Graham Stevenson

Eddie Frow

Eddie Frow, described in the celebrated book “Love on the Dole” by means of a little character sketch, was a real hero of the Communist Party’s struggle against 1930s unemployment in Salford and remained true to his beliefs in a very long life.

A skilled engineer, he was later elected as shop steward in factory after factory, being successively and comprehensively victimised. He had 21 jobs in 20 years and only walked out of one of them voluntarily. Frow was a long term delegate to the AEU National Committee and secretary to the Manchester District Committee of his union.

Eddie Frow

In later life, he married Ruth and they became famous as collectors of books and memorabilia on working class history. So large did the collection become that their semi-detached home in Old Trafford became completely dominated by it. To save it for posterity, Salford City Council agreed to take over their library, the Working Class Movement Library, and re-housed it in a former nurses’ home opposite the university.

See: http://www.wcml.org.uk

Sources:

Ruth Frow “Edmund Frow 1906-1997: the Making of an Activist”
Morning Star February 9th 2000

Ruth Frow

The joint guardian of Salford's Working Class Movement Library,
Ruth founded the library with husband Edmund Frow (see separate entry) more than 50 years ago and it grew into one of the country's most important collections of working class history. The library's priceless collection of 30,000 books, pamphlets, periodicals and 2,000 items of memorabilia started life crammed into the Frows' home in King's Road, Old Trafford, in the 1950s.

Ruth Frow was born in 1923. After service in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, Ruth's interest in labour politics led her in 1945 to join the Communist Party, in which she found "enormous comradeship and warm-hearted generous people." She was involved with the British Peace Committee and became the secretary of the Teachers for Peace group. At a Communist Party summer school, she met her future husband Eddie, finding that they had a common interest in books, particularly on labour history. They saw their respective collections as complementary and so decided to merge them into a rudimentary history library.

Ruth moved to Manchester to eventually set up house with Eddie, who was then an Amalgamated Engineering Union official. Partly influenced by the Communist Party historian James Klugmann, they spent their holidays scouring the country to buy books and memorabilia of the broad labour movement. On each trip, they filled their little 1937 Morris van, which was always driven cheerfully by Ruth.

As secretary of the Stretford Communist Party branch in the early 1960s, Ruth worked hard for the Daily Worker bazaars and was the branch delegate to the 26th congress of the Party. She was also secretary of the Manchester Peace Committee and the first vice-chairman of Manchester CND. Ruth was also an active member of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and represented Manchester Teachers Association on the Manchester and Salford Trades Council. She was president of Altrincham NUT in 1970. In her professional career, she became deputy head at a large comprehensive, Parr’s Wood School in Didsbury.

For years the formidable couple travelled the country, building a library which today tells the story of working people's fight for social justice and political rights over the past 200 years. As Ruth and Eddie's collection grew, it filled more than just the walls of every room at 111 Kings Road. Many of the books that they had unearthed were irreplaceable gems. Apart from on open days and other events, the couple always welcomed visitors to see the collection. In 1972, a charitable trust was set up and, in 1974, Ruth and Eddie gave the free use of their home to the North-West Labour History group to pursue its activities.

In 1987, Salford City Council generously decided to move the library at its expense into Jubilee House, a former 40 room nurses' home. A lottery award enabled the library to create its own website and put its catalogue online, allowing anybody could search its contents. E-mail enquiries poured in from many countries and the library gained an international reputation. Visitors from home and abroad were always greeted with a really warm, personal welcome by Ruth. All felt the friendly hospitable environment she created, particularly the students who came to further their research. She was happy to conduct a tour of the library's 40 rooms and draw on her detailed encyclopaedic knowledge of working-class history to answer any questions.

The Friends of the Library society was started by Ruth and Salford MP Frank Allaun became its president. Ruth's organisational skills were put to good use in mounting many exhibitions in the library and elsewhere and also events in the library annexe. She had a major input into all the books and pamphlets published jointly by her and Eddie.

Her research for her MEd at Manchester University on the half-time system of education was later published in a book, which is now a standard work on the subject. Both Ruth and Eddie were later awarded honorary degrees from the Central Lancashire and Salford Universities for their services to the labour movement.

When Salford Council reduced its support, Ruth played a large part in winning financial and other support from trade unions and friends, thus making possible the library's continued independent existence.

Apart from her politics, Ruth specialised in English literature. She was passionately fond of poetry, particularly Shelley. She kept herself up to date with the latest developments in the theatre and film, regularly attended Hallé concerts and was an opera enthusiast. The couple lived in a flat within the library before moving to a home in Salford.

Unsurprisingly, Ruth’s wide circle of friends extended well beyond the labour movement; she made an indelible impression on all she met.
When Eddie died, she carried on undaunted working for the library. Never did she see herself as a leader, though many others did, but rather as the servant of the library - that was what mattered to her.

Ruth died suddenly, aged 85 years of age, on January 11th 2008, after a stroke and a heart attack, just a month after she welcomed news that her 'labour of love' had won a £313,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant to be spent on its project `The Past Meets the Present: a History of Working Lives’. She said at the time: "This project will ensure the collections are accessible for generations to come." With the collective that she was instrumental in developing and the support of the labour movement, her dream will surely be realised.

Bernard Barry, Morning Star 21 January 2008; additional information - Deborah Linton Morning Star 15th January 2008

Les Fulton

Resident in Kirkcaldy, Fulton was a leading figure in Fife teacher’s union activities. He was a national executive member of the Educational Institute of Scotland from 1976. He was national president in 1978/9 and became credited with much of the success of the two-year campaign of in the early 1980s against government cuts in pay and services. As parliamentary convenor for the EIS between 1980 and 1987, he won the EIS to fund the development of teaching unions around the world. Widely known in the Scottish labour movement and highly regarded as an inspirational figure, wit and raconteur, he died aged 69 in 1992.

Morning Star 23rd January 1992

Jack Gadsby

Born on February 8th 1905, in Aston Road, Birmingham, his family moved to near Blaenavon, South Wales, when he was four years old. Having left school at 13 years, Jack briefly moved in and out of various labouring jobs until he settled on coal mining for thirteen years. He was involved in all the major battles of the period, including the general strike and its aftermath. He was married in 1927, unfortunate to be laid off shortly after and then intermittently unemployed.

Jack joined the Communist Party in 1928 and became secretary of the National Unemployed Workers Union for the Abersychan branch, near Pontypool. He became involved in the Party’s successful campaign to win a council seat for Roly Hanson, who was followed as a councillor ten years later, and then for many years afterwards, by Goff Miles.

In this period, Jack was only briefly employed only for a period across 1933-4 but Party work kept him busy; he had a Daily Worker round of 36 papers. In January 1936, he attended by his own account a “six-month Communist Party school”, although where and what this was he did not elaborate. Following this, he volunteered to go to Spain but was turned down as unfit, arising from long years of malnutrition and illnesses associated with poverty.

