additions continue to be welcomed.
A compendium of Communist biographies
This is a rather esoteric collection of (mostly) obituaries and life histories of members of the British Communist Party. No special objective has been applied to selecting names, rather they constitute an electronic selection from a file of a large number of cutting collected over twenty years. Some of the life stories were garnered from biographies and memoirs. These references were collected to satisfy my interest in the personalities of Party history and a wistful feeling that one day I would in some way help to retain their memories.
I have applied no sectarian exclusion. By no means all of them stayed with the Party, inclusion is only justified by a period of significant membership and by the fact that the individuals are mostly deceased or extremely elderly! The relatively famous and the not so famous are included. The source of the material is credited where this was noted by me at the time of collection of the obituary, although in many cases I have edited out what I felt to be un-political, subjective personal asides but not relevant personal information.
The project is, as they say, a work in progress. Since I began the admittedly strange and obsessive collection of obituaries of the CPGB and CPB, other, academic, initiatives have begun to focus on Communist biographies. Nonetheless, I feel there is some value in a public airing of the details of these remarkable lives.
The only observation I make is that it is evident that the British Party attracted an extraordinary range of talented individuals. If the collection does no more than further an understanding that such individuals were by no means psychologically flawed, a theory beloved of cold war warriors, then some purpose is served. Should readers have suggestions of changes and additions, I should be only too delighted to admit these, with no political editing and, o couse, credited them where requested.
May Abbot
Weaver from age of 14, member of YCL and CPGB from an early age. Full time secretary of the Rossendale branch of the Textile Workers Union. Member of Distircit Committee of CPGB. Husband was Sid Abbott. Died in 2001.
Morning Star November 19th 2001
Ted Ainley
Secretary of the Communist Party's cultural committee in 1960s, he was for many years editor of the Party's weekly journal World News (later called Comment).
Born in Manchester of a working-class family he, along with his brothers. Ben and David, were associated with' the Communist Party from its earliest days. His brother David was secretary of the Morning Star Co-operative Society. Ted joined the Young Communist League at its foundation in 1922 and the Communist Party in 1923.
Ted Ainley was a member of the executive committee of the YCL for many years and its. organiser first in Glasgow and then in the North East in the late 1920s. Soon after the Daily Worker was founded, he joined its editorial staff and worked on the paper for a number of years. He was general secetary of the Association of Scientific Workers during World War II but had to relinquish this position because of ill health.
But it was as a speaker, especially as a teacher and educator, that he became known widely inside the Party. A classic worker-intellectual who mastered Marxist theory, especially economics, the hard way. He wrote many articles on this subject, edited the' Communist Party's Economic Bulletin for a long period and made himself an expert on the Common Market. His talks and lectures on Marxist theory were reputably laced with great wit, and he was in very great demand as a tutor. He had wide intellectual interests, was a leading representative of the Communist Party' in the 1960s dialogues with Christians. In the last few years of his life held a position in the' education department of the Party. He was 64 when he died in 1968 (?).
Upload a file of the foregoing text, complete with a photgraph of Ted Ainley, scanned from the undated cutting which is the source for this entry.
Morning Star - undated cutting, probably 1968 (possibly 1967)
Bill Alexander
Bill Alexander was born into a large family, his father being a carpenter on 13th June 1910 Ringwood, Hampshire. He studied at Reading University where he secured a Chemistry degree, on graduating became an industrial chemist.
Alexander was known most especially as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), He was Commander of the British battalion of the International Brigade and a Communist Party member to his death in July 2000, by virtue of his CPB membership after many years in the CPGB.
Bill Alexander pictured in his youth, in Spain:
Described as “morally and physically tough, but a kind and caring family man" (Colin Williams). In the post war period, he was Assistant General Secretary of the CPGB. In retirement, he was mostly concerned with his role as Secretary of the International Brigade Association. In this capacity, he was associated with a project to establish brigade memorials in several parts of Britain, details of which he collated in a book.
He was also an architect of the transformation of the IBA from a dwindling band of survivors of the civil war into an association of those who identified with it as an anti-fascist historical event. An opponent of revisionism in the CPGB in the 1980s.
Bill Alexander in later years:
Morning Star 26.7.00
Robin Page Arnot
Robin Page Arnot was born in 1890 at Greenock. His father was the editor of the `Greenock Telegraph’ and `Clyde Shipping Gazette’. He went to Glasgow University where he helped to form the University Socialist Federation in 1912.
Robin Page Arnot was closely connected with the Labour Research Department from its beginnings. In 1912 the Fabian Beatrice Webb had established a Committee of Enquiry into "The control of industry in the state of tomorrow". One of the volunteers attracted to the project was Arnot. The committee soon turned into the Fabian Research Department and in 1914 Arnot became its full-time secretary, a post he held until 1926.
Arnot was called up to fight in the war in 1916. He refused to go, being opposed to war and was imprisoned for two years in Wakefield as a conscientious objector. When he was released in 1918 he returned to his former post as Secretary of the Research Department which had by then changed its name to the Labour Research Department, having become an independent 'fact-finding body for the trade union and labour movement'.
In 1919 the miners demanded higher wages, shorter hours and nationalisation of the mines. The government established a Committee of Enquiry and the Miners' Federation asked the LRD for help. Arnot assembled evidence on their behalf and publicised the miners' cause. Arnot, together with H H Slesser, the Federation legal advisor, drafted the Mines Nationalisation Bill which was presented to the Royal Commission set up by the government. During the railway strike later that year, Arnot and the LRD organised publicity for the railwaymen.
Arnot was one of the founder members of the Communist Party in 1920, as was his second wife, Olive. Robin Page Arnot was also a member of the Party's Central Committee and as such was arrested under the 1797 Incitement to Mutiny Act in 1925 in the run up to the General Strike and spent six months in jail. He was released on the eve of the strike and helped to form the Northumberland and Durham Joint Strike Committee. He later returned to the LRD as Director of Research and wrote a book on the general strike.
Arnot was the first Principal of the Marx Memorial Library from 1933 and from 1949-1975 he wrote a famous 6-volume series on the history of the miners. He was also the author of a two-volume `Short History of the Russian Revolution’ (1937). He was elected to the LRD's Executive in 1938 and was re-elected every year until 1976 when he was made Honorary President. He was also a contributor and working editor for 'Labour Monthly', the journal founded by Palme Dutt, until its last issue in March 1981. Arnot died in 1986 aged 95.
Sources: 'Labour Research' June 1986, 'Morning Star' May 19 1986, University of Wales Swansea LIS Archives
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Honor Arundel
National Agricultural Workers Union activist and a regular contributor to the Country Standard, she was Communist Party candidate in 1958 for the West Sterlingshire, Scotland, constituency.
Michael Walker
Jack Askins
Joined YCL in the 1930s. Served in the army during the war, afterwards became the Industrial Organiser for the Lancashire and Cheshire District of the CPGB. Later worked a conductor on Manchester Corporation, then a driver, becoming active in the T&G. After victimisation worked as a lorry driver. Major contributor to the fight against bans and proscriptions against Communists in the T&G. In the 1960s, was a strong supporter of Vietnamese people and worked tirelessly with his wife, Betty, to raise money for Medical Aid for Vietnam. Onset of multiple sclerosis did not dampen his zeal.
Married Dr Joan McMichael in 1985, whose outstanding work on Medical Aid for Vietnam was known throughout the world. Awarded the Order of Friendship by the Vietnamese Government in 1985. Opponent of revisionism in the CPGB. Died aged 67 in 1987.
Download a file with a photograph of Jack Askins scanned from the Morning Star cutting from which this entry is based, including the above text.
Morning Star January 2nd 1987
Glen Baker
Active Communist since he joined around 16 years of age, Glen Baker was born in Ipswich. He was closely involved with the cultural magazine Artery in the 1960s and 1970s. Long active in CARDRI, the body based in Britain defending progressive Iraqis against the repression of the Saddam Hussein regime, he was also a member of the executive of the National Council of Liberation.
A member of CPSA from his early working days, he was later much involved in PCS, the civil service unions. A regular book reviewer for the Morning Star arts page, Glen Baker died in August 2005, aged 57.
Morning Star
Kay Beauchamp
Kay was born in 1899 and had been a teacher. She was on St Pancras Council of Action during the General Strike. As Managing Director of the Daily Worker, she had been jailed for contempt of court when the paper described the conviction of NUWCM leader Wal Hannington as a 'frame-up'. She was later a local Councillor for the Party in Finsbury and served as International Secretary of the Party. She also worked in the party’s Education Department and later edited Liberation’s magazine. Married to Tony Gilbert, both she and he died in 1992.
John Bain
Brian Behan
Born November 10th 1926, he became a well-known Irish playwright and novelist and inveterate self-publicist. Brian Behan was the younger brother of the more famous Brendan. Their mother had been a courier to James Connolly during the 1916 rising. On emigrating to London to find work on the Festival of Britain construction site as a bricklayer, Brian Behan became an active trades unionist and a member of the Communist Party. His activities saw him briefly in prison twice; once in 1951 arising from a dispute on the Festival site, and again in 1958, after a dispute on the nearby Shell Centre site. He became a member of the CPGB EC very quickly but left in 1956, after Hungary, to join the Socialist Labour League (the later Workers Revolutionary Party) as its secretary, although this lasted only a few short years too. After a work injury, he left bricklaying and entered university as a mature student in 1969. Subsequently, after a teaching course, he lectured in media studies at the London College of Printing from 1973 to 1990. He died on November 2nd 2002.
Guardian 5th November 2002
Nan Berger
Born on March 8th 1914, near Manchester to a prosperous family, familiarly known to family and friends as `Nancie’, she was married to Roland Berger. Moved to London in 1935, where she and her LSE student brother, Peter, both joined the Communist Party. In 1939, she attended the League of American Writers in the US. In 1940, she joined the Bank of England, promptly set up a staff committee for temporary clerks and found herself summarily dismissed. Her subsequent career as a civil servant in the statistical office of the Ministry of Fuel and Power, eased by the changed circumstances of the later wartime period, was considerably more successful. Though a low graded worker in the Ministry, she developed a statistically valid and rational plan for assuring the distribution of fuel with equity.
When aged only 33, she was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours’ list of 1948, an incredible achievement, especially given the looming frigidity of the Cold War. She maintained a firm belief in Marxism but allowed her status as a card-carrying member to lapse some time in this period. Thereafter, she was a free-lance journalist, for much of the rest of her life. She was editor of “Hospitality”, a hotel and catering management journal and, more solidly, author of a book on the educational and social value of school meals.
In 1962, Berger joined Helen Joseph on a trip to make contact with banned women activists in South Africa. Nan Berger was co-author of “Woman – Fancy or Free” (1962) and a Penguin handbook on women’s rights in 1973. She died on July 16th 1998.
Guardian 27th July 1998
Reg Birch
Born 7th June 1914 and grew up in Kilburn, north west London. His father was a small jobbing builder, who died in 1929. Reg left school to become an apprentice toolmaker and immediately joined the AEU. He became increasingly active and then prominent in the London North District of the union during the 1930s, leading to his joining the Communist Party in 1939.
In 1941, he was already an Acting Steward in Swift’s scale-making factory in the Park Royal area (the heart of the engineering world of west London, which Birch became particularly associated with), when a dispute broke out for the reinstatement of a sacked convenor. Despite the wartime restrictions of Order No. 1305, preventing industrial disputes, the Works Committee at Swift’s called for a “complete holiday” for all unless reinstatement occurred. In the subsequent legal case, Birch defended himself, but leniency was in any case applied all round, for reasons of politics.
That year, he was elected President of the North London AEU, a position he retained until be became a full-timer for the union. In 1942, he began working at Landis & Gyr, also in the Park Royal area. Within two years he was sacked and then reinstated as solidarity action was undertaken. He became a member of the prestigious National Committee of the AEU in 1943 and was repeatedly re-elected up until 1960, when he became a fulltime official. Immediately the war was over, he secured employment at Havilland Engines and was there without a break to 1960, he was also convenor of shop stewards for all that time from 1946.
