Graham Stevenson

A to E by surname, Introduction and A-Z full list of Compendium of Communist Biography

A compendium of Communist biographies
(Section A to E follows below.)

Read the overall introduction to some 600 individual Communist Biographies in this section of this site, covered in over a quarter of a million words. The first of the alphabeticised sections also follows here.

[Work on newly researched biographies is on-going and new suggestions and supplies of materials are always welcome. Plus, additions and corrections from readers are always welcome.]

Introduction: at January 2008

This is a rather esoteric collection, to date, of now well over some six hundred life stories of members of the British Communist Party and, for reasons of history, the Communist Party of Ireland. No special objective has been applied to selecting names; rather they constitute a selection from a file of a large number of life stories garnered by myself over some decades from obituaries, biographies and memoirs. These 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 (but not exclusively) deceased! (Being dead is not an obligatory requirement if the subject approves of being entered into the Compendium and the text used). 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, although in most cases the sources have been considerably varied. I welcome any reminiscences that readers feel should be included, or corrections they may have.

The project is, as they say, a work in progress. Since I began this project other, academic, initiatives have begun to focus on Communist biographies. I sometimes despair at the lack of sympathy and understanding; some academics seem to view Communist lives with less understanding than ornithologists might their particular subjects! I therefore feel there is some value in a public airing of the details of these remarkable lives in a compendium of this nature.

The only observation I make is that it is evident that the British and Irish Communist Parties 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 and often seemingly furthered by supposedly sympathetic academics with their fondness for tittle-tattle, then some purpose is served.

Should readers have suggestions of any changes and additions, I should be only too delighted to admit these, largely unedited, and credited unless otherwise requested. My thanks to the many collaborators who have submitted their own entries and these are usually provided with a by-line; all entries without a name are my own responsibility in their entirety. Special mention must surely go to Michael Walker, a tireless collector of Communist biographies, especially - but not exclusively - with a Welsh, agricultural, or Middlesex angle, who has contributed a very large number of entries, particularly of the `unsung'.

Also, a reminder to those who know (and a tip for those that do not) of the Working Class Movement Library in Salford; the WCML's excellent website contains a brief outline of the main roles of very many Communist Party members, necessarily with a bent towards the North West of England. See:

http://www.wcml.org.uk/people/biogs.htm

If you are able to, it is also well worth a trip to see the magnificent collections of books, pamphlets and ephemera:

Working Class Movement Library, 51 The Crescent, Salford M5 4WX;
tel:- 0161 736 3601 fax:- 0161 737 4115
www.wcml.org.uk
enquiries@wcml.org.uk

Finally, an appropriate dedication to all of these remarkable people, detailed in this section of the site, a rejoinder to their lives that so many of them would have cherished:

“Man's dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world - the fight for the Liberation of Mankind."

GRAHAM STEVENSON

The text of biographical sketches on surnames A to E follows. Scroll down on the main site to find the other alphabetical sections. A list of the entries is placed at the head of each section.

The full list of the biographies currently on the site also follows here:

A
Sam Aaronovitch, May Abbott, Syd Abbott, Mary Valentine Ackland, Alf Adler, Tom Ahern, David Ainley, Ted Ainley, Jimmy Airlie, Joyce Alergant, Bill Alexander, George Alsop, George Allison, Colin Anderson, Keith Andrews, Paddy Apling, John Archer, Jim Arnison, Robin Page Arnot, Honor Arundel, Jack Askins, Lil Atkin, Sid Atkin, Dave Atkinson, Bert Axell.
B
Bert Baker, Glen Baker, Jesse Baker, Ted Baker, Willie Barclay, Baz Barker, Andy Barr, Lionel Bart, Eric Batter, Kay Beauchamp, Clem Beckett, Brian Behan, Tom Bell, Ernie Benson, Joe Bent, Nan Berger, Claude Berridge, J R Betteridge, Ken Biggs, Reg Birch, Morrie Blaston, Dickie Bond, Charles Bornat, Rutland Boughton, Harry Bourne, Dave Bowman, Gerry Bradley, Lawrence Bradshaw, Ted Bramley, Clive Branson, Noreen Branson, Frank Bright, Bill Brooks, Ern Brooks, Mary Brooksbank, George Brown, Isobel Brown, Eric Browne, Felicia Browne, Robert Browning, Les Burt, Alan Bush, Nancy Bush.
C
George Caborn, Jimmy Callan, Marie Cairns, Dr Donald Cameron, J R Campbell, The Campbell’s, Ernie Cant, Phil Canning, David Capper, Bill Carr, Bill Carritt, Leslie Cartwright, Julia Casterton, Christopher Caudwell, Lee Chadwick, Paxton Chadwick, Barbara Champion, Frank Chapple, Tony Chater, Alex Clark, Bill Clark, Bob Clark, Harry Clayden, Arthur Clegg, W P (Pat) Coates, Claude Cockburn, Ben Cohen, Dan Cohen, Gerry Cohen, Jack Cohen, Monty Cohen, Fred Copeman, Jack Collins, Max Collins, Bob Cooney, Alfred Comrie, Jim Conway, Don Cook, John Cornford, Maurice Cornforth, Bert Corry, Alice Cousins, Jimmy Cousins, Bill Cowe, Dora Cox, Idris Cox, Stewart Crawford, Helen Crawfurd, Arthur Crawley, Arthur Croft, Len Crome, Ted Crook, George Cross, Vince Crossland, James Crowther, Jim Cunningham, Zelda Curtis.
D
Lawrence Daly, Bob Dalziel, Hugh Sykes Davies, Louie Davies, Madge Davison, Fanny Deakin, Tommy Degnan, Pat Devine, Dorothy Diamond, Harold Dickenson, Geordie Dickie, Maurice Dobb, John Dodds, Len Doherty, Richard Doll, Arthur Dooley, John Douglas, Bob Doyle, Charlie Doyle, Mikki Doyle, John Douglas, “Mrs G M Draper”, Thora Driver, Tom Driver, Peter Duffy, Kath Duncan, T Duncan, Bill Dunn, Jack Dunn, Bruce Dunnet, Jack Dunman, Tommy Durkin, Rajani Palme Dutt
E
Allan Eaglesham, Gladys Easton, Sid Easton, Alan Ecclestone, Michael Economides, Jessie Eden, Eric Edney, Max Egelnick, Jack Eighteen, Sid Elias, R Ellesmere, Frank Ellis, W L Ellis, Dick Etheridge, Arthur Exall.
F
Reuben Falber, Huge Faulkner, Jim Faulkner, Hymie Fagan, Jean Feldmar, Lily Ferguson, Morris Ferguson, Jack Firestein, Ida Fisher, Martin Flannery, George Fletcher, Frank Foster, Ralph Fox, Harry Francis, Alec Franks, Jean French, Harry Friell, Jimmy Friell, Ernie French, Eddie Frow, Les Fulton, Reuben Falber, Huge Faulkner, Jim Faulkner, Hymie Fagan, Jean Feldmar, Lily Ferguson, Morris Ferguson, Jack Firestein, Ida Fisher, Martin Flannery, George Fletcher, Jack Forshaw, Frank Foster, Sid Foster, Ralph Fox, Harry Francis, Alec Franks, Jean French, Harry Friell, Jimmy Friell, Ernie French, Eddie Frow, Les Fulton,
G
Jack Gadsby, Willie Gallagher, Robin Gandy, Douglas Garman, Doreen Garner, Jack Gaster, Maire Gaster, Tommy Geehan, Arthur George, Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Leslie Mitchell), John Gibbons, John Gibson, T Gibson, G C T Giles, Ken Gill, Percy Glading, Colin Glen, Tony Gilbert, Cyril Golber, Charles Godden, Maurice Godfrey, John Gollan, Dave Goodman, John Gorman, Angela Gradwell, Ike Gradwell, Jim Grady, Frank Graham, Robbie Gray, C. Desmond Greaves, George and Nan Green, Norman Green, Norman Greenfield, Edwin Greening, Johnnie Griffin, Harry Gross, David Guest, Frank Gullet, George Guy.
H
Peter Hagger, Charlotte Haldane, J B S Haldane, Tommy Handley, Wal Hannington, Stanley Harrison, Barbara Haq, Finlay Hart, George Harvey, John Barrett Hasted, Eddie Hayes, Frank Haxell, Betty Heathfield, Margot Heinemann, Sam Henderson, Jack Hendy, Nina Hibbin, Phillip Hicken, Phil Higgs, Jim Hiles, Christopher Hill, Denis Hill, Rodney Hilton, Charles Hobday, Geoff Hodgson, Billy Holt, Tom Hopkins, Harold Horne, Arthur Horner, John Horner, Jack Howells, Charlie Hoyle, Spen Hudson, Ron Hunt, Harry Hunter, Margaret Hunter, Alan Hutt, Douglas Hyde, Harry Hyde, Jenny Hyslop,
I
Albert Inkpin, Evdoras Ioannides
J
John Jackson, T A Jackson, Julie Jacobs, Tommy James, Mikola Januszewicz, Nora Jeffrey, George Jelf, Alfred Jenkin, Mick Jenkins, C Job, Billy Johnson, Monty Johnstone, Arthur Jones, Bill Jones (Liverpool), Bill Jones (London) Bridget (née Kane) Jones, Claudia Jones, Eddie Jones, Lewis Jones, John Jones, Tom Jones, Arthur Jordan, Maggie Jordan
K
Tom Kaiser, Jock Kane, Solly Kaye, Yvonne Kapp, Gladys Keable, William Keegan, Molly Keith, Stan Kelly-Bootle, Lou Kenton, Peter Kerrigan (the docker and actor), Peter Kerrigan, Rose Kerrigan, Arnold Kettle, Lippy Kessel, James Klugmann, Frida Knight, Jim Kooyman, Rose Kosky
L
Winifred Langton, Edgar Lansbury, Minnie Lansbury, Chris Law, Gilbert Lawton, Norman le Brocq, Hymie Lee, Billy Lees, Phil Leeson, Jock Leishman, Maurice Levitas, Hyman Levy, John Lewis, Jack Lindsay, Ted Lismer, Mary Litchfield, “Mrs Litterick”, A L (Bert) Lloyd, Bill Loch, Sabine Loeffler, Diana Loeser, Kay Loosen, Harry Ludlow, Terry Lynskey, John Lyons
M
Ewan MacColl, G MacCollough, Hugh MacDiarmid, Malcolm MacEwan, J D Mack, Arthur MacManus, Nan MacMillan, Dai Maggs, John Mahon, Jimmy Maley, Col. C J Malone, Tom Mann, Edith Mansell, Beattie Marks, David Marshall, Martin Marshall, Gordon Massie, Betty Matthews, Doug Matthews, George Matthews, Alf Maunders, Stanley Mayne, Jim McCallum, Alec McCollough, Pat McConnochie, Alex McCrindle, Mick McGahey, Leo McGree, Billy McLafferty, Gordon McLennan, Harry McLevy, Sean McLoughlin, Andy McMahon, Joan McMichael, Nan McMillan, Rab McNulty, Kinsman McQueen, Harry McShane, Bill Megarry, Eddy Menzies, Allan Merson, David Michaelson, Jeff Mildwater, Geoff Miles, Alec Miller, Jimmy Milne, Robert Milton, Mick Mindel, Abe, Alex and Dave Moffat, Dora Montefiore, Bill Moore, John and Mary Morgan, Marguerite Morgan, R Morrison, A L Morton, Max Morton, Declan Mulholland, James (Jack) Mullins, Harry Mundy, Ian Munro, Sean Murray, Helen Muspratt Dunman, Margaret Mynatt.
N
Len Nash, Sid Nash, Reg Neal, Marjorie Negrea, John Walton Newbold, Peter Nicholas, T E Nicholas, Jock Nicolson, Melita Norwood
O
Sean O’Casey, Joe O’Connor, L P O’Connor, Paddy O’Daire, Effie O’Hare, Elsie Oliver, Jimmy Ord, Michael O’Riordan
P
Wilf Page, Bernard Panter, Bert Papworth, Jack Pascoe, Billy Paterson, Frank Paterson, John Park, Eric Park, Willie Paul, Will Paynter, Bert Pearce, Wogan Phillips, Phil Piratin, Phillip Poole, Harry Pollitt, Raymond Postgate, Tom Potter, Charles Poulsen, Ernie Pountney, Annie Powell, Joan Powell, Jim Prendergast, John Prime, Dave Priscott
Q
Harold Quinton
R
Bert Ramelson, Arthur Reade, Erik Rechnitz, Betty Reid, Robert Robson, George Renshaw, Edgell Rickword, Percy Riley, Charles Ringrose, Marion Robertson, Alec (Spike) Robson, Gertie Roche, Esmond Romilly, Idris Rose, Jean Ross, Benny Rothman, Andrew and Theodore Rothstein, Bill Rounce, Cliff Rowe, Ben Rubner, George Rudé, Bill Rust
S
Shapurji Saklatvala, Laurie Sapper, Alf Salisbury, Raphael Samuel, Bill Savage, Jim Savage, Reggie Saxton, Arthur Scargill, Harold Scargill, Minna Scarth, Cash Scorer, Bill Sedley, Connie Seifert, Bob Selkirk, Jim Service, Jean Shapiro, Jock Shanley, Monte Shapiro, Vishnu Sharma, Albert Shaw, Jack Shaw, Marje Schilsky, Sylvia Shellard, George Short, Colin Siddons, Shimmy Silver, Thora Silverthorne, Brian Simon, Roger Simon, Arthur C Simpson, Betty Sinclair, Eleanor Singer, Hugh Smith Sloan, Rosemary Small, Ted Smallbone, Albert Smith, Harry Smith, Jock Smith, Rab Smith, Rose Smith, Jimmy Sneddon, Willie Spraggan, Dave Springhall, Ken Sprague, D.D (Denzil) Stalford, Frank Stanley, Michael Stephen, Bob Stewart, Hilton Stewart, Jimmy Stewart, Doug Stone, Harry Stratton, Hugh Styler, Henry Suss, Jack Sutherland, Irene Swan, Randall Swingler
T
Annie Taylor, Dr Cyril Taylor, Sammy Taylor, Norman Temple, Peter Thiele, E P Thompson, George Thompson, W H Thompson, John `Jocky’ Thomson, Katherine Thompson, Chris Thornycroft, Michael Tippett, John Tocher, Duncan Todd, Dona Torr, Arthur True, Doris Tuchfield, Angela Tuckett, Julian Tudor Hart, Reg Turner,
U
Edward Upward, Shaukat Usmani, Arthur Utting
V
Tom Vaughan, Pete Venters, Freddie Vickers, Chris Vowles
W
Bill Wainwright, Bobby Walker, Denver Walker, Iris Walker, Melvina Walker, Les Walkey, Arthur Walmsley, Ian Walters, Fred Warburton, Bill Ward, Wally Ward, Bill Warman, Des Warren, Alec and Ray Waterman, Ray Watkinson, Alf Watts, Frank Watters, Freda Watters, Frank West, Fred Westacott, Joe Whelan, Lewis Whilton, Frank Whipple, Bill Whittaker, Syd Wilkins, Dan Wilson, Dr Alistair Wilson, David Arnold Wilson, Alan Winnington, Ellen Wilkinson, Wilfred Willet, John Roose Williams, Tom Wintringham, Margaret Witham, Jack Woodis, Margaret Woodis, Charlie Woods, Barnet Woolf, Ernie Wooley, Bert Wynn
Z
Lazar Zaidman, Molly Zak, Nancy Zinkin, Peter Zinkin