In 1938, with rearmament boosting the economy, he found work on the construction of an ordnance factory. In 1940, he followed the rearmament boom, like so many others, to Coventry, where he was able to obtain work in Warwickshire Flour Mills for very many years. It was a hard job, carrying heavy sacks, amidst an unpleasant environment – flour got in every crevice you could imagine and some you never knew existed - and more established workers in Coventry would not put up with it. He became the TGWU workplace branch secretary and, although there was pressure from on high to prevent him holding this office, no-one in the branch wanted him to give it up and so he stayed in situ.

He went to the Standard Motor Company in 1949, for a better paid job in a more congenial political environment. He became a stalwart of the Party’s factory branch for the next two decades, retiring slightly early on medical grounds in 1969. He wrote his own memoirs in the early 1970s, which were privately published.

Source: Jack Gadsby “Memories of a worker in South Wales and Coventry” CRIS Resource Centre, Coventry (no date, circa 1977?)

Willie Gallagher

Born 25th December 1881 in Paisley, Willie Gallagher was to become an engineering worker who fist joined the Independent Labour Party in 1905 but a year later switched to the Marxist-inclined Social Democratic Federation, which soon became the British Socialist Party.

An early campaigner for prohibition of alcohol, Gallagher was originally a member of the temperance movement, often holding open-air debates on Glasgow Green between 1908 and 1910. He became influenced by 'The Industrial Workers of the World' and their espousal of syndicalist ideals whilst in the United States in 1911.

On his return, he became a Gallagher became an active member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and a shop steward at Albion Motors prior to the first world war and was a major campaigner against the declaration of war in 1914-1918.

Group photograph of workers at Albion Motor Works, Scotstoun, in 1911, with William Gallacher pictured second from right in second top row.

He led a strike for a penny an hour increase in the engineering and shipbuilding industries of the Clyde from February 1915. Out of this grew the Clyde Workers Committee, which Gallagher chaired. He was arrested and put in Carlton Jail after the `Battle of George Square’ in 1919. Unrest in the central belt of Scotland was so serious that troops were despatched. Gallagher was twice imprisoned during these years.

A firm supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, Gallagher was initially a sceptic with regard to parliamentary politics and the Labour Party As a former chairman of the CWC, he represented the Clyde shop stewards at the second congress of the Communist International in Moscow in July 1920, where he met Lenin who famously not only convinced him of the need for a Communist Party but also that it should contest elections; a matter not only of some irony, but also importance, since he was for a decade and half the Communist Party’s only MP.

Gallagher was one of the founders of the Communist Party in 1920 and was imprisoned in 1925, along with others of its leadership in advance of the General Strike. A member of its central/executive committee from 1922 to 1963, he was elected Communist MP for West Fife in 1935, after six years' involvement in the miners' struggles. This unique experience earned him considerable notoriety in Britain and elsewhere.

Willie Gallagher

He published his early memoirs, “Revolt on the Clyde”, in 1936 and served the West Fife constituency as MP until 1951. For a long time, he was the only communist MP in the House of Commons, until joined by Phil Piratin in 1945. His “The Case for Communism” was published by Penguin Books (1949) in very large numbers and was widely read. Gallagher also wrote very many pamphlets over the years.

He was chairman of the Communist Party until 1956, when he became president, a post which he held until 1963. Gallagher's 1965 funeral in his home town of Paisley was attended by the leading left-wing political figures of the day including Bob Stewart, Rajani Palme Dutt, D N Pritt, Hugh McDiarmid, Frank Stanley, John Platt-Mills, and Johnnie and Elsie Gollan. Among the pallbearers were Frank Stanley, Gordon McLennan and Peter Kerrigan.

William Gallacher’s maiden speech as an MP in the House of Commons on 4th December, 1935 still reverberates down the decades:

“On this side of the House we represent and speak for the workers of this country, the men who toil and sweat. (Hon. Members: "So do we.") Oh! You do speak for the workers, do you? (Hon. Members: "Yes.") All right. We shall see.

The leader of the miners says that theirs is the hardest, most dangerous and poorest paid job in the country. Is there anybody who will deny it? The miners make a demand. They ballot for it, and the ballot is a record, and we who speak for and on behalf of the miners demand an increase of 2s. a day for the miners. We demanded it from these benches.

Now it is your turn. Speak now. Speak, you who claim to represent the workers. We say not a penny for armaments. It is a crime against the people to spend another penny on armaments. Every penny we can get should go in wages for the miners, towards the health and well-being of the mothers and the children and adequate pensions for the aged and infirm. Ten shillings a week.

I would like the Noble Lady (Lady Astor) to receive only 10s and then she would change her tune. Last night the Chancellor of the Exchequer was meeting some friends, and they were having a dinner, the cost of which was 35s. per head. Thirty-five shillings per head for a dinner, and 10s. a week for an aged man or woman who has given real service to this country and has worked in a factory or mine.

We require every penny we can get in order to make life better for the working class. If the £7,000,000,000 which we spent during the War in ruin and destruction had been spent in making life brighter and better for the people of this country what a difference it would have made.

I would make an earnest appeal to those honourable members of the House who have not yet become case-hardened in iniquity. The National Government are travelling the road of 1914, which will surely lead to another and more terrible war, and to the destruction of civilisation. Are honourable members s going to follow them down that road?

The party which is represented on these benches, from which, at the present moment, I am an outcast, has set itself a task of an entirely different character, that of travelling along the road of peace and progress and of spending all that can be spent in making life higher and better for all. We invite those of you who are prepared to put service to a great cause before blind leadership of miserable pygmies who are giving a pitiful exhibition by masquerading as giants, to put first service to a great cause, not to a National Government such as is presented before us, but to a Labour Government drawing towards itself all the very best and most active and progressive elements from all parties and constituting itself, as a consequence, a real people's Government concerned with the complete reconstruction of this country, with genuine co-operation with the other peace nations for preserving world peace, and a Government that follows the road of peace and progress.

I make an appeal even while I give a warning. Do not try to stop us on the road along which we are travelling. Do not try to block the road by the meshes of legal entanglements or by fascist methods."

Sources: Gallacher Memorial Library, Glasgow Caledonian University; Supplement to “Scottish Miner” (1981)

Robin Gandy

Born 1919, Gandy became a Communist at university. He was also to become an intimate friend, student and colleague of the noted mathematician, Alan Turing, who is now more widely famous for his work on the Enigma coding machine during the Second World War.

Gandy himself recalled the circumstances of his joining the Communist Party. After a while at Cambridge, he realised that “if one wanted to do anything, the Communist Party were the only people. There was the Socialist Club, but that was run by the Communists. So I joined the Communist Party and became one of the people who ran the Socialist Club... Eric Hobsbawm was there in the first year; after the war he became a close friend. When I joined the Party, the King's College cell consisted of two people including myself! The days of the romantic intellectual Marxists were gone. It was less modish. I left Cambridge and the Party but was a fellow traveller for a while.”

Turing was, in the long run, more influential on his life’s course. Gandy inherited all of Turing's mathematical books and papers on his death in 1954 and then carried forward part of his intellectual tradition, especially by becoming a pre-eminent figure in the renewal of mathematical logic and moving rapidly away from his radical past.