He visited the USSR on an AEU delegation in 1946 and Hungary the same year. Whilst he subsequently claimed to have been an opponent of the British Road to Socialism from 1950, he served on the Communist Party Executive Committee from 1957 and was especially supportive of the line that backed Soviet intervention against a counter-revolution.
Birch first contested the Presidency of the AEU against Bill Carron in 1956 but lost decisively. In 1960, he was elected Divisional Organiser of London North. He again ran for the Presidency, unsuccessfully, in 1964 but this time the result was much narrower. Birch was elected in membership ballots an AUEW (the new name of the union) delegate to the TUC in 1966,1967 and 1968.
A secure base for his leadership ambitions was won when he was elected to the AEU Executive Committee, a fulltime post, for the London and South East seat in 1966, a seat he retained until his retirement in 1979.
In 1967, the Communist Party’s Engineering Advisory split 24 votes to 16 on the question of who to support for the Presidency. The majority favoured backed former Party member, Hugh Scanlon, as a contribution to building a broad left alliance and as a more likely winner. Events proved the majority absolutely right, but not before Birch had stood as a candidate against Party policy, although his vote trailed very badly indeed.
Expulsion from the Communist Party was inevitable and now Birch’s unexpurgated sectarianism came out for all to see. He was agitating for the foundation of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) in September 1967. In the following year, he and others had formed this party and Birch was CPB M-L Chair from 1968 to 1985.
Notwithstanding this shift in direction, Birch’s west London base and EC seat gave him a big enough role in the 1970s. During this period, he was Secretary of the trend-setting trade union side of the Ford NNC, forging a reputation for crafty yet witty negotiating techniques and was a member of the TUC General Council from 1975 to 1979. In retirement, he was solely concerned with the activities of his party, which never numbered more than a couple of hundred at the very most and was much reduced following his retirement from the front rank. Birch died on 1st June 1994.
“Reg Birch: Engineer, Trade Unionist and Communist” Will Podmore, Bellman Books (2004)
Charles Bornat
Bornat was a Coventry based architect in the post-war periuod, associated with the progressive development of the rebiuilt city. A long term member of CPGB, he was born in 1911 and died on the 17th July 2000, aged 91.
Guardian obituary July 2000
Dave Bowman.
Born on March 6th 1913, Dave Bowman first became involved in Communist politics in the 1930s. For most of the three decades after the Second World War, he was the focal point of the Communist Party’s considerable influence in and around Dundee. In 1945, he refused to run as the Communist parliamentary candidate for Dundee East against John Strachey out of sympathy for the man and his previous politics. This was a decision that embittered his partner in the Dundee West seat, Krishna Menon, a future foreign minister in Nehru’s government. Nonetheless, Bowman did contest the seat on seven occasions in all, unsuccessfully so, despite the strong Communist tradition in Dundee.
An engine driver, who followed in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather, he was an activist for the National Union of Railwaymen rather than ASLEF. Bowman was, like many railway workers, highly proud of his industry. He himself drove the fastest steam locomotive in the world, the Mallard, in its prime years and, during the war, he was sufficiently regarded as a loco driver to drive Winston Churchill and the Polish general, Sikorski, on a special mission to Dundee.
Bowman had four three-year terms on the NUR executive from 1953 to 1974. (The union operates a rule debarring continuous service on the EC, requiring periods of absence in between terms of office.) He eventually became NUR President between 1975 and 1977, at the time this was a highly influential position of what was then an exceedingly large union.
It is widely conceded that Bowman would have been elected President in the 1960s, were it not for his Party membership. Arising from the anti-communist bans and proscriptions of the later 1940s, the union’s rulebook stipulated that its President had to be a delegate to the Labour Party and be eligible to sit on its national executive. Clearly, as member of the Communist Party, he would be unable to fulfil this stipulation. Despite all this, Bowman was only narrowly defeated in the 1958 presidential election, so widely was he admired.
At this stage, unlike the campaigns to lift the bans on Communists in other unions, there was little interest in applying pressure for the removal of this minor and esoteric constitutional limitation. There were suspicions that this experience wore down Bowman’s otherwise staunch commitment to Communism. He took issue with the calculatedly nuanced position of the Party’s executive committee after the 1968 Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia and allowed himself to fail to be re-carded in 1970. His departure from the Communist Party was marked by considerable press attention, negatively directed at the Party. Later, he quietly joined the Labour Party and was thus a member according to rule when he was finally elected President at the last possible moment before he retired from work.
As such, he was intimately involved with the 1975 national rail pay talks. The NUR had put in a 30% pay claim in the wake of the successful outcome of NUM’s 1974 dispute that led to the fall of Heath’s government and the election of one lead by Harold Wilson. With a strike looming, Bowman and the NUR General Secretary, Sid Weighell, were called to Downing Street. Although they called the strike off, it was with their demands more or less met. As President of the NUR, he was disappointed in his hopes to overcome the skill sectionalism that had marked out the train drivers union, ASLEF, preventing three generations of Bowmans from joining it due to their political commitment to all-grades industrial unionism. Dave Bowman died on March 3rd 1996, aged 82.
Guardian date contemporary to Bowman’s death
Clive Branson
Born in 1907. At the age of 23 he exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy. Joined ILP c1927, CPGB in 1932. Member of British Battalion of International Brigade and spent 8 months in fascist concentration camp.
Organised IB convoy on his return at the end of 1938, collecting over £5,000 that was used to send food and medical supplies to Spain
Painted Battersea street scene during the blitz, exhibiting for Artists International Association
Conscripted into the Royal Armoured Corps in 1941 and sent to India in 1942. Killed in action on the Arakan Front during the fighting for the Ngankedenk Pass on February 25th 1944.
Details extracted from a variety of sources
Noreen Branson
Born on May 16th 1910, into a wealthy and aristocratic family in London, she was a skilful singer and joined the Bach choir in 1929. In early 1931, she took part in an East End charity concert, where she met Clive Branson, a painter and poet. They agreed to marry within only a few days and their life together centred on politics. Significantly, their artist daughter was called Rosa.
Initially members of the ILP, they later joined the Communist Party and Noreen the Co-operative Women’s Guild. They lived in the poorer parts of Chelsea and Battersea
Late in 1934, Harry Pollitt asked her to take money and documents to the then illegal Communist Party of India in Bombay. Her social background was perfect cover. During one hunt for a Comintern messenger, she was dancing with the chief of police during a new year’s ball.
She attended the 7th world congress of the Comintern in Moscow and spent several months engaged in the high risk task as a courier to underground parties in Europe.
Clive Branson went to Spain, as a volunteer for the International Brigade, where he was captured and spent eight months as a prisoner. In January 1938, whilst her husband was held in a fascist camp, Noreen began to work as a researcher for Pollitt. She then very quickly moved over to the Labour Research Department. Having been named in the deeds of Marx House as its purchaser, she was also deeply involved in its establishment and was its Vice-President up to her death.
From 1938, she worked with LRD for the next 65 years! (She was editor of `Social Service News’ from 1941.) She became the editor of its journal, `Labour Research’, for 28 years from 1944 to 1972 and continued to be associated with the group for the rest of her life. (Social Service News, which she continued to be editor of simultaneously with Labour Research, merged with the latter in 1950.)
During the Second World War, her husband, Clive, was killed in Burma in 1944 and, the next year, she published his letters as “A British Soldier in India”.
She was Secretary of St Pancras Trades Council for a while from 1947, and was a delegate from the clerical and administrative workers’ union.
Member of the Communist Historians Group, Branson was a serious and published author. She was writer of a book on the struggles in Poplar, in East London, from 1919-25 and on `Britain in the Nineteen Thirties’, the latter with Margot Heinemann and two volumes of the history of the CPGB covering 1927 to 1951
As an LRD specialist, she concentrated on issues relating to social services. Her first personally written book, “Room at the Bottom” (1960) was a critique of the welfare state, but was published under the name of Katherine Hood. She also co-authored a book with Roger Simon, under the same name (he was James Harvey!). Noreen Branson died aged 93 on 25th October 2003 “still convinced of the need for a socialist transformation of society”. [Quote from Lionel Fulton in the Morning Star.]
Socialist History Society leaflet, Labour Research December 2003, Guardian (undated) October/November 2003, Morning Star 8th November 2003
Frank Bright
Born in Bideford, North Devon, around 1892, Bright went to Ynyshire in South Wales in 1911 to work in the Standard Pit. He became an active member of the Miners Unofficial Reform Movement and later a leading light of the Rhondda Communist Party.
During the run up to the General Strike, he stated that "far more important than the fight for wages is the struggle for power"; he was imprisoned during the course of that momentous year, one of several periods of imprisonment arising from his political activities.
He became Manchester District Organiser for the Communist Party in January 1927 and, in August 1930, went to the Lenin School in Moscow, well known as a "diligent exponent of Marxism" and a good platform speaker.
In 1935, he became Liverpool Communist Party Organiser and, in 1939, the Lancashire District Organiser, working with two other full-time organisers; Mick Jenkins (who had been active in the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers) and Bill Whittaker (an activist in the Colne Twisters & Drawers Association) and Sam Blackwell (Manchester AEU).
Bright had worked up a good reputation amongst the cotton workers in Lancashire. But he suffered from poor health and returned to Bideford, Devon and, from 1942-1943, was the Party’s Organiser for Devon and Cornwall. In 1942 he was concerned and alert enough to highlight the hostility conveyed during local WEA evening classes to the Soviet Union but he was to die relatively young only the following year.
Michael Walker
Ern Brooks
Born in 1911 in Manchester the son of a spinner. Printer’s apprentice, who later studied at Manchester Art School, where one of his fellow pupils was L S Lowry. Brooks was a landscape painter, of the modernist school, who exhibited regularly in galleries in London and Manchester in the 1940s and 1950s.
Married in the 1903s to Barbara Niven, for some 20 years the organiser of the PPPS Fighting Fund until she died in 1972. She was herself a painter and both were members of the Manchester Society of Modern Painters and the CPGB. They were also involved in the Manchester Theatre Union, launched by Joan Littlewood and Ewan McColl. Brooks designed backcloths for Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in London.
Both lived for a time with their friend, the poet, Hugh McDiarmid in the Outer Hebrides immediately before the war. After the war, they moved to London where Niven began work for the Daily Worker.
In 1949 Brooks was an official artist, recording the reconstruction of post-war Yugoslavia. Commissioned to paint morals, including one for the Festival of Britain. He earned a living as a free-lance graphic designer. Although his linocuts were freely used by the Daily Worker as fund raising objects! He was a member of the exhibitions’ committee of the Artists International Association. He and Niven were close friends of John Berger. Brooks died in Halifax in 1993.
Morning Star 12th December 2000
Les Burt
As a Barnado boy, he had little formal education, was passionate about self-improvement, reading avidly. An electrician by trade, he went to Yugoslavia on a youth brigade after the Second World War, working to develop modern roads. In the 1950s, he worked at Kodak in Harrow, selling the Daily Worker at the factory gate. He joked that this was the only way to keep his job because, ''if I was sacked, it would be seen as victimisation."
After a period as full-time north-west London area organiser for the Communist Party, he also worked at Willesden bus garage and at Thrupp & Maderley coachworks. He was a candidate for the party in elections in Brent, coining his own slogan "Put your shirt on Burt'! At one point, he polled over 3,000 votes. Member of both CP executive and London DC for many years. From 1984 to 1997, he was Treasurer and a member of the management committee of the PPPS, the co-operative society that publishes the Morning Star. Involved in the Watford pensioners’ movement in retirement, Burt also served in a major campaign to prevent the closure of the four West Hertfordshire hospitals. He died aged 80 in 2001, a lifelong communist.
Download a file containing this text with a photograph of Les Burt
Morning Star 10th August 2001
Dr Donald Cameron
Edinburgh Communist, for many years, senior lecturer in community medicine at Edinburgh University. He was born in 1921 into an Edinburgh family with strong socialist convictions. Served in India as a medical officer during the war and, as a young doctor, he campaigned for the creation of the NHS in 1948. In the 1950s, Dr Cameron advised on the development of health services and urban redevelopment in Edinburgh.