Entries by surname for the A to E section follow: 174
entries @ January 2008

Sam Aaronovitch, May Abbott, Syd Abbott, Mary Valentine Ackland, Alf Adler, Tom Ahern, David Ainley, Ted Ainley, Jimmy Airlie, Joyce Alergant, Bill Alexander, George Alsop, George Allison, Colin Anderson, Keith Andrews, Paddy Apling, John Archer, Jim Arnison, Robin Page Arnot, Honor Arundel, Jack Askins, Lil Atkin, Sid Atkin, Dave Atkinson, Bert Axell, Bert Baker, Glen Baker, Jesse Baker, Ted Baker, Willie Barclay, Baz Barker, Andy Barr, Lionel Bart, Eric Batter, Kay Beauchamp, Clem Beckett, Brian Behan, Tom Bell, Ernie Benson, Joe Bent, Nan Berger, Claude Berridge, J R Betteridge, Ken Biggs, Reg Birch, Morrie Blaston, Dickie Bond, Charles Bornat, Rutland Boughton, Harry Bourne, Dave Bowman, Gerry Bradley, Lawrence Bradshaw, Ted Bramley, Clive Branson, Noreen Branson, Frank Bright, Bill Brooks, Ern Brooks, Mary Brooksbank, George Brown, Isobel Brown, Eric Browne, Felicia Browne, Robert Browning, Les Burt, Alan Bush, Nancy Bush, George Caborn, Jimmy Callan, Marie Cairns, Dr Donald Cameron, J R Campbell, The Campbell’s, Ernie Cant, Phil Canning, David Capper, Bill Carr, Bill Carritt, Leslie Cartwright, Julia Casterton, Christopher Caudwell, Lee Chadwick, Paxton Chadwick, Barbara Champion, Frank Chapple, Tony Chater, Alex Clark, Bill Clark, Bob Clark, Harry Clayden, Arthur Clegg, W P (Pat) Coates, Claude Cockburn, Ben Cohen, Dan Cohen, Gerry Cohen, Jack Cohen, Monty Cohen, Fred Copeman, Jack Collins, Max Collins, Bob Cooney, Alfred Comrie, Jim Conway, Don Cook, John Cornford, Maurice Cornforth, Bert Corry, Alice Cousins, Jimmy Cousins, Bill Cowe, Dora Cox, Idris Cox, Stewart Crawford, Helen Crawfurd, Arthur Crawley, Arthur Croft, Len Crome, Ted Crook, George Cross, Vince Crossland, James Crowther, Jim Cunningham, Zelda Curtis, Lawrence Daly, Bob Dalziel, Hugh Sykes Davies, Louie Davies, Madge Davison, Fanny Deakin, Tommy Degnan, Pat Devine, Dorothy Diamond, Harold Dickenson, Geordie Dickie, Maurice Dobb, John Dodds, Len Doherty, Richard Doll, Arthur Dooley, John Douglas, Bob Doyle, Charlie Doyle, Mikki Doyle, John Douglas, “Mrs G M Draper”, Thora Driver, Tom Driver, Peter Duffy, Kath Duncan, T Duncan, Bill Dunn, Jack Dunn, Bruce Dunnet, Jack Dunman, Tommy Durkin, Rajani Palme Dutt, Allan Eaglesham, Gladys Easton, Sid Easton, Alan Ecclestone, Michael Economides, Jessie Eden, Eric Edney, Max Egelnick, Jack Eighteen, Sid Elias, R Ellesmere, Frank Ellis, W L Ellis, Dick Etheridge, Arthur Exall.

Sam Aaronovitch

Aaronovitch was the second son of Lithuanian Jewish parents who fled to London in the early part of the 20th century. Born on December 26th 1919, in Stepney’s Cable Street, he left school at 14 years and it was not long before he had joined the Young Communist League and, naturally, had played his part in the infamous battle of that street to prevent fascists from having a free hand in the East End.

From 1949, he worked full time for the Communist Party, playing a role in organising the political work of Communist in Rolls Royce factories, the St Pancras rent strike of 1956 and activity in Fords and Plesseys. He wrote several books and pamphlets on economic questions in this period, including “Economics for Trades Unionists” and “The Ruling Class”. For eight years he was the Party’s national cultural organiser, supporting the work of the Unity Theatre, promoting Paul Robeson concerts and the like. Doris Lessing hints at his role in her “The Golden Notebook” and her biography “Walking in the Shade”.

He had three wives, Bertha, Kirsten and Lavender, five children, and also lived for the last two decades of his life with Kath Halfpenny. Two sons became well-known, Owen, the actor, starred as Deirdre’s lover in `Coronation Street’ and David became well-known as a student leader, renegade Communist and sometime media hack in recent years.

As he approached his fifties, Sam decided to shift from Party work into the academic world. A for-then-rare mature student, he began an economics degree at Balliol College, Oxford in 1967. On graduating, he became lecturer and then principal professor in economics at South Bank Polytechnic. There, he created the Local Economy Policy Unit, an independent research institute that encouraged strategic thinking by local authorities. The energy and dynamism that marked him out all his life was still evident in his 70s, when he took to climbing in a big way. Sam Aaronovitch died aged 78 on May 30th 1998.

Guardian 4th June 1998

May Abbott

She was a weaver from the age of 14, and a member of YCL and CPGB from an early age. May Abbot was full time secretary of the Rossendale branch of the Textile Workers Union. A member of the District Committee of CPGB, May Abbott’s husband was Syd Abbott and May died in 2001.

Morning Star November 19th 2001

Syd Abbott

A leading engineering worker in Lancashire, he was the youngest ever district president of the AEU in Rawtenstall and became a full time worker for the Communist Party in around 1941-2. He was the Lancashire and Cheshire industrial organiser and was later elected as the District Secretary.

During the Second World War, he led the Communist campaign in the district for the opening of the second front and helped to build Communist influence and membership in the engineering factories of, particularly, the Manchester area. In the post war period, Syd Abbott was particularly involved in the peace moment.

He suffered a severe stroke in September 1960, whilst attending a meeting of the district committee and was forced to give up full time work, living quietly but supportively of the work of the Party and the Morning Star until he died in 1988.

Source: Morning Star 22nd March 1988

Mary Valentine Ackland

The poet and Communist, Mary Ackland, was born in London in 1906 to a wealthy family. She was briefly married at the age of 19 to Richard Turpin but this was annulled. She recognised herself as a lesbian in an age when it was difficult to do so. But she did find happiness with another poet, Sylvia Townsend Warner, who became her life companion.
The two women jointly published a book of poems `Whether A Dove or Seagull’ in 1933/4.

Ackland mainly worked as a journalist and regularly contributed articles to the Daily Workers and the Daily Chronicle. She also wrote for magazines such as the Left Review, the New Statesman and Time and Tide.

At the outset of the Spanish Civil War, Ackland and Warner went to Barcelona, where they worked for a British medical unit. In 1937, they were members of the British delegation to the Second Congress of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture, held in Spain.

During the Second World War, Ackland worked as a civil defence clerk. She wrote about her relationship with Warner in 1949 in `For Sylvia, An Honest Account’. This was only published posthumously for the first time thirty six years later, a second volume of poems, “The Nature of the Moment”, also appeared posthumously in 1973. Mary Ackland had already died in 1969, having lived with Sylvia Warner until her death in 1968. Their ashes were buried together under a single stone in Dorset.

Alf Adler

Born November 18th 1906 in the Durham coalfield, his father was invalided out of the First World War with `shell-shock’, what today would be called post-traumatic stress syndrome. His mother, faced with the penury her husband’s illness resulted in, took in washing as a means to earn money to feed the family.

Alf’s headmaster visited their home to try to persuade his mother to support him going into further education, a remarkable testament to his intelligence for the 1920s but the family needed money. Although he kept up his education by going to night school, Alf became an apprentice blacksmith. But he found himself was sacked for economy reasons when he came out of his time and qualified for an adult wage.

The work available in the coal mines of Yorkshire in the early 1930s attracted Alf from Durham and he began work at Goldthorpe Colliery but this did not last long. As the Depression bit, he was out of work and had to leave to Yorkshire to obtain work as chauffeur to a doctor in Manchester – six and a half days a week for 25/-, little better than the dole. During this period, Alf was active in the Communist Party and the setting up of anti-fascist movements. Of the intense struggles in Manchester, one of his abiding memories was being part of a group that turned upside down Oswald Mosley’s car as the British Fascist Leader was smuggled into the hall where he was to speak. The turnout against Mosley was such that the Leader did not again attempt a rally in the north of England.

In 1936, Alf met and married his wife, Evelyn, with whom he had two sons, David and John. He was to spend four years abroad in the services during the Second World War, being invalided out after contracting malaria. In the post-war years, he returned to mining but much later ran a hardware shop in Goldthorpe. For many years, in the 1960s, he was Chair of the Parent Teacher Association. Always a great lover of the countryside and of rambling, after retirement Alf used his own time to help out as an Assistant Warden on camp sites. He died in 1986 in Doncaster.

Sources: Frank Watters funeral oration 7th March 1986; notes by David Alder

Tom Ahern

Born in Ireland, Tom Ahern joined the Communist Party in the late 1930s and served in the armed forces in the Second World War. He was a member of the London District Committee of the Party and a parliamentary candidate. A leading member of the NUR, he was for 16 years the vice-president of the London Committee and a member of the national executive. Retaining strong links with his native land, Ahern was, over the years, much involved in anti-imperialist solidarity activity with the Irish anti-imperialist struggle. He died in July 1988, aged 83.