After being lecturer in applied mathematics at Leicester University College, and for a short while at Leeds, he moved to Manchester, creating joint schools of mathematics and philosophy. From 1967, he was Professor there and then left for a Readership at Oxford’s Wolfson College in 1969, where he remained in eminence until his death on 20th November 1995.

Douglas Garman

Garman was born in 1903, one of nine children born to a GP and his wife, Dr Walter and Marjorie Garman of Wednesbury, Staffordshire, who produced this family between 1901 and 1916. His sisters achieved notoriety by their many Bloomsbury liaisons.

Garman had been at Caius College, Cambridge, and seems to have acquired sympathies with the Communist Party there. He spent the 1920s between London and Paris, and was in Leningrad in 1926. With Edgell Rickword, he edited and wrote for a journal, `The Calendar of Modern Letters’, which briefly appeared from March 1925 as a monthly literary review. He published 'The Jaded Hero' in 1927.

Garman was Education Organiser of the Communist Party from 1934-47, some sources say 1940 to 1950. He ran summer schools at Swanage and was involved in the South Wales Hunger March of 1936, which he reported on behalf of the Daily Worker.

His sister, Lorna, married Ernest Wishart, a Cambridge friend of Douglas. A wealthy many, Ernest was also a committed Communist Party member and his firm, Lawrence and Wishart, became the party’s publishing house. From 1930-1940, Douglas Garman worked for the publishers Lawrence and Wishart, including a period as editor of `The Modern Quarterly’ and was involved in setting up the 'Marxist Historians' Group' in September 1938.

Douglas Garman was involved for a while with the celebrated art collector and bohemian bon vivant Peggy Guggenheim. He demanded that she prove her love by joining the Communist Party. The Party, however, refused to give her a card because she was not a worker. Only when she convinced the Communists that motherhood was unpaid full-time work did she officially become a Communist. But she had no real interest in politics and dropped her Party membership as soon as she broke up with Garman in 1937.

Douglas Garman retired to a farm in Dorset, where he continued to write and translate. He remained a member of the Communist Party until his death in 1969.

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=10040
les1.man.ac.uk/chnn/CHNN12ANN.html
http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/english/07_history/03_Peggy_Europe.htm
http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/2002/september/wooster.html
http://www.orthopedagogiek.com/educationalist.htm
http://www.nra.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/searches/regdocs.asp?LR=159

Doreen Garner

Doreen was born in Wallasey, Merseyside in 1903. She moved to Dorset around 1943 and worked for the Communist Party’s `Southern Times’ bookshop in Weymouth, at 38 St Thomas Street. During this period, Doreen stood as a Communist candidate in local elections.

When the bookshop in Weymouth was closed, Doreen went to work at the Party’s `People’s Bookshop’ in Brighton. This was at 16a North Street and Roland Mason was manager, with Betty Whittenbury assistant manager. The Brighton bookshop later moved to 15 Gloucester Road.

Doreen moved to work in the children’s library at Camden, London and retired initially to Cambridge then Northamptonshire to be close to her relative Elisabeth Jordan (nee Frood). Doreen Garner died in 1983.

Michael Walker

Jack Gaster

Gaster, a lawyer, was the son of the Sephardic (Iberian Jewish) Chief Rabbi of England and a medical inspector and doctor from Poplar. In 1931, he founded and played a significant role within the Revolutionary Policy Committee (RPC) of the Independent Labour Party, which resulted in a mass resignation of enormous numbers of ILP members and their joining the Communist Party.

Disaffection, arising from unhappiness at the policies of the second Labour Government which had been elected in 1929, saw the RPC becoming particularly active in London and its initial focus was on advocating the disaffiliation of the ILP from the Labour Party. After the ILP had agreed to this in 1932, the RPC sought to bring closer cooperation between the ILP and the Communist Party.

Jack Gaster

In 1933, the RPC successfully persuaded the ILP to adopt the policy of merging with the Communist Party, although this was never followed through. In 1934, a split in the ILP occurred and some left to form the Independent Socialist Party. By 1935, the ILP, though isolated from the wider labour movement, did not look as if it was going to move across to the Communist Party en bloc. Leading members of the RPC decided to wind it, leave the ILP and join the Communist Party.

Gaster, from hereon, became a Party stalwart and was an elected Communist councillor in Stepney in the late 1940s. For many years, he was the Communist Party’s prime legal adviser. He opposed revisionism in the CPGB in the 1980s and was, for many years, one of the high-profile honorary Vice Presidents of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers.

The obituary written by John Haylett in the Morning Star follows:

(Tuesday 20 March 2007)

JOHN HAYLETT pays tribute to Jack Gaster, a communist and tireless campaigner for justice:
"Stop the Korea war, before we are all dragged down to destruction by order of the American overlords," Communist lawyer Jack Gaster told a British Peace Committee rally in Birmingham.
Change Korea to Iraq and amend the date from 1952 to the present day and his active opposition to imperialist war emphasised a sense of continuity in a long life that was dedicated to peace and socialism, from his initial involvement with the Independent Labour Party in 1926 until his final days.
Another uncanny parallel between Iraq and Korea is that the Daily Worker report on the Birmingham rally quotes physics professor Eric Burhop calling for the abolition of all weapons of mass destruction.
But, unlike the non-existent Iraqi WMD that were fraudulently cited by Tony Blair to stampede British forces into backing the 2003 illegal invasion, there was substance to those instanced by Burhop.
And Gaster was at the heart of those pointing the finger at the US for its use of germ warfare in Korea.
He was part of an eight-member International Association of Democratic Lawyers delegation sent to Korea to investigate evidence of US war crimes. He returned with what he called "the preliminary material for another Nuremberg."
On the strength of his cross-examination of witnesses, he published a 38-page dossier - Korea ... I Saw the Truth - indicting Washington for germ warfare, executions without trial, burning alive, torture and organised destruction.

Maire Gaster

Maire attributed her early passion for social justice to her Socialist father, Robert Lind, once a well-known essayist for the New Statesman and the News Chronicle.

She was already a member of the Communist Party in her youth, to which she remained loyal, when she met and later married then ILPer, Jack Gaster (see separate entry) who also joined the Party. An avid letter writer in the 1930s, Maire was especially noted as a peace campaigner in the 1950s. In later life, she became fairly well-known as a CND activist. Maire Gaster died, aged 78, in 1990.

Source: Morning Star 28th September 1990

Tommy Geehan

Tommy Geehan was a Catholic textile worker who became the communist leader of the successful agitation that united both Protestants and Catholics against cuts in the outdoor relief in Belfast in 1932 and secured the nickname of "Molotov".

Geehan began his political life as a member of the Belfast Independent Labour Party (established in 1893) he became the Secretary of the Court Ward Labour Party, the “most virile and advanced of our locals”. Belfast ILP even had its own “Socialist Pipe band”. He wrote regularly for the ILP Northern Ireland journal the “Labour Opposition” (1925-1926), sometimes under his nom de guerre “plebeian”. Geehan was involved in 100,000 pennies campaign to build a new Labour hall, the original ILP hall being burnt down in 1920. The contact address for Geehan during this period was 15 Tyrone Street, Belfast.