He was an active member of the Socialist Medical Association and, as well as writing numerous scientific papers, he contributed to the review of Scotland's health for the Red Paper on Scotland, which was edited by Gordon Brown in 1975. An active Communist throughout his life, Dr Cameron became the Edinburgh branch secretary at the re-establishment of the Communist Party of Britain in 1988.
Morning Star 24th July 2003
Ernie Cant
Communist Party foundation member, died at his Nottingham home, aged 90 in 1982. By that stage, he was one of the few remaining Communists who had taken part in the discussions in 1920 that led to the foundation of the Communist Party. He had been a leading propagandist of the British Socialist Party, addressing meetings countrywide and contributing many articles to its paper, “The Call”.
He worked actively alongside trade union leader Will Thorne in the forerunner to the present day GMB. During the First World War, his anti-war activities landed him in prison many times. Not long after the foundation of the Communist Party, Ernie Cant became its first London district organiser and, in 1925, along with Harry Pollitt, William Gallagher and nine other leading Communists, he was sent to prison when the Tory government of the day was preparing for the 1926 General Strike.
During the miners' lockout that followed, he toured South Wales, speaking at meetings. For a time he did international duty with the International Class War Prisoners Aid Movement, being based in the Soviet Union and he also worked in the Organisation Department of the Communist International. Later when he moved to Nottingham, as a party organiser, he helped lay the foundations on which the East Midlands district of the party was built. As a lifelong co-operator, he served for some time on the management committee of the Nottingham Co-operative Society.
Morning Star undated cutting circa 1982
Christopher Caudwell
Born Christopher St. John Sprigg in Putney on October 20th 1907, he was educated at Benedictine School, Ealing. Aged 16 ½, he began work as a reporter for the Yorkshire Observer and stayed there for three years. Returning to London, he joined a firm of aeronautical publishers, as an editor. Whilst there, he invented an infinitely variable gear, the designs of which were published in a technical journal. His attracted a great deal of interest from experts in the field. Before he was 25 he had published no less than five aeronautical textbooks, seven detective novels, along with poems and short stories.
Christopher Caudwell:
Under the name of Christopher Caudwell, he published his first serious novel, `This My Hand’ in May 1935. Over the preceding half year, he had begun an intensive study of Marxism, leading to the draft of his work `Illusion and Reality’, a study of the objective basis to poetry. He moved to Poplar and joined the Communist Party in late 1935.
After a period in France, to observe the work of the popular Front, he returned to writing. As a key figure in the Poplar branch of the Party, he was involved in raising funds for an ambulance for Spain in November 1936 and Caudwell drove it there himself. After handing it over, he joined the International Brigade.
He became a machine gun instructor, was delegate to a group political section of the Brigade and joint editor of a wall newspaper.
Caudwell, as posterity knows him, was killed in action at Jarama on February 12th 1937. With great bravery, he remained alone covering the retreat of his outnumbered section, with Moorish troops only 30 yards away, firing a machine gun to the last.
Four of his books were posthumously published, `Illusion and Reality’, `Studies in a Dying Culture’, `Poems’ and `The Crisis in Physics’.
Details extracted from a biographical note by “GT” in “Illusion and Reality” Lawrence and Wishart (1946).
Alex Clark
Born January 2nd 1922, Clarke was a miner in his youth and joined the Communist Party in 1942 in Larkhill, Lanarkshire. He was Branch Secretary of Rigside CPGB branch from 1948 and became the full time Area Secretary of Stirling and Clackmannanshire CP in 1953. 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. From January 1969, he was the Scottish full time official for the acting union, Equity. Clarke was the recipient of the Glasgow Lord Provost’s award for public service in 1987 but refused the OBE in 1995.
Details from Clark’s own story in Scottish Labour History Review Winter 1997/Spring 1998
Paxton Chadwick
Well known artist and Communist, Paxton Chadwick was born on 4th September 1903 at Fallowfield, Manchester. As a child he showed great talent as an artist and went on to attend Manchester Art College in the 1920s. After leaving art college, he set up as a commercial artist in a studio first in Manchester, then in 1931 to Chelsea in London and from London’s west end to Welwyn Garden City.
Chadwick was then offered a part time post as art teacher at the pioneering and controversial Summerhill School at Leiston in Suffolk.
At Summerhill, he came into to contact with a number of teachers in the Communist Party, notably Vivien Jackson (herself the daughter of a prominent CP writer and printer) Max Morton, Richard Goodman and Cyril Eyre (who had joined the CP at Oxford University in 1933).
In 1934 a contingent of Hunger marchers passed through Leiston, the reception organised primarily by this group led to a crowd of over 1,000 welcoming the hunger marchers into Leiston. This in a town with effectively no history of radicalism or trade unionism.
Indeed, for many years following this event Leiston became maybe not quite a “little Moscow” but never the less a beacon for progress in a sea of East Anglian darkness, known throughout the region as “That communist place” according to John Saville “a tribute to the dedication, energy and intelligence of the quite small group of political activist”
The progressive forces being helped by left wing Labour activists such as Cllr Harry Silf of Stowmarket, Alec Brown an author, Trevor David of The National council of Labour Colleges as well as securing the support of non conformist in the town including Methodist preacher Tom Morgan (Chairman of Leiston Left Book Club) and a number of local Quakers.
By 1935 Chadwick had joined the Leiston Communist Party. The local Communist Party threw itself into “popular front” work encouraging local left wingers in the Labour party to join with the CP in defeating the well entrenched Conservative majority on the local council. The almost unique unity of the CP and Labour in Leiston was to be a feature for many years to come.
The focus for the Leiston popular front work would be the Leiston Leader, the first edition of which was produced in January 1936.
During the war Chadwick was called up into the anti-aircraft arm of the Royal Artillery where he continued to carry out council work and produce a wall newspaper for his unit. Chadwick ended the war as a Captain.
As chairman of Leiston council, he introduced a regular “open nights ”where electors could quiz councillors”, secured affordable housing, clean water, fought to abuses in the private rented sector, fought for improved war pensions and led the campaign to save the local Grammar school.
He also gave support to the annual Co-operative fete, Leiston thereafter could always be relied upon to secure a sizable Communist and left Labour vote and it was not uncommon to see Chadwick’s red and white Communist posters in house windows throughout the town.
His second wife was Lee Bosence (Chadwick) also became a Communist councillor, other Communist councillors who stood in Leiston included Daphne Oliver, Sydney Woodroffe, Bill Wellford, Ernest Ling. (Max Morton a Communist farmer was elected as a communist councillor for Pentlow Parish council, nr Sudbury)
But the CP’s electoral work was hampered by its size, for example in 1958 council election the Leiston Communist party could rely on just sixteen members of whom five were pensioners. Help had to be secured by the District Secretary, Neville Carey, from Ipswich and there was only one car (one more than the Labour Party) to help get electors to the polls. Chadwick himself stood for election last in 1960 and only narrowly missing out on being elected.
Paxton Chadwick was a first class artist and produced numerous nature drawings for Penguin books from 1949 until his death. He died in Whitworth hospital, London on 6th September 1961and his funeral address was given by Communist Party General Secretary, John Gollan.
Michael Walker
Ben Cohen
Born 1910, Cohen was the long-term branch secretary of the local Communist Party on Harold Hill Estate Hill estate, at the eastern end of Romford, Essex, an overspill for London. Ben Cohen, it is said, played a greater role in local campaigns in this part of Essex than any other individual. A constant presence for decades, he both instigated and supported various incarnations of the Tenants’ Association. A school headmaster by profession, he had a strong personal following amongst the tenants’ association, of which he was chair, and also local Labour Party activists. He was Press Officer to community campaign in May 1952 when nearly 200 children were involved in a ‘school strike’. Parents were unhappy at a free school bus being withdrawn. Cohen was a stalwart of local politics for nearly three decades until his untimely death in a plane crash in Havana, Cuba in 1977.
Source: www.haroldhill.org
John Cornford
Rupert John Cornford 27th December 1915 and died on 28th December 1936 was an English poet and CPGB member. He was born in Cambridge and educated at Stowe School and Trinity College Cambridge. As an undergraduate, reading history, he joined the CPGB. He was two or three years younger than the group of Trinity College communists that included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and James Klugmann. Someone else who would play a major part in his life, was fellow communist Margot Heinemann the future historian. They were lovers, and he addressed both poems and surviving letters to her.
John Cornford:
From 1933 he was directly involved in Communist Party work, in London, and becoming close to Harry Pollit. During the the war in defence of the Spanish Republic he both recruited in Cambridge for the International Brigade , and fought himself: firstly though he was in in Aragon in August 1936, with a POUM unit which he found politically trying. Returning home to Britain he returned to Spain in December. He was killed at Lopera , near Madrid. Although his poetic opus was relatively small, due primarily to his youth, certain poems strongly suggest he had the potential of poetic greatness.
John Corcoran
Stewart Crawford
Convenor of the Yarrow shipbuilding yard in Glasgow. He died on the 4th of July 2000, aged 51.
Crawford served his apprenticeship as an electrician at Yarrow’s and, with the exception of a brief period in the 1960s, worked there for all of his working life. For the bulk of that time he was a shop steward and a leading union figure within the workplace. Distrust and disgust was how he described his rapport with the leadership of his union, the AEEU.
At the age of 26 he was elected the electricians’ convenor and later the overall convenor for the whole yard, representing 5,000 people. He was influenced in his politics by his uncle, Bobby McKain, also a communist and a steward in the shipyards.
Crawford was prominent in the 1960s in the demonstrations and campaigning against the war in Vietnam. He was the secretary of the Clydebank YCL and a member of the YCL’s Scottish Committee.
Crawford was deeply involved in the solidarity campaign with the opponents of Pinochet’s takeover in Chile. As a result of this, a Chilean exile, an electrical worker and trade unionist, came to live with Crawford and his family.
In the late 1980s he was prominent in establishing the-Scottish section of Trade Union CND, a remarkable thing given his position as a convenor of a shipyard commissioned to do work in the construction of Trident. He was chair of the national stewards’ combine committee for the shipbuilding industry.
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Trade Union Review October 2000
Dr Len Crome MC
Born Daugavpils in Latvia on 14th April 1909 died in Stoke on Trent on May 5th 2001, aged 92. Doctor, soldier and Communist. Chair of the International Brigade Association.
James Gerald Crowther
A pioneering science journalist, he was born in 1899. He had begun to study maths and physics at university but left in 1919 after for health reasons only a term. He joined the Communist Party, secretly, in 1923. After a period teaching, he sold science textbooks before becoming, at first, a part time journalist. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he was a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union. It was particularly his writing about technological advances there that brought his talents to attention.
Thus, from 1928 until the beginning of the Second World War, he wrote on science for the Manchester Guardian, practically inventing the concept of such journalism. Crowther obtained a very high level of access to Soviet officialdom, acting as a bridge to the international scientific community and this flowed into his becoming closely associated with developments at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the 1930s. Under Ernest Rutherford, this was at the cutting edge of research into the structure of the atom.
The disappearance of a close Soviet colleague during the purges of the Thirties affected him; his membership of the Party is uncertain from 1937 yet, although disillusioned with the Stalin regime, he retained his Marxist principles. He preserved a warm collaboration with noted Marxist scientists, J D Bernal and J B S Haldane.
In the latter part of the wartime period, he went on to become the director of science for the British Council and was involved in the setting up of UNESCO. In the post-war period, until his death in 1983, he completed his life’s work of almost 40 popular science books.
Morning Star 23rd July 2005
Richard Doll
Famous for his join scientific work on the link with cancer and smoking in a 1950 paper, Doll was a member of the Communist Party until May 1957. He resigned, due to his difference with the conclusions of the CPGB’s commission on Inner-Party Democracy. He and his wife were members of the Norland branch in Kensington at least for most of the 1950s but had probably joined in their youth. In his later years, Doll was the most influential occupational epidemiologist, working particularly on exposure limits to asbestos.