Morning Star 16th July 1988

David Ainley

Born in 1909, he joined the YCL in 1923, and was a leading activist for most of his youth. He was the Manchester & Provincial representative in the YCL leadership from 1925. A member of the Lancashire and Cheshire District Committee and the national executive committee of the League and District Secretary, he followed this by being elected YCL National Organiser.

After the YCL, he was Manchester Area Secretary of the Communist Party. He was, for a time, a chair of a shop stewards’ committee and combine committee, and a branch officer for the AEU. He was a District Committee member for the AEU, Trades Council delegate, on the board of the Beswick Co-op.

Before the Second World War he was northern circulation organiser of the Daily Worker. After the war, for 27 years, he was Secretary of the Peoples Press Printing Society, the co-operative of readers that owns the Morning Star, from 1945 to 1972. He was heavily involved in the co-operative movement in the London Co-ops, a former president of the London Co-operative Society, a member of the executive of the Co-operative Union and a central officer of the International Co-operative Alliance. David Ainley died in 1986.

Morning Star 25th February 1986

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).

Ted Ainley was born in Manchester of a working-class family 3rd October 1903. It has been claimed that “Teddy Ainley was in reality Theodore Hertzle Abrahamson, whose father had been Lazarowicz”. [Margaret McCarthy “Generation in revolt” p73] He and 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; Ben was a Marxist tutor and an NUT activist.)

Ted started work as an apprentice chemist and later was in the rag trade and active in Tailor & Garment Workers Union. He joined the Young Communist League at its foundation in 1922 and the Communist Party in 1923 and Ted Ainley was a member of the executive committee of the YCL for many years and its. He became full time YCL organiser, first in Glasgow and then in the North East in the late 1920s. s. In 1929 he went to Moscow to attend the Lenin School. Soon after the Daily Worker was founded in 1930, he joined its editorial staff and worked on the paper for a number of years.

In 1931 back in Manchester he was the organiser of an unemployed workers demonstration (7th October 1931) that was dispersed by fire hoses. During 1933-34 he worked in a left wing book shop, “Books and Books” in Manchester. In 1935 he represented the Manchester branch of the Waterproof, Garment Workers Union on the local trades council. On the death of his local union secretary he was elected to the office but was not allowed to hold it because of his membership of the Communist Party. He later became a full time officer for the shop assistant’s union. In 1943 he became assistant General Secretary of Association of Scientific Workers and in 1949 General Secretary, a post he held until 1951, when ill health forced him to relinquish this position because of ill health.

He worked in the West Middlesex Communist Party bookshop from 1952-53 and then at the central propaganda department a CP headquarters at King Street. 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. He was editor of World News & Views from 1957-1962.

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.

His clarity and wit made him in great demand as a lecturer throughout the country. Ted Ainley died on 19th March 1968 aged 64

Ted Ainley

Sources: Morning Star, the Frows, Graham Stevenson, Michael Walker

Bill Alexander

Bill Alexander was born into a large family, the son of a carpenter on 13th June 1910 at Ringwood, Hampshire. He studied at Reading University where he secured a Chemistry degree. After graduating he became an industrial chemist. Alexander joined the Communist Party and played an active role in the campaign against Oswald Mosley and the National Union of Fascists during the 1930s.

On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Alexander joined the International Brigades. As a member of the British Battalion, he arrived at the battlefront early in 1937. He took part at the battle at Brunete where after a fortnight the battalion was down to 42 out of an original strength of 300.

Alexander, now a political commissar, also played a prominent part in the fighting at Teruel in January 1938. Two months later Alexander took over as commander of the battalion, but shortly afterwards he was wounded in the shoulder and invalided back home.

In 1939 Alexander joined the British Army but was refused a commission. The matter was raised in the House of Commons and as a result he was sent to Sandhurst Academy. During the Second World War he served in North Africa, Italy and Germany and reached the rank of captain in the Royal Armoured Corps.

Alexander was Area Secretary of the Communist Party on Merseyside after the war. In 1946, he led a march through Liverpool on Saturday 31st November under the title “Work for Merseyside”. This culminated in a rally outside St Georges Hall, where an open air meeting was held to condemn unemployment in the region, then standing then at 30,000. Alexander called for new industries to be brought into the district and suggested the clearing of blitzed sites and re-equipping of parks as two short term measures.

Later he became the Communist Party's District Secretary in Wales and, in 1959, Assistant General Secretary of the party. In the 1960s Alexander left Party work to become a chemistry teacher in a comprehensive school in South London.

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. In 1982 he published British Volunteers for Liberty, an account of the International Brigade in Spain.

He was also co-author of `Memorials of the Spanish Civil War’ (1996). In 1996 Alexander led a delegation of veterans back to Spain to visit the old battle grounds. In recognition of his actions during the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish government awarded him citizenship of Spain.

He was a prominent opponent of revisionism in the CPGB in the 1980s. Bill Alexander died on 11th July 2000. He was a Communist Party member to his death in July 2000, by virtue of his CPB membership after many years in the CPGB. He has been described as “morally and physically tough, but a kind and caring family man" (Colin Williams).

Bill Alexander pictured in his youth, in Spain:

Bill Alexander in later years:

Sources: Morning Star 26.7.00; Michael Walker

George Alsop

Alsop was the Secretary of the Chopwell Miners Lodge in the 1950s, having worked there since he was 15 years old in 1928. A member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party, he was a Party candidate for Durham County Council Blaydon West in the local elections of 1956.

George Allison

Also known as Geordie Allison, he was the son of a miner from Bowhill, Fife. Born in 1895, he was one of five brothers, all miners, one – Jock – was killed in World War I. For someone who had obviously suffered so much in the cause of building the Party, Allison’s name and role has not to date been afforded the attention he obviously deserves. Not only was he victimised from jobs, he was imprisoned once for building unions in India, and once for causing a naval mutiny in Britain. He was, moreover, a significant voice in the building of rank and file workers’ movements.

George and two of his brothers were victimized after the 1921 miners’ lock out, beginning on 31st March, when the owners posted seven day notices demanding the most drastic reduction in wages. George secured a job at the Niddrie pit near Edinburgh in 1922, along with his brother David. Geordie was subsequently forced the leave the industry after injuring his back in a pit accident but was to go on to much greater things. As Harry Pollitt put it: “George Allison, a leading Fife miner, went to India to help in building trade unions and in 1927 was sentenced to 18 months in jail”; the time he spent in an Indian jail, broke his health and he returned to Britain.

George now joined the Communist Party’s Central Committee. He moved to London and became involved in the National Minority Movement, becoming its Acting General Secretary when Horner went to Moscow in 1930. He was, along with Pollitt, the key figure of the Minority Movement Charter Convention at Bermondsey Town Hall in April 1930 when the nine point charter was adopted, becoming the Workers Charter. Allison was also a representative of the Minority Movement along with Tom Mann, William Allan and Wal Hannington to the fourth RILU Congress, held in Moscow in August 1930. Allison was only too aware of the failings of the Minority Movement, stating in The Worker of 26th September 1930 that "passivity and phrase-mongering are no substitutes for hard practical work"

In 1931, the security services, including Naval Intelligence and MI5 had set up a hasty organization to sort out the suspected ring leaders of the famous Invergordon mutiny in September 1931 and avert future mutiny. A sting operation was put in place to trap the ringleaders, which resulted in the arrest of Allison and Bill Shepherd, sub editor of the Daily Worker.

A contact had been made allegedly from sailors at Portsmouth and Allison and Shepherd travelled to Portsmouth to meet a sailor called Boutsfield. In reality he was working for the security service. Boutsfield asked Allison and Shepherd to print a leaflet calling for strike and a draft leaflet was drawn up with their collaboration. Allison was to return to Portsmouth with the printed leaflet, thus the Security Service could catch them “red handed” with seditious leaflets. Allison however had become suspicious and arrived to meet Boutsfield without the leaflets, never the less he was arrested and so was Shepherd, later.

Despite the lack of evidence against them the prosecution labelled Allison and Shepherd as the Invergordon mutiny leaders (which they were not). It was Len Wincott on the Cruiser Norfolk who had been one of the key leaders; he only joined the Communist Party after his dismissal from the navy. George Allison was sentenced In November 1931 to three years in jail and Shepherd 20 months hard labour.

After release, he became secretary of the Communist Party's North Midlands District (covering the South Yorkshire coalfield, North Derbyshire, North Nottinghamshire and North Staffordshire) from the mid-1930s until the beginning of the war. During World War II, Herbert Morrison’s decided almost unilaterally and out of spite to ban the Daily Worker under the Defence Regulation 2D “fomenting opposition to the War”. George Allison became national organiser of the Daily Worker Defence League (formerly Daily Worker Readers’ League). He then became the Communist Party's national industrial organiser but was to die relatively young, broken in health by his experiences, in 1951.

Source: J Klugmann `History of CPGB 1919-1924’; `Communism & British Trade Unions 1924-1933’; `Voices from Hunger marches’, interview with James Allison

Michael Walker (with additional material by GS)

Jimmy Airlie

Jimmy Airlie was born on November 10th 1936, in Renfrew, the son of a boilermaker. He served his apprenticeship as a fitter with Simon and Lobnitz, a shipyard on Clydeside. After his National Service, he returned to the yards and joined the Communist Party, with which he was to remain for the next three decades.

Airlie, as he was invariably known in that macho style common in Scottish politics of the past, came to prominence during the 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilding occupation, when he was a member of the Communist Party and joint convenor for the yard. Whilst it was Jimmy Reid who garnered all the attention due to his barnstorming platform style, it was Airlie (and with him Sammy Barr) who as full time convenor of shop stewards, was the strong man behind the scenes, a role suited to an ex-Lance Corporal from his National Service days. The occupation of the yard forced the then Tory government to retreat on a closure programme and it became a model for many other, similar struggles.

In his long years of service for the engineering union, he had been a district, divisional and national committee delegate. In 1979, he became a full time official for his union, firstly as assistant divisional organiser, and then subsequently played an increasingly significant role in support of the AEU broad left around the `Engineering Gazette’. He was the first Communist in a decade to win an executive council seat in the now thoroughly right-wing AEU, unexpectedly taking Gavin Laird’s former seat for Scotland. An attempt was made to undermine his formidable base in the Scottish region of the union by giving him national responsibility for Ford’s but it only increased his profile. He suffered widespread criticism for a highly controversial single-union deal in 1983, brokered by him and signed in secret, which undermined the national bargaining forum in Fords; opposition from the T&G saw Ford withdraw from an investment plan in Dundee for a new electronics plant.

Jimmy Airlie

His other national responsibilities included atomic energy, aluminium, flour milling and oil refining. He served for over ten years as the Scottish executive councillor until his retirement in September 1996. He had been a member of the TUC General Council. In a period when the AEU left lost out completely and the right swept all before it, Jimmy Airlie was seen as the main defender of the left and the man most likely to lead it in the future.

Despite everything, Airlie kept his Communist Party membership up until 1991, as the CPGB was about to dissolve. He described himself in these terms: “I am a Communist. I have been a Communist all my life.” He was widely considered to be a highly intelligent supremely skilled and fearless negotiator, a brilliant tactician and a biting wit, who never quite fulfilled all of his potential, taking early retirement when it became clear that the right would ensure that he would be prevented by age rules from launching an electoral bid for the Presidency of the AEU. Airlie died at age of 60 years on March 10th 1997

Morning Star 11th March 1997; Guardian 11th March 1997; Independent 11th March 1997; Observer 16th March 1997

Joyce Alergant

Born around 1918, Joyce Alergant left school at the age of 14 to work as a shop assistant. After a period of unemployment, she worked in a Liverpool slum area where she saw wretched housing conditions and poverty. In 1938 she joined the Communist Party, worked for the Aid to Spain Movement and helped organise supplies to Chinese war orphans. At the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the Red Cross and served in a Military Hospital, nursing the wounded from Dunkirk. Blitzed from her home she moved to London and worked at the Ministry of Supply.

She graduated from Liverpool University and subsequently became one of a number of Westminster City Council Communist Councillors in 1945, including Dr Joan McMichael and Bill Carritt. As a Councillor, she secured big concessions for Peabody tenants in the Covent Garden area – her ward - in September 1946.