In late 1925 he left for Canada, the report in Labour Opposition states “Tommy was a hard and uncomplaining worker and it was under his secretaryship that the division made its great forward drive”. Geehan was always very much on the left wing of the ILP. A new life in Canada did not seem to work out for Geehan and he returned to Belfast in mid 1926.

Geehan became closely associated with Roddy Connolly’s Workers Party of Ireland (established in 1926) and left the NILP in 1929 to join the Belfast Workers Group, the Belfast section of the Communist Revolutionary Workers Group.

By 1930 Northern Ireland had the highest rate of unemployment of the three states of the United Kingdom. In the Workers' Voice of 23 July 1932, Geehan explained how he saw the way forward. He urged that a: `United Front must be organised by the rank and file workers themselves and the struggle for the abolition of the means test, for adequate relief for all unemployed workers, and against any further wage cuts, must be carried through by the rank and file of the Trade Unions, Labour Parties, the unemployed and those in receipt of outdoor relief. Steps should be taken immediately by the Rank and File Committees in the unions, the Unemployed Workers Committees, and the Revolutionary Workers Groups to organise a meeting of all militant workers. From this meeting a representative committee should be formed that could map out the launching of a wide-spread campaign against the Government and the whole Northern capitalist class.'

Following this, on the 25th July 1932, the Belfast Relief Workers' Committee was established. The next month on 18 August 1932 it organised a conference of over 5,000. It demanded five concessions:

• The abolition of task work

• An increase in relief to pay one man 15/3d per week, his wife 8/- per week and

• 1/- per week for each child All relief work to be paid in cash

• Street improvements and other schemes to be paid at trade union rates

• Adequate outdoor allowance to all single men and women who are unemployed and not in receipt of unemployment benefit.

On 30 September, the 20,000 workers on relief went on strike. Marches in sympathy came from Coleraine and Derry to Belfast. Alarmed, the Government tried to split the strikers by an offer of increased rates to married relief workers; but this was rejected on a motion of Geehan, the Chairman of the Relief Workers' Committee. On 5 October, 60,000 from all over Belfast – a huge number in proportion to the population – took to the streets in peaceful and good natured demonstration. They were led by bands, ironically playing popular tunes such as 'Yes, We Have No Bananas', and marched from the Labour Exchange to a torch-lit rally at the Custom House.

In absolute terror at the implications of this united working class action, the Stormont government banned further marches but a huge protest demonstration went ahead anyway, on 11 October. This time the establishment countenanced the use of the militarised Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), a force with direct links to the Orange Order. Inevitably, demonstrators clashed with them and the RUC withdrew but were sent in again, this time backed by British troops. The result was Bloody Sunday – 11 October 1932. On the Falls Road two protesters, Samuel Baxter and John Keenan, were shot dead by armed forces and barricades rose in defiance on both the Shankill and the Falls. That night, 11th October 1932, there were about 40,000 workers in Queens Square, Belfast. The main speakers were Tommy Geehan, Davey Scarborough, Jimmy Koter, Betty Sinclair, Sean Murray and Arthur Griffin.

The government now imposed a curfew. But the sight of massive and unified working class struggle saw the Belfast Board of Guardians announce big increases in benefits and changes to the rules. Concessions on some of the strikers' demands were made, allowances were increased for families (though, not in all cases to the level demanded), single men in lodgings were given relief and the rate of relief was fixed as uniform (though still subject to the Means Test) for all Belfast. In addition, relief would continue indefinitely rather than ending after six months. Geehan accepted this as a magnificent victory

But retaliation was swift, British trade union leader Tom Mann who attempted to attend the funerals was summarily sent to prison. Arthur Griffin was arrested and got three months in jail. (He died later from his treatment.) Sean Murray (1898-1961) from Cushendall, Co Antrim (later Communist Party of Ireland General Secretary and Lenin College student) was expelled from Northern Ireland for seven years, for simply "being a communist”.

Later, Archie Magill estimated that sixty activists had joined the Communist Party as a result of the strike and in January 1933 Geehan beat Murtagh Morgan of the Northern Ireland Labour Party into third place in the contest for the Court Ward councillorship on Belfast Corporation (Council).

As a result of Geehan’s high profile Communist activities, he was later forced to leave Belfast when his home was burnt out by a loyalist mob. However he was still able to organise squatters successfully in the Belfast suburb of Glenard. Of the 144 families that were forced to move to Ardoyne a number were Republican and Communist organisers from throughout Belfast City, Geehan was one of the people who arrived at Ardoyne. By now popularly known as Molotov, he brought with him the experience of being an effective organiser.

At a meeting on the 7th August 1936 Geehan spoke on the need to support the Republican cause in Spain he also stated that “reduction in welfare payments would compel young men to join the army to escape starvation….While Lord Craigavon was cruising around the Mediterranean.” Geehan also spoke at length about the NCCL report into the use of “Northern Ireland Special Powers Act”, an Act which until 1966 was exclusively used against Republicans and Communists.

After the second world war the RCWG would became the Communist Party of Northern Ireland but its eternal glory will be the day a handful of Communists united the Shankhill and the Falls against the tyranny of Lord Craigavon’s Outdoor Relief and won.

Michael Walker

Tony Gilbert

David Tony Gilbert was born in Poplar in 1914 and moved to Bethnal Green, alien territory for a Jewish family in the early thirties. He was apprenticed as a nailer in the fur trade and became active in the anti-fascist movement, then the Communist Party. He was subject of an anti-semitic assault by British Union of Fascist thugs in the early thirties, waking up in Bethnal Green Hospital.

When the war in Spain began, he joined the International Brigade and was its Courier. He used ruefully to recall being consulted about the direction they should be taking at a fork in the road and sharing responsibility for marching into a trap and captivity until the end of the war.

Thus, he was a POW from March 1938 until he was repatriated later that year. Back home, it took him some time to adapt, and he recalled during the first air raids on London using his Spanish experience and heading in the opposite direction to everyone else - out to Victoria Park on the grounds that if a bomb hit a building it could collapse on you but you had to be very unlucky to suffer a direct hit out in the open.

Tony worked in the Yorkshire Coalfield as a Bevin Boy before joining the British Army. After the war he was an industrial militant and could call on experience as a miner, an NUR activist at King’s Cross and as an engineering worker. Awakened to the importance of anti-colonialism by his wartime experience, he was quick to understand the uses of racism and the need to face it head on. The first black recruits to British Rail at Kings Cross were all put in his shop prior to an attempt to victimise him. He also worked in the Circulation Department of the Daily Worker/Morning Star.

Tony loved setting up an open air meeting and with skills learned in his youth in East London was a magnetic speaker. He was in the leadership of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, which changed its name in 1970 to Liberation. Tony became its General Secretary and wrote and spoke consistently against racism and imperialism. For many years he was active in the Stoke Newington Branch of the Communist Party and on the Hackney Borough Committee and lived with, then married, Kay Beauchamp (see biography in A - E section), also a lifelong Communist and anti-racist. Both of them died in 1992. (His first wife was Sheila.)