Jack Dunn
Born 23rd February 1915. His father was victimised in Staffordshire after the General Strike and then found work in the Kent coalfields. Jack followed his father into the pits. He worked at Snowdown, Tilmanstone and Betteshanger. Was elected as a Communist councillor for Deal in the immediate post-war period. Held many positions in Kent Area NUM, including its member of the national executive. Full time Area Secretary for many years. Chair of SERTUC in the 1970s. Supporter of the Morning Star in the 1980s internal conflicts. Died 14th March 2002
Bruce Dunnet
Born in Edinburgh. Moved to London in the post Second World War period. Became renowned there as a street corner orator for the CPGB. Played a significant role in the folk revival of the 1950s. Presented the “Bein’ Behan” cabaret at the Edinburgh Festival. This later inspired the Establishment Club and the TV satire programme, “That was the Week that Was”, in the early 1960s. Organised a concert at the Festival Hall to celebrate the life of Ewan McColl during the 1984 miners’ strike. Died at the age of 78
Morning Star March 26th 2002
Jack Dunman
Hampshire & Dorset Communist Party District Organiser in 1939, Editor of Country Standard from 1945. Dunman joined the Labour Party in 1929 but then joined the CP in 1933 and was its prospective parliamentary candidate for Abingdon in 1945. Long-standing CP functionary in the psot-war period.
Jack Dunman writes in a 1950 campaign report in World News and Views: "There was a tremendous friendliness to us in the villages and towns, both to me personally and on account of past work and interest in bur policy. Thousands agreed with us and gave us money, but voted Labour in the end. The people will be very ready to listen to us in the future on the basis of what they have heard and read of our policy and will be more than ever ready to bring their difficulties to us” In this constituency, forty-two meetings were held 15 000 people canvassed, 2,500 Specials and 400 Socialist Roads sold, whilst the sum of £380 was collected”
Michael Walker
Tommy Durkin
Arriving in Britain in the early 1930s from Ireland, Durkin’s desire to break out of poverty saw him walk every inch of the way from Liverpool to London to find work. Once in the capital, he found this in the building industry and became a leading organiser for UCATT and one of its predecessors. During the 1970s, Durkin, who by now had also taken the role of 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. More notoriously, 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 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.
The strike was co-ordinated by a broad Grunwick Strike Committee and attracted a wide range of support to picket lines, due in part to Durkin' s role. The national impact of the dispute led the then Labour government to set up a Cabinet Committee to deal with the issues that it raised.
Durkin was also a member of the south-east regional TUC and played a vital part in the first People's March for Jobs in 1982. Strong supporter of the Morning Star and member of the CPB until his death at the age of 87.
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Morning Star 28th December 2002
Rajani Palme Dutt
Born in 1896, Dutt was a leading figure in the Communist Party of Great Britain from the beginning and for most of his life. His father was an Indian doctor living in Britain and his mother was Swedish, a relative of Olaf Palme, a former Prime Minister of Sweden.
A brilliant student, and unexpected cartoonist, Dutt was suspended from Oxford for opposing the First World War and, in 1920, joined the newly formed Communist Party. He founded and edited the magazine `Labour Monthly’ – not an official Party journal - from 1921 until his death. Dutt married Salme Murrik, a Comintern functionary, early in life. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the CPGB from 1923 until 1965, and was the party's chief theoretician for many years, being the author of many books. He also played an especially important role in assisting the Communist Party of India in becoming established in its early years.
Throughout, Dutt was especially vigilant over loyalty to the Soviet Union. In 1939, when Harry Pollitt initially supported Britain's entry into World War II, it was Dutt who was foremost on the central committee in arguing the line that the war should be opposed, which resulted in Pollitt's temporary resignation as General Secretary. Dutt also differed with the Communist Party's opposition to the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. By this stage, he had retired from party leadership roles but remained a member until his death in 1974.
Gladys Easton
A member of the Lambeth YCL in the 1930s from a working class background, she was very active in demonstrations in support of Spain and she helped the Spanish Youth Foodship committee. She was also a supporter of the Socialist Youth Camp held on the outskirts of London, which was then regularly attended at weekends by members of the YCL and Labour League of Youth. In 1952, married a stalwart of the Transport and General Workers Union, Sid Easton. He was a taxi driver, a former accomplished boxer, branch secretary and member of the general executive council of the TGWU. Gladys was well known to many of the prominent personalities of the TGWU, through this connection. Remaining a communist throughout her life, she stood on a number of occasions as a communist parliamentary candidate and was noted for being an able fund-raiser. Gladys Easton worked for many years for Thompson's, the trade union orientated solicitors. Died on November 21 2001 in her eighties.
Morning Star 30th November 2001
Dick Etheridge
Dick Etheridge was convener of shop stewards at the Longbridge motor works on the south west outskirts of Birmingham from 1945 until 1975. (What was known as the `Austin’, then later the British Leyland and then the BMW Rover and finally merely the Rover plant.) He was also an active and influential member of both the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Communist Party.
Born in Halesowen in 1909, Richard Albert Etheridge was brought up in Birmingham. In 1940 he began work at the Austin Motor Company’s Longbridge plant. In 1941 he was elected a shop steward and in 1945 he became convener and thus the principal representative of the shop stewards in dealings with the management. Also in the 1940s he was elected secretary of the Austin AEU Shop Stewards' Committee.
Following the Austin-Nuffield merger the shop stewards of the amalgamating companies formed a combine committee: the BMC Joint Shop Stewards Committee. In February 1956 Etheridge became Chairman of this Committee. Later in that year the Committee played a major role in the anti-redundancies strike. In 1968 when the British Leyland Motor Corporation was formed a corresponding shop stewards' combine committee was created. This was the co-federal BLMC Combine Trades Union Committee (often called the BLTUC) of which Etheridge became co-chairman.
In 1946 Etheridge was elected to the AEU's Birmingham District Committee. He remained a committee member until 1965 when the District was divided. 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, the important annual policy making conference of the union policy. In 1963 and again from 1966 to 1974 he was elected an AEU delegate to the annual Trades Union Congress.
Dick Etheridge had joined the Communist Party before beginning work at Longbridge and during the war years he was active in its Austin Motors factory branch. After the war he was active in formulating party policy in respect of the motor industry and on matters concerning his union. In 1950 he contested the Birmingham, Northfield constituency in the general election. He served on both the Birmingham City and Midlands District Committees of the Party and from 1961 until 1973 was a member of the national Executive Committee and he died in March 1985..
Sources; Warwick Modern Records Centre (Salmon, J., `Organised labour in a market economy’, University of Warwick Ph.D thesis, 1983. Obituaries in Morning Star, 20 Mar 1985, and Times, 21 Mar 1985. Wyatt, R. J., Austin, 1906-52 (Newton Abbot, 1981).
Jean Feldmar
Feldmar was certainly elected as a Communist councillor for Sevenoaks in 1961 and, it is believed, first elected in 1958. Also Communist councillor for Darent Hulme Parish Council, Shoreham, Kent.
MW
Frank Foster
Frank Foster was born in South London around 1915, into an active socialist family, and joined the Labour Party in his youth. He joined the Communist Party in 1939 and lived at South Road, Southall. He spent the war years at Fairey Aviation working in the tool room, along with John Mansfield. He was involved with “the Propeller” (the Communist party’s journal for aviation manufacturing workers) and was elected Fairey convenor of stewards for the engineering union.
He won much acclaim when he tried to improve production during the war and, according to John Mansfield, “turned over management” to such an extent that Stafford Cripps MP came down to investigate. His leadership led to the CP having a membership of 20 out of the 75 staff employed in the toolroom at Fairey. Later he moved to Feltham where he was also elected convenor. “He hardly ate a thing but smoked heavily”, said Peter Pink about him.
Foster, along with Bob Good (EMI union convenor), was considered the driving force of the local Hayes Communist Party. He was very popular choice as full time West Middlesex Communist Party District Secretary
in the 1950s. He regularly stood for election at local and national elections for the CP and was Hayes & Harlington parliamentary candidate in 1959.
Foster was married with two children and ended up living on a barge on the Thames but died relatively young.
Michael Walker
Eddie Frow
The model for the hero of the novel, “Love on the Dole”, who is arrested in a demonstration against the Means Test and jailed for five months, Frow was a skilled engineer. He was elected as shop steward in factory after factory, being successively and comprehensively victimised. He had 21 jobs in 20 years and only walked out of one of them voluntarily. Frow was a long term delegate to the AEU National Committee and secretary to the Manchester District Committee of his union.
In later life, he married Ruth and they became famous as collectors of books and memorabilia on working class history. So large did the collection become that their semi-detached home in Old Trafford became completely dominated by it. To save it for posterity, Salford City Council agreed to take over their library, the Working Class Movement Library, and rehoused it in a former nurses’ home opposite the university.
Ruth Frow “Edmund Frow 1906-1997: the Making of An Activist”; Morning Star February 9th 2000
Willie Gallagher
Born 25th December 1881 in Paisley, he was to join the SDF in 1906. An early campaigner for prohibition of alcohol, Gallagher also became a shop steward at Albion Motors prior to the first world war and was a major campaigner against the declaration of war in 1914-1918.
He led a strike for a penny an hour increase in the engineering and shipbuilding industries of the Clyde from February 1915. Out of this grew the Clyde Workers Committee, which Gallagher chaired. He was arrested and put in Carlton Jail after the `Battle of George Square’ in 1919. Unrest in the central belt of Scotland was so serious that troops were despatched.
A firm supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, Gallagher was initially a sceptic with regard to parliamentary politics and the Labour Party. In July 1920, he met Lenin, who famously convinced him of the need to contest elections. A matter not only of some irony, but also importance, since he was for a decade and half the Communist Party’s only MP.
Gallagher was imprisoned in 1925, along with other leaders of the CPGB in advance of the General Strike. He published his early memoirs, “Revolt on the Clyde”, in 1936 after he had been elected as Communist MP for West Fife the previous year. He served the constituency in this capacity for a further 15 years.
Wrote his own memoirs “Revolt on the Clyde”, “The Case for Communism”, published by Penguin Books (1949) and very many pamphlets.
Supplement to “Scottish Miner” 1981
Tony Gilbert
Tony was born in Poplar in 1914 and moved to Bethnal Green, alien territory for a Jewish family in the early thirties. He was apprenticed as a nailer in the fur trade and became active in the anti-fascist movement, then the Communist Party. He was subject of an anti-semitic assault by British Union of Fascist thugs in the early thirties, waking up in Bethnal Green Hospital.
When the war in Spain began, he joined the International Brigade and was its Courier. He used ruefully to recall being consulted about the direction they should be taking at a fork in the road and sharing responsibility for marching into a trap and captivity until the end of the war.
When he was repatriated, it took him some time to adapt, and he recalled during the first air raids on London using his Spanish experience and heading in the opposite direction to everyone else - out to Victoria Park on the grounds that if a bomb hit a building it could collapse on you but you had to be very unlucky to suffer a direct hit out in the open.
Tony worked in the Yorkshire Coalfield as a Bevin Boy before joining the British Army. After the war he was an industrial militant and could call on experience as a miner, an NUR activist at King’s Cross and as an engineering worker. Awakened to the importance of anti-colonialism by his wartime experience, he was quick to understand the uses of racism and the need to face it head on. The first black recruits to British Rail at Kings Cross were all put in his shop prior to an attempt to victimise him. He also worked in the Circulation Department of the Daily Worker/Morning Star.
Tony loved setting up an open air meeting and with skills learned in his youth in East London was a magnetic speaker. He was in the leadership of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, which changed its name in 1970 to Liberation. Tony became its General Secretary and wrote and spoke consistently against racism and imperialism. For many years he was active in the Stoke Newington Branch of the Communist party and Hackney Borough Committee and lived with, then married Kay Beauchamp also a lifelong Communist and anti-racist. Both of them died in 1992. (I was in Stoke Newington Party Branch when he, Kay Beauchamp, Kay's sister Joan Thompson and Leah Wesker used to provide an unrivalled historical backdrop to all deliberations!)
Two of Tony’s brothers were also in the Party one, a hairdresser, advertised in the Daily Worker and Morning Star as Gilbert and another was a bookdealer with a shop at The Angel. Whilst Tony was really a very little bloke - less than five feet – such was his presence that he somehow only looked small from across the street!
John Bain
Colin Glen
An active Communist in the Glasgow area all his life, Glen was also a long-term member of the Carpet Workers Union, which merged with USDAW. He was an activist in Glasgow Trades Council. Glen died in September 2004, aged 93.