In an interview with Hetty Rayner, women’s editor at the Daily Worker, in late 1946 Joyce summed up the work of Westminster Communist councillors, “… the rent reductions and decreases we have managed to achieve, amount to a total of £4,500 (close to half a million pounds in today’s money). Some tenants in bombed houses have had a reduction of as much as 16s per week.”

Joyce was one of five Communist Party members charged with “conspiracy to incite and direct trespass” because of their role in securing homes for bombed out and newly demobbed men from the army through the mass occupation, or as we would say today `squatting’ of empty housing. She was most involved in the famous occupation on Sunday 8th September 1946 (in pouring rain) of the empty seven story luxury flats at the Duchess of Bedford House and Melcombe Regis Court, in Kensington, West London. The other four Communists on trial were: Ted Bramley (London Communist Organiser and Communist LCC Councillor), Maurice “Tubby “ Rosen (Communist Councillor Stepney, Stan Henderson (Communist Organiser Hammersmith) and, Bill Carritt (Communist Councillor Westminster).

Joyce recalled that one squatter, who had been sharing a dilapidated house with seventeen other people, told her “I clutched at the prospect of a new house as a drowning man clutches at a straw.”

As the squatting movement spread across London and Britain, Nye Bevan - the Minister responsible for housing - feared an outbreak of “prairie fire” occupations. Writs against the five were secured on September 17th. At her formal appearance at Bow Street, Joyce as the only women on trial, was separated from the men and placed with a large group of “regular prostitutes and habitual drinkers”. The case was referred to the High Court. Joyce was under no illusion that, as with so many other Communists, she could face a two-year jail sentence, a prospect she did not relish at all.

On the first day of the trial at Old Bailey on Wednesday 30th October 1946, Joyce was presented with a large bouquet of chrysanthemums by supporters, which were immediately confiscated by the “sour faced” wardens. On day two, Thursday 31st October 1946, the jury found the five guilty on all counts but also secured the minimum penalty of a two year suspended sentence.

The Judge Stable passing sentence stated “I am satisfied that the motive was primarily to find houses for the unfortunate people and I am satisfied that what stimulated your action was a genuine sense of distress at the predicament in which these people found themselves” (Daily Worker 1st November 1946)

The Squatters’ movement forced the Government and local councils to start to requisition empty property for housing working people.

I feel sure that Joyce was related to a Mr Alergant, who in 1904 was the owner of a tobacco shop on Brownlow Hill below Clarence Street where Jewish socialists used to gather and interestingly was close to Liverpool University, where Joyce went to University.

Michael Walker
Source: Our History - London Squatters 1946 by Noreen Branson

Colin Anderson

Born on July 3rd 1952 and a life-long Communist, Colin Anderson worked at the National Savings branch in Cowglen Glasgow for more than 30 years. He held virtually every lay position there was at branch and departmental level in the Civil and Public Servants Association from the early 1970s and was a member of the union’s national conference Standing Orders Committee.

On being promoted within the civil service, he took up activity in the union that then existed for higher grades, the National Union of Civil and Public Servants (NUCPS). When CPSA and NUCPS later merged to form Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, he continued his involvement in the new all-grades body as a negotiator for the National Saving Agency. Representing over 4,000 members, Colin Anderson was responsible for the communications strategy of PCS in its long-running campaign against privatisation.

He was also Chair of the Glasgow Anti-Apartheid Movement, helped organise the “Free Mandela at 70” campaign which organised a Glasgow to London march at a rally of 30,000 people in Glasgow Green in 1988 and many events subsequently relating to progressive developments in South Africa. He later became Vice-Chair of Action for Southern Africa, the campaign body that succeeded the AAM, following the end of apartheid.

After an accident in 1989, Colin lost a leg and became involved in trade union disability rights issues; he was a member of the TUC’s Disability Forum and represented the Scottish TUC on the Employment Services Agency’s Disability Advisory Committee.

A long-time supporter of the Straight Left group in the Communist Party of Great Britain, Colin Anderson continued to be associated with the trend after the dissolution of that party. He died on January 9th 1999, leaving a partner, Diane, and a daughter, Sophie.

Source: `Straight Left’ March 1999

Keith Andrews

Born February 15th 1907, Andrews, known affectionately as `Andy’, joined the RAMC in the 1920s and served in India and China. By the 1930s, he was a Communist in Kilburn, engaged in anti-fascist struggle. From August 1936 to October 1938, he was engaged in medical units attached to the International and other Brigades. He served in France with the Royal Artillery in the Second World War. From 1955 to 1972, he was a COHSE branch secretary and secretary of the Taunton Communist Party.

Morning Star 15th February 2006

Paddy Apling

A food scientist by training, in his Communist Party work, Apling was mainly “a background planner, information source, writer of leaflets, press representative and sideman to the charismatic leader of the time”, though he was no mean street speaker himself.

His innate leadership qualities were, obviously, recognised in the army, where he was sent to Sandhurst (then Royal Armoured Corps OCTU), and commissioned just after VE-Day. He expected to be sent to the Far East - but after more training in 1944 at Bovingdon and Barnard Castle again, VJ-Day intervened and he joined 4th Royal Tank Regiment in Venezia Giulia, Italy. After a year as a successful troop leader, of a troop consisting of battle-hardened men, most of whom had fought their way through Italy, he was seconded to 2nd Armoured Brigade HQ and made Brigade Welfare Officer. There he was given control, handing over the Brigade HQ to the Italian Army and then responsibility for the loading of the SS Canterbury Castle, carrying the last of the Brigade from Venice to Egypt after the Peace Treaty in June 1947. This was all probably because he had very quickly learned to speak Italian. Subsequently, he spent some 4 months in the Suez Canal Zone.

In the post-war period, Paddy was involved in the Ilford tenant’s struggle, a major event in which the key figure was Frank Chinnery, a party full-timer, who had served in the Palestine Police. Having moved away from Ilford in 1959, Paddy was later in party branches at Chesham and Reading. In recent years, he has engaged in much local work and interchange over the internet and, just for the record (!) remains alive and well.

John Archer (1863-1932)

John Archer can only marginally be considered in a collection of Communist biographies by virtue of his brief association with Saklatvala, in the context of the early concept of Labour Communism. Nonetheless, as an individual he is sufficiently interesting in the larger picture to be considered worthy of inclusion.

He was born on 8 June 1863 in Liverpool, his father being a ship’s steward from Barbados and his mother an Irish Catholic. The evidence suggests that John Archer was a merchant seaman in his youth; his wife Bertha was a black Canadian, but it is not clear how they met, or where Archer had travelled before he settled in Battersea, which was certainly by 1901.

He was by this stage a professional singer but appears later to have been a medical student at some point. Archer began to become involved in left-wing circles about this time. He was linked to the work of the Battersea Trades and Labour Council and its alliance with the local electoral political group, the Progressives, which sought to control local municipal affairs, such as fair wages, social and leisure services, from 1894.

He attended the first Pan-African Conference in July 1900, held at Westminster Town Hall and was elected to the Executive Committee of the short-lived Pan-African Association established at the Conference.

In November 1906, standing as a Progressive candidate, Archer was elected to Battersea Borough Council as one of six councillors for the Latchmere ward and he also opened a photographic studio in Battersea Park Road. Some photographs taken by him have survived in Annual Reports of the local Trades Council. He was appointed to the Baths, Health and Works Committees. Later on, he joined the Board of Guardians, which supervised public health and welfare, then became Chair of the Baths Committee. He maintained an interest in the Nine Elms Swimming Club for the rest of his life.

The following year he was being attacked in local journals for too close an interest in the writings of the SDF leader, H.M. Hyndman.

In the November 1909 Council elections the Progressive Alliance, the Labour Party and the socialist organisations fielded separate lists of candidates and Archer failed to get re-elected.

In 1909, he was re-elected for Latchmere Ward, and shortly afterwards re-elected to the Board of Guardians. Following re-election of the Progressive group as a majority, Archer was Mayor from November 1913 to November 1914.

Only the second black mayor in Britain (the first was a Bahamian doctor elected in Norfolk in 1904) but, being the first to be elected in a major city, he attracted much attention, receiving many messages from well-wishers throughout the world.

Archer increasingly threw himself into local politics, becoming identified with the struggle to improve local conditions through the Borough Council and the Board of Guardians.

By 1919, Archer had become election agent for Charlotte Despard, celebrated suffragette, Irish nationalist and socialist parliamentary candidate in North Battersea.

In February 1919, he attended the first post-war Pan-African Congress in Paris and, in June, as President of the African Progress Union, he led a deputation to Liverpool to discuss the recent race riots in the city. The APU also financially aided the Guyanese lawyer who defended black men arrested in the disturbances.

In July 1921 Archer introduced the Indian left-winger Shapurji Saklatvala in a session on colonial freedom at the second Pan-African Congress and was to be election agent for Saklatvala in 1922, 1923 and 1924, brokering a deal by which his candidate was uniquely unopposed by Labour. When the Labour Party imposed a ban on Communists holding office, Battersea Labour Party opposed the move, especially as it affected its MP. Saklatvala.

The local Labour Party was disaffiliated and Saklatvala had the whip withdrawn in 1924 and from then on sat as a Communist MP. When the police, raiding the Communist Party HQ in Battersea, discovered a letter from Saklatvala outlining plans to undermine the Labour Party. Archer set up a new affiliated North Battersea Labour branch in his shop, and organised the campaign of a new candidate, William Sanders, who fought and defeated Saklatvala in 1929.

His health continued to deteriorate and he was admitted to St James Hospital, where he died on Thursday 14 July 1932, a few weeks after his 69th birthday. His death certificate states the cause of death as cardio-renal failure.

www.100greatblackbritons.com/bios/john_archer.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archer_
British Library Board Online Gallery feature by Mike Phillips

Jim Arnison

Born in Hanky Park, Salford, Arnison began working life as an apprentice plumber, aged 14, in 1939 and eventually became the long-standing Northern correspondent of the Morning Star.

He had a lively youth; in France, gendarmes arrested him and took him to a police station to await escort back to a ferry for Dover. He visited Hiroshima in 1946, after the US had dropped the devastating bomb. He was also part of the embattled British delegation to the World Festival of Youth in Berlin in 1951. Jim was a Communist Party full timer for much of the 1960s.

He became especially involved in and aware of the situation in Northern Ireland after a relative of his wife in Belfast who had, unknown to them, been a volunteer in the Provisional IRA, was shot and killed in 1972; this led to years of involvement in political work related to British imperialism’s role in Ireland.

Arnison was a severe critic of revisionism in the Communist Party and backed the Morning Star in the divide between camps. But he was critical of some courses adopted by the opposition and published his autobiography, “Decades”, in 1991.

Morning Star February 26th 1991

OBITUARIES OF JIM ARNISON BY JOHN GREEN

1) Friday September 21, 2007, The Guardian

For 26 years from 1964, Jim Arnison, who has died aged 82, was northern correspondent for the Daily Worker (after 1966, the Morning Star). He was never happier than when covering the industrial battles of the era.
One of the longest and most dramatic was the Roberts-Arundel strike in Stockport, Greater Manchester, which erupted into violence in February 1967 after the American owner sacked 145 employees and advertised for non-union labour. For 18 months, Jim became a fixture on the picket line and at the local engineering union office. His book, The Million Pound Strike (1970), gave a blow-by-blow account of the dispute.
Similarly, his book, The Shrewsbury Three: Strikes, Pickets and "Conspiracy" (1974), documented the injustice of a case the previous year in which 24 building workers were tried for "conspiracy to intimidate and unlawful assembly" and three of them, Des Warren (obituary, May 1 2004), Ricky Tomlinson and John McKinsie Jones, were sent to prison. During the miners' strikes of 1974 and 1984-85, Jim was working from dawn to dusk.
Born in Salford, Greater Manchester, Jim topped the class in English and French at his secondary school. He recalled how at home he would listen to his trade unionist father passionately arguing politics and union issues. Like other local youngsters, he suffered the illnesses of poverty; rickets meant he wore leg splints for several years.
In 1939, aged 14, he went into the building industry - completing his education in Salford's excellent public library. His later support for the Working Class Movement Library was fired by that experience. From 1943 he served as a radar operator on the light cruiser HMS Argonaut in the Atlantic, Greece and, in 1945, Japan, where he visited Hiroshima. "It was like walking through a gigantic cemetery," he wrote in his autobiography, Decades (1991).
After the war he joined Ex-Service-men for Peace and later CND. Back in the building trade, a member of the Communist party and working as a plumber, he became a shop steward, and later president, of his local union branch. In the late 1950s and early 60s, he was active in the north-west's opposition to the resurgence of Sir Oswald Mosley's neo-fascist movement.
Honest, forthright, generous and humorous, Jim was universally respected. I first met him in the 1970s while working in television documentaries. He was unstinting in his help and advice on industrial and trade union affairs, despite me being a "softie southerner".
Jim died shortly before his wife Millie, who was already ill with cancer. He is survived by three daughters, 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
John Green