I was in Stoke Newington Party Branch when he, Kay Beauchamp, Kay's sister Joan Thompson, and Leah Wesker used to provide an unrivalled historical backdrop to all deliberations! Two of Tony’s brothers were also in the Party one, a hairdresser, advertised in the Daily Worker and Morning Star as Gilbert and another was a book dealer with a shop at The Angel. Whilst Tony was really a very little bloke - less than five feet – such was his presence that he somehow only looked small from across the street!

John Bain

Arthur George

Born in February 1892, Arthur was the fifth of seven children of a poor family. His father died from wounds received in the Boer War and the authorities decided that, as a single parent, his mother was able to keep only two of her children, the others being placed in care. There he remained from the age of three years until he was 17.

During this time, he contracted measles, which developed into an ear and throat infection that caused life-long deafness that was marked with constantly unpleasant pus but having spent more time in hospital than school but `graduated’ as a skilled carpenter and an avid reader. He spent time in an `approved school’ that is to say a punishment institution for under-age offenders and was a soldier in the First World War. These unpromising experiences to his life led him to become a larger than life figure and a life-long Communist Party member.

A keen supporter of the Clarion Choir, Arthur also made chairs from scratch for the 1960s Midlands Communist Party offices in Well Lane in Birmingham but was by way of being honoured as a self-taught historian with a remarkable ability to communicate ideas. He received at least two honorary degrees, one from Keele University. Arthur was a keen cyclist into the countryside even into his advanced years, with a penchant for sleeping in hay-stacks and nibbling turnips for breakfast! Allegedly, he sold his heart and kidneys to medical science in 1972 in exchange for a substantial sum of money.

His life-long companion, May, "Old May", as he called her (he was always “Old George”) was a talented pianist and an only daughter. Arthur and she fell in love but she was never to get her father's permission to marry. By the late 1940s, Arthur was employed at, and allowed to live in, the big expensive house as a handy man and a talented gardener. When May died, she hadn't prepared a will, so her brother (possibly step-brother) claimed the house and Arthur found himself back again in an institution, surrounded by old people. He hated every minute of it. Then May’s heir put the house up for sale and sent Arthur a letter telling him to go and tidy up the surroundings, cut the grass and water the plants, so as to increase the attractiveness of the property to potential purchasers.

This was too much for Arthur who knew there was never any affinity between "Old May" and her heir. That afternoon, instead of carrying out his instructions, Arthur visited this person and, with a pair of scissors, committed an act of violence that led to his arrest for murder. He was found guilty and sentenced to 'life' imprisonment, not that life meant very much at his age. Arthur became the oldest prisoner on record in Winson Green jail at the age of 88 years and served six years before dying in August 1986 in the prison hospital.

Sources: Handwritten notes for an oration – Frank Watters – 1st September 1986; `Being Frank’ (1992) by Frank Watters; GS personal knowledge

Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Leslie Mitchell)

Born James Leslie Mitchell in 1901 at Auchterless, Aberdeenshire, his father was an impoverished crofter, Danes Mitchell, and his mother, Lellias Grassic Gibbon. The young Mitchell boy was educated at Stonehaven Academy and he spent most of his childhood in Arbuthnott, a farming community in the Mearns. His family’s tie to the land was to create a love-hate relationship between this area and the writer. Mitchell was forced to leave school early, after arguments arose with the school authorities in Mackie Academy.

In 1917, still only 16 years old, he ran away from Stonehaven to Aberdeen and got a job as a reporter on a local paper. In Aberdeen he joined the trades council, which already had a strong left wing tradition. Like many other British cities in 1917, Aberdeen established its own soviet in solidarity with the Russian Revolution and its enthusiastic founder was young James Mitchell!

Shortly afterwards, he moved to Glasgow where he got a job on Farmers Weekly, where – rather in defiance of the subject of his main employment, he became aware of the depths of the problems of urban areas. He was sacked after a few months for fiddling his expenses so as to make donations to the British Socialist Party, one of the three organisations that merged to form the Communist Party in 1920. He was promptly blacklisted by the newspaper employers in the west of Scotland, and could not get a job anywhere as a journalist and turned to the armed forces for food and shelter, rather than for patriotism and attraction.

In her biography of Grassic Gibbon, long-time CPGB functionary, Betty Reid, suggests he may have only been a Communist Party member for a short time. As a BSP member, he is likely to have been a foundation member of the Communist Party but, as a soldier based abroad, it is unlikely that he would have been able, or even at that time encouraged, to hold a membership card. But, as a youth disgusted with the effects of war on his community, he does not in the least seem to have jettisoned his political affinities.

For nine years, from 1919 to 1928, he was a member of the Royal Army Service Corps. Although Mitchell hated life in the army, it did allow him to travel, in particular to the Middle East and Egypt, which fuelled his interest in ancient civilisations. A later interest was included ancient American history. His military experiences in the Middle East inspired his first short stories and much of his fiction and non-fiction.

He came out of the army in 1928 determined to devote his life to writing, and settled down with his wife Rhea in Welwyn Garden City, doing little else; a factor that appeared to have inhibited the Communist Party formation local to him from encouraging his reapplication for membership, although there is some evidence of him doing so twice in 1931 and a hint that he was suspected of Trotskyism by someone. Events over the next few years would make this a rather stupid approach. Few newspaper or magazine publishers would take his stuff, though one of his first published short stories was read and acclaimed by HG Wells. He had one novel published in 1928 and another in 1929.

From 1930 to 1934, eleven novels, two books of short stories, three anthropological books and an 'Intelligent Man's Guide to Albyn' with Hugh MacDiarmid entitled `Scottish Scene’ (1934), were published under the names Mitchell and Gibbon. McDiarmid and he were close friends and their book was essentially an attack on what was wrong with their country.

Many of his poems, with such self-explanatory titles as `The Communards of Paris’ and ‘On the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg’, spoke of his political commitment. One poem contains an unflattering profile of Ramsay MacDonald, denounced for splitting Labour and forming the National Government in 1931. He wrote for both the Left Review and the more mainstream Cornhill Magazine.

He published the historical novels `Three Go Back’ (1932) and `Spartacus’ (1933) under his own name. It was, however, with the output under the pseudonym of Grassic Gibbon, taken from his mother's maiden name). that he has been remembered for. The three novels `Sunset Song’ (1932), `Cloud Howe’ (1933), and `Grey Granite’ (1934), which form the trilogy `A Scots Quair’ appeared under his pseudonym. His other novels are written mainly in plain English but the trilogy is in the vernacular of the common people of Aberdeenshire. (The word `quair’ is derived from the word quire, a measurement of paper, thus it is a literary work of some length.)
A thinly-disguised autobiographical character is re-cast as a female protagonist, Chris Guthrie, who runs through the trilogy. Chris's son, Euan, becomes a Communist but goes about his relations with others with off-putting sectarianism, which is rather criticised, albeit with love, by his girlfriend Ellen, and his mother.