Morning Star 28th September 2004
Charles Godden
Born in 1917, Charles Godden joined the Communist Party in the 1940s and was in the army during world war two, serving as a non-commissioned officer. After the war he pursued a career in education and was a highly respected English teacher with a particular warmth and appreciation of Shakespeare. He was resident in Nuneaton and active in the NUT throughout his career, being a delegate from the East Midlands to NUT national conferences on countless occasions, as well as being a trusted and experienced activist on the executive of the Warwickshire area of the NUT for many years. Charles also penned theatre reviews for the Morning Star, being particularly well placed to send reviews of RSC productions from Stratford-upon-Avon.
He was a member of the East Midlands District Committee of the CPGB in the 1970s, a committee that resisted the increasingly revisionism of the party at the time. Charles was also active in the collective of CPGB teachers, led by the late Ian Gunn latterly, but with major contributions from many others, who produced the regular and well respected `Education for Tomorrow’.
He was a staunch communist throughout his life, an accomplished amateur actor, and a genial and pleasant mannered individual, in fact a gentleman of the old fashioned English variety. In his mature years he became very actively involved with the Summer Courses for English teachers, held over a number of years as an act of solidarity with education in the GDR in Potsdam at the Padogogische Hochschule Karl Liebknecht.
By the mid 1980's Charles was the leader of the British teaching team. Charles had a great sense of humour, was extremely well read and particularly enjoyed organising the choral singing which commenced every day’s activity on the summer course, which catered for well over 130 GDR English teachers each year. In the mid 1980s Charles settled into a new life as a resident of Dresden in the DDR, where he died on August 21st 2004 aged 87.
John Corcoran
Cyril Golber
A former executive committee member of the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers, he was a life long Communist. After victimisation by the textile employers became a taxi driver and active T&G member. Golber died in September 25th 2001, aged 80.
Morning Star 27.9.01
John Gollan
Born 1911, in Edinburgh, Gollan - a signwriter in his youth - was involved in socialist and Communist Party activity in the city from an early age until he left in 1960. He went on to be successively editor of the Young Communist Leagues’s newspaper Challenge and General Secretary of the League in the 1930s and Communist Party District Secretary for the North East England and then Scotland, Assistant General Secretary, National Organiser and General Secretary, succeeding Harry Pollitt from 1956-1976. From 1949 to 1954 he had been assistant editor of the Daily Worker.
Details from website description of papers associated with an unpublished biography by Margot Kettle, written in consultation with his widow Elsie Gollan, in Scottish National Archives.
Dave Goodman
Born February 25th 1915, Goodman spent his early years in Middlesborough, where his Jewish Russian parents had settled. He joined the YCL in 1930 and later volunteered for the International Brigade in Spain. After being wounded, he returned to Spain as political commissar to the fourth company of the British Battalion of the IB. He was taken prisoner in 1938 and spent ten months in a concentration camp, until release.
Goodman was prevented from doing any kind of war work during the Second World War and became CPGB full time organiser in Devon and Cornwall in 1940s and 1950s. At the age of 50, he became a mature student, graduating from Hull in 1969 and moving to Stoke on Trent to become involved in adult education. He was active in the pensioners’ movement in his later years and died January 3rd 2001, aged 85.
Guardian 29th January 2001
Robbie Gray
Gray was born on November 5th 1945 in Glasgow to an academic family. He went to Cambridge University and then completed a doctorate at Edinburgh.
He joined the Communist Party in 1970 (“and never left it”) and what is now Portsmouth University in the same year. By 1986, he was appointed a Reader then a Professor, in 1997. A member of the Editorial Board of “Social History”.
Gray published a number of works; “Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh” (1976), “The Aristocracy of Labour in 19th Century Britain 1850-1914” (1981) and “The Factory Question and Industrial England 1830-1860” (1996). He died on March 19th 2001, aged 55 years leaving an unfinished work on Victorian autobiography.
Guardian April 26th 2001
C Desmond Greaves
Charles Desmond Greaves (1913-1988), political activist and labour historian, was born 27 September 1913 at 7A Rockville Street, Birkenhead, Merseyside. His father, Charles Edward Greaves, a post office official, and his mother, Amy Elisabeth Taylor, were Methodists, of mixed English, Irish and Welsh background.
Greaves graduated in chemistry and botany at Liverpool University, where, like many young intellectuals of his generation, he became active in left-wing politics. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934, and remained a member all his life. Politically he was always more interested in issues of nationality and imperialism than of socialism.
He worked in Woolwich Arsenal during World War II. In 1941 he joined the Connolly Club, later the Connolly Association, which sought to organise the Irish immigrants who were streaming into Britain's war-time industries by urging them to join trade unions and bring their influence to bear on the politics of the country they had moved to.
In 1948 he became editor of the Connolly Association's monthly newspaper, The Irish Democrat, and remained so until his death. In 1951 he gave up a well-paid position as chief research chemist at Powell Duffryns to devote himself full-time to politics. His commitment and that of the Connolly Asssociation was to the cause of a united independent Ireland, to be achieved by making the ending of Partition the policy of the British labour movement.
In the 1950s as the guiding political brain of the Association Greaves advanced the view that the way to a peaceful solution of the partition problem was to discredit Ulster unionism in Britain through exposing the discriminatory practices occurring under the Stormont regime, in the process winning sympathetic allies for the cause of Irish reunification. This perspective was embodied in the new constitution he drafted for the Connolly Association in 1955.
There followed a fifteen-year-long campaign of political education and propaganda in Labour Party and trade union circles, which did much to ensure that when, in 1968, the civil rights movement got going in Northern Ireland, British Labour opinion was substantially on the nationalist rather than unionist side. This was a transformation from 1949, when the Labour government's Ireland Act had purported to give the Stormont parliament a veto on constitutional change.
There is good reason to regard Greaves as the intellectual progenitor of the 1960s civil rights movement. He pioneered the idea of a civil rights campaign as the way to undermine Ulster unionism and he had considerable personal influence on leading figures of that campaign.
In 1968 he advanced the conception of a Bill of Rights imposed by the Westminster parliament as a middle way between leaving the Stormont parliament unreformed and abolishing it altogether in favour of direct rule from London. Such a Bill of Rights would at once outlaw discriminatory practices by Stormont, while encouraging the north to come closer to the south.
In 1971 as a result of Connolly Association lobbying this became the policy of the British Trades Union Congress. It was also the policy of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. In 1971 Greaves personally drafted a Bill of Rights in appropriate parliamentary form and it was proposed on the same day, 12 May 1971, by Arthur Latham MP in the Commons and Lord (Fenner) Brockway in the Lords.
The Conservative majority rejected it. The Connolly Association and NICRA opposed Britain's abolition of Stormont and imposition of direct rule in 1972. Greaves regarded the subsequent quarter-century of Northern Ireland conflict as vindicating his Bill of Rights conception. He was also a strong opponent of the Common Market and European political integration on what he regarded as democratic and internationalist grounds.
Greaves's principal contribution to labour history was `The Life and Times of James Connolly' (1961). This established that Connolly's birthplace was Edinburgh. In writing it he had the advantage of meeting many who had known Connolly personally. His `Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolutio' (1971) deals with the complex social dynamics and class relations of the revolutionary period 1916-23. His study of Anglo-Irish relations and the background to the civil rights movement, The Irish Crisis (1972), was translated into Russian, Hungarian and Italian. In 1979 he wrote Sean O'Casey, Politics and Art. The executive of Ireland's largest trade union commissioned him to write its history, which led to The Irish Transport and General Workers Union: the Formative Years (1982).
He wrote numerous pamphlets, countless articles and three volumes of satirical poetry,his two mature collections being Four Letter Verses and the Mountbatten Awar and an unfinished comic epic Elephants Against Rome.
Scientist, historian, poet, musician, political organiser, orator, journalist, wit, excellent cook and dedicated gardener, Desmond Greaves was an extraordinary man, whose genius confidently spanned C.P. Snow's 'two cultures'. He left a voluminous journal and extensive research records, for deposit in the National Library of Ireland. He never married.
His younger sister, Phyllis, predeceased him. He died suddenly 23 August 1988 returning to Liverpool from a political meeting in Glasgow, his body being taken off the train at Preston.
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Sources: A Coughlan, `C.Desmond Greaves, 1913-1988', an obituary essay (1991), which contains a detailed bibliography; S Redmond, `Desmond Greaves and the origins of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland' (1999); all from:
www.irish democrat.co.uk
Stanley Harrison
Harrison was born on August 1st 1913 to a poor, working class Yorkshire family. Despite this, hew as to win a rare scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, where he read history and modern languages. His favourite language was Spanish and, as a labour of love, he translated Lope de Vega's play “Fuenteovejuna”, and it was performed at London's left-wing Unity Theatre. Whilst it was at university that he joined the CPGB.
During the war he worked at the government's Caversham monitoring service, a BBC listening station. Then he was posted to Cairo posting, where he listened to broadcasts from the Balkans, and met his wife Gina, a Croat.
In the post war period, the Party sent him to Prague to work at the Telepress agency. Czech security forces were to close this down and Harrison and his wife were exiled for six months to the Bohemian forests. There, he recalled learning a great deal about gathering and cooking mushrooms! Eventually, they returned to Britain. (Gina worked at Collet's, the left-wing bookshop in Charing Cross Road, and subsequently left the CPGB over the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary.)
Harrison became a sub editor on the Morning Star in 1951. He worked closely with Allen Hutt, the legendary chief sub-editor, who repeatedly won the Daily Worker the annual newspaper design award – usually with pages that Harrison had worked on. In 1966 he succeeded Hutt as chief sub-editor and served in this capacity until 1979. Harrison helped to train a generation of radical journalists – most of whom who moved on to other things. In 1974, he wrote “Poor Men's Guardians”, a study of the struggle for a democratic newspaper press from 1763-1973.
Post-retirement, he was for a time the London correspondent of an Athens socialist newspaper. Later, the couple left Highbury, in north London, (where Harrison used to go swimming with Jack Straw in the open-air pool) and settled in Brighton. Gina became active in the local Labour Party and Harrison edited the bulletin of Brighton and Hove Democratic Left, although he continued to support the Morning Star. He and his wife were involved in raising money and campaigned for the people of Bosnia, which they had kept an interest in, disintegrated, as Yugoslavia disintegrated. Harrison became an open-air speaker in his 70s to oppose the Falklands’ and the Gulf wars. He was 86 when he died on December 26th 2000.
Download a file containing the foregoing text and a photograph of Stanley Harrison.
Guardian 12th February 2001; Morning Star January 3rd 2001
John Barrett Hasted
Born February 17th 1921 in Woodbridge, Suffolk, and educated at Winchester College and at New College, Oxford, where he read chemistry and won a choral scholarship. Interested in Marxism, he visited the Workers' Music Association offices in London (led by Alan Bush) and then subsequently launched the Oxford Workers' And Students' Choir. Having joined the Communist Party as a student, this also led to a long participation in the WMA.
He was to serve in an artillery company in the Second World War as a Second Lieutenant and worked with the Telecommunications Research Establishment. Back in Oxford, as a science academic, he specialised in `dielectric constants’. He decided that his politics would hinder his promotion, and in 1948 became a University College London lecturer, while researching atomic physics.
In 1946, he heard the New York based Almanac Singers on record and arranged cyclostyled tuition in banjo and guitar from Pete Seeger. He spent years with the WMA Singers, the Topic Singers and the London Youth Choir. As a key figure in the latter, Hasted was noted for braving US army patrols, that tried physically and violently to stop his choir and others at Innsbruck on their way to the World Youth Festival in Berlin.
Before folk clubs proliferated, Hasted was providing singarounds at UCL and Cecil Sharp House, London home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. He popularised the use of five string banjos and twelve string guitars. He wrote “Go Home Yankee”, a popular song in the 1950s.
He cut 78s for Topic records. His Streets Of London (not the later Ralph McTell work), gained currency through the songbook `New City Songster’ (1955). By 1956, Hasted had realigned the Ramblers Folk Group and the John Hasted Skiffle & Folksong Group emerged from the cellar of 44 Gerrard St, soon to be named the 44 Skiffle Club. In the late 1950s came his accompaniments for Dominic Behan's `Irish Songs Recalled’ and Shirley Collins's `Sweet England and False True Lovers’. In 1958, he visited the US to meet scientists, and Woody Guthrie.