2) MORNING STAR
Jim Arnison was born in 1925, a year before the General Strike, in that "dirty old town" of Salford, as characterised by Ewan MacColl, a fellow pupil at his school, in his song I'm a Ramblin' Man.
The family lived in a two up, two down, terraced house in Hanky Park, which was described so evocatively in Walter Greenwood's classic novel Love on the Dole. Jim remembered Greenwood visiting the family while he was collecting material for his novel.
As a child, he suffered the usual illnesses of poverty - diphtheria and rickets. As a result, he wore splints on his legs for several years. He describes these years graphically in his autobiography Decades.
At school, he was top of his class in English and French and, today, he would undoubtedly have gone to university. But, in 1939, he left school aged 14 and went to work in the building industry.
He completed his education at Salford's library, devouring the novels of Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck and Howard Fast. As a young man, he joined the Communist Party.
Then, in 1943, he joined the forces to fight fascism as a radar operator on HMS Argonaut. In action, he witnessed the reality of war and the unnecessary slaughter of German POWs. He saw action in the Atlantic, Greece and the Pacific.
Experiencing the devastation of Hiroshima in 1945 turned him into a lifelong campaigner for peace and against nuclear weapons. He became a leading member of Ex-Servicemen for Peace and, later, CND.
Returning to the building trade as a plumber, he soon became a shop steward and later president of his local plumbers union branch. He went on to play a leading role in trade union affairs in north-west England.
During the '60s, when Mosley and his fascist Union Movement attempted a comeback, Jim helped organise North-West anti-fascists and mass opposition to Mosley's marches.
In 1964, he began working for the Daily Worker and its successor the Morning Star. He refused to leave his beloved north, considering anyone who lived south of that city a "softie southerner" and so became the paper's only northern correspondent for 26 years.
He concentrated on industrial affairs and covered the volatile and dramatic industrial battles of the 1960s and '70s.
The Roberts Arundel strike, one of the longest, largest and most dramatic trade union disputes for decades, exploded in violence in February 1967. Jim was on the picket line or in the local AEU union office almost every day during that bitter struggle. His book The Million Pound Strike commemorates that dispute.
The building workers' strike against LUMP labour in the building industry ended in 1972. A year later, 24 Shrewsbury building workers were convicted of "conspiracy to intimidate and unlawful assembly." Three of those, Des Warren, Ricky Tomlinson and John McKinsie Jones, were imprisoned in a clear case of Establishment victimisation. Jim's book The Shrewsbury Three, documents that injustice.
He was never happier than when covering these disputes. During the miners' strikes of 1974 and 1984, he was out from dawn to dusk, following the pickets or in the local strike headquarters.
He was respected by all who came into contact with him, as an honest and generous man, with a great sense of humour.
Jim Arnison died unexpectedly in Salford hospital on Sunday August 19.
JOHN GREEN
Morning Star Friday 28 September 2007
3) MORNING STAR
Jim Arnison was born on 5th May 1925 into a family where his father became active after listening to a fascist speaker in the '30s and his mother was an engineering shop steward, he learned the facts of the class struggle early in his life. His membership of the Communist Party was a logical development.
He was apprenticed as a plumber and served in the navy during the war, Both experiences sharpened his understanding which was increased when he married Milly Bradbury, whose Irish connections drew him into the "troubles" in Belfast. Jim and Milly's three girls and the grandchildren enjoyed the warmth and devotion which their family life generated.
In 1964, Jim changed jobs and became the northern industrial correspondent for the Daily Worker and, later, the Morning Star, a position which he enjoyed thoroughly. He wrote several significant accounts of important events, eight of which were published as books. The most important was his account of the trial of the Shrewsbury Three. As a building worker himself, he followed and reported the situation with rare insight.
Towards the end of July this year, material that Jim had collected from Belfast and deposited in the Working Class Movement Library in Salford was mounted and displayed. The family, including those who had enjoyed the hospitality of the Maze prison, joined with trustees and friends of the library to listen to Jim's opening address, which he delivered with typical humour. It was a happy and memorable occasion.
Jim wrote his life story in the autobiography Decades.
He died on 19th August 2007

Morning Star Monday 27 August 2007

Robin Page Arnot

Robin Page Arnot was born on December 15th 1890 at Greenock, where 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, with GDH Cole and others, and of which he was to become its chair. He contributed to the ILP’s `Labour Leader’ under the non de plume of 'Jack Cade'.

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 Fabian 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 also wrote a history of the LRD in 1926.

Along with a number of others, such as Walter Holmes and William Mellor, who dubbed themselves the “Guild Communist Group”, a left trend amongst a larger movement for “guild socialism”, numerous in the LRD, Arnot was one of the founder members of the Communist Party in 1920, although he was only 20 years old, as was his second wife, Olive. His strong intervention in the debate about Labour Party affiliation, for which he was in favour, marked him out as an advocate of British Communism fixing itself firmly as part of the wider labour movement.

With R Palme Dutt and W N Ewer, he set up the Trinity Trust that formed “Labour Monthly”, which ran from 1926 to 1981 and was long edited by Dutt. In all that time, Arnot was a regular contributor and working editor for the journal. From October 1922, Arnot was one of a three-man commission that worked for a year on measures to reorganise the British Communist Party. He also became 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.

He was a British representative at the Comintern’s 6th Congress in 1928. and was the first Principal of the Marx Memorial Library from 1933 until the end of the second world war 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) and a volume celbrating the 50th anniversary of the revolution, “The Impact of the Russian Revolution”. 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 wrote six volumes of miners’ history between 1949 and 1975. Arnot died in 1986 aged 96, from 1984 publicly and openly fighting the revisionist trend that was taking control of the CPGB even to the end.

Sources: 'Labour Research' June 1986; 'Morning Star' May 19 1986, June 9th 1986; Guardian 20th May 1986; University of Wales Swansea LIS Archives; Sunday Worker 25th October 1925

Honor Arundel

Honor Arundel, children’s writer and Daily Worker film critic, along with Geoffrey Trease, were two of the best known Communist children’s authors.

Honor (Morfydd) Arundel was born in North Wales in 15th October 1919. She had a passion for poetry and writing, as did many members of the Communist Party. For, as Randall Swingler the Daily Worker literary editor (1939-1941), stated, “Poetry is the most intense … form of communication between man”.

As a result of her interest she became heavily involved in the development of the Left Book Club’s Poets Group, established in late 1937; its London group meet at Honor Arundel’s flat in Belsize Park.

By March 1939 there were over 20 Left Book Club Poetry groups outside London which included Manchester (Secretary Ray Watkinson), Cambridge (George Scurfield) and Hastings (F C Ball).

Under the initiative of the Communist Party, the Left Book Club Poetry Group was re established in July 1938. The group produced a duplicated monthly newsletter, entitled “Poetry and the people”. Its first editors being John Ongley, John Isserlis and John Manifold. “Poetry and the people” was an attempt by the Communist Party to build on the relative success of “Left Review” which had built up sales to about 5,000 but had little broad appeal beyond the Party by “bringing the poet and the people into as close a contact as possible for their mutual understanding and enjoyment”. It is clear that not all in the Party felt that Swingler, Arundel and the other Communist Poets were necessarily spending their time productively. Maurice Cornforth, in the Daily Worker, wrote that there was “no point in treating communist poets as tender shoots which wilt at the first wind of critical comments from the working class”.

With the collapse of the Left Book Club at the beginning of WWII, Swingler and other Communist writers took the decision to establish a new “more professional” publication “Our Time”, which would include architecture, medicine, education, art and literature. The first edition of which appeared in February 1941 and incorporated “Poetry and the people”. The editors were Swingler, James Boswell and Allen Hutt. The administrator was Charles Ringrose (see entries for all but Boswell), but when Ringrose was called up to national service he was replaced by Honor Arundel.

By 1943 Honor Arundel and Peter Phillips had become editors of “Our Time”, with a new format introduced in August 1943. Initially, sales hit the 5,000 mark, the maximum possible due to paper shortage and war time distribution restrictions. But the Forces clamour for cultural magazines, especially amongst ENSA, was such that by the end of the war it was selling 18,000 copies. With the end of the war and falling sales and political retrenchment Our Time” folded in August 1949, Swingler blaming Emile Burns, the Chair of Communist Party’s National Cultural Committee for its demise.

Arundel married the Scottish Communist actor and Scottish Equity founder Alex McCrindle (1911-1990), who played Jock in the popular radio programme Dick Barton, Special Agent (1946-1951), went on to become a regular television character actor and later appeared in the first `Star Wars’ film in 1977 as General Jan Dodonna, leader of the Rebel Alliance. (See entry for McCrindle.)

Their house became a hub of Communist Party activity and organisation. Doris Lessing notes in her autobiography, “In a garden on the canal known as Little Venice, now very smart, then dingy and run down, there were held ceilidhs, where Ewan MacColl sang [...]. The house belong to Honor Tracy (sic) [Arundel], an upper-class young woman whose education had destined her for a very different life, and her husband Alex McCrindle ... who was in a radio series of immense popularity. There were people from the worlds of radio, music, and nascent television, and of course, women with children. Most of them were communists, but none of them were communists ten years later, except for Alex. And Ewan MacColl, the communist troubadour and bard.”

Arundel, as with so many writers who were members of the Communist Party was concerned about rural issues and as such was a regular contributor to the `Country Standard’, as well as being involved in the National Agricultural Workers Union. She was the Communist Party candidate in 1958 for the West Stirlingshire, Scotland, constituency.

As the Daily Worker’s film critic in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Arundel had In June 1949 attended the International Film Festival at Marianske Lazne, Czechoslovakia in June 1949. There, she met photographer and filmmaker, Paul Strand, who attended to present his film `Native Land’. A life time friendship developed and, she accompanied on a visit to Uist prior to the making of his acclaimed photography study on Tir a'Mhurain /Outer Hebrides (1962) about life on the Scottish islands.

Arundel’s children’s books, many of which were set in Scotland and a number which became considerably popular, included: `Emma's island’, `Emma in Love’, `The Longest Weekend’, `The blanket word’, `A Family Failing’, `Girl in the Opposite Bed’, `The amazing Mr. Prothero’ and `Terrible Temptation’.

Arundel also wrote `The Freedom of Art’, Lawrence & Wishart (1965) and
edited with Maurice Carpenter “New lyrical ballads, London: Editions Poetry, 1945. Anthology.

Honor Arundel died on 8th June 1973.

Sources: `A weapon in the struggle: The Cultural history of the CP in Britain by Andy Croft (strongly recommended); Paul Strand and the Atlanticist Cold War by Fraser MacDonald

Michael Walker

Jack Askins

Jack Askins was born on 28th April 1919, to an east European immigrant couple; his given name was Isadore, Issy as he was known in his youth. He left school at the age of 13 and went to work in a jewellery warehouse in Cheetham. Issy immediately met a group of young anti-fascist activists and engaged in anti-Blackshirt work. After a couple of years, he joined the YCL and then the Communist Party in 1937. He served in the Royal Artillery in the war but was invalided out due to asthma in 1942. On his return to Manchester, it was Norah Jeffrey, the Party organiser, who dubbed him `Jack’ and somehow the name stuck. Jack was then heavily involved in agitational work connected to a range of local factories, especially in Trafford Park, becoming a skilled factory gate orator.

He became the full-time worker at the Party’s Trafford Park and Stretford premises and bookshop, dubbed `the Kremlin’ by local factory workers. Jack was secretary of the Trafford Park branch, which had 250 members at Metro-Vickers alone. He now met his first wife of many years, Betty, who was a local YCL member; a doughty young woman, she once slung her handbag, containing a brick, at Oswald Mosley! He became the Industrial Organiser for the Lancashire and Cheshire District of the Communist Party, a particular source of pride for him from this period was the development of a thriving docks branch of the Party.