Extraordinarily, he wrote highly successful science fiction, `Three go back’ and `Gay Hunter’) about societies seeking to find the way to make human beings free once again. Unquestionably, Grassic Gibbon would have gone on to become a key part of the left writers’ revival of the anti-fascist 1930s. During 1934, he may have attended open meetings of the Communist Party in Welwyn, although commentators have played tug-of-war with whether he was or was not still linked to the Party as such. His widow recalled canvassing for the ILP in the 1931 election but then, big sections of the LIP was by then secret members of the CP and were to come over. Whatever the case, he was beset with ill health, even before a perforated ulcer and peritonitis cut his life short in February 1935. His final novel, `The Speak of the Mearns’, was unpublished at the time of his death. Outlines of many other books, from novels to an autobiography were left.

.John Gibbons

Born in Renton, Dumbartonshire John Gibbons spent his early years in Ireland. On his return to Scot, he worked in Brown’s shipyards on the Clyde, where he joined the Communist Party in 1928. He later came south, after victimisation for Communist activity, and worked in Portsmouth, where he organised Daily Worker sales.

He went to Moscow in 1933 with his wife Vicky and children, (Tommy and Jess, who became Soviet citizens) while working for a period first in the Comintern, then as an editor in the foreign languages publishing house, and later on the English language broadcasts of Moscow Radio. During the Second World War, with German troops advancing on the capital and reaching the gates of the city, despite the danger of occupation, he volunteered, to stay and ensure continuation of the English language broadcast.

When he became Daily Worker correspondent, his outstanding war reports were an inspiration to readers of the paper during the titanic struggle which ended with the liberation of the USSR and Eastern Europe from Nazi occupation. Among his notable dispatches, his report of the liberation of Kiev and the discovery of the notorious Babi Yar camp where the Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war made a profound impression.

John Gibbons was an outstanding working-lass journalist who was able to pithily convey to his readers the full horror of what he had seen. After the war, he worked on the English edition of `For a People's Democracy for a Lasting Peace’ first in 'Belgrade and then in Bucharest. Then he worked in Prague as the British Communist Party’s representative on the English edition of `World Marxist Review’.

He was one of an outstanding family of Communist fighters; his brothers Danny, Joe and Tommy fought with the International Brigade in Spain, where Tommy was killed at the battle of Brunete. In the post-war period, John and Vicky Gibson’s son, also a Tommy, was a student at Moscow University and a member of the Komsomol (Soviet Young Communist League) bureau. Tommy was untimely killed in an accident in 1956, while helping to bring in the harvest as a student volunteer in the then virgin agricultural lands of Kazakhstan. Vicky and John’s daughter became a lecturer at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.

Morning Star September 13th 1985; October 1st 1985

John Gibson

John William Gibson was born on December 2nd 1920 in Chester. Both his parents were strongly committed to social justice; his father was a metal worker. Like most of his contemporaries, John left school at 14 years and went to work in an engineering factory. He worked in the north-western area in various placed over the next decade; he worked on the then secret sonar project at Horwich and was later in the RAF. He joined the Communist Party in 1943 after hearing Harry Pollitt speak in Liverpool and remained loyal both to the Party and to the city for the rest of his life.

From the late 1950s, he was a CND activist and was a full-time Communist Party worker in the 1960s, also one of its local election candidates, and was a later enthusiastic volunteer for the Party’s bookshop in Berry Street. For 27 years, he was the north-west circulation representative for “Soviet Weekly”. John Gibson was also a prime mover in the building in Liverpool of strong branches of both the British-Soviet Friendship Society and the German Democratic Republic Friendship Society. He and his wife, Veronica (they married in 1954) often entertained visiting delegations and dignitaries from both countries at their convivial home in Algburth and set up events at Liverpool town hall around these visits. John Gibson died, aged 82, on September 3rd 2003.

Guardian October 28th 2003

T Gibson

Born in 1916, Gibson was a teacher, and the son of a Tyneside shipyard worker. Having served with the RAF during the Second World War, he was the Secretary of Peckham Communist Party and stood as Communist parliamentary candidate for Peckham at the 1950 General Election.

G C T Giles

Giles was an old Etonian and Cambridge scholar who served in the army in the 1914-18 war. In its aftermath he served in disabled servicemen's resettlement for the YMCA and then worked in journalism. His experiences in World War One seems to have shifted Giles towards first the Labour Party and then the Communist Party, early influences included E.D. Morel and Sylvia Pankhurst.

Giles joined the Teachers Labour League (later Educational Workers League) in the 1920s. He was also an executive member of the Educational Workers International. He was headmaster of Acton County School from 1926 to 1956.

In the 1930s, he was involved in support for victimised teachers in Germany and Spain. Giles was on the National Committee of the British Committee for the Relief of German Teachers and was associated with the International Committee for the Relief of Victimised Teachers (he was particularly concerned with Spain).

From at least 1931, Giles played a significant role within the Communist Party’s Teachers’ Advisory. His particular advocacy of a struggle for a high Basic Scale as the main road to professional status evoked massive response. Giles was, year after year, unanimously elected as leader of the Middlesex Teachers' Panel, effectively a negotiating forum. Middlesex teachers achieved particularly favourable conditions of service, largely due to the leadership of Giles in what was a model joint negotiating committee with the County Authority.

He became a member of the Executive of the National Union of Teachers, its Vice President in 1941, and eventually its President in 1944, the year of the 'Butler' Education Act. In that year he was also Chairman of the Teachers Panel of the Burnham Committee. Giles thus achieved a considerable degree of influence at a crucial period in British educational history, and did so in spite of his well known Communist sympathies - he was on the Executive Committee of the Party for about seven years.

Giles was a pioneer advocate of the Comprehensive School and his book, `The New School Tie’ and his famous lecture at a north of England educational conference in 1946 were landmarks in the campaign for comprehensive education. His considerable personal qualities seem to have enabled him to win the admiration of many with quite different views. He has been described (by Max Morris) as “a man of quite extraordinary charm, almost magnetic attraction and formidable persuasiveness”. Yet there were times, in 1940 and again from 1948 onwards, when Giles rightly feared for his job and, understandably, he and many Communists fought for a key NUT campaign to be for `security of tenure’ for teachers.

Even so, it was inside the NUT that internal attacks on the considerable Communist influence in the teaching profession began – with articles in 'Teachers World' in March and April 1948, which were part of what seems to have been a largely successful campaign to get candidates for office to declare whether or not they were members of the Communist Party. In 1948 this successfully undermined John Mansfield's bid for the Vice-Presidency, and reduced Giles' vote for the Executive.

In October 1948 the attack was renewed through what was later acknowledged to have been a fabrication - a widely circulated leaflet issued on behalf of the 'Young Communist Action Group', which turned out to be a fictitious body not part of either the Communist Party, or the Young Communist League. The leaflet demonstrated to the electors how to use the PR system to get the five Communist candidates elected. Its effect, as intended, was the reverse - Giles lost his place in 1949 and did not regain it until 1952. Communists, supported by others, pressed for an official NUT enquiry, its report failed to trace the source of the hoax.

MI5 files from 1949 on the perceived `penetration’ of the education system by the Communist Party were released in 2005. [Foreign Office paper FO 371/77385 1949 National Archives] One contains a note written in August of that year by MI5 on Communist attitudes towards education and the recruitment of teachers as what it saw as being part and parcel of “a struggle against the mastery of capitalism”.