His second wife persuaded him to focus on science, and from 1968 until his retirement he was head of experimental physics at Birkbeck College for 25 years. He was, in fact, a pioneer in his subject. He had tested out radar in the war, using microwaves to cook winkles from a Welsh beach! He published widely in science. In 1964, his Physics of Atomic Collision was published. “Aqueous Dielectrics” was published in 1973 and in 1981 “The Metal Benders” (1981) looked at Uri Geller’s tricks. His autobiography was “Alternative Memoirs” (1992) and Hasted died on May 4th 2002, aged 81.
Morning Star 22nd May 2002; Guardian September 9th 2002.
Nina Hibbin
In her day, she was the noted film critic of the Daily Worker and the Morning Star, who often rode her motorbike to screenings! Born Nina Gloria Hibbin on September 28 1922 into an eastern European Jewish family in Romford, Essex. She left home at 16 to work for Mass Observation, the forerunner of opinion polls. There, she documented reactions to the Second World War among the East Enders. She also worked for Picture Post, captioning photographs of ordinary people with appropriate comments from them.
She joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and after the war trained for teaching at Dartington Hall. When she took up a teaching post in Cornwall, she initially got into considerable trouble for being a Communist. In the early 1950s, she moved back to London. She became film critic of the Daily Worker in the early 1960s, and remained there for a decade.
As a film critic, she was a passionate advocate of east European cinema and a campaigner to persuade British distributors to screen what was then called third-world cinema. Ken Loach had cause to be grateful to her for the campaign she mounted to get Rank to release his now classic “Kes” in 1969. When she went to film festivals, she also represented the upper class magazine, “The Lady”! Her reviews, nonetheless, remained much the same, full of sympathy for working people and against the glibness of Hollywood.
When she finally left criticism in 1971, for what she described as a more useful occupation, she became the first films officer of the Yorkshire Arts Association, where she was one of the first to give grants to aspiring filmmakers. In the mid-1970s, she became programme director of the Tyneside cinema, in Newcastle, where she took many considerable risks in the films she showed.
Retiring to a cliff top home at Boulby, near Staithes, she and her husband Eric (whom she had met on a London demonstration) ran a cafe for walkers on the Cleveland Way. She also edited two books of poetry collected from local people. When she moved to Saltburn, three years before her death, she was still campaigning with a shop mobility scheme in Redcar, and against the British National Party standing in her ward. Her daughter, Sally Hibbin, is a noted independent film producer. Nina Hibbin died on May 28th 2004 aged 81.
Download a file containing this text and a photgraph of Nina Hibbin.
Guardian June 5th 2004
Phil Higgs
Member of AEU and convenor at the Rolls Royce plant in Parkside, Coventry for 22 years. Higgs played a prominent role in uniting convenors across the company’s plants across the country. A youth volunteer in Yugoslavia in the 1940s, he was involved in rebuilding railway lines (with Edward Thompson and others). As an extension of this interest, he helped found the city’s Belgrade Theatre, named after a Yugoslav city and partially constructed with wood from that country. A long-term prominent critic of revisionism within the Party, he moved to France in retirement in 1991 and joined the French Communist Party. Died aged 79 in 2001
Morning Star February 9th 2001 and GS personal knowledge
Christopher Hill
Born John Edward Christopher Hill on February 6th 1912 in York, where his father was a solicitor, his parents were Methodists, a fact of significance to his life-long area of study. When he was 16 and at St Peter’s school in York, the two Balliol dons who marked his entrance papers, Vivien Galbraith and Kenneth Bell, awarded him 100% and personally travelled to York to secure him for Oxford, rather than Cambridge.
He was then associated with Balliol from his time as an undergraduate in 1931 to his retirement as master 47 years later. He won a prestigious academic prize – the Lothian – in 1932 and a first class degree and an All Souls Fellowship in 1934.
Seemingly, the circumstances of his adherence to Marxism are unknown and Hill never shed light on any aspects of his personal life. He was of course an undergraduate during the Depression and the rise of Nazism. Hill attended GDH Cole’s Thursday lunch club regularly and found the experience tested his own previously held conceptions. He was certainly a member of the Communist Party by the time he had graduated and he spent ten months of 1935 in the Soviet Union, being ill for some of the time he was there. For the following two years he was an assistant lecturer at University College Cardiff, before returning to Balliol as a fellow and tutor in modern history.
Much of his wartime work was a closed book until after his death. It was a subject that he always refused to talk about. But, in 1985, a historian who agreed, out of respect for Hill’s academic eminence, to suppress the details until after his death, discovered details in unclassified documents.
In 1940, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, before becoming a major in the intelligence corps. He was liaison officer with Soviet military engineers who were in Britain to inspect tanks.
He was then assigned to a small unit that was preparing to be parachuted into the Baltic States to foment rebellion. But the mission was shelved and he was seconded to Northern Department of the Foreign Office from 1943 until the end of the war. As a fluent Russian speaker, Hill soon found himself as head of the Russian desk at the Foreign Office. Here, he would have been in a position to assist Britain’s wartime ally with information that had been held back and with influence.
It is claimed that he kept his Party membership and his details were kept on a special register of secret members. But the most outrageous evidence appears to be that he knew a friend of Kim Philby from The Times and wrote briefing papers for ministers inclining towards a policy of friendship and support for Soviet concerns.
During his time at the Foreign Office, Hill wrote “The Soviets and Ourselves: Two Commonwealths”, published after the war under the name K E Holme. Much of Hill’s early historical work was anonymous and geared to drawing attention to the developed Soviet study of the English 17th Century. In 1940, he published “The English Revolution 1640”, a tercentenary essay, asserting the revolutionary nature of his period of study.
The ferment of ideas that this and other studies was producing also lead to the formation of the Communist Party Historians Group, which Hill freely admitted was a decisive influence on his subsequent work. Hill was as involved as any of the extraordinary historians associated with the journal `Past and Present’ that came out of this activity and which dominated ground breaking historiography for the next quarter of a century.
Hill wrote “Lenin and the Russian Revolution” in 1947 and edited, with Edmund Dell, “The Good Old Cause”, a collection of documents, in 1949.
In 1956, Hill was critical of the official Party position on events in Hungary. But he did no immediately leave. Rather, he was elected to the Commission on Inner-Party Democracy in 1957. However, he and two others wrote a minority report, which was not accepted and thus led to Hill leaving the Party.
It was in the period after leaving the Party that Hill produced his major work but he always insisted there was no connection. His personal life also changed much at this time, after a divorce.
His work centred upon seeking an understanding of the dynamic of the revolutionary power of religion, as in the stream of texts such as “Economic Problems of the Church” (1955) and “Puritanism and Revolution (1958), “Society and Puritanism In Pre-Revolutionary England” (1964) and “Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution” (1965 and 1986 [revised]).
In 1965, Hill was successful in the election for Master of Balliol, something of an achievement since he had not disowned Marxism and only a decade before could not even have dreamt of the possibility, given the cold war hostility there had been in academia. The two significant achievements of his administrative tenure were the opening up of Balliol to women and the provision for student representation on the governing body.
Hill had written a pamphlet on Cromwell for the Historical Association in 1958 and later produced a biography, “God’s Englishman” in 1970. But the abiding theme of his books was revolution, as with “The Century of Revolution” (1961), “Reformation to Industrial Revolution” (1967) and “The World Turned Upside Down” (1972), which was turned into a play performed at the National Theatre.
Hill gave a talk on radio marking the centenary of the publication of Marx’s “Das Kapital”. He ended it by recounting how Marx had accidentally come across some former comrades from the 1848 revolutions, may years later. They had become prosperous and one, reflecting on old times, indicated how he felt that he was becoming less radical as he aged. “Do you?” said Marx, “Well I do not.” Many thought that Hill had quoted this to reflect upon himself.
Whatever the case, unarguably, the 1970s saw Hill become increasingly more and not less radical in his interpretations, as his confidence in his subject became masterful. There was “Anti-Christ in 17th Century England” and “Milton and the English Revolution”, which particularly provoked controversy. Indeed, his work became the target of attack by a range of critics.
For a couple of years after he retired he was a visiting professor at the Open University. But the titles continued to pour out of the lifetime of study he had given to his period. There was “Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution” (1980), “The World of the Muggletonians” (1983), “The Experience of Defeat” (1984), an account of the Restoration period, a study of Bunyan in 1988, then “The English Bible in 17th Century England” in 1993 and “Liberty against the Law” (1996). Three volumes of essays also appeared in the 1980s, reflecting the abundance of articles and reviews he had written throughout.
Both the OUP and Verso published tribute collections, in the form of “Puritans and Revolutionaries” and “Reviving the English Revolution”. When he died, on February 24th 2003 aged 91, it was as the historian of the 17th century in England. Hill may not have forced a general acceptance of the Marxist interpretation of the Civil War but he certainly won by the body of his work an acceptance of the particular importance of that century to the rest of British history.
Guardian 26th February 2003; The Times March 5th 2003
Rodney Hilton
Hilton was one of the leading medieval historians of the 20th century, and a leading figure in Marxist historiography. A lasting achievement of his was to open up understanding of the real lives of the medieval peasantry and ordinary townspeople.
He was born on November 17th 1916 in Middleton, Lancashire to a family with ILP traditions, went to Manchester Grammar School and then to Balliol College, Oxford. There, he encountered medievalists, VH Galbraith and Richard Southern, and the Marxist historian of the 17th century, Christopher Hill.
At university, Hilton joined the Labour Club and the Communist Party, in the company of Denis Healey. His thesis applied a Marxist analysis to the rural economy of Leicestershire between the 13th and l5th centuries, focusing on the emergence of agrarian capitalism.
During the Second World War, he was on active service in North Africa, Syria, Palestine and Italy. At the end of military service, in 1946, he was appointed to a lectureship at Birmingham University.
A leading figure in the Communist Party's historians' group, a collective study from these discussions, “The Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism was eventually published by him in book form in 1976. Hilton left the Communist party in 1956 but remained a steadfast advocate of the British Marxist tradition throughout his life.
Hilton was appointed to a personal chair in medieval history at Birmingham University in 1963, and served for some years as the head of its school of history in the late 1960, a post he later left to concentrate on research. He remained at the university until his retirement in 1982.
He co-authored a book on the 1381 Peasants’ revolt, with the fellow Communist Hymie Fagan in 1950. Hilton was encouraged to resume a theoretical interest in revolts by the student rebellions of the 1960s, including the sit in at Birmingham University in 1968. In 1977, his “Bondman Made Free” marked a return to these themes. It was an influential book, which surveyed peasant unrest over many centuries and countries, though focusing on the 1381 rising. Hilton saw in those events a coherent programme and lasting effects, both of which were denied by more orthodox historians.
“The English Peasantry In The Later Middle Ages” (1975) was the book of the Ford lectures that he had delivered at Oxford in 1973. He wrote about medieval women in the 1970s and explored the ballads of Robin Hood as an insight into popular mentalities of his period. He played an important role in developing the history of towns, which had been neglected in the general enthusiasm for peasants and agrarian studies in the previous decades.
Just before he retired in 1982, and over the next few years, he published a series of innovative studies of medieval towns, placing them in the framework of feudal society, rather than the beginnings of modernity. Hilton’s work was rooted in impeccably researched detail from archival sources, especially of the West Midlands and another book was an exploration of that region in the 1300s.
Hilton became associated with the use of new archaeology as a source of historical information, best exemplified by his involvement in the excavation of a deserted medieval village. His work also revels in colourful episodes, such as the quarrelsome people of Halesowen, whose behaviour demonstrated the social disruption caused by the growth of a new town in his period of study. This heavy emphasis on detailed research and treating medieval folk as real people has influenced a trend in historians, sometimes called “the Birmingham school” in homage to his influence. He died at the age of 85, on June 7th 2002.
Guardian June 10th 2002
Mikola Januszewicz
Member of the Communist Party of Britain on his death and he had also been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, before he left over its late revisionism.