From 1954, he worked a conductor on Manchester Corporation, producing a printed monthly paper, the Busmen’s Clarion, from July 1954 to February 1956. The paper became very influential and was not liked by either the council or the union hierarchy. A clear plot to sack him ensued. After a union branch meeting, when he was not on duty but was wearing uniform, he was apprehended by an inspector, when in the company of four other uniformed employees, for not paying his fare. Some 300 other workers had left the meeting in uniform but only Jack was `tailed’. In those days, no staff passes were issued and workers generally recognised each other when they boarded a bus and were not expected to pay. With the union diffident about his dismissal and the corporation completely hostile to reinstatement, Jack did not press the issue, in the interests of maintaining unity amongst the workers for the more pressing struggles ahead. The effects of Cold War propaganda could still be felt amongst the workforce.

After a spell on the markets, Jack went lorry driving but illness forced him to give this up but not his union work. Jack was a major contributor to the fight against bans and proscriptions against Communists in the T&G and became a regular delegate to the TUC from his union. For many years during the 1960s, he was the Party’s candidate in Bowlee ward in Middleton and his activism on local issues was so vigorous that his vote was consistently around 20% of all votes cast. From 1965, he became extremely active on the issue of the Vietnam War. As 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, even if it sometimes confined him to a wheelchair.

He pioneered the issue of disabled access to the TUC annual conference in a one man campaign to end the invisibility of the disabled and was a frequent speaker in his wheelchair from by the side of the rostrum, eventually embarrassing Congress House into making permanent and proper provision for wheelchair users as a matter of course at congress.

However, unquestionably, the single most important obsession of his life from the late 1960s was solidarity with the people of Vietnam; he was a prime mover in many things but the massive material support he mobilised for the building of a hospital and a crèche there was all but legendary. In 1985, he was awarded the highest honour that the people of Vietnam can bestow a foreigner, the Order of Friendship. He had effectively led Britain’s solidarity work with Vietnam from a wheel-chair.

Sadly, after a lifetime’s comradeship, his wife Betty died in 1982; in 1985, Jack remarried to Dr Joan McMichael, who had been a comrade on the Party EC and in the solidarity work with Vietnam with him. Her outstanding work on Medical Aid for Vietnam was known throughout the world. Joan moved to the North-West of England to share his life and they formed a truly formidable alliance.


Jack Askins

A member of the Communist Party’s Executive Committee from 1971 to 1979, he was a firm opponent of the delirious and head-long rush to break-up of the Party that was associated with the revisionist tendency of Marxism Today. Although one of the first to be expelled from the Party for his support for the Morning Star, Jack was deeply saddened by this and not a little bemused by the typically bureaucratic and erroneous technicalities leading to his ejection from the Party he loved. His name had been mistakenly added to a letter he had not “properly perused” that offended the revisionist leadership. Jack was one of the first to support the establishment of the Communist Campaign Group, which led to the re-established Communist Party of Britain.

When Jack died on 1st January 1987, aged 67, three hundred people crowded only a few days later into the crematorium to hear Ron Todd, T&G General Secretary, Tony Chater, Morning Star editor, and the Vietnamese Ambassador; an even larger memorial meeting was held a month later. On his death, he was still a T&G branch secretary and delegate to the BDC. He was also Honorary Secretary of the North West British Vietnam Association and active in the campaign, Action for Research into Multiple Sclerosis.

Sources: Morning Star January 2nd 1987; “Jack Askins 1919-1987” published by Region 6 T&G (n.d. – c.1987); GS personal knowledge.

Lil Atkin

Born at the turn of the 20th century in Surrey, Lil lost her mother at a young age and bankruptcy drove her father and siblings north to find work. She worked in the hosiery mills of Leicester, travelling 19 miles each day to work to keep her family fed and together.

As a young woman, she joined the ILP and from there gravitated quickly to the young Communist Party. She met her husband, Sid, in Nottingham and they became well-known as a speaking pair at campaigning meetings throughout the county. They married in 1934 and moved to Birmingham, when Sid was appointed an organiser for the retail and distributive union, USDAW.

As the busy mother of three, Lil’s commitment to the Communist movement was shown in a lifetime of local branch activity and her persistence in mobilising her children to collect wild berries to render into jam for Daily Worker bazaars. This was accompanied by much knitting and sewing also, as well as organising others in such efforts. Lil Atkin died in 1978, predeceasing her husband by a matter of months.

Source: funeral oration for Lil Atkin by Frank Watters – September 1978

Sid Atkin

Coming from a Nottingham mining background, Sid Atkin played an active part in the 1926 General Strike and became a life-long Communist Party. In the 1930s, he was involved in Birmingham with the NUWM, anti-fascist activity and support for Spain, and the city’s great 1939 rent strike.

As an USDAW full time official from 1936 and Co-operative Society activist in Birmingham, Sid Atkins’ life-long commitment to the Communist Party undoubtedly held him back in his union career. He was a delegate and active participant at Birmingham Trades Council for decades, serving on its executive. A staunch supporter of the 1972 miner’s strike, he was a daily attendee at the Saltley Gate picket in Birmingham. Married for much of his life to a fellow-Communist, Lil, with whom he had three children, Sid died in September 1978.

Source: funeral oration for Sid Atkin by Frank Watters – September 1978

Dave Atkinson

Dave Atkinson, who died at the age of 91, was a lifelong communist and one of Tyneside's most outstanding trade unionists of the 20th century. Dave started work in 1929 as a Post Office telegraph boy. He rapidly became an active trade unionist and joined the communist movement at the age of 16. By the time that he volunteered for active service, in 1939, he had been involved in the Aid for Spain campaign and was a postman driver, a branch officer of the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW) and a delegate to Newcastle Trades Council.

Dave's army career saw his rapid promotion from machine-gunner in the Northumberland Fusiliers to lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps, with chief responsibility for vehicle waterproofing and amphibious training for the D-Day landings. After active service on Gold Beach, Normandy, then in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, he volunteered for Burma and was promoted to captain.

Dave often remarked wryly that the army needed to commission working-class soldiers like him since the upper class officers didn't know anything and too many were getting themselves killed. Whatever the truth of this, his leadership qualities were genuine - and his experiences served to sharpen, rather than diminish, his class perspective and his dream of world peace.
Demobilised in 1946, young Captain Atkinson dropped his title and returned to the Newcastle Post Office, again taking up his responsibilities as a union branch official.

He became North Eastern district organiser for the UPW in 1948, a post which he held until his retirement in 1975. He was then presented with the union's highest national award, the gold badge and honorary national membership, in recognition of 43 years service as a branch and district representative. In retirement, he was, for many years, the union's honorary auditor.

Within the wider Tyneside labour movement, however, Dave was better known as the spiritual and political "father" of Newcastle Trades Council, a soubriquet earned as a result of years of dedicated service and of always being willing to advise but also prepared to listen. In all, he served 35 years on the council's executive committee, including many years as president, helping to make Newcastle TUC the leading trades council in the northern region at the time.
His efforts were crowned by the successful four-month struggle in 1986 to raise over £45,000 to buy premises for the trades council and its Centre Against Unemployment, a building at 4 Cloth Market that is still in use for this purpose today. In December 1983, Newcastle TUC "adopted" apartheid political prisoner Harry Gwala as a positive gesture of solidarity with fellow trades unionists in South Africa.

Dave was delegated to contact Harry's family and so began a correspondence which went on even after 1988, when Harry was released. Despite motor neurone disease, Harry became honorary president of the South African Metal Workers Union and a leading ANC activist and Dave was able to meet him when he came to Britain for medical treatment in 1989.

Within the Communist Party, Dave's experience and knowledge were invaluable. As the leading Communist trade unionist on Tyneside, he was a constant adviser to then district secretary Horace Green.

For many younger comrades, he was an inspiration and a mentor. He was meticulous in financial matters and, on re-establishment of the CPB in 1988, he became treasurer of the Tyneside branch, then manager of the northern district mobile bookstall Clarion Books. He continued to help at the Tyneside Morning Star Bazaar until well into his 80s.

On his return from Burma in 1946, Dave married Iris, the love of his life. Together, they formed a committed, loving, communist partnership. Both were strong supporters of the Soviet Union and active in the British-Soviet Friendship Society. They visited the Soviet Union on a number of occasions, allowing Dave to build and strengthen contacts with leaders of the Soviet postal workers' union.

Sadly, Iris died in 1994, but Dave took great joy in his children Adrian, Neil and Sharon, their partners, his grandchildren and his first great granddaughter. In typical fashion, he celebrated his 90th birthday in 2005 by placing a substantial box advert in the Morning Star, thanking his family and the many individuals and organisations that had been a support in his own life - including the Morning Star.

In 1969, Newcastle Trades Council presented Dave with the Tom Aisbitt Award, a gold medallion given to "the most outstanding trade unionist in the area". Tom, a personal friend of Dave's, was a founder member of the Communist Party and had been a Woodworkers' Union delegate to the trades council for more than 40 years. Dave's statement in accepting the award aptly describes himself: "He was a marvellous man with an unswerving loyalty to, and belief in, the working class."

Obituary in the Morning Star - Thursday 01 March 2007 by Ruth Wallis and Martin Levy

Bert Axell

Herbert Ernest Axell was born on July 1st 1915, in Rye, East Sussex, Axell worked in his local post office after school and then served in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War, when he joined the Communist Party. Although returning to the post office, ill-health obliged him to retire early in 1952. His childhood interest in bird then developed into a formidable expertise. He became warden of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) Dungeness reserve from 1952-59.

Axell became, over the next decades, a highly important figure in ornithological research, in particular details of the thickness of legs – work that led to better fitting rings to check on migration. He was the RSPB’s land-use advisor and worked extensively abroad on bird management questions. Axell had several bird books published and died aged 86, on November 12th 2001.

Guardian 11th December 2001

Bert Baker

His association with the Daily Worker began in 1940, as the editor’s secretary and then, when the ban on publication ended, for a short time as a reporter. Baker then worked on local newspapers and the Daily Mirror, joining the Soviet Union’s TASS News Agency as its British correspondent in 1949. In 1953, he became the editor of the Communist Party’s internal weekly journal `World News and Views’.

Baker rejoined the paper in 1957, served as features editor for twenty years, including into the period of the name change to `Morning Star’, doubling as the paper’s TV critic, “Stewart Lane”. Ill-health forced him to retire in 1979 and he turned to freelance work but continuing as the Star’s TV critic until 1989. Whilst freelancing, he contributed to many journals including the Listener, the Scotsman, Variety and the children’s weekly, Early Times. He was also a life-long member of the National Union of Journalists, a member of the Broadcasting Press Guild and the Critics’ Circle.

Morning Star 29th October 1997

Glen Baker

An active Communist from around the age of 16 years of age, Glen Baker was born in Ipswich and became the YCL branch secretary there. In 1972, he moved to London, joining the Haringey YCL and Party branches. By 1977 he had moved to Hackney and the `Victoria’ Branch.

He was closely involved with the cultural magazine Artery in the 1960s and 1970s and was 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.

Baker is described as “a private man, not prone to declamatory speeches; a very thoughtful, well-read and intelligent personality. When he spoke, it was worth listening to, for he had a sharp, analytical mind.”

These talents were very clearly shown in his role as a regular reviewer for the Morning Star arts page. These were of a very wide ranging character and he reviewed novels, political theory, history and theatre, especially the fringe theatre. The `Sturdy Beggars’, a west London group in the latter tradition regarded him as a particularly “loyal supporter of socialist theatre”.

In Baker’s very last review, regarding Carver at the Arcola Theatre, in passing but absolutely accurately, he wrote that he himself was “capable of evocative prose and of discerning the beauty in nature”. All his reviews were informative and of a positive turn, even when he disagreed with those he was reviewing, for he always kept the reader in mind.

Baker was a member of the Communist Party of Britain and the secretary of its Hackney branch until his untimely death in August 2005, aged 57.
.
Sources: Morning Star and Mary Davies

Jessie Baker

Born and brought up in Brixton, south London, Jessie’s formal education was cut short by her suffering diphtheria as a child but this resulted in her becoming a wide reader and led to her developing socialist views. Like so many, she became aware of the dangers of fascism in the 1930s and became a member of the Communist Party. She was active in the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service at the beginning of the war and in September 1940 married Norman Baker.

Moving to live near Swindon, Wiltshire, she became a union shop steward while working at the Great Western Railway during the war. In peace time, back in London, in Lambeth, she was a long-time chair of management at Stockwell school, served on the council education committee and was involved in the Women's Cooperative Guild. She also worked for the Coop education committee and was a manager of a local special school. Her husband died in 1989. Jessie died aged 92, in 2007.