The agency reported that it had infiltrated the Communist Party and obtained extensive internal information, despite the fact that the Party attached considerable significance to “the safeguarding of membership particulars”. It was said that the Communist Party of Great Britain attached “considerable importance” to recruiting teachers and that this was reflected in the Party having some 775 teachers amongst its then 38,766 membership.

The Foreign Office commented on the MI5 memorandum: “that education is considered not only as an important field for exploitation but also as analogous to an industry, is not perhaps without significance”. The report also touched upon Communist Party activities amongst Commonwealth and Empire students, and internal activity in the NUT aimed at gaining access to the leadership of the union.

Throughout the cold war period, considerable and vituperative open attacks on Giles in particular, and Communist teachers in general, were made in the press, especially in 1949; such campaigns used the safeguard against libel that comments in parliament provided, especially in 1954, when an onslaught against Giles was initiated by John Eden MP. In October 1950 Middlesex County Council refused to endorse the appointment of R P Neal (see entry on Reg Neal) to the headship of Bounds Green School, and then imposed a blanket ban on the appointment of Communists or Fascists to Headships.

The leading opponent of the Communists was the Chairman of the Education Committee, Alderman Hoare, a supporter of the anti-Communist group, 'Common Cause'. By implication he accused Giles of Communist indoctrination in the school. Common Cause set up a Teachers Committee, which held a stormy local public meeting in 1953.

The dispute dragged on for years. Union embargos of posts proved ineffective, and the NUT failed to get a majority of Middlesex staff in 1956 to vote for a strike. It required a change of political control on Middlesex Council to reverse the ban. Giles retired from teaching in 1956.

Unquestionably, the NUT is today what it is, a genuine trade union and not a professional association, largely because of the principled and brave leadership that Giles and so many of his comrades gave in their day.

Sources: The WCML archive possesses material donated after Giles' death in October 1976. See:http://www.wcml.org.uk/tu/nut_giles.html
Also: Max Morris, G C T Giles, Education For Tomorrow: No 68, 2000 reprint of `Education Today and Tomorrow’ from shortly after Giles' death; and National Archives

George Guy

Guy was the final leader of the National Union of Sheet Metal, Copper, Heating and Domestic Engineers, one of the last craft unions formed in the early days of the industrial revolution. Under his leadership, that union merged with the technical union, TASS. It, in turn, merged with ASTMS to form MSF - now a major component of Amicus.

Like the union that he joined in 1934, he was friendly, independent, and proud of his origins, confident in his skills, class-conscious, loyal and progressive in his views. He began work as an apprentice in a firm producing gas meters, quickly becoming an activist.

From there, he moved to wartime work in the aircraft industry. After the war, he became convener of shop stewards at Park Royal Vehicles and then moved to British Light Steel Pressings, which became a byword for trade union strength and militancy.

This was a defining period for George, when a long strike prevented the blacklisting of trade union activist Joe Parker, who remained his friend until Joe's death last year. It was Joe who recruited George to the Communist Party in the 1940s and George was a communist until the end, always concerned about unity of the left and its progress.

After election to district officer in 1959 and district secretary in 1963, he became general secretary in 1974 - and retired after the merger in the mid-1980s. He was elected to the general council of the TUC, where he played a strong role in the difficult days of Thatcherism and TUC timidity and retreat.

He was an anti-racist and anti-imperialist. His childhood in the East End meant that he had been surrounded by immigrants, mostly Jewish, who, he claimed, gave him his special north London accent as well as his cryptic, sardonic humour and guaranteed his instinctive internationalism.

George never forgot his origins. He had robust class instincts and loyalties which were reflected in his judgements and conduct throughout his long life in the labour movement. He was the first to offer solidarity and help to workers in struggle in Britain. Specifically, he was an uncompromising ally of the miners and the print workers in their fight back against the Thatcherite onslaught.

Cartoon image of George Guy, penned by Ken Gill - probably during a General Council meeting!

As a communist, he was naturally an internationalist. He was a supporter of the Soviet Union and was saddened deeply by its collapse. His union signed up to anti-apartheid and anti-colonialism from the outset, in contrast to the last-minute conversions of some in the labour movement.

George's life was enhanced by his family. Audrey, his wife of 67 years, supported him throughout, and his two daughters and his grandchildren were a source of pride to him.

Ken Gill

Morning Star Tuesday 13 December 2005

Ken Gill

Born in 1927 in South West England, Ken Gill became a draughtsman and was appointment a full-time office of his union, the Draughtsmen’s and Allied Technicians Association (DATA) in 1962, covering initially Liverpool and Ireland. He became the editor of the union’s journal in 1968, deputy general secretary of what became the Technical and Supervisory Staff association (TASS) in 1972.

The General Secretary of TASS in 1974, Gill held a range of positions arising from his membership of the General Council of the TUC. He led for the TUC on equalities issues for a very long period, being a Commissioner for Racial Equality and chair of the Trade Union Equal Rights Committee, as well as the TUC’s General Council – and hence of the annual congress in 1985.

As Chair of the Management Committee of the People’s Press Printing Society, he was expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain for activities associated with defence of the paper against revisionist attacks from within the leadership of that Party.

Faced with technological change and industrial decline, Ken Gill reinvented TASS during the early 1980s, taking in a range of unions, such as the Gold and Silver Workers, the Metal Mechanics, the Sheet Metal Workers, the Tobacco Workers. In 1988, he and his long-time rival for the leadership of `white-collar’ unionism, Clive Jenkins (General Secretary of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs – ASTMS), buried the hatchet and brought their two unions together to create the new union, Manufacturing, Science and Finance (MSF), with each as a joint General Secretary. Jenkins retired first and Ken Gill retired in 1992.

In 1993-4, Ken Gill led a list of key Communists who had either stayed in the CPGB until its dissolution, continuing the fight for Marxism to the bitter end, or who had, for various reasons held back from joining the re-established Communist Party (of Britain) in 1988, in successfully calling on the CPB to engage in a Communist Unity process that led to the admission of these comrades, including many who were associated with the post-CPGB “Communist Trades Unionists” group (1992-1994) and the only partially overlapping “Communist Liaison”.

For many years, Ken Gill presided over the Cuba Solidarity Campaign.

Main source: Morning Star 7th September 1985 (NB: this collection of biographies are not obituaries and Ken is still happily very much with us!