During the war he had been a young Byelorussian partisan. Born near Minsk, he had also served with the Polish Red Army, the Maquis and the British 8th Army. He spoke many European languages fluently and could also translate from many more.
Januszewicz played an active part in many CND-related campaigns during the 1980s and was an active member of Scottish CND. He gained a great fondness for Scottish people and for Scotland although his passion for his native land was strong right to the end.
Morning Star May 4th 1992
Claudia Jones
Claudia Jones was born in 1915 in Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, Following the loss of the family fortunes due to the post-war cocoa price crash, she was sent at the age of eight with her three sisters to join her parents in New York. Jones’ mother died five years later and, in the depression years, her father was fortunate to obtain work as the janitor of a run down apartment block in Harlem.
So wretched was their poverty that they could not afford the 'graduation outfit' to enable Claudia to receive the Roosevelt Award for Good Citizenship she had earned, and so damp was their apartment that her formal education was virtually ended in 1932 by the tuberculosis which irreparably damaged her lungs. That, with the added complication of severe heart disease, plagued her for the rest of her life.
For over 30 years she lived in New York and was an active member of the Communist Party of the United States of America. Like many American blacks, Jones was persuaded by the spirited defence by the Communist Party of nine Negro boys falsely convicted of rape in 1935 in Scottsboro, Alabama. She joined the Young Communist League, where her talents as a writer and organiser were soon recognised.
By 1948, Jones had been elected to the National Committee of the CPUSA, was the Editor for Negro Affairs on the Daily Worker and had been arrested for the first time under threat of deportation to Trinidad. A much sought after speaker and advocate for peace and civil rights, she travelled widely in the United States but was arrested several times eventually being imprisoned for a year on trumped up charges of advocating the violent overthrow of the US government. While in prison her health deteriorated and in 1955 she was deported to Britain, much to the relief of the British colonial governor of Trinidad who had feared that she might "prove troublesome" had she been sent there.
She was given an affectionate send off by 350 friends and comrades led by her closest friends, the great, black singer/actor Paul Robeson and his wife Essie. The British government refused her a full passport until 1962 in spite of representations from Trinidad's first black Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams, its white colonial governor having argued for restrictions on her freedom to travel to be maintained.
The British Communist Party naturally responded to requests from their American comrades to help Claudia Jones find a role but it was no simple matter to parachute her into a leadership role. Her cultural and political affinity was less Trinadadian than American. Black nationalists and others, usually from the Maoist tradition, have both sought to paint a picture of alienation from the Communist Party in her last years, which is at the very least an arguable proposition.
There was however, definitely an underlying political problem in that the experience of the CPUSA, with a long-established black community engaged in an intensive liberation struggle, contrasted sharply with that of the CPGB, which was seeking in the late 1950s and early 1960s to establish an integrated relationship between newly established Commonwealth arrivals and a wider labour movement.
Questions related to organisational forms of organisation of black and other `immigrant’ communities within the British Party could possibly have been at the root of some differences but Jones was not at the heart of this debate. The controversy over whether separate black, Jewish, Indian and Cypriot branches should exist, or whether these members should be allocated to residential or workplace branches had begun to surface. Perhaps astutely recognising her effective alienation from mainstream British life, Claudia Jones in fact opted to spend her remaining years working with London's African-Caribbean community and she did this with extraordinary distinction.
In 1958, she founded and edited Britain's first black weekly newspaper `The West Indian Gazette’. In response to the infamous 1958 Notting Hill `riots’, she began to organise Carnivals under the auspices of the `West Indian Gazette’, the prime purposes of which were "to present West Indian talent to the public, which at that time could not see Caribbean people as anything other than hewers of wood and drawers of water". The programme for the first show in February 1959 clearly declared her intentions: "A part of the proceeds of this brochure are to assist the payment of fines of coloured and white youths involved in the Notting Hill events."
In the final analysis, perhaps because of her greatness in the black American struggle, Claudia Jones was very a different person to other, mostly white, American Communists who found sanctuary in Britain, some of whom were married to British Communists, or forged stable personal links, and maintained a future significant role within the CPGB. Certainly, Jones had few connections here and encountered frustration especially as her health gave away. She died in 1964 but her lasting legacy is undoubtedly the Notting Hill Carnival, leading to her being described as `the mother’ of the carnival. A degree of posthumous fame has arisen from this, which has resulted in a latter-day resurgence in recognition of her in the form of a 1980s television programme and a published biography.
bbc.co.uk; brothermalcolm.net; 100 greatblackbritons.com;
Marika Sherwood `Claudia Jones’
Lewis Jones
Author and Communist councillor, he was born 28th December 1897 in Clydach Vale, Rhondda, South Wales. He attended the Central Labour College in London 1923-1925, while in London he joined the Communist party in 1923. He was imprisoned for his activities in the Nottinghamshire coalfields during the 1926 general strike for three months. On his return to South Wales he became pit checkweigher at Cambrian Lodge.
In 1929 he resigned, refusing to work with the scab union, South Wales Miners Industrial Union. As the Welsh organiser of the National Unemployed Workers Movement he led hunger marches in 1932, 1934 and 1936 to London.
He led the anti fascist demonstration against Mosley and his Blackshirts speaking at Pontypool town hall in April 1936, in the same year he was elected along with another Communist councillor for Rhondda on Glamorgan County Council.
Arguable the CP’s “most effective organiser in Wales, and considered a “veritable patron saint of the Welsh unemployed who wore poverty as a cloak. Jones famously did not stand for Stalin during a meeting in Moscow.
He was also a talented writer “We live” and “Cwmardy” are a tour de force of working class literature and working class struggle. Jones had planned a third book, based on the return of a victorious Welsh International Brigade fighter from Spain.
Lewis Jones died shortly after correcting the proofs to “We live” on the 27th January 1939 on the day he had addressed 30 meetings on support for Spanish Republic and International Brigade and in the week that saw Barcelona fall to the fascists, according to folk memory in the Rhondda he died of a “broken heart” the result of the defeat in Spain.
For further reading, see Dai Smith `Lewis Jones' (Cardiff 1982); Dai Francis `South Wales Miners against fascism’.
Michael Walker
Tom Jones
Despite being thoroughly Welsh, Tom Jones was – like Lloyd George - in fact born in Lancashire, in his own case during the course of 1908. But his family soon settled in that vibrant Welsh-speaking coal mining village of Rhosllannerchrugog, Denbighshire: “one of the most politically conscious villages in Wales” according to Huw T Edwards.
He worked for 14 years as a miner in Hafod, Vauxhall and Bersham collieries, in Denbighshire, His experiences as a miner in the 1920s led him to became associated with the Labour Party from 1928. However, for a key period of time he was a member of the Communist Party. In the late 1930’s, he became Secretary of the local Rhos Peace Council.
In 1937 he joined the International Brigade to fight in Spain, joining the elite Anti Tank Battery. At the final battle on the Ebro, in July 1938, he was badly wounded in the right arm and captured by the Fascists.
His family believed him dead, but he was amongst prisoners kept in harrowing conditions in jails at Saragossa and Burgos. At one point he was in fact sentenced to death, though this was subsequently commuted to thirty years imprisonment. He shared a cell with Irish Republican and Communist Frank Ryan.
In March 1940 he was released as a result of a deal, whereby the British government paid a king's ransom of £2 million to the Spanish government. Henceforth Tom Jones was to be known by many as 'Twm Sbaen'. (Tom from Spain)
On his return to Wales he found work in a brewery and then at Monsanto Chemicals, Ruabon, where he became active in the Transport and General Workers' Union. During the war he became an officer in the Home Guard.
His work to build the TGWU soon impressed the union’ leaders and became a full time officer under Huw T Edwards, the secretary for region 13 (North Wales) based at Shotton. He then became TGWU Officer for Wrexham. Click here for an image of Tom Jones:
In 1953, he succeeded Edwards as Regional Secretary and, when the north and south Wales regions were amalgamated to form region 4, Tom Jones became its secretary until his retirement in 1973. In many ways Tom Jones saw the T&G as the ideal union. He considered that it did not suffer from the narrow outlook evident in some single industry unions largely because of the variety of trades it represented. He claimed that in the T&G it was possible to 'look through many windows'.
Tom Jones was never one to go cap in hand to London when problems could be more readily solved in Wales and he rightly took great pride in being one of the main instigators behind the founding of the Wales TUC n 1972. Few have contributed so much to the building of trade unionism in Wales. He retired in 1973, having become a deacon in the Welsh Congregational Chapel at Connah’s Quay. He accepted an O.B.E. in 1962 and a C.B.E. in 1974. But Tom Jones valued more the honour bestowed on him by the post-Franco Spanish government when it made him a Knight of the Order of Loyalty. He died on 21 June 1990, aged 81.
Sources: Gwyn Jenkins `Llafur’ (1991);`It was my Privilege’ by Huw T Edwards; Hywel Francis `Miners Against Fascism’; and Michael Walker.
Arthur Jordan
Jordan was the popular and successful Dorset Organiser for the National Union of Agricultural Workers Union for 17 years from 1945-1962. He organised trips of NUAW union members to meet South Wales miners, where the Party was notably strong, no doubt to strengthen the consciousness of his members.
In 1956 the CP had finally established monthly meetings in Dorset. A branch of 13 at Blandford had been established in 1950, Jordan reporting in the CP’s World News & views April 1958: “Over the years we have had successes and failures but whilst we cannot claim to have increased the size of the party in Dorset or to have established the Party as a political force we do feel prod that these comrades isolated as they are should have remained steadfast during the recent difficult period” (Dorset lost 4 members over the Hungary invasion.) The local CP women organised a market stall at Christmas time in Blandford to sell food, toys, clothes.
Despite doubling the union's membership in Dorset, he was sacked by the
union in December 1962 because of his Communist Party activities, including "accepting an invitation to speak to Salisbury Trades Council without obtaining permission of the General Secretary".
Michael Walker
Jock Kane
Kane first worked in the pits in West Lothian from the age of 14. After the General Strike, he was victimised for two years before obtaining work in the industry again.
In 1935, he was secretary of the Sheffield Communist Party. He worked in the Derbyshire coalfield before moving to Yorkshire, where he began work at Armthorpe pit, near Doncaster, in 1937. He was to turn the pit into a veritable stronghold of Communism and the NUM.
Jock’s brother, Mick Kane, was to become famed as the leader of a resurgent miners’ union in Nottingham pits in the early thirties. Jock himself played a leading role in the 1955 Doncaster Panel strike, one that pioneered flying pickets and was the spark that lit the fire that eventually engulfed Yorkshire miners and turned them into a focus for left-wing activism.
In 1963 became the first Communist to be elected to a full time position of the Yorkshire NUM, when he was elected compensation agent of the Doncaster Panel.
In 1966, he topped the pithead ballot for Yorkshire Area Compensation Agent, a significant official position in the NUM, with a 4,000 majority. In 1969, in a contest of 21 candidates, he was elected to the union’s national executive committee. He died at the age of 70 and his life long partner was Betty Kane.
Morning Star - undated 1977 cutting; “We were Rebels”.
Solly Kaye
Solly (Solomon) Kaye was born October 8th 1913, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His father died when he was five years old, leaving his mother to cope with poverty through charity.
At 14, he began work as a woodcarver in a small furniture shop making cabinets, moving to the fur trade later. Despite limited formal education, he was a capable painter and water colourist throughout his life, also producing poetry and cartoons. These talents had been revealed when he began attending art classes at the Bethnal Green men’s Institute in his youth.
Joining the Communist Party in 1934, he was a veteran of the 1936 battle of Cable Street. Kaye was a powerful and charismatic public orator, beginning with involvement in the unemployed workers’ movement and then activity against Mosley’s Blackshirts on street corners in the 1930’s East End of London. After the war, he was active in squatters and tenants’ campaigning work, especially against slum landlords. Kay married Margaret Johnson in 1946 and they had three children.
He was elected as one of three Communist councillors to Stepney council in 1960 as a result of this and remained on the Tower Hamlets council for 15 years. In common with other Communist councillors, it was said that his success in re-housing constituents undermined his power base! Although, more fundamentally, local government reorganisation also removed much of the geographical and community focus that had enabled a break through that lay at the heart of the East End, as well as other, highly localised strongholds.