Guardian 1st May 2007

Ted Baker

Born into a socialist background in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, Ted’s father was a victim of the Boer War, finding shoe making the only outlet for his war disabilities. Ted began working life 1922 in brass foundry and became a lifelong member of CP long standing council candidate.

He worked both at Avery and Lucas, which were the target for the Communists’ organisational drive amongst skilled workers. Along with Eden, George Hanson, Len Marsden, Doctor Mary Barrow leadership of Great Rent Strike of 1939. His personal home became the base for R P Dutt’s candidature in 1945 general election. Ted was an office-holder for some 40 odd-years in the AEU in various offices, including Chair of Birmingham No 16 branch and membership of Birmingham East DC of the union, for many years its Chair.

The Chair of the Communist Party’s Midlands Cultural Committee for many years, Ted was heavily involved in work to transform empty Trinity Church into a community cultural centre and the first trades unionist to be appointed to Midlands Arts Council.

Sources: Ted Baker letter to Times 12.1.78; FW oration 7.9.84; GS personal knowledge

Willie Barclay

Barclay was a full time trade union organiser for the Painters (union) Society. He led a campaign for improved housing in Dundee and stood as a Communist Party council candidate for Dundee Town Council in (1945 or 46).

He was one of several impressive candidates fielded by the Dundee Communist Party, which seemed inundated with powerful and influential local personalities. There was June Robertson, a local Dundee Communist Party official; Alexander Annan, the Dundee Area Secretary of the Party and a former shop workers union activist; David Bowman (NUR railway activist – see entry); Bert Livingstone, former Dundee Branch secretary who also took a "prominent part" in the fight for Spain; Jessie Malcolm, a shop steward in a Dundee factory; Willie Petrie, President of Dundee AEU who was involved with the fight to improve conditions in the shipyards); William Allan, a railway clerk; and Jack Cassidy, an AEU member.

Michael Walker

Baz Barker

Born in 1910, Basil Barker - known to all and sundry as Baz - was active in the labour movement from the age of 12. He was an activist in the General Strike, when he joined the Communist Party and was a major player in the fight against the scab Spencer union in Nottinghamshire. He then became involved in the unemployed workers' struggles of the 1930s.

Later in the decade, he was appointed full-time organiser for the Communist Party in Sheffield, succeeding Jock Kane. During the war, he entered the engineering industry, was elected as convenor at a Chesterfield factory and remained in the town for the rest of his life.

For many years he was a member of the national committee of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and President of the Chesterfield District Committee of that union. He was also a long term activist on and President of Chesterfield Trades Council.

In view of his services to the town, Chesterfield Borough Council granted him the freedom of the borough — the first time in 100 years that a trade unionist had received this honour and the only Communist to do so. The decision received widespread publicity. Baz remained a member of the Communist Party all his life, joining the re-established Party until his death in February 1994.

Andy Barr

Communist and trade union leader in Northern Ireland, Andy Barr was born on 23rd September 1913 at 29 Cluan Place, off the Mountpottinger Road, east Belfast. He started his working life as an apprentice sheet metalworker in Musgraves on the Albert Bridge Road, where he was apprenticed to Sam McCoubrey, who became the district secretary of their union, He secured a “clean job” at the recently established Shorts aircraft works in 1938.

He married Dorothy Adrain, a mill worker and shop steward at Ewarts Mill, in 1941. Barr was elected shop steward in 1942, in the same year he joined the Communist Party of Ireland. (His father had been involved in the Left Book Club.)

Barr stated, ‘I was just known as a militant shop steward in Shorts. People came to me when they were selling literature and I would have brought it: Unity, Labour Monthly, Daily Worker... I was reading all that stuff and I was becoming really interested in politics and joined the Party.’

He was elected convenor at Shorts in 1946 and went on to make a massive contribution to the labour movement as a leader, known the length and breadth of these islands and beyond. He became chairman of the district committee of his union in 1947 and was elected to the Executive Committee in 1948. He was sacked in 1949 for holding a meeting of his members in Shorts during working hours. Another eight senior shop stewards were dismissed when they openly supported him. Then 10,000 workers in Shorts’ five factories stopped work and all the shop stewards, including Barr, were reinstated. Barr was elected district secretary in 1953 and national president (Britain and Ireland).

In the later 1950s, Andy Barr played a prominent role in reuniting a divided Irish trade union movement into the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. He also campaigned for recognition of the ICTU by the Stormont
Government, ultimately conceded in 1964. He promoted the Communist Party’s policy as contained in its 1962 programme and advocated and actively supported the ICTU’s demands for democratic and economic reform. Barr supported the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and opposed the introduction of internment without trial.

When politicians characterised the civil rights movement as a communist-republican conspiracy, Barr’s analysis was: “I don’t think the party received full recognition of the part we played. We had many key people who devoted themselves almost full time to it. The CP played a very good role . . . One thing in particular, we tried to get the trade union movement to affiliate to NICRA. Of course we were not helped by some leftist elements among the republicans. That didn’t help us. Communists were playing a very important role in the mass demonstrations, the discussions that took place over the place—communists were involved in them all and tried to influence the civil rights movement along sensible lines that could be accepted by the Protestant population. That’s who we had to win to the civil rights struggle.”

During the para-military and Orange-led Ulster Workers’ Council stoppage of 1974, despite workers expressing through democratic meetings their opposition to the stoppage, many were forced out of work by the threat of violence.

Andy Barr was involved in convening a meeting of a couple of hundred people in the AEU hall in the Port of Belfast. Everyone spoke against the UWC stoppage. Barr proposed that a march into the shipyard through loyalist blockades into the Harland and Wolff shipyard. One participant recalled: “We invited Len Murray, the general secretary of the TUC, to attend. Credit where credit’s due: Len Murray turned up, but by that time the fear in the streets was palpable.” Barr himself recalled: “We saw there was going to be difficulties, but we said let’s start, small and all in numbers as we are. We’ll go through with it. And we marched through. I can recall very clearly taking off my glasses, as I knew they were going to be a liability, and we formed up in the front row.”

In 1974, Barr was finally elected president of the all Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Ireland’s TUC, a position long denied to Communists by the trade union hierarchy. On his election he said: “I think it is the highest honour that can be paid to any trade unionist. I have never sought honour from other than my own class—the working class.”

Andy Barr

Barr remained active in retirement, participating in education classes in the Fold, where he lived in Bangor, and campaigning on a range of local and international issues including opposition to the invasion of Iraq only a few weeks before his death in March 2003.

Michael Walker

Further Reading: Andy Barr: An Undiminished Dream (2003) by F Devine.

Lionel Bart

Born on 1st. August 1930, this surname of this famous British composer, playwright, and lyricist was originally Begleiter. He was the youngest of seven surviving children of a Jewish family in the East End of London, refugees from Galicia, which had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
So poor were they that his father worked as a tailor in a garden shed London. When Lionel was six years old, a teacher told his parents that he was a musical genius. Although he had an old violin, he did not practice and his lessons were stopped. He never learned to read or write musical notation; this did not stop him from becoming a central figure in in the development of modern British popular music.
A talented artist, when he was 16 he won a scholarship with St Martin's School of Art but he was expelled for "mischievousness". Having given up his ambition to be a painter, he took jobs in silk-screen printing works and commercial art studios.

Lionel did his National Service in the Royal Air Force, where he met John Gorman (see separate entry), who was also interested in using his artistic talent but who had already received training in the silk-screen printing side of the print business. After leaving the RAF, Lionel borrowed £50 and set up a printing business with Gorman in Hackney. Like Gorman, Lionel joined the Communist Party around this time, probably along with Gorman in 1949 whilst they were both still in the forces.

The delightful black and white photographs of them, taken in 1950 outside their workshop at 53 Elderfield Road, Hackney are reproduced in John Gorman's autobiography. A careful scrutiny will show the poorly-heeled poverty of their artisan-like condition.
Lionel’s infamous songwriting career actually began in amateur theatre. In 1952, he arranged the annual show, a cabaret called IYC Revue 52 for the left-leaning International Youth Centre. He and his co-writer, John Gold, created a story about Robin Hood. The following year the pair auditioned for a Unity production of the Leonard Irwin play, `The Wages Of Eve’. Then Lionel began composing songs for Unity Theatre, contributing material (including the title song) to their 1953 revue `Turn It Up’, and songs for their 1953 pantomime, an agit-prop version of Cinderella. While at Unity he was talent spotted by Joan Littlewood and joined Theatre Workshop.
Lionel was at the World Youth Festivals in Bucharest in 1953 and Poland in 1955, primarily arising from his involvement in Unity Theatre and it was his association with Unity that drew him into the Communist Party. His and John Gorman’s printing firm began to be a success but Lionel’s mind was elsewhere. He began to plan to enter showbiz. After noticing St Bartholomews hospital ("Barts") when passing by on a bus, he changed his name to Bart. This led to a serious surge in professional entertainment work that for a time sat uneasily with his role as proprietor of an art printing firm, especially one that sometime did work for the progressive movement.

His work included writing comedy songs for the radio programme, the Billy Cotton Band Show. In September 1956 he saw Tommy Hicks performing guitar in a Soho coffee bar. He signed him up to perform in a group called the Cavemen. Lionel Bart persuaded agents to see Hicks perform; being suitably impressed they signed him up and he adopted the stage name Tommy Steele.
Lionel’s songwriting (sometimes in collaboration, as with Tommy Steele) brought him widespread recognition; he wrote Livin' Doll for Cliff Richard and Little White Bull for Tommy Steele, along with Rock with the Cavemen, Handful of Songs and Butterfingers. This musical work led to his being awarded three Ivor Novello Awards in 1957, four in 1958-9, and two in 1960. His first professional musical was the 1959 Lock Up Your Daughters, based on an 18th century play by Henry Fielding. Following that, Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be was produced by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. This was particularly notable for its use of Cockney accents, which slightly presaged his later and infamous Oliver!
In 1960, Lionel was given the Variety Club Silver Heart for Show Business Personality of the Year, even so, he was still fond of flaunting his Communism in his early days of success before he was swept away by a life-style of unreality. He recorded a nine- track set in 1960 that contained the somewhat unlikely story-song of "Newmarket Nightmare" about the day "they entered a philly from the USSR" at Ascot with the daring name "For a Lasting Peace and a People's Democracy." She beats the favourite, "Challenge Royal," causing an uproar!
But his great success with Oliver! swept him into the limelight in a dazzling way. The musical opened on 30th June 1960 and received 23 curtain calls. It ran for 2,618 performances in its London run. The 1968 film version, directed by Carol Reed, won several Oscars, including Best Picture. The whole project was a huge hit from the very beginning and, unlike much else that Lionel was associated with, it did not lost its shine. The musical saw single hits such as As Long As He Needs Me (Shirley Bassey) and Consider Yourself. It is estimated that Oliver! brought Lionel around £16 a minute, when the average wage was nearer half that for a week.
Such success saw ironies; it was Lionel who wrote the theme song for the 1963 James Bond movie From Russia With Love. His other hits include: Do You Mind? (Anthony Newley and Andy Williams), Easy Going Me (Adam Faith) and Always You And Me (with Russ Conway)
After Oliver, Bart's next two musicals, Blitz! (1962) (which included Far Away - another hit for Shirley Bassey) and Maggie May (1964), had respectable West End runs but Twang! (1965) was a notorious flop and La Strada (1969), opened and closed on Broadway after only one performance. Bart used his now considerable personal finances to try to rescue them, selling his past and future rights to others of his works, including Oliver!, in order to generate capital. But he could not recapture the moment and, by 1972, Bart was bankrupt, with debts of £73, 000. He turned to drink, and a twenty-year period of depression ensued, from which he ultimately recovered, after attending Alcoholics Anonymous.
His old friend John Gorman reappeared to help Lionel sort out his life and he gained attention again in the 1980s with a new version of Livin' Doll with satirical words. In 1986 he received a special Ivor Novello Award for his life's achievement. His "Happy Endings," a 1989 advertising jingle for Abbey National, was a great success. Cameron Mackintosh, who owned half the rights to Oliver!, revived the musical at the London Paladium in 1994 in a version rewritten by Lionel Bart. Mackintosh gave Lionel Bart a share of the production royalties.
Although Lionel Bart was always known to be gay by those in the theatre world he was often publicly romantically linked with Judy Garland or Alma Cogan in the early days and did not come out publicly until the 1990s and he died of cancer, aged 68 on Lionel Bart died on 3rd April 1999.
Sources include: John Gorman “Knocking down ginger” p175

Eric Batter

Born in 1917, Batter was a Communist activist in Exeter until 1945. He then went to Plymouth, where he was associated with the Party’s `People’s Centre’ bookshop in Wimple Street. Later, he resided at Saltash, Cornwall and died in September 1993.