Percy Glading

Percy Eded Glading was born on 29th November 1893 and was trained as a mechanic. He was employed at the Royal Navy's Woolwich Arsenal in south-east London as a grinder during the First World War, being laid off in 1918. A founding member of the Communist Party in Britain, in February 1925, Glading was sent on a four month mission to India, using a pseudonym and ostensible acting for the AEU, which then maintained membership throughout the British Empire. Seemingly, he was debriefed by Rajani Palme Dutt and his brother, Clemens. Glading’s trip resulted in little contact with Communists but a general view that Calcutta, which he visited last, was the best place to establish links with the domestic revolutionary movement.
At this time political vetting was not very rigorous and Glading was able to return to work at the Arsenal in June 1925, just a few weeks after he got back from India. Eventually, after a programme of cross checking names of those employed in sensitive positions with known Communists, he was dismissed from his job as a mechanic examiner in October 1928 after he refused to renounce the Party. The Admiralty took the view that "men of revolutionary beliefs are unsuitable for employment in the country's arsenals and dockyards", as the Times put it (24 October 1928).
Glading became an official of the League Against Imperialism, the Secretary of the British Section. This had been established the previous year during a Brussels conference arranged by Willi Münzenberg, a leading official of the German Communist Party. At this point, the League was part of the Comintern's `united front' approach and George Lansbury was its President.

Glading attended the Lenin School in Moscow from October 1929 to April 1930 and was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1927-29. He was briefly involved in printing and distributing the Soldier Voice but soon became involved in the Indian liberation movement again, publishing in February 1931 the pamphlet “India Under British Terror”, published by the Meerut Trade Union Defence Committee. In 1933, he wrote the Communist Party’s pamphlet, “The Meerut Conspiracy Case”. The following year, he returned to his engineering expertise to produce a critique and explanation of the Bedaux system, having been involved since his return in agitation in the AEU once again.

After 1936, Comintern secret activity was much subsumed by the Soviet intelligence service and Glading appears to have been recruited by them around 1937 about a year after quietly leaving the Party, probably allowing his membership to lapse. He kept his post with the League Against Imperialism until March 1937.

By this point he was mainly involved in the Friends of the Soviet Union. The British Secret Service had opened a file on him as early as 1922, suspected him of spying from 1927 onwards and knew that he had attended the Lenin School. An MI5 agent, Olga Grey (born 1906), joined the FSU as a typist around 1925 and later was recruited for courier work, delivering funds to India. Gray’s father had been a night editor of the Daily Mail and she was the sister of a high ranking policeman. She kept up this secret work for a decade, though she suffered a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1935 and cut her ties with Communists. But Grey had gained and kept the confidence of Glading (some sources suggest she seduced him!).
In February 1937 Glading asked Grey to find a `safe-house’ (Actually an apartment at 62 Holland Road, Kensington) and this became a meeting place for Glading and Theodore Maly, a Soviet intelligence officer but only under security force surveillance. Glading had now arranged for sympathisers at Woolwich Arsenal, to take pictures of blueprints of new weapons being developed.
Glading had photographic equipment and a refectory table delivered to the Kensington flat. A `Rumanian’ couple began to visit with packages, ask Gray to go into the bedroom and photograph the items on the table. From the negatives, left unattended in the bathroom, Gray ascertained that they had obtained classified weaponry designs from the Woolwich army barracks and arsenal; the `Rumanians’ disappeared abroad days before arrests of the relatively minor figures involved occurred.
There has never been a satisfactory explanation as to exactly how secret the photographed work was. The political advantage of raising the tempo of the Soviet `menace’ the year before the outbreak of the Second World War does not seem to have figured in the many sources of the Woolwich `spy’ case that study it as `spy craft’. How the trap was set happened like this…
Back in 1928, another Communist at the Arsenal, George Whomack, had nearly been sacked but he was allowed to stay because he was prepared to renounce his association with the Communist Party. Now, through Olga Grey, Whomack (by now a Labour Councillor in Bexley) was exposed as passing blueprints to Glading from inside the Arsenal.
With the `Rumanians’ gone and the Soviet intelligence office hardly likely to allow himself to be compromised, MI5 set up a trap. After being caught in possession of the secrets, on 14th May, 1938, Glading, Albert Williams and George Whomack were convicted under the Official Secrets Act and imprisoned. Olga Grey testified as “Miss X” and Glading got six years' penal servitude, the others four and two years.
A later echo of Glading’s activities arose from the fact that MI5 failed to spot cryptic clues to the identity of Melita Norwood (see separate entry) in his diary. She was consequently put out of action for a few months, resuming her activities once Glading had been imprisoned without revealing her identity.

Glading died on 15th April 1970 and Gray later moved to Canada, made a good marriage, and was last heard of living outside Toronto in the 1980s, reportedly bitter at the £500 lump sum payment she had received from the MI5. This was the equivalent of maybe three years wages for a skilled worker at the time, with the purchasing power today of something like £75,000.

Colin Glen

An active Communist in the Glasgow area all his life, Glen was also a long-term member of the Carpet Workers Union, which merged with USDAW. He was an activist in Glasgow Trades Council. Glen died in September 2004, aged 93.

Morning Star 28th September 2004

Cyril Golber

A former executive committee member of the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers, he was a life long Communist. After victimisation by the textile employers became a taxi driver and active T&G member. Golber died in September 25th 2001, aged 80.

Morning Star 27.9.01

Charles Godden

Born in 1917, Charles Godden joined the Communist Party in the 1940s. He was in the army in World War Two and served as a NCO. After the war he pursued a career as school teacher and became a highly respected English teacher, with a particular warmth and appreciation of Shakespeare. Charles also penned theatre reviews for the Morning Star, being particularly well placed to send reviews of RSC productions from Stratford upon Avon, residing as he did for an extensive period in Nuneaton

He was a staunch Communist throughout his life, an accomplished amateur actor, and a genial and pleasant mannered individual, in fact a gentleman of the old fashioned English variety. He had a great sense of humour and was extremely well read.

He was resident in Nuneaton and active in the NUT throughout his career, being a delegate from the East Midlands to NUT national conferences on countless occasions, as well as being a trusted and experienced activist on the executive of the Warwickshire area of the NUT for many years, including a spell as the secretary.

He was a member of the East Midlands District Committee of the CPGB, a committee that strongly resisted the increasingly anti-Soviet line of the Party leadership from the 1970s.

Charles was also active in the collective of CPGB teachers, led by the late Ian Gunn latterly, but with major contributions from many others, who produced the regular and well respected `Education for Tomorrow’. He was also Secretary of the Midlands Association of Trades Councils and a member of the executive of the Midlands CND.

In his mature years, he became very actively involved with the Summer Courses for English teachers, held over a number of years as an act of solidarity with education in the GDR in Potsdam at the Padogogische Hochschule Karl Liebknecht. By the mid 1980s Charles was the leader of the British teaching team.

He particularly enjoyed organising the choral singing which commenced every day’s activity on the summer course, which catered for well over 130 GDR English teachers each year. In the mid 1980s Charles settled into a new life as a resident of Dresden in the DDR, where he died on August 21st 2004 aged 87.

John Corcoran

Maurice Godfrey

For many years, Maurice Godfrey was a full time official of the staff and managerial union ASTMS (Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs), which later merged with the technical and supervisory union, TASS (Technical and Supervisory Staff), to form MSF (which in term merged with the AEEU to create amicus).

After retirement, he served as Secretary to the Ealing Trades Council. Active all his life in the Woodcraft Folk, he was a life-long supporter of the Morning Star, and Daily Worker before it, and a member of the Communist Party of Britain. Godfrey died aged 69 in 1990.

Morning Star October 26th 1990