Kaye was a regular speaker at open air meetings in Finsbury Square, where he addressed city office workers during their lunch breaks. He was an effective fund-raiser for the Daily Worker/Morning Star at rallies, utilising his undoubted personal passion, humour and humanity to extract large sums from audiences. He worked closely with Ken Sprague in the `Mountain and Molehill’ graphics enterprise, where he displayed talent as a copy-writer.
Late in life, he became a woodcarving teacher in a north London school. Whilst backing the CPGB EC in its war against the Morning Star, largely as a loyal democratic centralist, he was against the dissolution of the CPGB. In all his time in the Party, he had been an uncritical and firm – at times downright unpleasant - denouncer of dissidence. Paradoxically however, he had come to oppose the continuation of a Leninist structure and was in the end much embittered by the entire experience, in retrospect personally negatively viewing his life in the Party. Given the extent of his contribution and success over forty odd years up to the mid-1970s, this was clearly a very sad outcome to a Dogged by ill-health for much of his old age, Solly Kaye died on May 1st 2005, aged 91 years.
Guardian May 4th 2005; Morning Star 19th May 2005
Gladys Keable
Born 1909, died 1972, Keable was a long term Communist and was also an Esperantist and professional illustrator. She was creator of “Micky Mongrel, our class conscious cur”, a cartoon feature that appeared from the first issue of the Daily Worker for about two years. Gladys Keable was National Organiser of the Young Pioneers, the YCL children’s’ organisation, in the 1930s and member of the YCL national bureau (equivalent to political committee, or politburo). National official of the British Labour Esperanto Association, then Secretary of the International of Proletarian Esperantists from 1937-1939. Leader of a rent strike in Stoke Newington in 1947 and a successful school strike in Debden, Essex, in 1952. Editor of the Daily Worker Children’s’ Corner 1956-70. She was a frequent illustrator in many left wing publications, as well as a professional illustrator in advertising and children’s’ literature.
Morning Star (Ken Keable) 31st January 2002
Frida Knight
Born Frida Stewart on 11th November 1910, her Cambridge childhood was privileged but her family was always interested in social causes. Her musical studies took her to Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, where she observed the rise of fascism. She worked with the unemployed in Manchester on music and drama projects during the Depression.
The role of the Communist Party in organising the International Brigades in Spain inspired Frida Knight to join the Party. She drove an ambulance to Spain in 1937, helping with refugee children in Murcia. Visiting the front line trenches in Madrid, she reported and broadcast on the war. Back in Britain, she acted as a fund-raiser for Basque refugee children, organising concerts and meetings all over the country.
She was still working with refugees in France, when the Germans invaded in 1940. Following arrest and months of internment, she escaped to Britain with a friend, leaving France with forged papers provided by the Resistance. She transported a message from Charles de Gaulle concealed in a cigarette. Until the end of the war, she worked with the Free French forces in London.
In the post-war period, Knight became the author of many musical biographies, including Beethoven, and a study of the French Resistance. She was a founder member of the Cambridge Peace Council and a long-time CND activist.
Nearer the end of her life, she chaired the local Morning Star Readers and Supporters Group. As co-founder and chair of Cuba Solidarity Campaign, she was only able to fulfil an ambition to visit Cuba before she died, when she `marched’ in the 1992 May Day parade in her wheelchair. She died on October 2nd 1996, aged 85
`Cuba Si!’ (CSC Journal) Winter 1996/7
Rose Kosky
Born in London's East End, the third of four sisters and a brother in a close Jewish family. Her parents were working-class Polish immigrants. Rose won a scholarship, but the grammar school was too distant, and required an expensive uniform, so she had to attend Mile End Central School. Her political education, in common with many young working-class people in the area, came from Young Communist League meetings. There, Marxist and socialist ideas were discussed along with classic Russian literature. At 19, she married fellow young communist, Maurice "Mo" Kosky, as he was about to be sent to war. In 1946 he returned, emaciated, from the Burmese jungle. She, meanwhile, started work in the Ministry of Information typing pool as a temp to the Soviet section, later becoming co-ordinator and editorial assistant. In June 1941, the Soviet Union entered the war. Rose's role was to help the department supply British news to a Moscow news sheet, the allies, and, via telexes from the Soviet Union, to provide favourable stories for the British press.
After the war, she worked with a range of bodies promoting women’s’ issues, travelling to Europe-wide meetings and conferences. In 1949 Rose attended the World Committee of Peace Partisans' conference, organised by the French Communist Party. In 1953, she joined a women's delegation that went from Moscow to Tashkent. As the first employee of the National Assembly of Women (NAW), founded on March 8 1952, she helped re-establish International Women's Day. After the NAW, she worked for the fundraising office of a charity for handicapped children.
She was very close to Connie Seifert and it was at the Seifert's north London home that she met the American actor and radical Paul Robeson and the architect Erno Goldfinger. Rose was also a friend of Dora Russell. In the 1960s, she took GCEs, and later a BEd in psychology, at London’s Sydney Webb College. After teaching, in the mid-1970s she joined an institution specializing in children with behavioural difficulties. She collaborated with psychologists on research and edited the subsequent research. Rose Kosky was a member of the Communist Party from the 1930s until the 1980s, when she joined the Labour Party. She retired in 1987 and died April 23rd 2003, aged 80.
Winifred Langton
Born in Plaistow, in east London, one of six children on May 20th 1909. Three of her siblings had earlier died in the 1902 smallpox epidemic. Her mother was a working class suffragette and a founder of the Communist Party. Her father was an active trades unionist and a foreman in Woolwich arsenal. He was the son of a freed slave from Guyana.
Win won a scholarship to a school in Bexleyheath but left at 16 years, complaining that she was being taught to be a snob. She worked as a waitress and then in a shoe shop.
In the early 1920, she sold Workers Weekly outside the Woolwich Arsenal. In the 1926 general strike, she was a cycle messenger for the unions and was an active supporter of hunger marchers in the early 1930s.
She married in 1931 but it did not last and was ended in 1936 to enable remarriage in 1937. In the war, Win worked as a motor mechanic whilst caring for her children and now elderly parents. After the war, she was a cleaner and ward orderly at Sheppey Hospital. Her husband died in 1947 and she remarried a year later. This third husband became seriously ill and she left work to care for him. They moved to Cumbria in the mid-1960s to join her elder daughter but her husband was to die in 1971.
Win Langton inaugurated a Hiroshima Day vigil in 1967 in Ulverston, which was sustained for more than 30 years. She raised so much money for Medical Aid to Vietnam that she was awarded a medal for it! She was invited to the opening of the hospital that she had helped to equip. In 1988, the Vietnamese Ambassador came to stay with her at her council house in Ulverston, Cumbria.
She joined the Greenham Common protest in the 1980s and, when she herself was in her 80s, she wrote a book about her Greenwich-based parents. In 1999, Ulverston town council awarded her a certificate of appreciation for her work in the community. She died, on March 7th 2003 aged 93, described in her obituary as a “veteran Communist”.
Guardian
Abe Lazarus
Lazarus was born, from a Jewish background, in Chiswick in 1911 and joined the Communist Party at Hammersmith in 1930. He played a key role in the Firestone strike in 1933 at Brentford for union recognition and thus secured the nickname “Bill Firestone”. He was later central to work at the then new Pressed Steel factory in Cowley in 1934, that was successful in securing union recognition.
Union officials believed that plant, whose workforce was recruited from among local women and unemployed miners from South Wales, was un-organisable. But the Communist dominated local Hunger March Solidarity Committee, formed to greet unemployed marchers from South Wales, began to give attention to this task.
In July 1934 a dispute on the night shift over piece rate developed into a walkout. The Communist Party sent Abe Lazarus, largely because of his work at Firestones, to Oxford. He formed a rank and file strike committee and recruited the workforce into the TGWU. After six weeks, the company conceded union recognition and shop steward organisation. After the strike the TGWU 5/60 branch which covered the factory secured virtual 100 percent union membership.
Involved in the Thames Valley bus strike of 1937, Lazarus narrowly missed being elected as a Communist councillor in Cowley in 1937. he became Communist Party District Secretary in the South Midlands in 1939 and the District Secretary West Middlesex in 1950.
![AbeLazarus[1].JPG](http://graham.thewebtailor.co.uk/archives/AbeLazarus[1].JPG)
Michael Walker
Norman le Brocq
Born in Jersey, Norman le Brocq was famed in the Channel Islands for his participation in the resistance to German occupation in the Second World War. This was notable in that much of Channel Islands society, especially that of the establishment, were fairly collaborationist in outlook. He, and the small band of native Communists, made contact with Soviet and other prisoners of war, involved in forced labour projects on the islands and provided support, information and sustenance to them. Small acts of sabotage reminded the Germans that not everyone was apathetic; their role is a reminder of what the reality would have been if the counter-factual history of Britain had been different. Despite the heroism of his actions as a young man, he was extremely modest about his exploits, of which he said little.
Le Brocq was secretary of the Channel Islands branch of the British Communist Party for much of the post-war period. He was a noted campaigner for working class rights in the field of housing and social policy in the semi-independent islands, which were strongly characterised by reactionary politics.
This remarkable man was held in extraordinary high regard in his community. So much so that he was able to win election to the Jersey `States’, or parliament. This body has never known party politics and was always dominated by the successful elite, so the election of a working class Communist Party member broke many precedents all at once. Though violently opposed by the establishment and local media in his several unsuccessful but impressive attempts to gain election to the States in the 1960s, his participation from around 1970 onwards in the States earned him universal plaudits for his fair-mindedness and ability. He was heavily involved in a phenomenal number of local charities and was even appointed president of the Islands Planning Committee and chair of the Sea Fisheries Advisory Committee, yet maintained allegiance to communism until the end of his life.
A director of the highly successful Channel Islands Co-operative Society for 35 years, he was its respect President for 27 of those years. In those years, membership of the retail co-op grew from just over 17,000 to almost 76,000, bucking the trend of mainland co-operative development. Turnover grew by some fifty times to nearly £52 million a year. Le Brocq’s often recalled his insistence on the retention of the traditional `divi’ as the main factor in this success but undoubtedly his own leadership was highly significant. He died in 1995, aged 74.
Co-operative News 21st January 1997; GS personal knowledge
Phil Leeson
Born in Barnton, Cheshire, on November 28 1925, he was educated at Sir John Deane's grammar school, Northwich. From 1943 to 1947, he served in the army in the Royal Signals. He read modern history, economics and politics at Manchester University, then took a teacher's certificate. While a student, he was active in the socialist society and joined the Communist Party. Afterwards, he taught history at Ravensbury Street and Newall Green secondary modern schools, and at Ashton Old Road primary school.
He returned to Manchester University to take an MA in economics and in 1962 began his 20-year career as a lecturer in the university's economics department. He spent relatively little time in developing countrles but his influence, from his Manchester University base, was enormous. Many of his former students reached high office in their own countries. He was crucial to the university's diploma and MA in economic development and the interdisciplinary MA in development studies.
Passionately committed to development education in the community, he was a frequent speaker for the WEA, World Development and UN Association meetings, and to sixth forms - on poverty, aid, debt, and foreign investment. A lifelong campaigner in the peace movement, he was also a loyalist to the CPGB Executive in the 1980s. Even so, he hated the personal bitterness that arose and maintained friendships across divides. He died aged 78 on April 1 2004
Guardian 15th May 2004
Maurice "Morry" Levitas (Moishe ben Hillel)
Born February 1st 1917, died February 14th 2001 by then one of the last surviving Irish veterans who served with the International Brigade in the fight against Fascism in Spain. Born in Dublin's Warren Street, a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood of artisan housing in the Portobello area. His parents, Harry Levitas from the Lithuanian shtetl of Akmeyan and Leah Rick from the Latvian capital of Riga, had fled the anti-Semitic pogroms of Tsarist Russia at the turn of the last century to join relatives already residing in Dublin. It was to prove to be a life-saving choice for both of them.
Leah Rick's sister and family, with the exception of a daughter who had emigrated to Palestine and a son in the Red A