Morning Star 2nd October 1993

Kay Beauchamp

Kay Beauchamp was an inspiring and motivational character with some seven decades of a leading role in British Communism to her credit, chalking up an impressive record of agitational work, helping found the Daily Worker, getting elected to a local council and nurturing future leaders of independent Africa in the process.

She was born to a farming family at Midsomer Norton in Somerset on May 27th 1899. Her older sister, Joan, was a decisive initial influence, having been an associate of Sylvia Pankhurst, she had become a founder member of the Communist Party in 1920. Kay followed her in 1924, after completing a history degree at University College, London under Professor A F Pollard, whose son, Graham, she married that year; the marriage was dissolved in 1972.

She worked on `Labour Monthly’ and helped Emile Burns produce a newsletter for the St Pancras Council of Action during the General Strike. An example of her youthful resourcefulness and bravura, during a police raid on Communist Party premises she burnt membership records.

Kay worked with the Minority Movement and then became the Party’s women’s officer. She was at the warehouse meeting in Tabernacle Street, Shoreditch on December 31st 1929, which established the Daily Worker and was the first women’s editor, a position that finance proved impossible to sustain. After a study tour of the Soviet Union, she became Managing Director of the paper. Arising from this role, she was jailed for contempt of court and imprisoned for five months when the paper described the conviction of NUWCM leader Wal Hannington as a “frame-up” and refused to pay a £1,550 fine.

For a period, she worked as a teacher and was also associated with the Party’s (Marxist) Education Department but mainly, during the 1930s and 1940s, she worked closely with Harry Pollitt, organising hunger marches, solidarity work with Spain and the campaign for the Second Front in world war two. She was propaganda officer for the London District Committee of the Party in the latter stages of the war.

After the war, she was elected a local Councillor for the Party to the Finsbury Borough Council. She acted as liaison officer to the Cypriot Communists’ London branch of AKEL (Progressive Party of Working People) and served as International Secretary of the Party. Arising from this role, she visited Morocco, Nigeria and Ghana. Kay was active from the start in the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), founded in 1954, and worked with Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and other future leaders of emergent Africa.
Following her formal retirement from work in 1960, became the Secretary of the London Area Council of the MCF, which brought her into contact with Tony Gilbert, a relationship that flowered from partnership on international solidarity work into a close personal bond. The both broke up with their respective former spouses and married in 1972. She was associated with the Labour Research Department for a long period from 1970, specialising in articles on housing and other social service issues, areas she had gained expertise upon as a councillor. One booklet, `Services for pensioners’ surveyed the disparate range of facilities across local authorities and sold over 30,000 copies.

Kay edited Liberation’s magazine and founded a publishing firm, Young World Books, which produced a considerable output of literary and political texts. `Tales from Mozambique’, which Kay edited, was the first ever edition in English of folk stories from that country. As a lover of the arts and music, she published poems and literature.

Continuing to be both politically active and to edit right up until her death at over 91 years, she combined this with the relatively energetic pursuits of bird-watching and foreign travel. Both she and Tony Gilbert died in 1992, within three weeks of each other, she on 25th January.

Sources: Morning Star January 27th 1992, January 28th 1992; Independent 30th January 1992; Labour Research March 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 immigrating 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.

Brian Behan

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

Tom Bell

Thomas Bell was born in Parkhead, Glasgow in 1882, the son of a stone mason and a cotton spinner. He left school at 12 years of age and his first job was as a `milk boy’. He then worked for an aerated water company but was to become an apprenticed iron moulder. In 1900 (or 1901), he joined the ILP, attending economics classes given by G S Yates. Bell became dissatisfied with the ILP’s attitude to trade unions and industrial workers and, in 1902, joined the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. But his continuing views on unions and workers led him, and those who thought like him, to be denounced by SDF leadership as “Impossibilists” and the entire group, led by Yates and Matherson, was expelled at the 1903 SDF conference.

Bell, along with others such as Willie Gallagher and Arthur MacManus, joined the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which was established in 1903 after their expulsion from the SDF. This organisation was also Marxist but was small; it was an overwhelmingly Scottish grouping, although there were also were small groups in Sheffield and Derby. This British SLP also had close links with the Socialist Labor Party of America led by Daniel de Leon.

He was a member of the Associated Society of Iron moulders of Scotland from 1904 and remained active in the union from then on. Bell soon became one of the SLP’s most prominent members, in the process steering it away from the grip of `de Leonism’. Bell was a member of the strike committee during the Singers and Argyle Motor Works in 1911.

An anti-war activist, Bell was also one of the leaders of the Clyde Workers’ Committee and shop steward’s movement during the First World War. When war broke out, he was active in the unofficial workers’ committee movement, first in Liverpool and then in Glasgow. In 1914, he was elected to the Executive of the Scottish Iron moulders but then left Glasgow to work in London and Liverpool.

For periods, he was a SLP propagandist in London and Lancashire. In 1919, Bell became editor of the SLP’s weekly journal, “The Socialist”. Under his editorship, its circulation rose to 8,000 in 1920, when he left the position.

He was also President of the Scottish Iron moulders' and leader of the 1920 moulders' strike, which was successful in obtaining a wage rise for the whole of the engineering industry. He was also active on trade union affairs in Merseyside and Manchester. Bell was a close associate of James Connolly and was Chairman of Manchester Labour College and Plebs League.

He played an important role in the establishment of the Communist Party in 1920, as one of three SLP delegates (Arthur MacManus and William Paul) to the Communist Unity Committee and Convention. He and his fellow SLP delegates’ support for the establishment of the CPGB led to them being expelled from the SLP.

Tom Bell

Bell was a Communist Party Executive member from 1920-1929 and initially National Organiser and was the first official representative of the British Party at the EC of the Comintern. He was editor of Communist review from 1923. During the political show trial of the British Communist Party leadership in 1925, Bell was sentenced under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 to six months in Wandsworth jail, along with Arthur MacManus, J T Murphy, J R Campbell, Robin Page Arnot, Tom Wintringham, Eric Cant. Five others got sentences of 12 months: Albert Inkpin, Willie Gallagher, Harry Pollitt, William Rust and Wal Hannington. (Bell was in the cell next door to Gallagher in Wandsworth jail).

He was head of the Party’s Agitation and Propaganda Department and the Colonial Department at different stages. Despite finding himself a little sidelined by the `bolshevisation’ measures of the late 1920s and early 1930s, he remained a member of the Party with some influence until his death in 1944.

Sources: “Pioneering Days” (first published 1941); Gallacher Memorial Library, Glasgow Caledonian University, Michael Walker, Sunday Worker 25th October 1925

Ernie Benson

The outstanding long-term organiser of the Communist Party during the 1930s to 1950s, in particular. In Ernie’s early days in York¬shire, he found his first experience of political agitation when pushed to chair a pub¬lic meeting and then discovering to his surprise that he was a highly effective orator. It was the sort of experience shared by many who came into the party and the labour movement before loud¬speakers and microphones.

Ernie was at the Party’s National Congress held in Leeds in 1929, which was attended by the later leader of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht, representing the Comintern.

When hunger marchers from Tyneside arrived in Leeds in 1931 to demonstrate against the means test, the local Labour Party was hostile, to say the least. Ernie Benson, though first rebuffed, eventually won the sup¬port of the then Baths Committee chairman, Labour Cllr. Craig Walker, to open the baths for the marchers. Interestingly, Craig Walker later joined the Communist Party.

Ernie went on to be involved intensively in the campaigns of the unemployed, especially regarding “Occupa¬tional Centres” and “Test Work” in¬cidents.

Morning Star October 9th 1980

Joe Bent

Born Spencer John Bent, after his father (the name “Joe” being more of a nickname), he was a towering figure in Southwark community politics for a couple of decades in the 1950s and 1960s. Joe Bent had a regular pitch on Sundays at the East St market in Walworth, where he is pictured when standing as the Communist Party candidate for Southwark around 1966. Joe stood in many elections, notably against the notorious Ray Gunter, a vicious Labour right winger and Minister of Labour in the Wilson governments, who thus became the object of particular opposition by Communists.

Joe was a superb orator and never needed a microphone or loud hailer. During the GLC elections, when he stood for the whole of Southwark, Joe narrowly missed by less than a thousand votes from winning a seat, his exact vote is uncertain but I believe it was well over 15,000. Joe’s effective campaigning was backed up by scores of local supporters including the late Nell Vyse, a veteran campaigner for Southwark tenants. The other photo was taken in the 1960s; it is of a meeting held by the Ex-Service Movement for Peace in East St market, Walworth. The ESMP was party dominated and lasted until around 1968, when it was subsumed by Ex-Service CND.

Joe regularly stood in general elections for his constituency; over a period of 16 years he built up a significant vote, more than doubling the numbers and almost reaching 5% of the total votes cast:

Votes for Percentage
Year Joe Bent of total vote

1950 668 1.30%
1955 951 2.39%
1959 1,395 3.57%
1964 1,599 4.91%
1966 1,404 4.73%

In 1970, Joe handed over the role of candidate but a modestly successful Communist vote in the area was bequeathed to his successor. Joe’s last contest was in the 1966 General Election.

Ray Gunter Labour 21,855 73.55%
A P R Noble Conservative 6,454 21.72%
Joe Bent Communist 1,404 4.73%

Joe Bent's father, John Spencer Bent, was awarded the Victoria Cross during WW1. [see http://www.stowmarket-history.co.uk/bent.htm] Whilst Joe himself was also a non-commissioned officer in the Second World War, rising to the rank of Captain, and serving in the desert war. Joe would never talk about the war, or his past, being very much a private man. Joe was also a close friend of Jean Ross (see separate entry), who inspired the character of Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli in the film "Cabaret".

He was always at his best at public meetings where he could really raise a crowd. He took up teaching eventually. Along with Nell Vyse, a veteran Communist tenants’ organiser, he did much for the people of Southwark.

Dick Maunders

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.

Nan Berger

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

Claude Berridge

Claude Berridge was born in 1901, according to the 1901 census a Claude Terrence Berridge was born in Leicester and this may well be the same person. Berridge joined the Communist Party in 1920. He later attended the Lenin school in Moscow and became editor of the National Minority Movement journal, the Worker. The National Minority Movement had been established at a conference at Farringdon Hall, London on 23/24th August 1924, attended by 270 delegates representing 200,000 workers. This conference formulated a National Programme of Action, which included a call for a £4 minimum wage, a 44 hour week, recognised workplace union committees and workers’ control. The National Minority Movement’s headquarters were at 38 Great Ormond Street, London.

Berridge secured employment at Napiers factory, Acton, West London but was sacked because of his Communist activities within three weeks of him starting. In 1933, he was elected President of the London District Committee of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), a position he held until 1939. During World War 2 he was appointed as an AEU full time official and had responsibilities for Ford's at Dagenham. He worked closely with fellow Communist AEU activists, Wally Hannington and Joe Scott from West London.

He was elected to serve on the AEU National Executive from 1957 until his death in 1966. A prominent speaker at the TUC Congress, Claude Berridge was also a member of the London District Committee of the Communist Party from 1944 and also a member of its Central and Executive Committees. At his funeral at Golders Green in July 1966, the pallbearers included Wolf Wayne, Dennis Goodwin, Bill Alexander, John Mahon and Pat Devine

Michael Walker

J R Betteridge

Born in 1911, Betteridge worked in the tailoring trade until 1948, when he became Secretary of Hackney Communist Party. He stood as the Party’s candidate for Hackney South at the General Election of 1950.

Ken Biggs

Ken Biggs was a lifelong Communist, internationalist, editor of Postmark Prague and Morning Star columnist, who passed away in Prague in April 2006 after a protracted illness. He will be remembered for his unswerving devotion to the working-class movement, his continuing optimism for a better - and avowedly socialist - future and for his lively reportage of the survival of radical Czech politics in the aftermath of the November 1989 counter-revolution.

Ken attended Dulwich College, in South London, in the mid-1950s. Dulwich was then as now, a rather select “Public School” but for some years before he became a pupil, under a socialist head called Patrick Gilkes, it had decided to admit several hundred South London boys who had done well enough on the 11 Plus exam to study there on government scholarships. This was an extraordinary social experiment in what had previously been a traditional public school. It led to dee